(Tehran) Two former leaders of the Islamic Republic of Iran, Mohammad Khatami and Mir Hossein Moussavi, demanded political reforms on Sunday to take account of the protest triggered by the death of Mahsa Amini.
Approaching 44e anniversary of the February 1979 Islamic revolution, one of the country’s main opponents, former Prime Minister Mir Hossein Moussavi, called for a “fundamental change” in the political system, which is facing a “crisis of legitimacy”.
“What is evident today is widespread discontent,” said reformist leader, former President Mohammad Khatami, in a statement released on Sunday.
He hopes that the use of “non-violent civil methods” can “force the state to change its approach and initiate reforms”.
“Iran and the Iranians need and are ready for a fundamental change, the main lines of which are traced by the pure movement Women-Life-Freedom”, underlines for his part Mr. Moussavi in a press release published on his site and reproduced Sunday by local media.
It thus refers to the main slogan of the demonstrations organized following the death on September 16 of Mahsa Amini, a 22-year-old Iranian Kurd arrested by the morality police who accused her of having broken the strict dress code of the Republic. Islamic.
For the opponent, this protest movement took place in a context of “interdependent crises” which are “economic, environmental, social, of legitimacy, cultural and media”.
Mir Hossein Moussavi proposes that a “free and fair referendum be organized on whether or not to draft a new constitution”, because the current “structure” of the system is “unsustainable”.
Unsuccessful presidential candidate in 2009, Mr. Moussavi had taken the lead in the protest against the re-election of outgoing President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, denouncing massive fraud.
Now 80 years old, the former prime minister from 1981 to 1989 has been under house arrest in Tehran for 12 years with his wife Zahra Rahnavard, without having been charged.
As during the “People’s Revolution in 1979”, “the population has the right to fundamental revisions in order to […] to pave the way for freedom, justice, democracy and development” of Iran, he added in his press release.
For his part, Mohammad Khatami, 79, deplores that “there is no sign of the will of the power to reform and avoid errors”.
President from 1997 to 2005 before being forced into silence, he regrets that the population is “desperate for the system in place”.