TEHRAN, Oct 24 (IPS) -

A letter from deputy intelligence minister to the Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Khamenei, that has found its way to some Iranian websites, shows that the police chief warned he would resign if Kazemeini and his armed followers, who had barricaded themselves in and around the cleric’s residence in a Tehran district, were treated harshly.

The crisis could have been resolved through negotiations but instead was handled roughly by forces other than those under Talai’s command. It turned into a standoff lasting several days between the dissident cleric’s followers and the police, plainclothesmen and vigilantes, creating a tense situation.

After clashes broke out between the supporters and the vigilantes, security forces moved in. ’’There were clashes between the people and the cult members. Law enforcement forces intervened to prevent unpredictable mishaps,’’ a security official of the Tehran local administration was reported by the Islamic Republic News Agency (IRNA) as saying.

Protestors attacked with teargas

But more sympathetic reports said the protestors were first attacked with teargas by the vigilantes and militia and that Kazemeini’s followers retaliated by taking hostages from among the plainclothesmen and the militia — rather than from among people on the street as the official version would have it.

Following the arrests of 41 of his followers earlier, Kazemeini had written letters of protest to Kofi Annan, Xavier Solana and the Pope as well as to Ayatollah Khamenei and chief justice Ayatollah Shahroudi.

In his letter to the Pope, Kazemeini had claimed to be the leader of the biggest independent religious society in Iran and of having been harassed by the Islamic regime for years for advocating separation of religion and state.

"My only crime is that I don’t want to mix politics with religion and lose my life in the hereafter for the sake of life in this world," he wrote in his letter to the Pope. "My house has been under siege by government forces for 50 days now. The orders to shoot me and my followers have been issued," he wrote, adding that his followers were being tortured in prison.

Wrote letter to Pope

"Judging from letters to the Pope and U.N. Secretary General, the Ayatollah (Kazemeini) seems to have had an exaggerated view of his mission or faulty advice from those around him because he claimed the crackdown on satellites dishes in Iran, a couple of months ago, was intended to block his voice from reaching the public or that the U.N. Security Council was going to issue a resolution following his letter to the Secretary General," an observer in Tehran, who did not want to be named, told IPS.

"Until a few months ago, he had been quite obscure and known only to a small group of followers in a poor southern Tehran district where his father had also preached in a mosque. He preached to a very large congregation at a stadium a few months ago after which he was summoned to the Special Court for the Clergy. After the arrests of a number of his followers, to which Amnesty International also reacted, he became famous,’’ the observer added.

Montazeri still under house arrest

Another dissident cleric, the Grand Ayatollah Hossein Ali Montazeri, once chosen to succeed Ayatollah Khomeini, has been living under house arrest for several years now. Montazeri still commands a large following in the country.

Throughout the country the clergy has come under strict regime control. All Friday prayer leaders are appointed by the state and any opposition to the state by clerics, politically or religiously, is severely punished by the Special Court for the Clergy, an extra-constitutional body that tries clergymen and has the power to sentence them to anything from defrocking to death. Kazemeini, who had earlier refused to attend a hearing of the same, was arrested under a warrant issued by that court.

Charges brought against Kazemeini are yet to be officially announced. "I have been accused of claiming to be the 12th Imam or his representative but that is not true,’’ ‘Iranews’ quoted him as saying. "I only defend the traditional religion.’’

In an editorial that followed Kazemeini’s arrest, the conservative ‘Jomhuri Eslami’ newspaper called him a fraud who wanted to be known as a representative and medium of the ‘Imam in Occultation’. The paper also questioned his religious credentials and warned against "deviatory religious trends in the Islamic and revolutionary society of Iran."

Belief in the return of Imam Mahdi, the 12th Imam, is a fundamental tenet among Shiites who hold that he went into occultation by the order of God and that he will re-emerge on the judgement day to save the world. Shiites have been awaiting that for nearly twelve centuries now.

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