Remember Iran's Green Movement?
President Hassan Rouhani will not open a new battlefront against hard-liners in pushing for the release of Mehdi Karroubi and Mir Hussein Mousavi while the nuclear negotiations are taking place.
The 2009 Iranian presidential elections were followed by organized, massive street demonstrations under the banner of the Green Movement against the disputed victory of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. The movement was a loose coalition of reformers, moderate conservatives and seculars.
Websites associated with the defeated candidate, Mir Hossein Mousavi, the former prime minister of Iran (1981-89) and one of the prominent leaders of the Green Movement, claimed that according to leaked information from the Ministry of Interior, the real number of votes were 21.3 million for Mousavi and 10.5 million for Ahmadinejad. It should be noted that a portion of religious conservatives could have voted for Mousavi because until that date his devotion to the Islamic system and velayat-e faqih (guardianship of the jurist), was approved by the ultra-conservative Guardian Council, which vets the candidates, otherwise he could not have run for presidency.
