WarSclerotic

An Iranian diplomat who defected last month said on Tuesday that Iran’s leaders would rather “slaughter” their own people than surrender power to any popular revolt inspired by uprisings across the Arab world.

Ahmed Maleki, who was vice consul of Iran’s consulate in Milan before fleeing to Paris with his family last month, is the latest in a string of officials to defect from the Islamic state and join a year-old opposition group called the Green Wave.

	Members of Iran’s opposition protest outside the Iranian embassy in Ankara, Turkey on Feb. 11, 2011.
	Photo by: AP

He said in an interview that Iranians had been inspired by images of popular revolt in North Africa but faced a regime far more brutal than those of Egypt, Tunisia or even Libya.

“In the course of the past 32 years the sole objective of the regime has been to retain power,” he told Reuters at a prestigious hotel in Paris, speaking through an interpreter.

“They are willing to … resort to whatever measure, including slaughter and bloodshed to the extreme in order to retain power,” Maleki said.

Two people were killed and dozens arrested on Feb. 14 when thousands of opposition supporters in Tehran and other cities took to the streets in sympathy with uprisings that toppled the leaders of Egypt and Tunisia.

	Mir Hossein Mousavi
	Photo by: AP Photo / Ben Curtis

Iran’s Islamist leaders, seeking to avoid a revival of mass rallies that erupted after the 2009 elections, have warned that any illegal gatherings by the opposition would be confronted.

Maleki said many other Iranian diplomats and military officers shared his critical point of view on the Tehran government but were waiting for the right time to switch sides.

He said he had fought for his country for 77 months in the 1980-88 Iran-Iraq War.

Maleki joins a former Iranian consul to Norway, an air force officer and a general who have already defected to the Green Wave. It was founded in March 2010 by exiled Iranian businessman Amir Jahanchahi, who aims to disrupt Iran’s vital energy sector to put pressure on Iranian leaders.

An international human rights group said Sunday that the two main Iranian opposition leaders and their wives are in grave danger after security forces allegedly abducted them from their homes, where they were under house arrest.

According to the International Campaign for Human Rights in Iran, leaders Mir Hossein Mousavi’s and Mahdi Karroubi’s apparent abduction indicates a serious escalation in the Iranian government’s effort to silence the opposition movement that grew out of protests over the disputed presidential election in June 2009.

Mousavi ran for president in the 2009 election against the incumbent, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who was declared the winner despite widespread charges of irregularities. Karroubi is an ex-speaker of the Iranian parliament who also ran on a pro-reform platform in the election.