Tehran, Dec 20 (DPA) Iranian ex-president Mohammad Khatami said that people should not be punished just for seeking their legitimate rights, the labour news agency ILNA reported Sunday.
“One of the most important aspects of suppression is that people should pay a price for just getting their rights,” the reformist cleric told a group of journalists.

Khatami is one of the main critics of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, and has not yet acknowledged his re-election in June, due to alleged fraud.

Referring to the people’s political and economic hardships in the recent years, Khatami said that “what the people needed and deserved was just a decent life”.

Together with former premier Mir-Hossein Moussavi, former parliament speaker Mehdi Karroubi and ex-president Akbar Hashemi-Rafsanjani, Khatami forms the opposition leadership quartet.

“A lot of misuse has been made of under the pretext of religion and the rights of women and men were ignored,” he said.

“Suppressors are those people who reserve all rights for themselves, then the people have no more rights and eventually become the oppressed ones,” the former president said,

Several reformist officials who served under Khatami during his 1997-2005 presidency are among those arrested after the June election.

“What we might say and do under the name of religion is sometimes far away from the real nature of the religion - many times we do not understand this real nature and just make the wrong things,” Khatami added.

Khatami and other opposition leaders accuse the president not only of election fraud but also of not implementing the constitution.

While all four demand the immediate release of political prisoners, the judiciary has already convicted most of them to heavy jail terms and five of them to death.

Referring to Ahmadinejad’s slogan of “justice,” Khatami said that “real justice is when people are not humiliated and easily gain their legitimate rights.”

Referring to violent confrontations with protesters in the recent months following the election, Khatami said that the main aim of 1979 Islamic revolution was “flower for bullet,” which means that even violence should not be replied by violence.

“If this aim was tarnished, then the damage (to the whole system) would be huge,” the cleric warned.