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Iran opposition under fire for 'spreading seeds of strife'

US lawmakers press Obama on Iran

AFP, Tehran
Iranian hardliners launched a fresh attack on reformists yesterday, accusing them of provoking instability and deriding a call for a referendum to resolves crisis that has exposed deep rifts in the Islamic regime.
"Some people who did not reach their goals in the election are creating doubts and then turning these doubts into a plot." Iran's police chief Esmail Ahmadi Moghadam said in a speech in the city of Mashhad.
"Those who do not abide by law and leave the supreme leader behind are liars. They are after spreading seeds of strife and doubt in the country," Moghadam was quoted as saying by the official IRNA news agency.
His remarks appeared aimed at opposition leaders such as Mir Hossein Mousavi,
who lost the June 12 presidential election to hardline incumbent Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, and also powerful cleric Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani.
In his first comments on the crisis, Rafsanjani said on Friday that a large number of Iranians had doubts about the vote -- in clear defiance of supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei who has upheld Ahmadinejad's victory.
Hundreds of thousands of people took to the streets to protest at Ahmadinejad's victory and in the ensuing violence at least 20 people were killed, and hundreds of protesters and reformists arrested by the regime.
Iranian hardliners also denounced a call by reformists for a referendum to resolve the deepening political crisis, branding it a Western plot to cause more "havoc."
The Association of Combatant Clerics, led by Ahmadinejad's reformist predecessor Mohammad Khatami, on Monday urged a referendum to try to end the worst turmoil in Iran since the 1979 Islamic revolution.
Khatami's group had voiced concern that "public confidence in the system has been damaged" by the election and its aftermath, which has highlighted sharp differences among Iran's political elite.
He also said that if the referendum did take place, the result would be "more crushing" for the reformists than the presidential poll which saw Ahmadinejad reelected by a landslide despite opposition claims it was rigged.
The conservative Khabar newspaper also rejected the idea of a referendum.
"A referendum would create challenges which our country cannot harbour and it would incite unrest instead of building confidence."
Khamenei had warned on Monday against action that could destabilise the 30-year-old Islamic republic, which has a parliamentary system but overall clerical rule.
Meanwhile. US lawmakers on Monday stepped up pressure on President Barack Obama to ready tough new economic sanctions on Iran in the event Tehran fails to freeze its suspect nuclear programme by late 2009.
Republican Senators Jon Kyi and John McCain, Independent Senator Joseph Lieberman, and Democratic Senator Evan Bayh urged Obama to prepare sanctions targeting the Central Bank of Iran in the event of diplomatic stalemate.