IND:  A very long piece with interesting insights.

Previous anniversaries have been marked by triumphant mass rallies in front of Tehran’s Azadi monument. By contrast, this year’s event threatens to be a bloody battleground witnessing a re-enactment of the extreme violence between security forces and opposition supporters that has marked several state-sanctioned public gatherings since Ahmadinejad’s allegedly fraudulent election victory, which has been the trigger for a cycle of anti-regime protest.

At the heart of such confrontational rhetoric is a battle for the very soul of the revolution and what it was designed to achieve. While supporters of the supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, swear loyalty to the concept of velayat-e faqih (leadership by an Islamic jurisprudence) devised by him, Mousavi and Karroubi have been suggesting with increasing boldness that the revolution has failed to free Iranians from tyranny. In fact, they claim, “leadership” by an Islamic jurisprudence has merely instituted a new form of political bondage.

Last week, in an unusually hard-hitting interview on his website, Kalemeh, Mousavi – who served as prime minister under Khomeini in the 1980s – accused the authorities of filling the prisons with “the most sincere and devoted sons of this nation” and warned that the Islamic regime was in danger of becoming a worse dictatorship than the shah’s regime. “Dictatorships in the name of religion are the worst kind of dictatorships,” he said.

“In the first years of the revolution, people were convinced the revolution had completely destroyed all those structures through which despotism and dictatorships could be recreated,” Mousavi went on. “I was one of the people who believed this. But today, I do not believe it any more. Today, we can identify those very structures that have led to despotism… Therefore I don’t believe that the Islamic revolution has achieved its goals.”

To Khamenei, who succeeded Khomeini as leader on the latter’s death in 1989, such talk is tantamount to heresy. Having publicly endorsed Ahmadinejad’s tainted election victory, Khamenei has committed himself to a course of depicting the Green Movement as puppets of a western-backed conspiracy bent on toppling the Islamic system in a “velvet revolution”.

In recent weeks, Mousavi and Karroubi had tried to bridge the schism between them and Khamenei by hinting at a compromise that would head off a final cataclysmic confrontation. They had called for changes guaranteeing free elections, a free press and the freedom to demonstrate, while demanding the unconditional release of all political prisoners. Crucially, in a step that implies acceptance of Ahmadinejad’s tenure as president – at least for now – they had also demanded that the government be held “accountable” for its actions. But these olive branches were offered before Mousavi’s latest statement, which further sharpened the divisions.