Tehran, Iran, October 17
By Mehdi Sepahvand –- Trend:
The Islamic Revolution Guard Corps has said that it has not interfered in elections in Iran in the past.
A recent wave of criticism against armed forces that uses Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei’s electoral guidelines to imply that the IRGC has been influencing elections is wrongly founded, IRGC Political Deputy Rasul Sanaei Rad told ISNA news agency October 17.
Ayatollah Khamenei recently issued a set of policies to regulate the behavior of various governmental and non-governmental organizations toward presidential elections, set to be held in 2017.
“The Leader did not just warn armed forces against interfering with elections, but the three branches as well as their subsidiaries and public organizations,” Rad said, blasting critics for picking only on the armed forces section in Ayatollah Khamenei’s order.
“Such media’s act of attending only to the ban on armed forces’ entry into elections will entail some sort of induction in society where the audience will think maybe something has happened in the past.”
“The armed forces even before the Leader’s order would not interfere in elections and would only attend to explanation and clarification,” he stated, adding, “Political players should not mar the grandeur of armed forces for some inferior objectives.”