Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei shot down speculation that leaders of the 2009 anti-regime protests would be freed, the Los Angeles Times reported Tuesday.

Khamenei said last week that public calls for “national reconciliation,” which would come about by freeing opposition leaders Mir-Hossein Mousavi and Mehdi Karroubi from their indefinite house arrest, were “meaningless.”

“People will not reconcile with those who beat up the Basiji on Ashura,” Khamenei added. The leader was referring to protests led by the Green Movement during the holiday of Ashura after disputed election results claimed that then-president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad had beaten Mousavi and won reelection. Protesters clashed with members of the Basij, a volunteer militia of the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps, which serves the Supreme Leader.

Despite Khamenei’s claim that the protesters instigated the unrest, the Times pointed out that “news reports at the time suggested that it was the demonstrators, of whom several were killed and hundreds arrested, who bore the brunt of the violence.”

Khamenei’s proclamation means that current Iranian president Hassan Rouhani will likely be unable to fulfill his campaign pledge to free the opposition leaders from their confinement, which has now lasted more than seven years. Last April, Rouhani himself denied a request from Karroubi for a public trial.

Despite Rouhani’s reputation as a reformer and a moderate, executions in Iran increased during each of the first three years of his tenure, reaching a total of 966 in 2015, the highest total in a decade.

A surge of executions in August prompted the United Nations’s official investigator of Iran’s human rights record to blast Iran for its “complete disregard of its obligations under international human rights law and especially of international fair trial standards and due process guarantees.”

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