Kadkhodaei sought to address this concern by noting that there was no regulation forcing Iranians to vote in their home cities and suggesting the over-vote could be explazined by “travelers.”
With or without religion, you would have good people doing good things and evil people doing evil things. But for good people to do evil things, that takes religion. - Steven Weinberg, 1999
Re:Iran declares win for Ahmadinejad in disputed vote
« Reply #31 on: 2009-06-26 00:06:27 »
[Hermit 2009-06-22] I think that Obomber is doing pretty well on Iran. I'd give him a D. To have scored higher, he should have restricted himself to his first comments and not added the second more intrusive set, even though I am sure that the pressure on him from the Clintonites and the rest of the Likudnicks is pretty extreme. Even though this puts them in the weird position of saying the same things as the neocons and extreme religious-right of the Republicans. Which also, in a way, tells a tale of motivation and inspiration.
[Hermit] His latest comments on the Iranian election, while still not having commented on the numerous studies finding Israel guilty of far more serious war crimes against the Palestinians in Gaza, refer e.g. Quote from: Hermit on 2009-06-25 23:48:22
Church of Virus BBS,General,Serious Business,Re:Starving a Nation: From the World's Largest Concentration Camp ), Reply 109, Israel's Crimes, America's Silence
, simply makes him look as bigoted as Bush. If not discussing Israeli crimes, either when they were happening or afterwards is intended to assist diplomacy, then the same ought to be true of Iran's lesser crime of brutality (though I have seen American police act rather viciously too), and if condemnation is supposed to help in Iran, then the same should be applied to Israel. The difference in approach makes Obama a hypocrite (just as his ever expanding wars in central Asia have made him a war-monger, and his failure to adhere to the SOF agreement in Iraq has made him a liar).
[Hermit] So from a poor pass, Obama transitions to a fail in diplomacy. He looks more and more like a smarter version of Bush. Rather sad, but not entirely unexpected.
With or without religion, you would have good people doing good things and evil people doing evil things. But for good people to do evil things, that takes religion. - Steven Weinberg, 1999
Re:Iran declares win for Ahmadinejad in disputed vote
« Reply #32 on: 2009-06-26 08:12:09 »
Twittergasms
Source: The Nation Authors: Alexander Cockburn Dated: 2009-06-13
How much easier it is to raise three--or 3 million--rousing tweets for the demonstrators in Tehran than to mount any sort of political resistance at home! Here we have a new Democratic president, propelled into office on a magic carpet of progressive pledges, now methodically flouting them one by one, with scarcely a twit or even a tweet raised in protest, aside from the gallant efforts of Medea Benjamin, Russell Mokhiber and their comrades at the healthcare hearings in Congress.
At the end of June US troops will leave Iraq's cities, and many of them will promptly clamber onto military transports and redeploy to Obama's war in Afghanistan and Pakistan. There's been no hiccup in this smooth transition from the disastrous invasion of Iraq to Obama's escalation farther east. The Twittering classes are mostly giving Obama a pass on this one or actively supporting it. Where are the mobilizations, actions, civil disobedience? Antiwar coalitions like United for Peace and Justice and Win Without War (with MoveOn also belatedly adopting this craven posture) don't say clearly "US troops out now!" They whine about the "absence of a clear mission" (Win Without War), plead futilely for "an exit strategy" (UFPJ). One letter from the UFPJ coalition (which includes Code Pink) to the Congressional Progressive Caucus in May laconically began a sentence with the astounding words, "To defeat the Taliban and stabilize the country, the U.S. must enable the Afghan people..." These pathetic attempts not to lose "credibility" and thus attain political purchase have met with utter failure, as the recent vote on a supplemental appropriation proved. A realistic estimate seems to be that among the Democrats in Congress there are fewer than forty solid antiwar votes.
Not so long ago Sri Lankan government troops launched a final savage onslaught on the remaining Tamil enclaves. In the discriminate butchery of Tamils, whether civilians or fighters, estimates of the dead prepared by the United Nations ran at 20,000 (the report was suppressed by the current appalling UN secretary general, Ban Ki-moon). I don't recall too many tweets in Washington or across this nation about a methodical exercise in carnage. But then, unlike those attractive Iranians, Tamils tend to be small and dark and not beautiful in the contour of poor Neda, who got out of her car at the wrong time in the wrong place, died in view of a cellphone and is now reborn on CNN as the Angel of Iran.
With or without religion, you would have good people doing good things and evil people doing evil things. But for good people to do evil things, that takes religion. - Steven Weinberg, 1999
Re:Iran declares win for Ahmadinejad in disputed vote
« Reply #33 on: 2009-06-29 05:29:15 »
Iran's Press TV disputes story of Neda's death
[ Hermit : I really wish that the editors of the Western media could learn to use dispute, rebut and refute correctly. ]
Source: CNN Authors: Not Credited Dated: 2009-06-28
The woman whose death has come to symbolize Iranian resistance to the government's official election results did not die the way the opposition claims, government-backed Press TV said Sunday.
Two people told Press TV there were no security forces in the area when Neda Agha-Soltan, 26, was killed on June 20.
Neda's death was captured on amateur video -- most likely by a cell phone -- and posted online. Within hours, she had become the iconic victim of the Iranian government crackdown.
Eyewitnesses say Neda was shot by pro-government Basij militiamen perched on a rooftop.
But Press TV said the type of bullet that killed her is not used by Iranian security forces.
A man who told the state-funded network he had helped take her to a hospital said, "There were no security forces or any member of the Basij" government-backed paramilitary present when she was killed.
Press TV did not name the man, who spoke Farsi and was subtitled in English on the broadcast.
CNN has not identified him and cannot confirm his account.
"I didn't see who shot who," he said. "The whole scene looked suspicious to me."
A second man, whom Press TV identified as Neda's music teacher who was with her when she died, told the station there was "no security forces in this street" when she was shot.
Press TV did not name the man, who had a gray mustache and ponytail. He spoke Farsi and was subtitled in English as he walked and pointed at what Press TV said was the scene of the shooting.
She was with a family friend who is a music teacher when she was killed. He appears to be the man who spoke to the Iranian broadcaster.
"There was no sign of a protest," he said. "We crossed the street to the other side to get a cab... When we reached this spot, a gunshot was heard. There was no shooting here... There were no security forces in this street. There were around 20, 30 people in this street. One shot was heard and that bullet hit Neda."
"The bullet was apparently fired from a small caliber pistol that's not used by Iranian security forces," the Press TV anchor said.
Iran has strict gun-control laws that bar private citizens from carrying firearms.
U.S. President Barack Obama said Tuesday he had seen the video of Neda's death and called it "heartbreaking.
"And I think anyone who sees it knows there's something fundamentally unjust about it," he said.
The shaky video of her death shows her walking with a man, a teacher of music and philosophy, near an anti-government demonstration.
After being stuck in traffic for more than an hour inside a Peugeot 206 -- a subcompact with a poorly working air conditioner -- Neda and the friend decided to get out of the car for some fresh air, a friend of Neda's told CNN after her death.
The two were near where protesters were chanting in opposition to the supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, whose calls for an end to anti-government demonstrations have sparked defiance across the nation.
Neda, wearing a baseball cap over a black scarf, a black shirt, blue jeans and tennis shoes, does not appear to be chanting and seems to be observing the demonstration.
Suddenly, Neda is on the ground -- felled by a single gunshot wound to the chest. Several men kneel at her side and place pressure on her chest in an attempt to stop the bleeding. "She has been shot! Someone, come and take her!" shouts one man.
By now, Neda's eyes have rolled to her right; her body is limp.
Blood streams from her mouth, then from her nose. For a second, her face is hidden from view as the camera goes behind one of the men. When Neda's face comes back into view, it is covered with blood.
Iran's ambassador to Mexico -- one of few Iranian officials who has spoken to CNN since the disputed June 12 presidential election -- suggested American intelligence services could be responsible for her death.
"This death of Neda is very suspicious," Ambassador Mohammad Hassan Ghadiri said. "My question is, how is it that this Miss Neda is shot from behind, got shot in front of several cameras, and is shot in an area where no significant demonstration was behind held?
"Well, if the CIA wants to kill some people and attribute that to the government elements, then choosing women is an appropriate choice, because the death of a woman draws more sympathy," Ghadiri said.
CIA spokesman George Little responded, "Any suggestion that the CIA was responsible for the death of this young woman is wrong, absurd and offensive." [ Hermit : Interesting. And when, in the absence of evidence, the President of the USA - and many others - suggest that the government of Iran "was responsible for the death of this young woman" it is not "wrong, absurd and offensive"? How the hypocrisy glistens. ]
With or without religion, you would have good people doing good things and evil people doing evil things. But for good people to do evil things, that takes religion. - Steven Weinberg, 1999
TEHRAN—The family, clad in black, stood at the curb of the road sobbing. A middle-aged mother slapped her cheeks, letting out piercing wails. The father, a frail man who worked as a doorman at a clinic in central Tehran, wept quietly with his head bowed.
Minutes before, an ambulance had arrived from Tehran's morgue carrying the body of their only son, 19-year-old Kaveh Alipour.
On Saturday, amid the most violent clashes between security forces and protesters, Mr. Alipour was shot in the head as he stood at an intersection in downtown Tehran. He was returning from acting class and a week shy of becoming a groom, his family said.
The details of his death remain unclear. He had been alone. Neighbors and relatives think that he got trapped in the crossfire. He wasn't politically active and hadn't taken part in the turmoil that has rocked Iran for over a week, they said.
"He was a very polite, shy young man," said Mohamad, a neighbor who has known him since childhood.
When Mr. Alipour didn't return home that night, his parents began to worry. All day, they had heard gunshots ringing in the distance. His father, Yousef, first called his fiancée and friends. No one had heard from him.
At the crack of dawn, his father began searching at police stations, then hospitals and then the morgue.
Upon learning of his son's death, the elder Mr. Alipour was told the family had to pay an equivalent of $3,000 as a "bullet fee"—a fee for the bullet used by security forces—before taking the body back, relatives said.
Mr. Alipour told officials that his entire possessions wouldn't amount to $3,000, arguing they should waive the fee because he is a veteran of the Iran-Iraq war. According to relatives, morgue officials finally agreed, but demanded that the family do no funeral or burial in Tehran. Kaveh Alipour's body was quietly transported to the city of Rasht, where there is family.
Everyone in the neighborhood knows the Alipour family. In addition to their slain son, they have two daughters. Shopkeepers and businesses pasted a photocopied picture of Mr. Alipour on their walls and windows. In the picture, the young man is shown wearing a dark suit with gray stripes. His black hair is combed neatly to a side and he has a half-smile.
"He was so full of life. He had so many dreams," said Arsalan, a taxi driver who has known the family for 10 years. "What did he die for?"
From Day 1, Iran’s women stood in the vanguard. Their voices from rooftops were loudest, and their defiance in the streets boldest. “Stand, don’t run,” Nazanine told me as the baton-wielding police charged up handsome Vali Asr avenue on the day after the fraudulent election. She stood.
Images assail me: a slender woman clutching her stomach outside Tehran University after the blow; a tall woman gesticulating to the men behind her to advance on the shiny-shirted Basij militia; women shedding tears of distilled indignation; and that young woman who screamed, “We are all so angry. Will they kill us all?”
How can a revolution kill its children? The post-1979 generation has risen, not alone, but in the lead. Perhaps Iran cannot be an exception to the rule that revolutions devour themselves.
A friend told me he no longer recognizes his wife. She’d been of the reluctantly acquiescent school. Now, “She’s a revolutionary.” I followed as she led us up onto the roof. The “death to the dictator” that surged from her into the night was of rare ferocity.
Women marched in 1979, too. But when the revolution was won, women were pushed out. Their subjugation became a pillar of the Islamic state. One woman told me that she had been 20 when she fought to oust the shah. “It’s simple,” she said. “We wanted freedom then, and we don’t have it now.”
In a way it is simple: laws that can force a girl into marriage at 13; discriminatory laws on inheritance; the segregated beaches on the Caspian; the humiliation of arrest for a neck revealed or an ankle-length skirt (a gust of wind might show a forbidden flash of leg); the suffocation that leads one artist I know to raise her hands to her neck.
Yes, it’s simple. From the outset, the regime targeted women, calculating that the patriarchal culture of the country would embrace the idea of an Islamic diktat that “put women in their place.”
But then again nothing in Iran is simple. One benefit of the massive show of resistance to a stolen vote, and future, has been to awaken Americans to the civic vitality of Iranian society — a real country with real people rather than a bunch of zealous clerics posing a nuclear problem.
This is a sea change. Iran has been denuclearized, not in the sense that the problem has gone away (on the contrary), but in the sense that a rounded picture, beyond to bomb or not to bomb, has formed.
Say Iran and murdered Neda Agha-Sultan surges where a bearded mullah once stood. Young, modern, connected, Neda just wanted to live her life. She personifies a certain Iran I’ve tried to evoke since the beginning of this year.
In some senses, women of her 20-something generation have benefited from the revolution; I told you to forget simplicity. It took an ayatollah to tell traditional families to educate their daughters. Today 60 percent of university students are women, about double the figure in 1982.
Here we stand close to the tragedy of this election. The vote offered an opportunity to bridge the gap between a fast-changing society of highly educated women and the regime. Past elections have served that purpose, nudging the clerical establishment in reformist directions.
Instead, hard-liners around President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad opted for schism, a historic error. The Iran of yesterday is gone, the Iran of tomorrow not yet born.
I don’t want to suggest that Iran is a nation of women thirsting to cast off their chadors. As Saeed Leylaz told me before he was thrown in jail along with most of Iran’s reformist brain trust, “Our feet are in traditionalism and our heads in modernism.” Zahra Rahnavard, the strong-willed wife of Mir Hussein Moussavi, the opposition leader, troubled as she inspired.
When a friend asked one Ahmadinejad supporter his reasons, the reply was brusque: because “all the whores are with Moussavi.” Cultural battle lines of great clarity have been drawn since June 12.
Women are angry with the state, of course. But they are also angry with the passive way men have accepted discrimination. Be strong! Fight harder! These are immediate messages summoned from old frustrations.
Their courage and pain haunt me. We need Delacroix to paint them. We need President Obama to put engagement — still the right medium-term objective — on hold in their name.
Islam has a lot to say about the rights of women; the mullahs of Qom have lots of training in how to say the opposite of what they said before. The revolution might have bent toward the women it fashioned. But it has stiffened against what it birthed, never wise.
I asked one woman about her fears. She said sometimes she imagines an earthquake in Tehran. She dashes out but forgets her hijab. She stands in the ruins, hair loose and paralyzed, awaiting her punishment. And she looked at me wide-eyed as if to say: do you understand, does the world understand our desperation?
Excerpt: TEHRAN — They are known mockingly as the “Joojeh Basiji” — the “chicken Basiji.” These are the militia scarcely old enough to manage more than a feeble beard. Teenagers, brainwashed from early childhood, they have been ferried into the capital in large numbers, given a club and a shield and a helmet and told to go to work.
I appeal to you, generals of the Islamic Revolutionary Guards, the Pásdárán: Do what I did! Defend the people, not the tyrant. I am a two-star general who was once at the top of communist Romania's version of the Pásdárán, the Securitate, and I learned the hard way that no tyrant can keep a country's people enchained for ever.
I have been in your shoes. In December 1988, the Romanians took to the streets to overthrow their two-bit Dracula dictator, Ceausescu, just re-enthroned at the end of a rigged election, just as the people of Iran are trying now to get rid of their Hitler-style dictator, just re-enthroned at the end of another rigged election. Like Ahmadinejad, Ceausescu also ordered his security forces to open fire against the population.
I sided with the people. Helped by the publisher of this very magazine, who had just published my book Red Horizons: The True Story of Nicolae and Elena Ceausescu's Crimes, Lifestyle and Corruption, I used the microphones of Radio Free Europe to expose the true face of Romania's tyrant. My fellow generals in the Securitate got the message, and ignored his order to stifle the people's rebellion in a bath of blood. On Christmas Day 1989, Ceausescu was executed for genocide by his own people. Now the former Kingdom of Romania, transformed by the communists into an epitome of tyranny, is a prosperous member of the European Union.
Iran is home to one of the world's oldest civilizations, going back to 7,000 BC. Its literature, philosophy, medicine, astronomy, mathematics and art have been major contributors to the whole Muslim civilization. Now Ahmadinejad, who dreams of being a new Hitler, wants to unleash a new Holocaust that will turn the whole civilized world against Iran, just as it was turned against Nazi Germany.
My fellow Pásdárán generals: Ahmadinejad is history. He'll share Ceausescu's fate. If not today, tomorrow, or the day after tomorrow. In the geopolitical Age of Twitter -- when seven in ten Iranians own a cellular -- there is no longer any place to hide. If you order your subordinates to fire on the people, your crime will be well documented with thousands of pictures at a new Nuremberg Trial.
If you break with the past and join the future, the liberated energy of Iran's people, enchained for much too long, will transform your country into an explosive democracy. Your children will be proud of your courage. Just as my daughter is now proud that her father eventually sided with freedom, not with tyranny.
Ion Mihai Pacepa (Lt. Gen., Romania) is the highest Soviet bloc official ever to have defected. In December 1989, Ceausescu was executed at the end of a trial whose accusations came almost word-for-word out of Pacepa's book Red Horizons (Regnery, 1987).
Since Iran's controversial and disputed election, President Obama has been noticeably restrained in his reaction. He has flashed his empathy, saying on Tuesday that he was "appalled and outraged" by the regime's brutality, but he has been equally emphatic about not being perceived as meddling in Iran's internal affairs. Despite increasing political heat, even from Democrats and the usually adulatory U.S. media, Obama persists in his low-key approach, clinging to emotive generalizations.
But it is the president's underlying policies that are wrong, not just his rhetoric. Saying that he does not want the "debate" inside Iran to be about the United States is disingenuous at best. Obama's real objective is to launch negotiations with Iran over its nuclear program, in the belief that he can talk Iran out of its 20-year effort to acquire deliverable nuclear weapons. He said it during the 2008 campaign, during his inaugural address and repeatedly thereafter.
Viewed in the light of this near-religious obsession with negotiation, Obama's reticence is entirely understandable: He does not want to jeopardize the chance to sit with the likes of Iranian supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad or the Islamic Revolutionary Guard.
In fact, everything we know about the regime indicates that Iran, and the Revolutionary Guard in particular, will never voluntarily give up its nuclear program, so Obama's policy is doomed to failure. (Inevitably, of course, if negotiations start, Obama would change the definition of success to include accepting a "peaceful" Iranian uranium- enrichment program, which means Tehran would retain its "breakout" capability to quickly produce nuclear weapons -- but exploring this further Obama failure has to wait for another day.)
Accordingly, it is Obama's policy errors, not his rhetorical ones, that should be opposed. Rhetoric itself is not policy but only the adjunct of policy, albeit often an important one. Obama's reticence reflects his larger misjudgment -- the dangerous misconception that there is a negotiated solution to Iran's nuclear threat that can satisfy both Iran and the United States.
Pursuing that objective is perilous for America, its allies and its friends -- in Europe, Israel and the Arab world alike. Moreover, Obama rarely mentions Iran's continuing role as the world's central banker for terrorist groups such as Hamas and Hezbollah, yet this is another threat that negotiation will not eliminate.
Obama's policy, and that of the United States, should be the overthrow of the Islamic revolution of 1979. The massive resistance to the June 12 elections is just another fact supporting that conclusion.
The Tehran regime -- not just Ahmadinejad but the entire Islamic revolution superstructure -- is enormously unpopular for three major reasons. First, the regime's economic mismanagement has brought the economy of a country rich in oil and natural gas to near-gridlock. Periodic but piecemeal strikes have been put down, but the prospect of a simultaneous, sustained, nationwide strike remains a potent threat
Second, Iran's young people -- two-thirds of the population is under 30 -- know they could have a much freer life if they could only overturn the mullahs' strict rule. The young are educated and sophisticated, and they know there are alternatives to Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini's velayat-e faqih, the system of "guardianship of Islamic jurists" that imposes harsh Sharia law on Iran today.
Third, Iran is only about 50% Persian. Arabs, Baluchis, Azeris, Kurds and others resent the ethnic, political and religious discrimination they face constantly and have little or no love for the Islamic revolution.
Of course, these various sources of discontent are not entirely reinforcing, and are sometimes in conflict, which indicates how difficult it is for a purely internal Iranian opposition to coalesce. Had the U.S. and others over the last 30 years done more to help Iranian dissidents, overtly and covertly, we might be in a different place today. The question is whether we are prepared to do now what we should have been doing for some time.
To date at least, the Obama administration's answer remains a resounding no. Obama wants negotiations with Tehran, not regime change. Given that the Revolutionary Guard and the hard-line mullahs -- and not the people -- are increasingly likely to be the short-term winners of the current Battle for Iran, supporters of regime change must now make longer-term plans.
We have missed a huge opportunity because of Obama's error (and that of his predecessors), but the continuing threat of Iranian nuclear weapons and support for international terrorism make the imperative of regime change no less compelling. The Iranian people will continue their opposition no matter how inconvenient it is for Obama's hoped-for negotiations. We should support them, and not just by rhetoric.
John R. Bolton, former U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, is a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and the author of "Surrender Is Not an Option."
Iran today is a revolution in search of its Yeltsin. Without leadership, demonstrators will take to the street only so many times to face tear gas, batons and bullets. They need a leader like Boris Yeltsin: a former establishment figure with newly revolutionary credentials and legitimacy, who stands on a tank and gives the opposition direction by calling for the unthinkable -- the abolition of the old political order.
Right now the Iranian revolution has no leader. As this is written, opposition candidate Mir Hossein Mousavi has not appeared in public since June 18. And the Khamenei-Ahmadinejad regime has shown the requisite efficiency and ruthlessness at suppressing widespread unrest. Its brutality has been deployed intelligently. The key is to atomize the opposition. Start with the most sophisticated methods to block Internet and cellphone traffic, thanks to technology provided by Nokia Siemens Networks. Allow the more massive demonstrations to largely come and go -- avoiding Tiananmen-style wholesale bloodshed -- but disrupt the smaller ones with street-side violence and rooftop snipers, the perfect instrument of terror. Death instant and unseen, the kind that only the most reckless and courageous will brave.
Terror visited by invisible men. From rooftops by day. And by night, swift and sudden raids that pull students out of dormitories, the wounded out of hospitals, for beatings and disappearances.
For all our sentimental belief in the ultimate triumph of those on the "right side of history," nothing is inevitable. This second Iranian revolution is on the defensive, even in retreat. To recover, it needs mass, because every dictatorship fears the moment when it gives the order to the gunmen to shoot at the crowd. If they do (Tiananmen), the regime survives; if they don't (Romania's Ceausescu), the dictators die like dogs. The opposition needs a general strike and major rallies in the major cities -- but this time with someone who stands up and points out the road ahead.
Desperately seeking Yeltsin. Does this revolution have one? Or to put it another way, can Mousavi become Yeltsin?
President Obama's worst misstep during the Iranian upheaval occurred early on when he publicly discounted the policy differences between Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and Mousavi.
True, but that overlooked two extremely important points. First, while Mousavi himself was originally only a few inches to Ahmadinejad's left on the political spectrum -- being hand-picked by the ruling establishment precisely for his ideological reliability -- Mousavi's support was not restricted to those whose views matched his. He would have been the electoral choice of everyone to his left, a massive national constituency -- liberals, liberalizers, secularists, monarchists, radicals and visceral opponents of the entire regime -- that dwarfs those who shared his positions, as originally held.
Moreover, Mousavi's positions have changed, just as he has. He is far different today from the Mousavi who began this electoral campaign.
Revolutions are dynamic, fluid. It is true that two months ago there was little difference between Ahmadinejad and Mousavi. But that day is long gone. Revolutions outrun their origins. And they transform their leaders.
Mikhail Gorbachev and Yeltsin both began as orthodox party regulars. They subsequently evolved together into reformers. Then came the revolution. Gorbachev could not shake himself from the system. Yeltsin rose up and engineered its destruction.
In the 1980s, Mousavi was Ayatollah Khomeini's prime minister, a brutal enforcer of orthodox Islamism. Twenty years later, he started out running for president advocating little more than cosmetic moderation. But then the revolutionary dynamic began: The millions who rallied to his cause -- millions far to his left -- began to radicalize him. The stolen election radicalized him even more. Finally, the bloody suppression of his followers led him to make statements just short of challenging the legitimacy of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and the very foundations of the regime. The dynamic continues: The regime is preparing the basis for Mousavi's indictment (for sedition), arrest, even possible execution. The prospect of hanging radicalizes further.
As Mousavi hovers between Gorbachev and Yeltsin, between reformer and revolutionary, between figurehead and leader, the revolution hangs in the balance. The regime may neutralize him by arrest or even murder. It may buy him off with offers of safety and a sinecure. He may well prefer to let this cup pass from his lips.
But choose he must, and choose quickly. This is his moment, and it is fading rapidly. Unless Mousavi rises to it, or another rises in his place, Iran's democratic uprising will end not as Russia 1991, but as China 1989.
If there hadn't been dissidents in the Soviet Union, the Communist regime never would have crumbled. And if the West hadn't been concerned about their fate, Soviet leaders would have ruthlessly done away with them. They didn't because the Kremlin feared the response of the Free World.
Just like the Soviet dissidents who resisted communism, those who dare to march through the streets of Tehran and stand up against the Islamic regime founded by the Ayatollah Khomeini 30 years ago represent the greatest hope for change in a country built on the repression of its people. At stake is nothing less than the legitimacy of a system incompatible with respect for individual rights. Also at stake is the survival of a theocratic regime that seeks to be the dominant power in the region, the indisputable spiritual leader of the Muslim world, and the enemy of the West.
The Islamic Republic that the ayatollahs have created is not just any power. To defend a strict interpretation of the Quran, Khomeini created the Pasdaran, the Revolutionary Guard, which today is a true army. To expand its ideology and influence Iran has not hesitated to create, sustain and use proxy terrorist groups like Hezbollah in Lebanon and Hamas in Gaza. And to impose its fundamentalist vision beyond its borders, Iran is working frantically to obtain nuclear weapons.
Those who protest against the blatant electoral fraud that handed victory to the fanatical Mahmoud Ahmadinejad are in reality demanding a change of regime. Thus, the regime has resorted to beating and shooting its citizens in a desperate attempt to squash the pro-democracy movement.
This is no time for hesitation on the part of the West. If, as part of an attempt to reach an agreement on the Iranian nuclear program, the leaders of democratic nations turn their backs on the dissidents they will be making a terrible mistake.
President Obama has said he refuses to "meddle" in Iran's internal affairs, but this is a poor excuse for passivity. If the international community is not able to stop, or at least set limits on, the repressive violence of the Islamic regime, the protesters will end up as so many have in the past -- in exile, in prison, or in the cemetery. And with them, all hope for change will be gone.
To be clear: Nobody in the circles of Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei or Ahmadinejad is going to reward us for silence or inaction. On the contrary, failing to support the regime's critics will leave us with an emboldened Ahmadinejad, an atomic Iran, and dissidents that are disenchanted and critical of us. We cannot talk about freedom and democracy if we abandon our own principles.
Some do not want to recognize the spread of freedom in the Middle East. But it is clear that after decades of repression -- religious and secular -- the region is changing.
The recent elections in Lebanon are a clear example. The progressive normalization of Iraq is another. It would be a shame, particularly in the face of such regional progress, if our passivity gave carte blanche to a tyrannical regime to finish off the dissidents and persist with its revolutionary plans.
Delayed public displays of indignation may be good for internal political consumption. But the consequences of Western inaction have already materialized. Watching videos of innocent Iranians being brutalized, it's hard to defend silence.
Mr. Aznar is the former prime minister of Spain (1996-2004).
EDITOR'S NOTE: Iranian authorities have barred journalists for international news organizations from reporting on the streets and ordered them to stay in their offices. This report is based on the accounts of witnesses reached in Iran and official statements carried on Iranian media.
___
A body of 12 clerics declared Iran's disputed presidential vote valid and free of major fraud, paving the way for President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to be sworn in next month despite claims of vote manipulation that sparked weeks of massive protest.
The Guardian Council, an electoral authority the opposition accuses of favoring Ahmadinejad, said Monday that it had found only "slight irregularities" after randomly selecting and recounting 10 percent of nearly 40 million ballots.
"From today on, the file on the presidential election has been closed," Guardian Council spokesman Abbas Ali Kadkhodaei said on state-run Press TV.
Opposition candidate Mir Hossein Mousavi has said Ahmadinejad stole re-election through fraud and demanded a new election. Western analysts have described Ahmadinejad's roughly 2-1 margin of victory as suspicious and improbable.
Conservative Ayatollah Ahmed Jannati, who heads the Guardian Council, said that "meticulous and comprehensive examination" revealed only "slight irregularities that are common to any election and needless of attention," according to the state TV channel IRIB.
The decision ruling out the possibility of a new vote was expected after the country's supreme leader endorsed the vote on June 19. The government had delayed a formal declaration as Mousavi supporters flooded in the streets in protests that were put down through a show of force by riot police and pro-government militiamen.
Mousavi has made few public appearances since then and said he would seek official approval for rallies.
The cleric-led government has said Ahmadinejad will be sworn in for a second term as early as July 26.
Asked if the United States would recognize Ahmadinejad as Iran's legitimate president, U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton said "We're going to take this a day at a time."
Monday's recount appeared to be an attempt to cultivate the image that Iran was seriously addressing fraud claims, while giving no ground in the clampdown on opposition.
Ahmadinejad would still have beat Mousavi if errors were found in nearly every one of the votes in the recount, according to the government.
"They have a huge credibility gap with their own people as to the election process. And I don't think that's going to disappear by any finding of a limited review of a relatively small number of ballots," Clinton told reporters in Washington.
Ahmadinejad also said he had ordered an investigation of the killing of a young woman on the fringes of a protest. Widely circulated video footage of Neda Agha Soltan bleeding to death on a Tehran street sparked outrage worldwide over authorities' harsh response to demonstrations.
Iran's leaders have been trying to blame the election unrest on foreign conspirators, a longtime staple of government rhetoric about internal dissent.
Ahmadinejad's Web site said Soltan was slain by "unknown agents and in a suspicious" way, convincing him that "enemies of the nation" were responsible.
An Iranian doctor who said he tried to save her told the BBC last week she apparently was shot by a member of the volunteer Basij militia. Protesters spotted an armed member of the militia on a motorcycle, and stopped and disarmed him, Dr. Arash Hejazi said.
Basij commander Hossein Taeb on Monday alleged that armed impostors were posing as militia members, Iran's state-run English-language satellite channel Press TV reported.
Tensions with the West rose Sunday when Iran announced it had detained nine local employees of the British Embassy on suspicion of fomenting or aiding protests. Iranian Foreign Ministry spokesman Hasan Qashqavi said Monday that five of the Iranian embassy staffers had been released and the remaining four were being interrogated.
Intelligence Minister Gholam Hossein Mohseini Ejehi claimed he had videotape showing some of the employees mingling with protesters. He said the fate of those who remain in custody rests with the court system. Ejehi boasted that Iran had overcome attempts at an uprising like the Velvet Revolution, the peaceful 1989 mass demonstrations that brought down Czechoslovakia's Communist regime.
Qashqavi said officials were in written and verbal contact with British Foreign Secretary David Miliband and that Iran had dismissed the idea of downgrading relations with Britain and other countries.
Italian Premier Silvio Berlusconi said Group of Eight leaders meeting next week in Italy will discuss possible sanctions against Iran.
Riot police clashed Sunday with up to 3,000 protesters near the Ghoba Mosque in north Tehran, the first major post-election unrest in four days.
Witnesses told The Associated Press that police used tear gas and clubs to break up the crowd, and said some demonstrators suffered broken bones. They alleged that security forces beat an elderly woman, prompting a screaming match with young demonstrators who then fought back. North Tehran is a base of support for Mousavi.
The reports could not be independently verified because of tight restrictions imposed on journalists in Iran.
Ashkan Sohrabi was a young 18-year-old who was killed on Saturday, June 20, after being shot by security and Basiji forces. After much investigation, I was able to get a hold of Elham Sohrabi, Ashkan's sister. This is my interview with her.
Rooz: Tell us about Ashkan.
Elham Sohrabi (Sohrabi): He was my younger brother, born in 1989, very smart and full of potential for education and sports. He was extremely kind and compassionate. Despite his young age, he made very wise decisions.
Rooz: Where were you on the day of the event?
Sohrabi: My mother and I were at our house. Ashkan had just returned from the gym. He told us people were protesting on the streets and that fires were burning everywhere. He said he had trouble getting home as anti-riot guards had closed off all surrounding streets and were dispersing people. My mother asked me not to let Ashkan return to the streets. I tried my best to distract Ashkan with things other than the street, but the crowds on our streets (Azadi) continued to get bigger. People sought refuge in alleys and homes. We heard different chants and the sound of bullets and smell of tear gas were everywhere. I asked Ashkan not to go to the street. But he said his last words to me and left the house: "Don't worry, I'll come back."
Rooz: And that is the last time you saw Ashkan?
Sohrabi: Yes. The last time I saw him was when he left the house.
Rooz: When was he martyred?
Sohrabi: I don't exactly know, but two hours later they brought the news of his death to us.
Rooz: Where was he shot?
Sohrabi: They had shot our Ashkan three times in the chest.
Rooz: Who was shooting at Ashkan?
Sohrabi: I did not see Ashkan's killer but the protesters didn't have any weapons. They just threw rocks.
Rooz: Were you easily able to retrieve Ashkan's body from the hospital?
Sohrabi: It's better not to talk about that.
Rooz: Were security forces present at the memorial service?
Sohrabi: Yes, two police cars [were there].
Sal: And I'm posting his 'after' pic on this thread; it can also be found at the following link:
As the Iranian authorities warned the opposition on Tuesday that they would tolerate no further protests over the disputed June 12 presidential elections, a report emerged of the hangings of six supporters of defeated candidate Mir Hossein Mousavi.
Speaking after Iran's top legislative body upheld the election victory of incumbent Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, sources in Iran told this reporter in a telephone interview that the hangings took place in the holy city of Mashhad on Monday. There was no independent confirmation of the report.
Underlining the climate of fear among direct and even indirect supporters of Mousavi's campaign for the election to be annulled, the sources also reported that a prominent cleric gave a speech to opposition protesters in Teheran earlier this week in which he publicly acknowledged that the very act of speaking at the gathering would likely cost him his life.
"Ayatollah Hadi Gafouri said that the Imam [Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini] never wanted [current supreme Leader] Ali Khamenei to succeed him. He even went to say that the Islamic republic died the day the Imam did," one source said.
Other criticisms from senior clerics over the regime's handling of the elections and subsequent protests included a report from a Persian news agency, which on Tuesday quoted a senior cleric from the city of Esfahan, Ayatollah Seyyed Jalaleddin Taheri-Esfahani, defending Mousavi against the regime's criticisms.
The ayatollah was quoted as saying: "Is it a case of justice to see that an honorable and modest Seyyed [a descendant of the household of the prophet Muhammad], who until the last moments of Khomeini's life was a dear and close companion of that grand leader, is now considered to be a rioter and an agent of arrogance who must be punished?"
On Monday, witnesses said thousands of policemen and Basij militiamen carrying batons were deployed in Teheran's main squares to prevent any recurrence of the opposition protests. Drivers who so much as shouted "Allahu Akbar" or beeped their horns had their windows smashed by the Basiji and riot police.
Women police, better known as the Sisters of Zeynab, are also now out in force, the witnesses said.
"Some people are still going out into the streets, but there is despair and sadness," said one source. "Now we are told that [pro-Mousavi] green bands are illegal, which is ironic because it symbolizes the color of Islam."
On Monday, the daughter of former president Hashemi Rafsanjani, spoke a gathering of opposition protesters in Teheran's Enqelab Square, sources said. "Mrs. Faezeh Hashemi arrived and tried to give the people some words of encouragement," said one, "but the police broke up the rally within minutes."
He added, "My nephew saw one of these Sisters of Zeynab beat down an elderly woman with no mercy. When he tried to intervene, saying to her, 'Miss, she is like your grandmother,' the woman turned around to get a Basiji to deal with him."
Mousavi's Facebook page is still carrying messages aimed at quashing the notion that he is caving in. "He did not give in to the Guardians Council," runs one new message. "Mir Hossein Mousavi is not under house arrest, he is not about to leave the country, he is under strong pressure to end this, but he always said he will stand up for the people's will to the end! He is from and with the people."
Amid the talk of despair and quashed protests, one defiant reformist supporter told this reporter: "The regime wants the world to think they have won. Don't believe it... Even if this regime is about to collapse, they would not let anybody know until their final hour."
Sal: Other Iranian protestors are lucky; they just get beaten and repeatedly raped (and not just the women):
He came to my shop around 10.30am. You could tell straight away that he had just been released. His face was bruised all over. His teeth were broken and he could hardly open his eyes.
He was not even into politics. He was just an ordinary 18-year-old in the last year of school. Before the election he came to me and asked how he should vote. He looks up to me. His father is an Ahmadinejad supporter.
He had gone home directly after his release, but his father did not let him in. He didn't mention he had been raped. At first, he didn't tell me either. It was the doctor who first noticed it and told me.
When he came to my shop he collapsed in a chair. He said he had nowhere to go and asked if he could stay with me. I called a friend of mine who is a doctor to come home and see him. Then I brought him home.
His shoulder blades and arms were wounded. There were some slashes on the face. No bone fractures, but he was bruised all over the body. I wanted to take some photos but he did not let me. The doctor said only four of his teeth were intact, the rest were broken. You could hardly understand what he said.
Then the doctor told me what had happened. He had suffered rupture of the rectum and the doctor feared colonic bleeding. He suggested we take him to the hospital immediately.
They registered him under a false name and with somebody else's insurance. The nurses were crying. Two of them asked what sort of beast had beaten him up like that. He was a broken man. He told us not to waste our money on him, and that he would kill himself.
He was arrested in Shiraz on 15 June, the Monday after the election. Some sturdy young men made a human shield around the demonstrators. He was among them. He said he managed to hit some of the anti-riot police. But then they caught him and beat him up.
"I was kept in a van till evening that day and then transferred to a solitary cell where I was kept for two days," he said. "Then I was repeatedly interrogated, beaten and hung from a ceiling. They call it chicken kebab. They tie your hands and feet together and hang you from the ceiling, turning you around and beating you with cables.
"They gave us warm water to drink and one meal a day. Repeated smacking was a regular punishment. In interrogations, they kept on asking if I was instructed from abroad. I believed I was going to be sent from the detention centre to prison. But they sent me to where they called Roughnecks' Room. There were some other youths of my age in there. I asked a guard why I am not sent to prison and the reply was: 'You have to be our guest for a while.'
"I refused to confess during interrogations. They said: 'Ask your friends what we'll do to you if you don't co-operate.' Others in the room were also arrested on 15 June. I was tempted to confess at this point but I didn't. On the third and fourth day, they beat me up again. They insisted we were instructed from abroad. I kept on saying we were only protesting for our votes.
"It was on Saturday or Sunday that they raped me for the first time. There were three or four huge guys we had not seen before. They came to me and tore my clothes. I tried to resist but two of them laid me on the floor and the third did it. It was done in front of four other detainees.
"My cell mates, especially the older one, tried to console me. They said nobody loses his dignity through such an act. They did it to two other cell mates in the next days. Then it became a routine. We were so weak and beaten up that could not do anything.
"Then the interrogations started again. They said: 'If you don't come to your senses we will send you to Adel Abad [another prison in Shiraz] to the pederasts' section so that you receive such treatment every day.' I was so weak I did not know what to say. Then they asked for my contacts. I told them I had no contacts and I was informed about the demonstrations through the internet.
"The same routine was continued till this morning when I was released. In the last week, there was no interrogation, no beating. Only rape and solitary confinement."
This is what he recounted. But he couldn't articulate quite like this. He was in much physical and mental pain as he talked. I asked him to tell his story in the hope of making a difference to those still detained.
• Esfandiar Poorgiv is a pseudonym.
Sal: And they are lying about their murder of Neda Soltani:
The International Police force, or Interpol, has denied a claim by Iran's police chief that it is seeking a doctor who witnessed the shooting death of 26-year-old "Neda."
Head of police Brig. Gen. Esmail Ahmadi-Moqaddam said, "Arash Hejazi is wanted by Interpol and Iran's Intelligence Ministry" in the murder of Neda, who's shooting fueled what were daily opposition rallies in the capital city of Tehran, according to a Wednesday report by Iran's Press TV, a state-run, English language network.
Speaking by phone to CBSNews.com Thursday morning from her office in Lyon, France, a spokesperson for Interpol flatly denied any involvement whatsoever in an investigation into Sultan's death.
"We've not received any request for information or for assistance on the death of that lady," spokesperson Rachel Billington said.
"We've received nothing from Iran," she emphasized.
Since video of Neda's murder swept across social networking Web sites, turning her overnight into a symbol of the Iranian opposition movement's defiance, the Islamic Republic's leaders have suggested repeatedly that her death was a staged act to stoke unrest.
Arash Hejazi, reportedly a doctor, was seen trying to care for Neda on the amateur video. He claimed to have witnessed her murder by a member of Iran's Basij voluntary militia.
In the interview with Press TV, the police chief claimed there was no connection between the young woman's death and the violent street demonstrations which paralyzed Tehran until dramatic crackdown by police and paramilitary militia members.
"The murder of Neda Agha-Sultan was a scenario and is not related to the Tehran unrest in any way," the network quoted Ahmadi-Moqaddam as saying.
Sal: The Guardian is trying to compile a list of the dead and detained:
UNITED NATIONS (Reuters) - Iranian Nobel Peace Prize recipient Shirin Ebadi called on U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon on Thursday to appoint a personal envoy to investigate human rights abuses in Iran.
In a letter also signed by the rights groups International Federation for Human Rights and the Iranian League for the Defense of Human Rights, Ebadi asked Ban to appoint the envoy to look into abuses in Iran following June's disputed presidential election.
A spokesman for Ban said the letter had been received by his office. Ban currently is on a trip to Myanmar in a bid to get the military junta there to release all political prisoners and prepare for credible elections next year.
The letter said Ebadi, a human rights lawyer, had made the request to Ban directly in a telephone conversation on June 23, eleven days after Iran's election. The United Nations at the time disclosed the conversation but did not mention the request for a human rights envoy.
Ebadi was given the Nobel Peace Prize in 2003 for her efforts to promote democracy and human rights, in particular the rights of women and children.
Action by Iranian security forces against demonstrators who charged that the election had been rigged in favor of incumbent President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad drew condemnation from Western countries and from Ban. Iranian authorities said the vote was fair.
"We would like ... to reiterate our call upon you to name a Personal Envoy for Iran," the letter said.
"Such an envoy would benefit from your authority in the relations with the Iranian authorities, an authority which is denied to human rights groups from Iran or from abroad in the context of this active repression," the letter said.
The June 12 election pitted hard-liner Ahmadinejad against Mirhossein Mousavi. In the aftermath of the vote, which drew the most vigorous organized protests since the 1979 Islamic revolution, state media said 20 people died in violence.
Ebadi has called on Ahmadinejad to prosecute those who shot protesters and pay compensation to their families while also calling for fresh elections held with U.N. observers.
Sal: And Iran shot itself in the foot trying to prove its elections were fair by using faked ballots as 'evidence' (pic at addy):
Mahmoud Ahmadinejad called off a trip to Libya today as his regime continued to face heavy criticism over the disputed Iranian elections.
In the latest development, images have emerged of suspicious ballot papers which appear to show the re-elected president's name written in the same handwriting on many sheets.
Some have also claimed that the papers were suspiciously crisp and unfolded.
The images were shown as part of footage of a recount, broadcast on Iranian state television to supposedly assuage concern over the results
These are images from the recent TV broadcast session where they 'recounted' some ballot boxes and found out that indeed Ahmadinejad's votes were higher than previously counted,' one commenter wrote on website The Huffington Post.
'These pictures show two things very clearly: 1) that a whole lot of the ballots that are being recounted are fresh, crisp, unfolded sheets - which makes no sense, given that people typically had to fold these sheets before they can slip them into the ballot boxes, and 2) that the handwriting on so many of the sheets which are votes for 'Ahmadinejad' are the same handwriting (and very clearly so).'
The Iranian president had been due to appear at an African summit today but cancelled at the last minute.
His spokesman gave no reason for Ahmadinejad's decision not to attend.
It would have been the president's second foray abroad since the June 12 poll set off Iran's most dramatic internal unrest since the 1979 Islamic revolution.
Iran's hardline rulers have refused to accept claims that the election was rigged, despite mass street protests in support of losing candidates Mirhossein Mousavi and Mehdi Karoubi
The Guardian Council, a supervisory body, on Monday endorsed the election result and dismissed complaints of irregularities, saying a partial recount had shown these were baseless.
But Karoubi, a reformist cleric who came fourth in the poll, remained defiant, saying in a statement posted on his party's website that he viewed Ahmadinejad's government as illegitimate.
Karoubi and Mousavi, a moderate former prime minister, have both called for the election to be annulled and held again.
'I don't consider this government legitimate,' Karoubi said. 'I will continue my fight under any condition by every means, and I'm ready to cooperate with pro-reform people and groups.'
Security forces have crushed street protests and hardliners have regained the upper hand in the world's fifth biggest oil exporter, whose nuclear programme has alarmed the West.
But Mousavi and Karoubi continue to reject the election result in what amounts to an unprecedented challenge to Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, who has upheld the outcome.
Karoubi, a white-bearded cleric who was close to Iran's revolutionary leader Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, demanded the release of 'thousands' of people arrested during the unrest.
'What is most important now is to preserve our revolutionary and political attitude and confront those who want to sideline us. We should all preserve our revolutionary unity,' he added.
Iran has accused foreign powers, notably Britain and the United States, of fomenting the post-election demonstrations.
The semi-official Fars news agency said one of the local staff of the British embassy still detained in Tehran had helped organise the protests, in which at least 20 people were killed.
All of the other nine Iranian employees who were arrested on Sunday have now been released.
Fars agency had said: 'Among the three detained British embassy staff there was one who ... had a remarkable role during the recent unrest in managing it behind the scenes.'
On Monday the Iranian Foreign Ministry said five had been freed and another three were reported released today.
Sal: The EU contemplated having every member country recall their staff unless Great Britain's detained personnel were released:
Sal: Meanwhile, yet another Iran regime critic claims that the theocracy has failed:
'This Iranian Form of Theocracy Has Failed' In a SPIEGEL interview, Iranian theologian and philosopher Mohsen Kadivar discusses Tehran's path towards a military dictatorship, how the country's religious leaders abuse Islam and opportunities for reform. http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/0,1518,633517,00.html
SPIEGEL: Ayatollah Kadivar, we are meeting you here at Duke University in the US State of North Carolina, 7,500 miles away from your home. Are you not needed more urgently in Iran now?
Kadivar: Believe me, in these dramatic hours I would much rather be in my homeland. Within the next two weeks, the future of Iran will be decided. Almost all my friends, 95 percent of them, are now in prison; and I am barely able to contact my family, the phones are almost dead.
SPIEGEL: You are said to be the co-author of the most recent declarations of opposition leader Mir Hossein Mousavi.
Kadivar: That is not right. Although I enjoyed his statements, they are not mine. I published my declarations separately, although I support Mousavi strongly. We have found means to communicate with each other. Via the Internet and via third parties, I am in constant contact with my homeland. Every day I receive about 100 messages.
SPIEGEL: Tehran appears quiet at the moment, at least compared with the mass protests of the week before last. Are we currently seeing the beginning of the end of the resistance -- or the end of the Iranian regime?
Kadivar: This Iranian form of theocracy has failed. The rights of the Iranian peoples are trampled upon and my homeland is heading towards a military dictatorship. President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad behaves like an Iranian Taliban. The supreme leader, Mr. Ali Khamenei, has tied his fate to that of Ahmadinejad, a great moral, but also political mistake.
SPIEGEL: What has your counsel been for opposition leader Mousavi in recent days? Is he truly the undisputed head of the movement?
Kadivar: Yes, he is the leader. All reformists now support Mousavi, my friend from our days at Tarbiat Modares University in Tehran. He was a professor of political science and I was professor of philosophy and theology. I believe he should insist on new elections and continue calling for non-violent protests ...
SPIEGEL: ... which would then be violently squashed by the security forces of the regime, the Basij and the Pasdaran.
Kadivar: In the long term, a regime can hardly oppose millions of peaceful protesters -- unless it opts for a massacre and, in doing so, completely loses its legitimacy. We should again and again point to the rights granted by the Iranian constitution. In Article 27, it is clearly pointed out that every citizen has the right to protest. Our protest is non-violent, legal and "green" -- thoroughly Islamic.
SPIEGEL: That's what you say.
Kadivar: Article 56 of our constitution includes the right of God that is give to all Iranian citizens. The citizens then elect their leader, president and parliament. The constitution is very clear on that: The leader must be elected and not selected by those claiming to know God's will.
SPIEGEL: The state doctrine of Welayat-e Faqih (Guardianship of the Islamic Jurists) and its highest representative, Ali Khamenei, see it quite differently. They claim the protest movement is directed against the law and against religion.
Kadivar: The people call "Allahu Akbar" from the rooftops. They carry signs asking "Where has my vote gone?" The protesters don't want to rebel against everything, but they do want justice and they do want fair elections. He who refuses those demands risks a civil war.
SPIEGEL: It is true that the protesters are using the color of Islam and chanting "Allahu Akbar" ("God is great"). But have they not reached the point where they want more? They were also shouting, "Down with the Dictator!" Maybe the young people who are behind the movement want a democratic republic based on the Western model with separation of religion and state.
Kadivar: I admit that some young people are oriented towards the West. But one should not give too much weight to that. The majority of my compatriots would not want a complete separation of state and religion. Neither would I. Iran is a country with Islamic traditions and values. More than 90 percent of our citizens are Muslims.
SPIEGEL: Which values specifically are you referring to?
Kadivar: Above all, stands justice and the fulfillment of the will of the people. Under the rule of Ali, our first Shiite imam, there were no political prisoners, non-violent protests were permitted and critical comment even invited. One must not betray those values.
SPIEGEL: And Khamenei and Ahmadinejad did?
Kadivar: Yes. I plead for a truly Islamic and democratic state, a state that respects human dignity and does not refuse the rights of women, a state where people can freely elect their religious and secular leaders.
SPIEGEL: But now you are talking about a revolution -- a completely new, different Iran.
Kadivar: I am speaking of a country where religious leaders do not have the right to determine how the country is led in opposition to the majority of the community, ostensibly according to the will of God. Such a right does not exist, neither in the Shiite tradition nor in other imperatives. I do not believe in any divine rights for clergy or believers.
SPIEGEL: In 1978, Ayatollah Khomeini said in a SPIEGEL interview: "Our future society will be a free society, and all the elements of oppression, cruelty and force will be destroyed."
Kadivar: Revolutionary leader Ayatollah Khomeini was a charismatic personage. At the beginning of his rule he had 95 percent and towards the end still over 75 percent of Iranians on his side. Mr. Khamenei is not that charismatic and he is currently in the process of destroying the tie of justice between the religious leaders and the people. When he, together with Ahmadinejad, speaks about foreign countries being behind the protests in Iran, he very much reminds me of the king (the Shah). He used the same arguments and could not recognize that he was witnessing a national and democratic protest movement of his own people. Towards the end, the shah only thought of holding up his regime. Today, Mr. Khamenei does not think any differently.
SPIEGEL: But while the shah was expelled from office by the revolution, Khamenei and Ahmadinejad seem to be firmly entrenched. Many important positions are filled with their people.
Kadivar: It seems that way. But Iran is no longer the country it was prior to the election protests. I can even imagine that Mr. Hashemi Rafsanjani as head of the Assembly of Experts might actually invite the religious leader to the assembly for a frank discussion. Theoretically, he could even dismiss Khamenei. Then Ahmadinejad would fall too.
SPIEGEL: But for that to happen, the majority of the grand ayatollahs would have to oppose the two.
Kadivar: Among the grand ayatollahs in Qum, the resentment towards Ahmadinejad's arrogance is growing. Only one of the 12 has congratulated him so far. Several, including my most revered teacher Ayatollah Hossein Ali Montazeri, who is greatly venerated in the whole country, spoke out sharply against the election fraud.
SPIEGEL: Can other countries do anything to aid the opposition?
Kadivar: No. This is a battle the Iranian people have to win by themselves. I think that so far, President Obama has acted very prudently and not given those looking for any reason to attack ammunition. Ahmadinejad's insistence that Washington has fueled the unrest has no effect.
SPIEGEL: Obama compared Ahmadinejad and Mousavi and commented that the difference between the candidates is only minor. Is he correct?
Kadivar: This is correct, but then again, it is not correct. The differences regarding the nuclear question and the evaluation of Israeli politics are indeed minor. As for the right to uranium enrichment, you won't find an Iranian politician who thinks differently. But on the question of democracy, the differences are formidable. Ahmadinejad takes an aggressive position, while Mousavi emphazises the adherence to laws and the constitution. I believe that the issue of democratization is presently the central problem. Everything else, including the nuclear question, is secondary.
SPIEGEL: Western politicians see it quite differently.
Kadivar: Whoever at this point in time moves the nuclear question to the forefront will not find an open ear in Iran. Blood is flowing in our streets and you keep asking me about nuclear energy.
SPIEGEL: Some in the West fear that things could get far worse -- and they mean for the world -- if Iran obtains nuclear weapons.
Kadivar: We are particularly concerned about Israel. This country has handed its nuclear energy to the military. Every Muslim -- well, everyone -- is afraid of Israel. Israel's nuclear arsenal should be placed under the control of the United Nations and the Non-Proliferation Treaty.
SPIEGEL: Do we understand you right, that there will be no change on the nuclear question regardless of who wins the power struggle in Tehran?
Kadivar: Every Iranian government will claim the right to the peaceful use of nuclear energy ...
SPIEGEL: ... but that is not the issue. We are talking about the nuclear bomb.
Kadivar: America has it, Israel has it. What is said about my country is only potentiality not reality. If the nuclear bomb is evil, then it is evil everywhere -- not only in those countries that oppose US policy. It is a double standard policy.
SPIEGEL: What would happen if Israel or the United States attacked nuclear plants in Iran?
Kadivar: That would be in contempt of all moral values. The Iranians would take up resistance, and they would do it together, regardless of political disposition and religion.
SPIEGEL: What will Iran look like five years from now?
Kadivar: I hope there will be a democratic Iran. My country has the inherent potential to become an exemplary democratic society.
SPIEGEL: And how do you see your role in this process?
Kadivar: I will go back to Iran, but not in the coming days. If I returned to Tehran now, I too would be imprisoned. The conditions there are miserable. My friend Dr. Saeed Hajarian urgently requires medication and health care -- he should be in the hospital, not in jail. I have heard that my friends Mostafa Tajzadeh and Abdallah Ramezanzadeh have been tortured. Ramezanzadeh was the spokesman of President Mohammad Khatami and Tajzadeh his deputy interior minister.
SPIEGEL: You spent eighteen months in the infamous Evin prison in Tehran.
Kadivar: I will return to Iran and I am also prepared to go back to prison, but only after legal court proceedings.
SPIEGEL: Would you take a political office in a democratic Iran?
Kadivar: As a scholar, author and professor I have an important role to fulfull. And we have excellent political leaders in Iran -- for example Mir Hossein Mousavi, whom I support.
SPIEGEL: Ayatollah Kadivar, we thank you for this interview.
Interview conducted by Erich Follath and Gabor Steingart.
An important group of religious leaders in Iran called the disputed presidential election and the new government illegitimate on Saturday, an act of defiance against the country’s supreme leader and the most public sign of a major split in the country’s clerical establishment.
A statement by the group, the Association of Researchers and Teachers of Qum, represents a significant, if so far symbolic, setback for the government and especially the authority of the supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, whose word is supposed to be final. The government has tried to paint the opposition and its top presidential candidate, Mir Hussein Moussavi, as criminals and traitors, a strategy that now becomes more difficult.
“This crack in the clerical establishment, and the fact they are siding with the people and Moussavi, in my view is the most historic crack in the 30 years of the Islamic republic,” said Abbas Milani, director of the Iranian Studies Program at Stanford University. “Remember, they are going against an election verified and sanctified by Khamenei.”
The announcement came on a day when Mr. Moussavi released documents detailing a campaign of fraud by the current president’s supporters, and as a close associate of the supreme leader called Mr. Moussavi and former President Mohammad Khatami “foreign agents,” saying they should be treated as criminals.
The documents, published on Mr. Moussavi’s Web site, accused supporters of the president of printing more than 20 million extra ballots before the vote and handing out cash bonuses to voters.
Since the election, the bulk of the clerical establishment in the holy city of Qum, an important religious and political center of power, has remained largely silent, leaving many to wonder when, or if, the nation’s senior religious leaders would jump into the controversy that has posed the most significant challenge to the country’s leadership since the Islamic Revolution.
With its statement Saturday, the association of clerics came down squarely on the side of the reform movement.
The group had earlier asked for the election to be nullified because so many Iranians objected to the results, but it never directly challenged the legitimacy of the government and, by extension, the supreme leader.
The earlier statement also came before the election was certified by the country’s religious leaders, who have since said that opposition to the results must cease.
The clerics’ decision to speak up again is not itself a turning point and could fizzle under pressure from the state, which has continued to threaten its critics. Some seminaries in Qum rely on the government for funds, and Ayatollah Khamenei and the man he has declared the winner of the election, incumbent President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, have powerful backers there.
They also retain the support of the powerful security forces and the elite Revolutionary Guards. In addition, the country’s highest-ranking clerics have yet to speak out individually against the election results.
But the association’s latest statement does help Mr. Moussavi, Mr. Khatami and a former speaker of Parliament, Mehdi Karroubi, who have been the most vocal in calling the election illegitimate and who, in their attempts to force change, have been hindered by the jailing of influential backers.
“The significance is that even within the clergy, there are many who refuse to recognize the legitimacy of the election results as announced by the supreme leader,” said an Iranian political analyst who spoke on condition of anonymity for fear of reprisal.
While the government could continue vilifying the three opposition leaders, analysts say it was highly unlikely that the leadership would use the same tactic against the clerical establishment in Qum.
The backing also came at a sensitive time for Mr. Moussavi, because the accusations that he is a foreign agent ran in a newspaper, Kayhan, that has often been used to build cases against critics of the government.
The editorial was written by Hossein Shariatmadari, who was picked by the supreme leader to run the newspaper.
The clerics’ statement chastised the leadership for failing to adequately study complaints of vote rigging and lashed out at the use of force in crushing huge public protests.
It even directly criticized the Guardian Council, the powerful group of clerics charged with certifying elections.
“Is it possible to consider the results of the election as legitimate by merely the validation of the Guardian Council?” the association said.
Perhaps more threatening to the supreme leader, the committee called on other clerics to join the fight against the government’s refusal to adequately reconsider the charges of voter fraud. The committee invoked powerful imagery, comparing the 20 protesters killed during demonstrations with the martyrs who died in the early days of the revolution and the war with Iraq, asking other clerics to save what it called “the dignity that was earned with the blood of tens of thousands of martyrs.”
The statement was posted on the association’s Web site late Saturday and carried on many other sites, including the Persian BBC, but it was impossible to reach senior clerics in the group to independently confirm its veracity.
The statement was issued after a meeting Mr. Moussavi had with the committee 10 days ago and a decision by the Guardian Council to certify the election and declare that all matters concerning the vote were closed.
But the defiance has not ended.
With heavy security on the streets, there is a forced calm. But each day, slowly, another link falls from the chain of government control. Last week, in what appeared a coordinated thrust, Mr. Moussavi, Mr. Karroubi and Mr. Khatami all called the new government illegitimate. On Saturday, Mr. Milani of Stanford said, former President Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani met with families of those who had been arrested, another sign that he was working behind the scenes to keep the issue alive.
“I don’t ever remember in the 20 years of Khamenei’s rule where he was clearly and categorically on one side and so many clergy were on the other side,” Mr. Milani said. “This might embolden other clergy to come forward.”
Many of the accusations of fraud posted on Mr. Moussavi’s Web site Saturday had been published before, but the report did give some more specific charges.
For instance, although the government had announced that two of the losing presidential contenders had received relatively few votes in their hometowns, the documents stated that some ballot boxes in those towns contained no votes for the two men.
The head of Mossad, Israel’s overseas intelligence service, has assured Benjamin Netanyahu, its prime minister, that Saudi Arabia would turn a blind eye to Israeli jets flying over the kingdom during any future raid on Iran’s nuclear sites.
Earlier this year Meir Dagan, Mossad’s director since 2002, held secret talks with Saudi officials to discuss the possibility.
The Israeli press has already carried unconfirmed reports that high-ranking officials, including Ehud Olmert, the former prime minister, held meetings with Saudi colleagues. The reports were denied by Saudi officials.
“The Saudis have tacitly agreed to the Israeli air force flying through their airspace on a mission which is supposed to be in the common interests of both Israel and Saudi Arabia,” a diplomatic source said last week.
Although the countries have no formal diplomatic relations, an Israeli defence source confirmed that Mossad maintained “working relations” with the Saudis.
John Bolton, the former US ambassador to the United Nations who recently visited the Gulf, said it was “entirely logical” for the Israelis to use Saudi airspace.
Bolton, who has talked to several Arab leaders, added: “None of them would say anything about it publicly but they would certainly acquiesce in an overflight if the Israelis didn’t trumpet it as a big success.”
Arab states would condemn a raid when they spoke at the UN but would be privately relieved to see the threat of an Iranian bomb removed, he said.
Referring to the Israeli attack on an alleged Syrian nuclear facility in 2007, Bolton added: “To this day, the Israelis haven’t admitted the specifics but there’s one less nuclear facility in Syria . . .”
Recent developments have underscored concerns among moderate Sunni Arab states about the stability of the repressive Shi’ite regime in Tehran and have increased fears that it may emerge as a belligerent nuclear power.
“The Saudis are very concerned about an Iranian nuclear bomb, even more than the Israelis,” said a former head of research in Israeli intelligence.
The Israeli air force has been training for a possible attack on Iran’s nuclear site at Natanz in the centre of the country and other locations for four years.
Did the Toppling of Saddam Hussein Lead to Recent Events in Iran? Given the connections between Iraq and Iran, it's not as unlikely as it sounds. By Christopher Hitchens http://www.slate.com/id/2222254/
The most exciting and underreported news of the past few weeks in Iran has been that the emerging challenger to the increasingly frantic and isolated "Supreme Leader" Ayatollah Ali Khamenei is former President Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani. And Rafsanjani has recently made a visit to the city of Najaf in Iraq to confer with Ayatollah Ali Husaini Sistani, a long-standing opponent of the Khamenei doctrines, as well as meeting in the city of Qum with Jawad al-Shahristani, who is Sistani's representative in Iran. It is this dialectic between Iraqi and Iranian Shiites that underlies the flabbergasting statement issued from Qum last weekend to the effect that the Ahmadinejad government has no claim to be the representative of the Iranian people.
One of the apparent paradoxes involved in visiting Iran is this: If you want to find deep-rooted opposition to the clerical autocracy, you must make a trip to the holy cities of Mashad and Qum. It is in places like this, consecrated to the various imams of Shiite mythology, that the most stubborn and vivid criticism is often to be heard—as well as the sort of criticism that the ruling mullahs find it hardest to deal with.
So it is very hard to overstate the significance of the statement made last Saturday by the Association of Teachers and Researchers of Qum, a much-respected source of religious rulings, which has in effect come right out with it and said that the recent farcical and prearranged plebiscite in the country was just that: a sham event. (In this, the clerics of Qum are a lot more clear-eyed than many American "experts" on Iranian public opinion, who were busy until recently writing about Mahmoud Ahmadinejad as the rough-hewn man of the people.)
It's not too much to read two things into the association's statement. The first is that public discontent with the outrages of the last few weeks must be extremely deep and extremely widespread. Differences among the clerisy are usually solved in much more discreet ways. If the Shiite scholars of Qum are willing to go public and call the Ahmadinejad regime an impostor, they must be impressed with the intensity of feeling at the grass roots. The second induction follows from the first: It is not an exaggeration to say that the Islamic republic in its present form is now undergoing a serious crisis of legitimacy.
An excellent article by Abbas Milani in the current issue of the New Republic gives a historical and ideological backdrop to the discrepant forces within Shiism and in particular to the long disagreement between those who think that the clergy must rule on behalf of the people (the ultra-reactionary notion of the velayat-e faqui, which I discussed in this column) and those who do not. Among the more surprising members of the anti-Khomeini opposition is the late ayatollah's grandson Sayeed Khomeini, a relatively junior cleric in Qum about whom I have also written before. And among the best-known of those who think it is profane for the clergy to degrade and compromise themselves with political power is Grand Ayatollah Sistani, spiritual leader of neighboring Iraq. (To emphasize the cross-fertilization a bit further, bear in mind that Sistani is in fact an Iranian, while Ayatollah Khomeini did much of his brooding on a future religious despotism while in exile in Iraq.)
Which brings me to a question that I think deserves to be asked: Did the overthrow of the Saddam Hussein regime, and the subsequent holding of competitive elections in which many rival Iraqi Shiite parties took part, have any germinal influence on the astonishing events in Iran? Certainly when I interviewed Sayeed Khomeini in Qum some years ago, where he spoke openly about "the liberation of Iraq," he seemed to hope and believe that the example would spread. One swallow does not make a summer. But consider this: Many Iranians go as religious pilgrims to the holy sites of Najaf and Kerbala in southern Iraq. They have seen the way in which national and local elections have been held, more or less fairly and openly, with different Iraqi Shiite parties having to bid for votes (and with those parties aligned with Iran's regime doing less and less well). They have seen an often turbulent Iraqi Parliament holding genuine debates that are reported with reasonable fairness in the Iraqi media. Meanwhile, an Iranian mullah caste that classifies its own people as children who are mere wards of the state puts on a "let's pretend" election and even then tries to fix the outcome. Iranians by no means like to take their tune from Arabs—perhaps least of all from Iraqis—but watching something like the real thing next door may well have increased the appetite for the genuine article in Iran itself.
There are, no doubt, other determining factors as well. Contrary to the simplistic distinction between the "liberal urban" and the "conservative rural" that is made by so many glib commentators, Iran is a country where very rapid urbanization of a formerly rural population is being undergone, and all good Marxists ought to know that historically this has always been a moment pregnant with revolutionary discontent. In Saddam's Iraq, the possession of a satellite dish was punishable by death; everybody knows that the mullahs in Iran cannot enforce their own ban on informal media and unofficial transmission. And yet, precisely because they are so dense and so fanatical, they doom themselves to keep on trying. Every Iranian I know is now convinced that if this is not the end for the Khamenei system, it is at least the harbinger of the beginning of the end.
Christopher Hitchens is a columnist for Vanity Fair and the Roger S. Mertz media fellow at the Hoover Institution in Stanford, Calif.
The Iranian tyrant, Ali Khamenei, told his cluster of top advisers two days ago that it was time to totally shut down the protests, and he ordered that any and all demonstrators, regardless of their status, be arrested (although there is no longer room for new prisoners in Tehran’s jails; they are now using sports arenas as holding areas). He further ordered that all satellite dishes be taken down (good luck with that one; there are probably millions of them in Tehran alone). He ordered that the crackdown be done at night, to avoid all those annoying videos. By Sunday night, hundreds of new arrests had been made, including the regime’s favorite targets: students, intellectuals, and journalists.
His deadline: July 11th. He told his minions that if that were accomplished, the rest of the world would come crawling to him.
He may be right about most of the rest of the world, which has distinguished itself by its fecklessness, but he is certainly not right about his own people, who have sabotaged a major petroleum pipeline in Lurestan, and who are planning to go on strike in the next few days. I don’t know the provenance of the people who hit the pipeline (perhaps the fact that the political desk of the Tehran Times reported it is significant), but calls for strikes, building towards a big demonstration on July 9th, come from Mousavi, Karroubi and Khatami.
Mousavi got a big boost over the weekend from an important group of senior clerics in the holy city of Qom. They branded the “elections” and the new government that will shortly be sworn in, as illegitimate. This is a serious matter, leading Stanford’s Professor Abbas Milani to say “This crack in the clerical establishment, and the fact they are siding with the people and Moussavi, in my view is the most historic crack in the 30 years of the Islamic republic.” They are also explicitly siding with Mousavi, who released a detailed critique/expose of the fraud that confirmed Ahmadinezhad in office.
So Khamenei is under pressure, and he is not well equipped to deal with it. He has a serious cancer, and takes opiates to mitigate the pain. People around him are whispering that his decisions are poorly reasoned and often impulsive, and some of those close to him, including his son, are apparently issuing orders in his name. This sort of rumor is devastating for the sort of personal rule upon which the Islamic Republic rests. We’ll see in the coming days if the Mousavi forces are able to maintain and increase the pressure, and how Khamenei and his henchmen respond.
At the moment, there is evidence of some panic, as Iranian leaders are exporting their wealth.
Meanwhile, the American Government was sending conflicting signals to Tehran. On the one hand, it seems that Obama will be going to the upcoming G8 conference with a request that there be no new sanctions on Iran. This comes at a time when the Europeans, for the first time, seem inclined to get at least a little bit tougher on the mullahs, and it effectively demolishes the myth that this administration intends to do anything to support the Iranian people in their life and death struggle for freedom (perhaps this should not surprise us; after all, Obama’s 4th of July message did not contain the word “freedom,” but it did talk a lot about his own legislative proposals). At the same time, Vice President Joe Biden three times said the United States would do nothing to prevent an Israeli attack against Iranian nuclear targets.
So apparently we’re prepared to let the Israelis do our dirty work. A real standup sort of policy.
UPDATE: A great video on the Iranian uprising. Notice the many women with uncovered heads.
UPDATE II: The 3-day strike. Apparently the regime was so worried about the strike that they shut down most factories, businesses and offices. This is another sign of regime insecurity. And Mousavi today (Monday) received several distinguished visitors, including Khomeini’s grandson.
Re:Iran declares win for Ahmadinejad in disputed vote
« Reply #38 on: 2009-07-21 18:44:01 »
Facts show Twitter yet to lure Middle East users
Source: The National Authors: Tom Gara Dated: 2009-07-20
Which website has been the focus of more than 100 stories in the UAE’s English-language media in the past 12 months?
It isn’t Ikbis, the Jordanian video-sharing site that dishes up nine million videos to Middle-Eastern viewers every month. And it is not Darrb, the brainchild of an Emirati entrepreneur, which could shake up the logistics industry as Craigslist has done to classified advertising.
It is instead the mini-blogging site Twitter, which according to figures released yesterday has almost 5,000 UAE users. That is not a typing error; no missing zeros. The most promoted website in the country has as many customers as the average corner store. [ Hermit : Given that the UAE has the highest Middle Eastern computer density after Jewish Israelis, this puts claims of "Twitter storms" in other Middle Eastern countries into perspective. ]
Obviously, who these customers are matters more than their number. Among that user base, which would fit into a couple of residential apartment towers, is a healthy mix of journalists, spin doctors, marketers, media personalities and decision makers.
When a story erupts on Twitter, the country will hear about it; when one breaks out in the local corner store, it is unlikely to make it to the next city block.
For a business such as Spot On, the public relations firm that produced the numbers, the growth of Twitter among decision makers and influencers is a big deal, “opening up new marketing opportunities and, indeed, challenges”, according to Carrington Malin, the firm’s managing director.
Reaching an influential crowd once meant spending big dollars on lavish parties and high-end advertising space, or wooing journalists and radio hosts with the promise of a big story. For those smart enough to use it properly, Twitter opens up a free, instant, two-way communications channel with that very same crowd.
But what it has not achieved, and seems unlikely to do, is change the dynamics of a Middle-Eastern internet culture that has shown a clear disinterest in the kind of open, public self-expression that Twitter is all about.
For many technologies, adoption begins in the US and Japan, before spreading elsewhere in Asia and on to Europe. The concept is then taken up in the Middle East, spreading outward from wealthy GCC countries. Mobile phones are a good example, as are online advertising and internet banking.
Like every rule there are plenty of exceptions, and the phenomena of what many call social media seems to be one of them. Middle-Eastern internet users have taken to watching and sharing online video and multi-player games, but blogs and Twitter remain a niche pursuit.
Consider the UAE, where 780,000 people have set up a Facebook account, of which 75,000 use the site in Arabic. There is clearly no lack of interest in web surfing and the country is among the most connected in the world. Yet only 5,000 people have set up Twitter accounts, and even less are writing a blog.
The “walled garden” provided by Facebook clearly has an appeal. A note posted on your personal Facebook profile can be viewed only by the people you list as friends, and is kept away from the prying eyes and permanent public archives of Google. [ Hermit : I wonder how Facebook's breaking down of this wall is going to be taken. Badly, I would guess. ]
Cultural traits of the region, such as an emphasis on protecting the family name, play a part. So do governing structures that discourage free expression, particularly when the expression tends towards criticism of rulers or powerful personalities.
Even though blogs and online self-expression remain far from the mainstream, the notion that they have emerged as a potent tool of the masses is a powerful and attractive one.
For the media, particularly those trying to attract an international audience, the story of a young generation in the Middle East driving social change through new forms of expression is one too good to let the facts ruin.
In Egypt, talk of a Facebook movement is widespread, particularly among foreign correspondents and democracy activists, whose optimism regarding social change often eclipses the facts. The country is home to the largest number of Facebook users in the region, with tens of thousands joining groups on the system dedicated to changing the country’s political and social system.
But when the groups asked members to join public protests this April, none showed up.
“The failure of the ‘Facebookiyin’ to organise significant strikes on April 6 this year should have surprised no one,” wrote the Middle East analyst Marc Lynch.
“I have a hard time thinking of a communications technology more poorly suited for organising high-risk political collective action than Facebook. Joining a group is perhaps the lowest-cost political activity imaginable, involving none of the commitment and dedication necessary to go out to a protest.”
Spot On PR and other technology and media types heralding the growth of Twitter are thinking more about corporate communications than public protest, but their belief that Twitter will become a mainstream form of expression in the region is as stretched as the belief in a Facebook revolution in Egypt.
Sometimes the success of a technology or idea in the West does not lead to its inevitable acceptance in the Middle East. The region’s blogging community, which remains minuscule, is a good example of low adoption.
Twitter will stay in the same basket, no matter how many journalists and PR types wish to tell you otherwise.
With or without religion, you would have good people doing good things and evil people doing evil things. But for good people to do evil things, that takes religion. - Steven Weinberg, 1999
Ahmedinejad's vice president and nuclear chief has resigned, Rafsanjani has condemned the Ahmedinejad regime, as Grand Ayatollah Montazeri has declared a fatwa against it.
The names and stories of the Iranians who have been brutalized or killed in the aftermath of the post-election protests are gradually seeping into a memorial vault of the faces of suffering and endurance in the name of sociopolitical reform.
One by one, the faces of protest are providing an essential yearbook of the individuals who comprise the protest masses, and a catalogue of the Iranian government's treatment of political activists.
On Friday June 19, a large group of mourners gathered at the Ghoba mosque in Tehran to await a speech about the martyrs of the post-election protests by presidential candidate Mir Hossein Mousavi. According to one Iranian blog, 28-year-old Taraneh Mousavi was one of a group of people that was arrested by plainclothesed security forces for attending the gathering.
Taraneh, whose first name is Persian for "song", disappeared into arrest.
Weeks later, according to the blog, her mother received an anonymous call from a government agent saying that her daughter has been hospitalized in Imam Khomeini Hospital in the city of Karaj, just north of Tehran -- hospitalized for "rupturing of her womb and anus in... an unfortunate accident".
When Taraneh's family went to the hospital to find her, they were told she was not there.
An important group of religious leaders in Iran called the disputed presidential election and the new government illegitimate on Saturday, an act of defiance against the country’s supreme leader and the most public sign of a major split in the country’s clerical establishment.
A statement by the group, the Association of Researchers and Teachers of Qum, represents a significant, if so far symbolic, setback for the government and especially the authority of the supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, whose word is supposed to be final. The government has tried to paint the opposition and its top presidential candidate, Mir Hussein Moussavi, as criminals and traitors, a strategy that now becomes more difficult.
“This crack in the clerical establishment, and the fact they are siding with the people and Moussavi, in my view is the most historic crack in the 30 years of the Islamic republic,” said Abbas Milani, director of the Iranian Studies Program at Stanford University. “Remember, they are going against an election verified and sanctified by Khamenei.”
The announcement came on a day when Mr. Moussavi released documents detailing a campaign of fraud by the current president’s supporters, and as a close associate of the supreme leader called Mr. Moussavi and former President Mohammad Khatami “foreign agents,” saying they should be treated as criminals.
The documents, published on Mr. Moussavi’s Web site, accused supporters of the president of printing more than 20 million extra ballots before the vote and handing out cash bonuses to voters.
Since the election, the bulk of the clerical establishment in the holy city of Qum, an important religious and political center of power, has remained largely silent, leaving many to wonder when, or if, the nation’s senior religious leaders would jump into the controversy that has posed the most significant challenge to the country’s leadership since the Islamic Revolution.
With its statement Saturday, the association of clerics came down squarely on the side of the reform movement.
TEHRAN -- When the protests broke out here last month, Mehdi Moradani answered the call to crush them.
On the first day of the unrest, the 24-year-old volunteer member of Iran's paramilitary Basij force mounted his motorcycle and chased reformist protesters through the streets, shouting out the names of Shiite saints as he revved his engine.
On the fourth day, he picked up a thick wooden stick issued by his Basij neighborhood task force and beat demonstrators who refused to disperse.
By the eighth day, demonstrators alleging that President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad had rigged his re-election were out by the hundreds of thousands. Mr. Moradani says he mobilized in a 12-man motorcycle crew, scouting out restive neighborhoods across Tehran. He battled protesters with a baton and tear gas. The demonstrators fought back with rocks, bricks and bottles. Mr. Moradani says he handcuffed scores of demonstrators and dragged them away as they kicked and screamed.
...
For Mr. Moradani, the biggest shock during the election turmoil came in his personal life. He had recently gotten engaged to a young woman from a devout, conservative family. A week into the protests, he says, his fiancée called him with an ultimatum. If he didn't leave the Basij and stop supporting Mr. Ahmadinejad, he recalls her saying, she wouldn't marry him.
He told her that was impossible. "I suffered a real emotional blow," he says. "She said to me, 'Go beat other people's children then,' and 'I don't want to have anything to do with you,' and hung up on me."
In a shocking and unprecedented interview, directly exposing the inhumanity of Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei's religious regime in Iran, a serving member of the paramilitary Basiji militia has told this reporter of his role in suppressing opposition street protests in recent weeks.
He has also detailed aspects of his earlier service in the force, including his enforced participation in the rape of young Iranian girls prior to their execution.
The interview took place by telephone, and on condition of anonymity. It was arranged by a reliable source whose identity can also not be revealed.
Founded by Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini in 1979 as a "people's militia," the volunteer Basiji force is subordinate to the Iranian Revolutionary Guards and intensely loyal to Khomeini's successor, Khamenei.
The Basiji member, who is married with children, spoke soon after his release by the Iranian authorities from detention. He had been held for the "crime" of having set free two Iranian teenagers - a 13-year-old boy and a 15-year-old girl - who had been arrested during the disturbances that have followed the disputed June presidential elections.
"There have been many other police and members of the security forces arrested because they have shown leniency toward the protesters out on the streets, or released them from custody without consulting our superiors," he said.
He pinned the blame for much of the most ruthless violence employed by the Iranian security apparatus against opposition protesters on what he called "imported security forces" - recruits, as young as 14 and 15, he said, who have been brought from small villages into the bigger cities where the protests have been centered.
"Fourteen and 15-year old boys are given so much power, which I am sorry to say they have abused," he said. "These kids do anything they please - forcing people to empty out their wallets, taking whatever they want from stores without paying, and touching young women inappropriately. The girls are so frightened that they remain quiet and let them do what they want."
These youngsters, and other "plainclothes vigilantes," were committing most of the crimes in the names of the regime, he said.
Asked about his own role in the brutal crackdowns on the protesters, whether he had been beaten demonstrators and whether he regretted his actions, he answered evasively.
"I did not attack any of the rioters - and even if I had, it is my duty to follow orders," he began. "I don't have any regrets," he went on, "except for when I worked as a prison guard during my adolescence."
Explaining how he had come to join the volunteer Basiji forces, he said his mother had taken him to them.
When he was 16, "my mother took me to a Basiji station and begged them to take me under their wing because I had no one and nothing foreseeable in my future. My father was martyred during the war in Iraq and she did not want me to get hooked on drugs and become a street thug. I had no choice," he said.
He said he had been a highly regarded member of the force, and had so "impressed my superiors" that, at 18, "I was given the 'honor' to temporarily marry young girls before they were sentenced to death."
In the Islamic Republic it is illegal to execute a young woman, regardless of her crime, if she is a virgin, he explained. Therefore a "wedding" ceremony is conducted the night before the execution: The young girl is forced to have sexual intercourse with a prison guard - essentially raped by her "husband."
"I regret that, even though the marriages were legal," he said.
Why the regret, if the marriages were "legal?"
"Because," he went on, "I could tell that the girls were more afraid of their 'wedding' night than of the execution that awaited them in the morning. And they would always fight back, so we would have to put sleeping pills in their food. By morning the girls would have an empty expression; it seemed like they were ready or wanted to die.
"I remember hearing them cry and scream after [the rape] was over," he said. "I will never forget how this one girl clawed at her own face and neck with her finger nails afterwards. She had deep scratches all over her."
Returning to the events of the last few weeks, and his decision to set free the two teenage detainees, he said he "honestly" did not know why he had released them, a decision that led to his own arrest, "but I think it was because they were so young. They looked like children and I knew what would happen to them if they weren't released."
He said that while a man is deemed "responsible for his own actions at 13, for a woman it is 9," and that it was freeing the 15-year-old girl that "really got me in trouble.
"I was not mistreated or really interrogated while being detained," he said. "I was put in a tiny room and left alone. It was hard being isolated, so I spent most of my time praying and thinking about my wife and kids."
Iran's regime has made huge efforts to crush the country’s demonstrating citizens. But their heroic and lucid protests have opened a path to the future via a reconnection with Iran’s true revolutionary past, says Fred Halliday.
It is already five weeks since the presidential elections on 12 June 2009 in Iran, whose official results and handling by the authorities provoked an immediate and nationwide outbreak of popular demonstrations. It may appear that the authoritarian ruling clique headed by Iran's spiritual (Ayatollah Khamenei) and political (Mahmoud Ahmadinejad) leader has in this period been able to contain and push back the challenge to its power.
The deployment of police, basij militias and pasdaran (Revolutionary Guards) has crushed the mass street protests; at least dozens and perhaps hundreds of the leaders and top advisers of the reformist presidential candidates have been arrested; and a climate of fear has been imposed. The most visible manifestations of the hugely impressive popular movement of the "Persian spring" - whose eruption took almost all observers by surprise, and which quickly won an amazing breadth of support across Iran's social groups and regions - seem to have been closed down as suddenly as it burst into the open.
Yet even a vigorous clampdown has been unable to extinguish all public displays of dissent. The open defiance by thousands of opposition supporters around Friday prayers at Tehran University on 17 July 2009 is but a surface indication of the heaving anger below. The gathering heard a call by the former president and influential figure Hashemi Rafsanjani for those arrested in the protests to be released. It is a significant intervention in a delicate phase, when factions within the regime as well as millions of disaffected Iranian citizens are positioning for the even more decisive confrontations ahead.
If past performance is anything to go, the exertion of state violence since the election is only the beginning. In a pattern familiar from earlier phases of the Islamic Republic - as also occurred during the Shah's regime - opposition members will continue to be brutalised in prison and then forced to engage in televised "confessions": acts of deliberately preposterous humiliation designed not to reveal the truth (about "foreign conspiracies" or whatever), but to terrorise and break the will of the regime's opponents.
More ominous is what may follow this phase of detention, mistreatment, and humiliation. Many precedents, including the repression of the liberal and left opposition in 1979-81 in particular, suggest that once foreign correspondents have been expelled from Iran and international attention has moved on, the actual killing in prison of opposition members can proceed. In the past, such killings followed fake trials where executions were justified under the catchall charge of "waging war on God", or in supposed attempts to escape.
The revolution's dialectic
Many who know the modern history of Iran - be they Iranian or someone like myself who followed (and in part witnessed) the events of 1978-79 when the Islamic Republic came into being - will be struck by the many parallels, insights, warnings and differences offered by that earlier moment and the post-election upsurge of 2009.
The apparel, slogans and precise demands may seem far apart, but at heart the opposed forces are similar. On one side, the mass demonstrations of 1978 that undermined the Shah's regime and led to the dissolution of his state and his army, and the mobilisations of summer 1979 when left and liberal forces sought to defend press freedom, the rights of women and of ethnic minorities; on the other, the gangs of hizbullahi thugs, the mass pro-Khomeini demonstrations, and the newly established pasdaran forces that were determined to subdue the yearnings for such freedom and rights.
The urge to repress, above all the contempt for the peacefully and democratically expressed views of others, were evident in the first months of the Islamic Republic. I recall, in particular, an educative encounter in August 1979 with a Revolutionary Guard who had come with his colleagues to close down the offices of the independent newspaper Ayandegan. When I asked this pasdar what he was doing, he replied: "We are defending the revolution!". "Why are you therefore closing the paper?", I asked. "This newspaper is shit", he declared. When I suggested that 2 million people read the paper, he replied, without reservation: "All right, then these 2 million people are shit too!" Thus was my induction into the political culture of the Islamic Revolutionary Guards.
But if such incidents from the early months of the Islamic Republic cast some light on the recent popular explosion in Iran, other analogies - above all with challenges to communist rule in east-central Europe after 1945 - also suggest themselves. This is true in a deeper, sociological sense as well as in the epiphenomena of the protests.
For their main rallying-cry was (and is) at once contemporary and full of historical resonances that derives from Iran's formative constitutional revolution of 1906. What they demand, and what the opposition presidential candidate Mir-Hossein Moussavi has reiterated in his statements since the demonstrations, is a broad range of freedoms: of expression, of social behaviour, of media.
For in a sense the Islamic Republic has, like communism, lost its original ideological credibility and has prepared the way for its own demise: above all by educating people. The demonstrators in Iran in June 2009 did not, after all, carry posters of Shi'a imams (Ali or Reza), or chant religious slogans; far less brandish pictures of Lenin, Mao Zedong or Che Guevara. They were, like the mass movements that challenged communism, part of what Jürgen Habermas called (à propos 1989) a "revolution of catching up" - one that wanted to be part of the modern world and for their country to take its rightful and collaborative place in it.
Yet just as by the 1980s millions of citizens in east-central Europe were coming to express their dissatisfaction in terms beyond reformist communism, so the Iranian demonstrators of June 2009 were articulating a programme that was also larger and more international than that of their predecessors: one born of the increased awareness of the outside world produced by education, the internet and the very real pluralism of information and opinion that, for all its repression, the Islamic Republic has permitted.
The closing option
The analogies between the Iran of 1978-79 and the Poland, Hungary and Czechoslovakia (for example) of 1989 also underline an important if as yet obscure contrast in this Iranian crisis. Here, it may be apposite to quote the entirety of an astute observation of Lenin about the need for successful revolutions to meet two conditions. The first, often invoked, is that the people cannot go on being ruled in the old way. The second, neglected but equally important is that the rulers cannot go on ruling in the old way.
Here indeed lies both the originality and the enigma of the - it can be seen now, ongoing - Iranian convulsion of 2009. The success of Mir-Hossein Moussavi in inspiring a mass movement in the weeks just prior and subsequent to the presidential election can be explained more or less straightforwardly as the confluence of three factors:
* a long-term growth of dissatisfaction with the social, economic and political actions of the Islamic Republic
* a particular revulsion with the political direction and economic failures of Iran since Mahmoud Ahmadinejad came to power in June 2005
* a set of short-term events and processes in the days leading up to the election (including disgust at the vulgarity of Ahmadinejad in his TV debate with Moussavi, and the creative use by the opposition of SMS, Facebook and other communications).
By contrast, the nature of the divisions within the state is much less definable - though the existence of such divisions is a fact. To observe Iran in these weeks is like watching a stage where only some of the actors are in the light: there is another, equally important, process underway which remains in the shadows. This is the conflict within the clerical and political elite: more broadly, the Islamic nomenklatura - the 5,000 or so clergy, politicians, and businesspeople with special access to the rents from oil, gas and trade who have coalesced into Iran's new ruling group.
The fissures within this elite are indicated by the open defiance of former presidents Hashemi Rafsanjani and Mohammad Khatami; they run through the clerical city of Qom, and much of the official political networks. Whether they also split the armed forces, the pasdaran and the intelligence services is unclear: but a working initial premises is that until evidence emerges that these security bodies are indeed divided, the Khamenei-Ahmadinejad camp will retain the initiative. Reports from Qom indicate that the regime is doing all it can - including the use of money and intimidation - to keep the majority of the clergy on its side.
It would thus be mistaken, in this context at least, to assume that the post-election protests mark the beginning of the end of the Islamic Republic. They may turn out to do so, but the precedent of 1979-81 is sobering here. At a time when Ayatollah Khomeini and his associates faced much greater challenges than this one, and when to many it seemed that the regime would fall, it managed - by mobilising the support it undoubtedly had, and by brutal repression of its opponents - to survive.
A different outcome in the period of revolution itself carries the same lesson. Few expected the regime of the Shah, which had international support and a modern army of 400,000, to crumble in the face of unarmed demonstrators within a matter of months. To evaluate regime resilience in Iran is no easy task.
The opening door
But if the character of the intra-regime tensions and the immediate fate of the Islamic Republic are hard to read, the post-election demonstrations have most certainly created a new framework for the understanding of Iran's political world.
The key point is that the protests have opened the history and legacy of the Islamic revolution itself to a range of different interpretations - and by extension to a questioning of established ones. For example, the Marxist left cleaved for many years after 1979 to the belief that it had "made" the revolution, only for its achievement to be stolen by Ayatollah Khomeini and the clergy. This argument always obscured another and greater act of usurpation by the clerical elite, which involved suppressing the role of the much larger nationalist constituency of opposition to the Shah and his alliance with the United States that played a very significant role in the revolution.
The demonstrators of 1978-79 did not want the Shah, but nor did they want a dictatorship of ayatollahs either: they wanted, in the signal slogans of the revolution, "independence" and "freedom". Many prominent Iranian figures of the time were representatives of this trend: among them the liberal prime minister Shahpur Bakhtiar, who tried to manage a democratic transition after the Shah relinquished power, and was assassinated in Paris in August 1981; Ayatollah Hossein-Ali Montazeri, Khomeini's chosen successor, who spent the years 1997-2003 under house-arrest in the city of Qom for criticising clerical control of the state; and followers of the ex-prime minister Mohammad Mossadeq, overthrown in the coup of 1953, who organised the 1979 anti-censorship demonstrations.
In the same way that Lenin and the Bolsheviks pushed aside not only their Czarist opponents, but also Russian liberals, social-revolutionaries and Mensheviks, so Khomeini and his associates set out to monopolise the post-revolutionary state and extinguish both their political rivals and the very memory of their contribution to a history that belongs to all Iranians. It is the great contribution of the brave citizens of Iran who took to the streets in June 2009, and affirmed their rights in peaceful and dignified fashion, to have reclaimed this truth.
Their demonstrations thus have opened a door to Iran's past as well as the future. Another slogan of the epic popular tide of 1978-79 - marg bar fascism, marg bar irtija (death to fascism, death to reaction) - may yet combine with the marg bar dictator of the marches of 2009 in a way that heralds the end of the demagogic clique that now rules Iran. The people of Iran, and their friends and admirers the world over, can only hope that this day comes sooner rather than later.
The American attention span for foreign crises is notoriously short. In the two weeks since Iran’s disputed election and the ensuing protests and violence, Michael Jackson died, Sarah Palin resigned, and news from Iran slipped below the fold and into the inside pages of most daily newspapers.
In this case, however, American editors and readers are not solely to blame. The Iranian authorities had an interest in making this story disappear, and they have done a very effective job. They expelled all foreign reporters, imprisoned most active local ones (according to Reporters Without Borders, forty-one Iranian journalists have been imprisoned since June 12th), and let local stringers for foreign media organizations know that their options included prison, silence, and exile. The inner circles of the opposition candidates, and the independent analysts and civil-society leaders who aggregate and interpret information for the press, are also in prison, or, at the very least, unable to communicate freely by e-mail or phone. Very few unofficial sources of information remain accessible—mainly anonymous, frightened informants on the ground.
The less we hear from Iran, the easier it is to presume that the regime’s strong-arm tactics have succeeded in putting down the protest movement. But the silence we hear is only our own. The protest movement that exploded into Iran’s streets in June was not a momentary flash of anger. It would not have been so heart-stopping if it were. Rather, for the segment of the populace engaged in the protests, it was the culmination of decades of frustrated hopes and indignities. Among the protesters were those who had placed their trust in the reform movement, which had promised evolutionary change through legal means; these people were already bitterly disappointed by the end of the Khatami years, in 2005, and had, with some difficulty, mustered the will and the optimism to participate in the electoral process once again. What propelled them to the streets was the long, slow burn of accumulated grievance, and there is little reason to believe that their fury has so swiftly expended itself.
Iran’s broad middle class has entered into open revolt against its government. The reformists, who once sought to triangulate between these forces and the theocracy, have by and large chosen the side of the protesters. This is a confrontation to be measured not in days but in months, or even years. Among analysts of Iran, debates rage over the relative demographic, political, and economic strength of the opposition coalition. We’ll know it by its failure or its success, and not in the immediate short term.
One fascinating question to emerge in the past two weeks is whether the clergy sides with Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, or with the leading opposition candidate, Mir-Hossein Moussavi. Ayatollah Hossein-Ali Montazeri has issued a fatwa that essentially dismisses Khamenei as the country’s Supreme Leader, on the ground that an unjust leader has no legitimacy. Ayatollah Yusuf Saneei has condemned the attacking of protesters as a sin, and Ayatollah Bayat Zanjani has issued a fatwa against coöperating with Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s government. Then, too, the Association of Researchers and Teachers of Qom Seminary declared the election illegitimate.
But Montazeri, who was supposed to succeed the leader of the 1979 revolution, Ayatollah Khomeini, until he issued an open letter condemning the mass murder of political prisoners in 1988, has been in more or less frank opposition to Khamenei for decades. He has endured house arrest in the upper floor of his home for six years; he has repeatedly denounced Ahmadinejad’s nuclear and even economic policies; he was one of very few public figures to support the student protesters who were beaten and put down in 1999; and he has even defended the rights of Iran’s most persecuted minority, the Bahai. Saneei, too, has long held positions far more progressive than those of the ruling establishment, and the Association of Researchers and Teachers of Qom Seminary, which was founded to support former President Mohammad Khatami, consists largely of mid-ranking clerics.
Mehdi Khalaji, an analyst at the Washington Institute who trained as a cleric for fourteen years in Qom, is confident that the clerical establishment supports Khamenei, and that those who dissent are neither politically powerful nor influential within the ulema itself. The silence of the top conservative ayatollahs, he suggests, should be read not as dissent but as approval. After all, the clerical establishment depends on the Islamic Republic for its very existence, financially and otherwise.
What may be most interesting in all of this, for the outside observer, is the illustration of a more diverse Iranian religious establishment than we often credit. In fact, Qom has long housed reformist and independent strains of religious thought. But these voices have been increasingly marginalized. Back in 2007, when I was researching the rise of the most hard-core fundamentalists in Qom, the reformist cleric Mohsen Kadivar told me that such clerics had become increasingly powerful “because they stop every independent voice and current in Qom seminary or Najaf seminary, every city. So we have many clergies, many mujtaheds who are now silent because they cannot do anything. When they are not active in the society, it is obvious that these fundamentalists increase their power, and they have a lot of opportunities.”
One question raised by recent events is whether the conflict has driven a consequential wedge between the part of the clergy that wields power and those who see the clergy as independent—and, as at previous points in Iranian history, as a defender of the people against the excesses of autocrats. Clerics like Montazeri and Saneei may not wield much political power, but their moral authority and spiritual following are large, and probably growing.
For two decades he was considered to be above the petty political squabbles, a cautious elder contemplating questions of faith and Islam while guiding his nation into the future.
But Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, whose title of supreme leader makes him Iran's ultimate authority, has gotten his hands dirty. His decision in recent weeks to so stridently support the nation's controversial president after a disputed election has dramatically changed his image among his people, setting in motion an unpredictable series of events that could fundamentally change the Islamic Republic.
"Public respect for him has been significantly damaged," said one analyst, speaking on condition of anonymity. "Opposing him is no longer the same as opposing God."
The venerated Khamenei has even become the target of public jokes and criticism.
President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad "commits crimes, and the leader supports him," was a popular slogan during the riots of June 20, the day after Khamenei delivered a blistering Friday sermon in which he said that the election a week earlier had been won by Ahmadinejad.
At July 9 demonstrations, protesters mocked the ayatollah's son, Mojtaba, who many believe hopes to succeed his father.
'Khamenei-jad'
In seeking to fill the robes of the Islamic Republic's late founder, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, Khamenei has never been deemed to have the same level of religious credentials or oratorical skills. Over the last two decades, he has invested more in building up support among the nationalistic leaderships of the Revolutionary Guard, security apparatus and militias than in cultivating a clerical establishment that increasingly reflects the values and aspirations of modern Iran.
But his decision to tilt heavily toward raw force rather than the power of the turban has exposed a dilemma. His right to rule is based on Khomeini's theological concept of velayat-e faqih, guardianship of religious jurists, which places him as a spiritual guide hovering above the political structure. Now, for many, Khamenei has lost his aura of infallibility and is seen as just one more political infighter -- "Khamenei-jad," as one commentator in the capital joked, combining his name and that of his controversial protege.
"It's gotten so bad that people stare at me on the street thinking because I'm a cleric I must be an Ahmadinejad supporter, until I hold up my two fingers and show my support for [opposition candidate Mir-Hossein] Mousavi, and the people become happy," Ayatollah Hadi Ghaffari, a reformist cleric, told a giggling crowd in a popular audiotape distributed around the Internet and on YouTube.
"Mr. Khamenei, you're making a mistake. I am committed to guardianship of the jurisprudent more than Khamenei . . . but I might have something to say to the guardian at the time," he said.
Another reformist cleric, Mohsen Kadivar, told Germany's Der Spiegel magazine that Khamenei's decision to tie his fate to Ahmadinejad's disputed election win was "a great moral, but also political, mistake."
Reformist journalist Issa Saharkhiz, who was recently jailed, wrote that Khamenei "has chosen the path of tyranny which the people of Iran and the world have already thrown into the waste bin of history several times."
Few believe the Islamic Republic is on the verge of collapse or revolution. The military, numerous high-ranking clerics and segments of the population continue to support the absolute power of the leader.
But recent developments might make it difficult for Ahmadinejad to govern, much less implement the hard-line agenda he shares with Khamenei of tightening social restrictions and confronting the West.
"Khamenei has always ruled from a position of insecurity vis-a-vis his clerical contemporaries and also the population," said Karim Sadjadpour, an Iran analyst at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace who has studied much of Khamenei's writings. "Now he's in a situation where not only is he disliked, but he no longer elicits the same fear that he did before the election."
Broader opposition
The threats to Khamenei no longer come from just the reformists. Even some staunch Ahmadinejad supporters said they were disheartened by Khamenei's decision to play such a key role in blessing the controversial election results. One Iranian conservative, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said that "it diminished the office" of the House of the Leader, the supreme leader's headquarters, meant to be revered by Shiite Muslims.
"He has lost a remarkable number of his own religious and traditional walks of people who had traditionally been supporters of the Islamic system in Iran," said Bizhan Bidabad, an Iranian intellectual in Tehran.
As Khamenei's credibility and powers of persuasion with moderates have collapsed, so has his ability to keep protesters under control without the truncheons and tear gas of the security forces. With Khamenei's golden halo gone, the Revolutionary Guard and its allied radicals might figure he no longer serves a purpose, said one political analyst.
"I think that Khamenei is finished as a politician," he said, speaking on condition of anonymity. "He has always played the role of a balancer. Now that he's removing one part of the balancing act, the remaining actors might decide at some point that they are better off without him."
Portions of the Iranian population have long quietly resented Khamenei because they opposed the Islamic Republic's theocratic constrictions, but for the better part of two decades his political views remained ambiguous, even nebulous. That changed after the election, when he blessed the vote even before it was officially ratified and delivered a momentous speech in which he personally stood up for Ahmadinejad, who won amid fraud charges, and described the president's views as "closer" to his.
"It was not the right decision to congratulate the current president prior to the ratification of the election result," said Mohammad-Ali Dadkhah, a human rights lawyer, days before he was jailed. "The supreme leader made a prejudgment, not a judgment."
The president's opponents took on his challenge and continued questioning the vote, damaging the supreme leader's personal credibility by forcing him and his adjutants to make further defenses of the election results.
"For nearly two decades Khamenei has wielded power without accountability," Sadjadpour said. "Those days are over. Formerly sacred red lines have been crossed. For the first time, people have begun openly questioning whether Emperor Khamenei has any clothes on."
While direct anger at Khamenei has been rare over the years, people are now shouting slogans against him from rooftops. One political cartoon making its way around the Internet shows him riding double on a motorcycle with a club-wielding Ahmadinejad, likening the pair to the Basiji militiamen who have stormed crowds of demonstrators.
Pondering next step
Khamenei's allies seem at a loss over whether to bandage his hemorrhaging legitimacy by singing his praises or utilizing the blunt instruments of state. Despite jailings and beatings, Iranian authorities have yet to squelch vocal defiance of Khamenei's order to end debates and protests over the election. Notably, it has been mostly military officials and not clerics who have rushed to the system's defense, denouncing Mousavi's green-bedecked supporters as subversives.
"The green movement was intent on piling pressure on supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and the Islamic establishment," Gen. Yadollah Javani, a hard-line commander of the Revolutionary Guard, said this month. "The sedition's eye was injured but it was not blinded. Now we have to blind it totally before gouging it out."
How much has changed for Iran in one occasionally breathtaking month. The erratic uprising is becoming as important as the Islamic revoluti on 30 years ago -- and not only for Iran. Both redefined political action throughout the Middle East.
The costs are steadily mounting for the regime. Just one day before the June 12 presidential election, the Islamic republic had never been so powerful. Tehran had not only survived three decades of diplomatic isolation and economic sanctions but had emerged a regional superpower, rivaled only by Israel. Its influence shaped conflicts and politics from Afghanistan to Lebanon.
But the day after the election, the Islamic republic had never appeared so vulnerable. The virtual militarization of the state has failed to contain the uprising, and its tactics have further alienated and polarized society. It has also shifted the focus from the election to Iran's leadership.
Just a day before the election, Iran also had the best opportunity in 30 years to end its pariah status. Since the 1979 takeover of the U.S. Embassy, Tehran has sparred with five U.S. administrations. President Obama's offer of direct engagement is the most generous to date. He had the world's major powers and a growing number of Americans on board.
The tide has turned. At its summit in Italy last week, the Group of Eight industrialized nations "deplored" the post-election crackdown and urged "democratic dialogue" with the opposition. At his news conference there, Obama noted the G-8's "strong condemnation about the appalling treatment of peaceful protesters post-election in Iran" and "behavior that just violates basic international norms."
Given its advancing nuclear technology and regional influence, Iran believed before the election that it held the trump cards in any negotiations. Now, politically disgraced, it is the needy one. Yet Washington might also pay a price for engaging with a government that brutalizes its people. Any involvement could effectively bestow legitimacy on a disputed election and reject the transparency and justice that protesters are seeking.
The uprising has transformed Iran's political landscape. Over the past month, dozens of disparate political factions have coalesced into two rival camps: the New Right and the New Left.
The core of the New Right is a second generation of revolutionaries, called principlists, who have wrested control of the security instruments and increasingly pushed their elders aside -- at least for now. It includes Mojtaba Khamenei, the supreme leader's son and chief of staff; Mojtaba Samareh Hashemi, a presidential adviser and campaign manager; Intelligence Minister Gholam Hossein Mohseni-Ejehei; Interior Minister Sadegh Mahsouli; Major Gen. Mohammad Ali Jafari of the Revolutionary Guards; Basij commander Hasan Taeb; influential commentators such as Hossein Shariatmadari, editor of the newspaper Kayhan; and industry titans like Mehrbad Bazrpash, the former cabinet minister for youth affairs who now heads Saipa, the automobile manufacturer.
The New Left is a de facto coalition of disparate interest groups that found common cause in anger after the election. The name comes from opposition candidate Mir Hossein Mousavi, who was considered leftist as prime minister in the 1980s, and the opposition's goal is to open up the rigid theocracy.
Its organization, tools and strategy are weak, but it is the most extensive coalition since the 1979 revolution. The New Left includes former presidents, cabinet ministers and members of parliament as well as vast numbers of young people (the dominant demographic), the most politically active women in the Islamic world, white-collar professionals and inflation-sapped laborers.
What was a political divide has become a schism. Many Iranian leaders served time together in the shah's jails; today, their visions of the Islamic republic differ so sharply that reconciliation would be almost impossible.
What happens next will be determined by three factors: leadership, unity and momentum.
The opposition is most vulnerable on leadership. The big unanswered question is whether Mousavi, a distinctly uncharismatic politician, can lead the new opposition over the long term. He was an accidental leader of the reform movement, more the product of public sentiment than the creator of it. Without dynamic direction, the opposition may look elsewhere.
The regime is most vulnerable on unity. Many government employees, including civil servants and members of the military, have long grumbled about the strict theocracy. In 1997, a government poll found that 84 percent of the Revolutionary Guards, which include many young men merely fulfilling national service, voted for Mohammad Khatami, the first reform president.
Momentum may be the decisive factor. The regime will need to shift public attention to President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's second-term agenda. Though Ahmadinejad blames the outside world for the protests, he may focus on regional or international goals to win the legitimacy that his presidency is unable to get at home.
For the opposition, the calendar of Shiite rites, Persian commemorations and revolutionary markers is rich with occasions to spark demonstrations. The opposition also has supporters in Iran's parliament who are likely to challenge Ahmadinejad's cabinet choices and economic proposals. Further arrests and future trials could also spark new tension. With each flash point, the regime's image is further tainted, its legitimacy undermined.
Robin Wright, a former Post reporter, is the author of "Dreams and Shadows: The Future of the Middle East" and is a public policy scholar at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars.
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