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Iran’s top leader warns opposition against protests

Iran’s supreme leader said yesterday that Iran’s disputed presidential vote had not been rigged, sternly warning protesters to halt massive demonstrations demanding a new election or be held responsible for creating chaos.

Ayatollah Ali Khamenei sided with hard-line Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and offered no concessions to the opposition. He effectively closed any chance for a new vote by calling the June 12 election a “definitive victory.”

The speech created a stark choice for candidate Mir Hossein Mousavi and his supporters: Drop their demands for a new vote or take to the streets again in blatant defiance of the man endowed with virtually limitless powers under Iran’s Constitution.

Khamenei accused foreign media and Western countries of trying to create a political rift and stir up chaos in Iran.

“Some of our enemies in different parts of the world intended to depict this absolute victory, this definitive victory, as a doubtful victory,” he said, according to an official translation on state TV’s English-language channel. “It is your victory. They cannot manipulate it.”

Khamenei said the 11 million votes that separated Ahmadinejad from his top opponent, Mousavi, was proof that fraud did not occur.

“If the difference was 100,000 or 200,000 or 1 million, one may say fraud could happen. But how can one rig 11 million votes?” Khamenei asked during yesterday’s prayers at Tehran University.

Mousavi and his supporters have staged massive street rallies in recent days that have posed the greatest challenge to Iran’s Islamic ruling system since the 1979 Islamic Revolution that brought it to power.

So far, the government has mostly allowed the protests to take place. But Khamenei opened the door for a much harder crackdown.

“It must be determined at the ballot box what the people want and what they don’t want, not in the streets,” he said. “I call on all to put an end to this method. ... If they don’t, they will be held responsible for the chaos and the consequences.”

Khamenei blamed the United Kingdom and Iran’s external enemies for fomenting unrest and said Iran would not see a second revolution like those that transformed the countries of the former Soviet Union.

He remained staunch in his defense of Ahmadinejad, who attended yesterday’s prayers, saying his views were closer to the president’s than to those of former Iranian president Hashemi Rafsanjani, a powerful patron of Mousavi.

Khamenei’s address was his first since hundreds of thousands of Mousavi supporters flooded the streets in Tehran and elsewhere in the country in rallies evoking the revolution that ended Iran’s US-backed monarchy.

On Thursday, supporters dressed in black and green flooded downtown Tehran in a somber, candlelit show of mourning for those who have been killed in clashes since last Friday’s vote.

Also See: Middle East keeps wary eye on Iran
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