Is Mousavi Really The Hero We Want Him To Be?

Presidential candidate Mir Hussein Mousavi has become the de facto head of the protests in Iran - after all, the whole reason people are taking to the streets in the first place is because they think their votes weren’t counted and that he was cheated out of the presidency. But is Mousavi really the reformist leader we’ve (at least we in the West) have made him out to be? Perhaps not…

Members of Mousavi’s own Azeri community have their doubts according to EurasiaNet. The Azeri make up about a quarter of the population in Persian-dominated Iran, yet they often complain about being the victims of ethnic discrimination, claiming to routinely suffer from restrictions on their cultural and linguistic rights. The Azeri voted heavily in favor of Mousavi – at least it’s thought they did before the vote-rigging began. But they haven’t taken to the streets in huge numbers to support Mousavi, nor to they seem to plan to do so in the future.

The reason is that the Azeri don’t see Mousavi as a strong champion of ethnic rights; his record on fighting for minority rights is said to be “lackluster”. While the community views him as a change from Ahmadinejad, they don’t view him as a particularly large change, nor do they expect that their lives would greatly improve, or that discrimination against the Azeri, would end under President Mousavi.

It’s useful to remember that despite the reformist mantle, Mousavi is a political insider, intimately involved in the revolution that brought the Ayatollahs to power in 1979, and that he served as the Islamic Republic’s Prime Minister from 1981 to 1989.

Mousavi was PM when members of the group ‘Islamic Jihad’ launched devastating suicide attacks against US interests in Beirut, Lebanon in 1983, including a truck bomb attack on military barracks that killed 299 people, 220 of them US Marines (the death toll from the Beirut bombing was the worst one-day loss the Marines had suffered since the Battle of Iwo Jima in World War II). Islamic Jihad was an affiliate of Hezbollah, which in turn was (and is) supported by Iran. According to former CIA officials, not only did then Prime Minister Mousavi almost certainly know in advance about the attacks because of Iran’s sponsorship of Hezbollah, there’s some belief that he may have picked the bombers himself.

Of course people can change a lot in the course of 25 years, they can try to atone for a lot of sins, but it is at least a cautionary point to keep in mind, that the situation in Iran is far more complex than many out there – our politicians, the media and legions of Tweeters – would like to believe.