Opposition Leaders Defy Iranian Authorities, Call Ahmadinejad Government Illegal

By Thomas Erdbrink
Washington Post Foreign Service
Thursday, July 2, 2009

TEHRAN, July 1 -- Three opposition leaders, including a former president, openly defied Iran's top political and religious authorities Wednesday, vowing to resist a government they have deemed illegitimate after official certification of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's reelection.

Their defiance in the face of harsh official denunciations and threats of arrest and prosecution appeared to dash the government's hopes of pressuring the opposition into accepting the disputed June 12 election.

Rather than dropping his complaints of extensive vote-rigging, leading opposition candidate Mir Hossein Mousavi took his fight to a new level Wednesday, risking arrest by urging followers to continue their protests. After formal certification of the election results Monday night by the Guardian Council, a top supervisory body of Shiite Muslim clerics and jurists, Iranian authorities warned that no further protests would be tolerated.

Mousavi, 67, a former prime minister, was joined in his dismissal of the official results by two other opposition leaders: presidential candidate Mehdi Karroubi, 71, a cleric and former speaker of parliament, and Mohammad Khatami, 65, a cleric who served as president for eight years before Ahmadinejad, now 52, was first elected in 2005. They also called for the annulment of the June 12 vote and the continuation of protests, although Khatami's remarks were not as tough as those of the two candidates.

The three made clear that they do not oppose Iran's system of religious government, but they charged that the country is turning into a dictatorship. The government regards Mousavi and Karroubi as bad losers who are ignoring a legal election result and are trying to overthrow the system by organizing a "color revolution" similar to those that swept away governments in Eastern and Central Europe this decade.

There was no immediate response by authorities, but Morteza Agha Tehrani, an influential pro-government member of parliament, was quoted by a local news agency as saying that some lawmakers would soon file a court case against Mousavi.

The opposition's persistence appeared to put the government in a bind. If Iran's top leaders order the arrest of Mousavi and the political and religious figures who support him, they risk further undermining the country's complex system of religious and democratic governance. But if they allow Mousavi to continue calling for protests and challenging the election results, they could jeopardize the authority of the supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, and other key figures who have backed Ahmadinejad's reelection.

Political factions and some grand ayatollahs, senior Shiite religious leaders with tens of thousands of followers, have voiced disapproval of the violent response to street protests and have called on authorities to heed demonstrators' complaints.

"There has been a velvet revolution against the people and against the republicanism of the system," Khatami said during a meeting with families of war casualties, according to a Web site associated with his faction. "A big segment of society has lost all trust in the system, and this is a disaster."

A leading moderate party formed by reformers close to Khatami, the Islamic Iran Participation Front, called the election a "coup d'etat" and the result "unacceptable."

In Tehran late Wednesday, tens of thousands of residents shouted "Allahu akbar!" (God is great) from their balconies and rooftops, a form of protest supporting Mousavi and Karroubi. But the only traffic on the capital's normally bustling streets appeared to be special police patrolling in black SUVs. Main squares all over the city were empty, witnesses said, although Wednesday night is the traditional start of the Iranian weekend.

The country's text-messaging service, turned off since the day before the election, resumed Wednesday, with Tehran's residents sending one another carefully formulated messages to avoid attracting official attention.

Meanwhile, Iran's national police chief, Brig. Gen. Ismail Ahmadi Moghaddam, announced that detained protesters "have been sent to the public and revolutionary courts in Tehran." He said that 1,032 people were detained during post-election unrest and that most have been released.

The police chief also said that 20 "rioters" were killed after the election, the semiofficial Fars News Agency reported. He said that no police officers died but that more than 500 of them had been injured. "The police behavior toward the illegal gatherings staged during the final days of unrest was completely legal," Fars quoted him as saying.

For his part, Ahmadinejad canceled a planned trip to Libya on Wednesday to attend an African Union summit, the Foreign Ministry announced.

Staff writer William Branigin in Washington contributed to this report.

Iran Crisis: Can Obama and U.S. Deal with a Divided Iran?

By Joe Klein

"The most treacherous government is Britain," Ayatullah Ali Khamenei, the Supreme Leader of the Islamic Republic of Iran, intoned at Friday prayers on June 19, and I had to laugh. The Supreme Leader, in the midst of announcing a crackdown on the Green Revolution demonstrators, was sounding like the lead character in the most famous contemporary Iranian novel, My Uncle Napoleon, a huge hit as a television series in the 1970s. Uncle Napoleon is a beloved paranoid curmudgeon, the Iranian Archie Bunker. He blames everything — the weather, the economy, the moral vagaries of his family — on the British. This has been a constant theme in Iranian public life for at least 100 years, although the U.S. has supplanted Britain as the Great Satan, the source of all Iranian miseries, since the revolution of 1979. (See pictures of Neda Agha-Soltan, the young woman whose death has rallied the opposition.)

Suddenly, now, the Brits were back, and you had to wonder why. Certainly the BBC's Persian service, the most popular source of news for better-educated Iranians, was a real problem for the regime. Khamenei and various flunkies also blamed the U.S., especially the CIA, for the unrest, but the attacks on the Great Satan were muted — a curious development. Was it due to Barack Obama's initial, temperate response to the rigged election results? Was it a recognition that Obama's Cairo speech and New Year's greeting to the Iranian people had made him popular across the Persian political spectrum, a less convincing Satan than George W. Bush had been? Was it a pragmatic recognition that one way for the regime to regain credibility with its own people would be to open negotiations with the Obama Administration, thereby demonstrating that it had credibility with the most powerful country in the world? These questions, which roiled Obama's foreign policy team and the international community as the Iranian crisis ended its second week, reflected a growing sense that the Khamenei-Ahmadinejad regime would prevail against the demonstrators, but had seriously wounded itself in the process. (See the top 10 players in Iran's power struggle.)

Of course, Uncle Napoleon had a point. Iran has been a long-standing target of foreign meddling. It was not just the CIA-assisted coup in 1953 against the popular democratic Prime Minister Mohammed Mossadegh, which Obama mentioned in his Cairo speech. It was also the Western support for the Shah and, worst of all in the minds of Iranians, the U.S. support for Saddam Hussein in the Iran-Iraq war of the 1980s, including the provision of chemicals that Saddam used to concoct poison gas. This remains an open wound in Iran. (See "In Tehran, Terror in Plain Clothes.")

On election day, I interviewed a woman in southern Tehran whose husband was a chemical victim of the war. There are thousands and thousands of such people among the estimated 1 million Iranian casualties of the conflict. Indeed, the war defines the current division at the top of the Iranian establishment: the breach is between the generation that made the revolution of 1979 — leaders like Mir-Hossein Mousavi, the former Presidents Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani and Mohammed Khatami, among others — and the generation that fought the Iran-Iraq war, led by Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and his cohort among the battle-hardened leadership of the Revolutionary Guards Corps. The war led to a significant militarization of Iranian society, and the Supreme Leader, a member of the 1970s generation, has drifted away from his contemporaries toward the military. Among the rumors and major questions emerging from the election was whether the rigging was a quiet coup, staged by the Ahmadinejad generation against its revolutionary elders. "It is an open question whether the Supreme Leader is really in charge or is just a front for the military, led by Ahmadinejad," an Iranian analyst speculated. But the point is moot: Khamenei, who had attempted to stand above the Iranian factions, is now yoked to Ahmadinejad. (Read "The Turbulent Aftermath of Iran's Election.")

Khamenei's old colleagues consider this a perversion of the role of Supreme Leader — and perhaps the last best hope of the Green Revolution demonstrators was that Rafsanjani, the most powerful of the dissidents, could persuade the Assembly of Experts, which appoints and can dismiss Supreme Leaders, to take action against Khamenei. Various U.S. government sources told me they believe that the Experts are divided: one-third supporting Rafsanjani, one-third supporting the Supreme Leader, one-third undecided. It is likely that the Experts will follow the wind, unwilling to challenge the government unless the situation in the streets becomes decisively more brutal and chaotic. Rafsanjani's fate — whether he is able to hold on to his posts as chairman of the Assembly of Experts and of the Expediency Council, or perhaps get himself named the next Supreme Leader — may be the clearest barometer of the Green Revolution's success.

It seems clear that Obama's carefully calibrated remarks about the events in Iran were intended to address the Uncle Napoleon factor, and also to keep the door open for negotiations with the Khamenei-Ahmadinejad regime. It seems equally clear that the criticism from Senator John McCain and other neoconservatives was, in part, an emotional response to the events in the streets, but also an effort to score political points against a popular President and, long term, an attempt to prevent any negotiations with Iran from taking place. McCain won and lost during the course of the battle: the terrible events in the streets — especially the public death of young Neda Agha-Soltan, recorded on a cell-phone video — made it necessary, and appropriate, for the President to move in McCain's direction and use tougher language condemning the Iranian security forces, even if Obama continued to refuse to question the legitimacy of the Iranian government.

But McCain also lost, because of the bluster and false analogies of his comments. He compared Obama's diffidence to Ronald Reagan's forcefulness in proclaiming the Soviet Union an "evil empire" in the 1980s — but even the most pro-American Iranians were infuriated by George W. Bush's attempt to lash their country into an "axis of evil" with their mortal enemy Iraq and North Korea. The situations in Iran and the Soviet Union were nowhere near analogous. Iranians in the streets were looking for greater freedom, not the overthrow of the regime. The neocon effort to turn the Iranians into East European rebels against the Soviet Union was as crudely misleading as Benjamin Netanyahu's fantasy that the Iranian government is a "messianic apocalyptic cult" led by mad mullahs likely to nuke Israel. The truth is, Iran's government is a conservative, defensive, rational military dictatorship that manages to subdue its working-class majority softly, by distributing oil revenues downward. (On June 23, Ahmadinejad announced that doctors' salaries would be doubled, for example.)

"The Iranian government has been weakened and tainted by the events," an Arab diplomat told me. The international implications of that weakness are unknowable, for now. "I could give you very convincing arguments either way," an Obama Administration official told me, speaking of the prospects for negotiations with the regime. The prevailing view was that the Iranians would withdraw for a time and attempt to get their house in order. But it is also possible that the regime will move aggressively toward negotiations with the U.S., in order to convey the impression of stability and international legitimacy to its people. If that happens, the Obama Administration may be in position to gain concessions from the Iranians in the area where the Khamenei-Ahmadinejad forces were least willing to negotiate — Iran's nuclear program. "Under the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, they have to reveal all their nuclear activities, which they haven't done," a senior Administration official told me.

It is not impossible that a weakened Iranian regime might be willing to engage on these issues — especially if, as the Iranians insist, they are not attempting to weaponize the uranium they are enriching. Such negotiations would be a diplomatic risk worth taking. They would be a significant political risk, however — with McCain and others screaming appeasement. Whether or not to negotiate, now that the Iranian government has disgraced itself in the eyes of the world, is sure to be a defining moment for the Obama Administration.

Iran's New Revolutionaries

Comment

By Babak Sarfaraz

June 24, 2009

Supporters of Mousavi, as they listen to his speech at a demonstration in Tehran on Thursday June, 18, 2009.

Tehran

For those steeped in the arcane art of Khamenei-watching, June 19 holds a special significance. On that day, after issuing his much-anticipated ultimatum to the people of Iran, the Supreme Leader showed a side of himself never before seen in public: while finishing his blood-soaked sermon with a vow of martyrdom, instead of looking bold and defiant, he looked weak and pathetic. Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the man whose mien has inspired fear and awe in millions of people, actually had a lump in his throat. He fought back tears before tens of millions of bemused and perplexed viewers because in less than three weeks' time, a system he had helped perfect--rule by a supreme religious leader--was showing signs of unraveling.

Pressure had been mounting as accusations swirled that Khamenei and the top brass of the Revolutionary Guards--working in concert with President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad--had perpetrated a vast election fraud aimed at defeating reformist candidate Mir-Hossein Moussavi and simultaneously purging the government of recalcitrant elements, beginning with the faction led by longtime Khamenei nemesis Hashemi Rafsanjani. Apparently confident of success, the alleged conspirators did not foresee the huge popular movement that took up Moussavi's cause. On June 15 close to 800,000 people marched peacefully through the streets of downtown Tehran. The numbers kept swelling for two days, until Khamenei ended the brief Tehran Spring with his ultimatum and a massive show of force.

In the past few weeks, millions of Iranians have voted with their feet, marched peacefully, experienced mass catharsis, fought pitched street battles and defied the government's edicts with increasing confidence. Before the crackdown, they got a taste of freedom and personal empowerment, and they won't soon forget it.

Khamenei's anguished sermon on June 19 was not provoked simply by the popular uprising in the streets. According to a well-placed source in the holy city of Qom, Rafsanjani is working furiously behind the scenes to call for an emergency meeting of the Khobregan, or Assembly of Experts--the elite all-cleric body that can unseat the Supreme Leader or dilute his prerogatives. The juridical case against Khamenei would involve several counts. First, he would be charged with countenancing a coup d'état--albeit a bloodless one--without consulting with the Khobregan. Second, he would stand accused of deceitfully plotting to oust Rafsanjani--who is the Khobregan chairman and nominally the country's third-most-important authority--from his positions of power. Third, he would be said to have threatened the very stability of the republic with his ambition and recklessness.

Rafsanjani's purported plan is to replace Khamenei's one-person dictatorship with a Leadership Council composed of three or more high-ranking clerics; this formula was proposed and then abandoned in 1989 by several prominent clerics. Rafsanjani will likely recommend giving a seat to Khamenei on the council to prevent a violent backlash by his fanatic loyalists. It is not clear if Rafsanjani will have the backing of the two-thirds of the chamber members needed for such a change, though the balance of forces within the Khobregan could be tipped by the events unfolding in the streets. As a symbolic gesture, Rafsanjani is said to favor holding the meeting in Qom--the nation's religious center, which Khamenei has diminished--rather than in Tehran, where it has been held before.

If there is one iconic image that has emerged from the extraordinary recent events, it is that of the masked young men and women who have appeared at all the major flashpoints. The Green Wave--the name chosen by Moussavi for his movement--is a multigenerational, multiethnic and multiclass phenomenon, though with a strong urban, middle-class accent. It is also composed of men and women in roughly equal numbers.

However diffuse the Green Wave, it has a critical component that is the linchpin of the entire movement: a class of young revolutionaries who have sustained it through difficult times. Many of these young men and women are between 18 and 24; they sport green armbands and masks, and they are fearless. Before the Revolutionary Guards stepped into the fray on June 20, the young militants of the Green Wave withstood days of unrelenting attacks by the fanatic Basij militia and the regular riot police.

What powers this new militancy? The Islamic Republic is not a dictatorship in the normal sense of the word. Its practitioners believe they are doing God's work on earth. Guiding the wayward by persuasion and coercion is among their chief tasks. Nearly every young person in Iran, particularly young women, can recount dozens of stories of humiliation and discrimination at the hands of government agents and supporters. For them, each rock thrown at the police, each hand-to-hand combat with the militiamen and vigilantes, each confrontation with the heavily armed Revolutionary Guards is not just an act of political defiance but a cathartic experience of personal liberation.

Unlike their wide-eyed parents with their utopias and romanticization of revolutionary violence, the new young revolutionaries are sophisticated and canny. They have few illusions about the magnitude of the problems facing their country or the complexities of living in a highly traditional and religious society. For example, despite the fact that they are overwhelmingly secular, their slogans mingle political and religious themes to avoid alienating the faithful. Their response to Obama's initially measured rhetoric is another sign of a new political sophistication at work: everyone understands that US meddling would be the proverbial kiss of death to the opposition's cause.

In the days and weeks to come, this infant movement will face difficult challenges. It may suffer some setbacks and reversals, but what matters is the experience it has gained. At this stage, it is doubtful that fear alone can contain the rising tide of discontent or return things to the status quo ante.

Babak Sarfaraz is a pseudonym for a journalist in Iran

As Ahmadinejad Tightens Grip in Iran, Mousavi Faces Tough Choices

By Thomas Erdbrink
Washington Post Foreign Service
Monday, June 29, 2009

TEHRAN, June 28 -- With the opposition visibly weakening in Iran amid a government crackdown, President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and his supporters have begun to use his disputed victory in this month's election to toughen the nation's stance internationally and to consolidate control internally.

In recent days, they have vilified President Obama for what they call his "interventionist policies," have said they are ready to put opposition candidate Mir Hossein Mousavi's advisers on trial and have threatened to execute some of the Mousavi supporters who took to the streets to protest the election result.

On Sunday, news agencies reported that the police broke up another opposition gathering -- witnesses said it numbered about 2,000 -- and detained eight British Embassy staff members, accusing them of a role in organizing the demonstrations.

The actions reflect the growing power of a small coterie of hard-line clerics and Revolutionary Guard Corps commanders, Iranian analysts say. Revolutionary Guard members, in particular, have proved instrumental to the authorities since the June 12 election, and analysts say their clout is bound to increase as the conflict drags on.

The emerging power dynamics leave Mousavi with tough choices. Confronted with increasing political pressure over what supporters of the government say is his leading role in orchestrating riots, he can either acknowledge his defeat and be embraced by his enemies or continue to fight over the election result and face imprisonment.

"Everything now depends on Mousavi," said Amir Mohebbian, a political analyst. "If he decreases the tension, politicians can manage this. If he increases pressure, the influence of the military and security forces will grow."

Should he continue to fight, other analysts say, Mousavi and many of his advisers could be jailed, which would mean the end of their political influence within Iran's ruling system. The exclusion of such a large group would end Iran's traditional power-sharing system. Authority would rest in the hands of the supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Ahmadinejad, and his supporters, leaving the parliament as the lone outpost of opposition voices.

On the other hand, accepting defeat might allow Mousavi to create a political party that, although unable to challenge the rule of Khamenei, could give him an opposition role during Ahmadinejad's second term. Mousavi's supporters, who are still enraged over post-election violence that they blame on the government, would be extremely disappointed by such a move.

The one possible wild card in Mousavi's favor seems to be coming from the holy city of Qom, one of the most influential centers of Shiite learning. There, several powerful grand ayatollahs have issued statements calling for a compromise and, most tellingly, have not joined Khamenei in his unequivocal support of Ahmadinejad.

"Events that happened have weakened the system," Grand Ayatollah Abdolkarim Mousavi Ardabili said during a meeting with members of the Guardian Council, the semiofficial Iranian Labor News Agency reported Saturday. "You must hear the objections that the protesters have to the elections. We must let the people speak."

Another grand ayatollah issued two fatwas, or religious edicts, on Saturday, saying Islam forbids security forces from hitting unarmed people. Grand Ayatollah Asadollah Bayat Zanjani said the protests were Islamic. "These gatherings are the lawful right of the people and their only method for informing the rulers of their requests," he said.

Mousavi and another opposition candidate, Mehdi Karroubi, have vehemently refused to recognize the election results, which officially gave Ahmadinejad a landslide victory. They have also declined to participate in recount efforts by the Guardian Council, which must certify the final results Monday but which the opposition insists is biased.

Their refusal plays into the hands of the president's camp, which, strongly supported by state media, has launched a campaign against Mousavi, the protesters and his advisers. According to the official narrative of this campaign, opposition unrest was fomented by Iran's foreign enemies -- including the United States, Great Britain and Saudi Arabia -- in an attempt to overthrow the regime.

The Iranian government and its allies are gearing up to use those accusations to bring to court some political opponents, a move aimed at silencing the opposition for a longer period, analysts here say. The Paris-based International Federation for Human Rights said Sunday that more than 2,000 people are in detention and that hundreds more have gone missing since the election.

"We are very worried about my husband's fate," said Mahdieh Mohammadi, wife of journalist Ahmad Zeidabadi, a government critic. He was arrested the day after the election. "When you know nothing at all for the past two weeks, naturally you start to worry about everything."

State media have rolled out a daily serving of alleged plots and conspiracies involving Mousavi supporters. They refer to the protesters as "rioters" and "hooligans." Mousavi's aides are linked to plans for "a velvet revolution" meant to overthrow Iran's complex system of religious and democratic governance. Some demonstrators have been forced to make televised statements in which they admit to being the pawns of foreigners.

The head of the parliament's judicial commission has said that Mousavi could be put on trial. Ayatollah Ahmad Khatami, a staunch ally of Iran's supreme leader, called Friday for "severe and ruthless" punishments for the "leaders of the agitations," asking the judiciary to try them as those who "wage war against God." Such crimes are punishable by death under Iran's Shiite Islamic law.

Khamenei has said that those organizing the "riots" will be held responsible for the "violence and bloodshed." He has openly supported Ahmadinejad, breaking with the Islamic republic's tradition of the supreme leader being above the fray.

The Revolutionary Guard Corps, whose power mushroomed after the U.S. invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq in 2001 and 2003, respectively, is in position to gain even more sway in the government. The 120,000-member corps acts as a praetorian guard, protecting Iran's Islamic ruling system, and its commanders are close to top Iranian leaders. In recent years, the corps has added divisions, expanded its intelligence operations, helped professionalize the voluntary militia known as the Basij and taken greater control of the borders.

"We are now in a security situation. That is increasing their influence," said Mohebbian, the analyst, who is critical of both main presidential candidates. "Mousavi's extremist actions have made it easy for military people to get involved in politics, which is always bad for democracy."

Former president Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, an Ahmadinejad rival who supported Mousavi, on Sunday broke his post-election silence and called for an investigation into complaints of election irregularities.

"I hope those who are involved in this issue thoroughly and fairly review and study the legal complaints," Rafsanjani said.

Special correspondent Kay Armin Serjoie in Tehran contributed to this report.

In Tehran, a Mood of Melancholy Descends

By NAZILA FATHI

TEHRAN — An eerie stillness has settled over this normally frenetic city.

In less anxious times, the streets are clogged with honking cars and cranky commuters. But on Saturday, drives that normally last 45 minutes took just a third of the time, and shops were mainly empty. Even Tehran’s beauty salons, normally hives of activity, had few customers; at one, bored workers fussed over one another’s hair.

People who did venture out said they were dispirited by the upheaval that has shaken this country over the two weeks since the contested presidential election, and worried they would get caught up in the brutal government crackdown of dissent that has followed.

Even in areas of the city not known for liberal politics, the sense of frustration, and despair, was palpable. Those who accuse the government of stealing the election said they had lost the hope for change they had during the protests that drew tens of thousands of people into Tehran’s streets. But others also confessed to feeling depressed.

One staunch supporter of the incumbent president, who the government says won in a landslide, said he was distressed by the street protests and the crackdown that, by official counts, claimed more than 20 lives.

“People have been hurt on both sides, and this is disappointing,” said the man, who sells light bulbs in Imam Khomeini Square. “We need to build our country, not engage in these kinds of clashes.”

By late last week, the country’s leaders had succeeded in quelling the massive demonstrations that challenged their legitimacy. But the widespread feeling of discontent — even among those who had no part in the protests — was likely to pose a lingering challenge to leaders’ attempts to move quickly past the vote and return life to normal.

There were further signs on Saturday that the opposition was running out of options in its attempts to nullify the re-election of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, which has been confirmed by the country’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.

The Expediency Council, headed by former President Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, issued a statement that called the supreme leader’s decision the final word on the election, although it did say the government should investigate voting complaints “properly and thoroughly.”

Mr. Rafsanjani has been one of Mr. Ahmadinejad’s strongest critics and one of the most ardent supporters of Mir Hussein Moussavi, Mr. Ahmadinejad’s chief rival in the election. But after the vote, the former president had been quiet, and many Iranians had hoped he would broker some compromise behind the scenes.

And although an opposition Web site carried a new message from Mr. Moussavi, the first in several days, he did not present any new plans for resistance. He instead reiterated demands for a new election, which the government has rejected.

At the same time, those in the opposition were increasingly fearful for the hundreds of government critics who have been jailed.

Amid rumors that the government was beginning to force confessions — a tactic leaders have used in the past to tarnish dissidents’ reputations — the IRNA news agency reported that a jailed journalist had said reformist politicians were to blame for the recent protests.

The journalist, Amir-Hossein Mahdavi, was the editor of a reformist newspaper close to Mr. Moussavi that was shut down before the election.

Mr. Ahmadinejad, meanwhile, responded Saturday to statements by President Obama, who made his most critical remarks of the Iranian leadership on Friday, when he called the government’s crackdown “outrageous” and said the prospects for a dialogue with Iran had been dampened.

Mr. Ahmadinejad suggested that Washington’s stance could imperil Mr. Obama’s aim of improving relations, according to the ISNA news agency.

“Didn’t he say that he was after change?” Mr. Ahmadinejad asked. “Why did he interfere?”

On Saturday, security forces were still on the streets, but uniformed guards had replaced the most feared forces, the Basij paramilitary members, who were involved in many of the beatings and shootings of demonstrators, and the hard-line Revolutionary Guards in their camouflage outfits.

The shops on Baharestan Square, which was the scene of the latest clashes on Wednesday, and on Haft-e Tir Square, where the paramilitary forces attacked people a day earlier, were open Saturday. But shopkeepers said business was limping.

“We used to sell nearly $2,000 a day,” said a woman at an Islamic coat shop on Haft-e Tir Square. “But since the election, our sales have dropped to $900 a day.” She gave only her first name, Mahtab, citing fear of retribution.

Like many others who spoke, Mahtab said she was depressed by what she had seen since the election. She said that she was not a political person and had not even voted June 12, but that the repression on the streets was “beyond belief.”

“I am disgusted, and wish I could leave this country,” she said.

She said she had seen a paramilitary officer outside the shop hit a middle-aged woman in the head so hard that blood streamed down the woman’s forehead.

When Mahtab and her colleagues tried to leave the shop to go home, she said, the forces began clubbing them while shouting the names of Shiite saints. “They do this under the name of religion,” she said. “Which religion allows this?”

Daily life has also been affected.

Although people are still going to work, some parents have been reluctant to take their children to day care, fearing that unrest on the streets would prevent them from picking up their children. University exams have been postponed and many families have traded parties for small get-togethers, where the election is a constant topic of conversation.

“People are depressed, and they feel they have been lied to, robbed of their rights and now are being insulted,” said Nassim, a 56-year-old hairdresser. “It is not just a lie; it’s a huge one. And it doesn’t end.”

Iranian Cleric Calls for 'Ruthless' Punishment of Protest Leaders

By Thomas Erdbrink and William Branigin
Washington Post Foreign Service
Saturday, June 27, 2009

TEHRAN, June 26 -- An influential Iranian cleric on Friday urged "ruthless" punishment, possibly including execution, for leaders of protests against a disputed presidential election, while President Obama intensified his criticism of a crackdown on the Iranian opposition and rejected President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's demand for an apology.

Two weeks after Iranians turned out to vote in massive numbers, authorities moved on two fronts to halt continuing unrest over the results, warning that protest leaders could be subject to the death penalty under Islamic law but also creating a "special committee" to review the election process with participation from the two leading opposition candidates.

In a sermon at Tehran University before traditional Friday prayers, Ayatollah Ahmad Khatami, a close associate of Iran's supreme leader, escalated the hard-line rhetoric that the state has adopted this week toward demonstrators, foreign news media and various "enemies," including the United States and Britain.

Saying that "unauthorized demonstrations" are against both national law and Islamic law because Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Iran's supreme leader, "has advised against them," Khatami argued that a protester who engages in "destructive acts" could be considered a mohareb, or someone who wages war against God. "And Islam has said that a mohareb should receive the severest of punishments," he said.

"Accordingly, I call on the officials of the judicial branch to deal severely and ruthlessly with the leaders of the agitations, whose fodder comes from America and Israel, so that everyone learns a lesson from it," Khatami said, according to a translation by state radio. Under Islamic law, the punishment for waging war against God is death.

Iran's judiciary said Tuesday that a special court would be set up to make an example of "rioters" arrested during the demonstrations. According to Iranian state media, more than 450 have been arrested. International human rights groups say the number is higher and includes demonstrators, journalists and well-known dissidents who have long called for more political freedom in Iran.

In Washington, Obama condemned recent violence against protesters as "outrageous" and dismissed Ahmadinejad's demand Thursday that he apologize for similar previous comments. Obama suggested that it was Ahmadinejad who should be apologizing to Iranian victims and their families for the violent actions of security forces.

Speaking at the White House after a meeting with German Chancellor Angela Merkel, Obama said Iranian demonstrators have shown "bravery in the face of brutality," and he described the violence against them as "outrageous" and "unacceptable." If the Iranian government wants the respect of the international community, he said, "then it must respect the rights and heed the will of its people."

In response to questions, Obama said opposition leader Mir Hossein Mousavi, a former prime minister who asserts that he was denied victory in the June 12 election through fraud, appears to have "captured the imagination or the spirit of forces within Iran that were interested in opening up." He indicated that direct U.S. engagement with Iran over its nuclear program would have to wait until the situation there becomes clearer.

On Ahmadinejad's demand Thursday for an apology, Obama said, "I don't take Mr. Ahmadinejad's statements seriously about apologies, particularly given the fact that the United States has gone out of its way not to interfere with the election process in Iran." Instead, he said, "I would suggest that Mr. Ahmadinejad think carefully about the obligations he owes to his own people," notably "the families of those who've been beaten or shot or detained."

Merkel said Iran "cannot count on the world community turning a blind eye" to the violence.

Iran's Guardian Council, a supervisory body led by Shiite Muslim clerics and jurists that certifies election results, reiterated Friday that it has found no significant fraud in the election, which the Interior Ministry has said Ahmadinejad won with nearly 63 percent of the vote.

"After 10 days of examination, we did not see any major irregularities," a council spokesman, Abbas Ali Kadkhodai, told the official Islamic Republic News Agency. The council is scheduled to complete an inquiry into the election by Monday.

But the council later announced the formation of a "special committee" to review the election process and invited participation by representatives of Mousavi and another opposition candidate, Mehdi Karroubi. The council gave the two candidates 24 hours to name their representatives. It said 10 percent of the ballot boxes would be recounted in the presence of the committee, which would then issue a report about the election. No deadline for the report was specified.

The council said the special committee would also include "political and social figures," notably Ali Akbar Velayati, who served as foreign minister when Mousavi was prime minister in the 1980s and who is now an adviser to Khamenei on international affairs.

There was no immediate response from Mousavi or Karroubi, who have criticized the Guardian Council. They have called on the council to annul the election and hold a new one.

In his Friday sermon, Khatami ruled that out. He denied that the election was rigged and said those who insist on nullifying it "should know that this idea will be fruitless."

Addressing thousands of chanting supporters, he harshly denounced various foreign governments, the United Nations and Western news media, which he accused of false reporting and "assisting the enemy." He told the gathering, "I do not know how they are free to roam around in the country."

Appealing for unity, Khatami said, "Let us not institutionalize grudges. . . . Let us have a united position against the foreigners who have prepared their sharp satanic teeth to loot the legacy of your martyrs."

The cleric, a member of the Assembly of Experts and a supporter of Ahmadinejad, claimed that protesters were responsible for the slaying of a young woman, Neda Agha Soltan, who has become an opposition icon since cellphone cameras captured her dying moments after she was shot last Saturday on a Tehran street.

"Take a look at the story of the lady who was killed for whom Mr. Obama sheds crocodile tears and the West has made a big story," he said. "Any logical individual who watches the film realizes that the work has been done by rioters themselves."

Khatami also asserted that the woman was killed in "a quiet alley" where security forces "would only arrest people" rather than shoot them. "The state does not kill people in such places," he said. "All signs and evidence show that they [protesters] were behind this murder. Now they make a hue and cry against the state. I am warning those liar media."

Arash Hejazi, an Iranian doctor who says he tried to help Agha Soltan, has told British news media that she was shot by a member of the pro-government Basij militia who was riding a motorcycle.

At Tehran's Behesht-e Zahra cemetery, dozens of friends, relatives and other well-wishers paid their respects at Agha Soltan's grave Friday, stopping briefly to utter prayers or place flowers before moving on, news agencies reported. The government has prohibited public mourning ceremonies for the young philosophy student.

"What sin did she commit?" asked a young woman tearfully as she prayed in front of the grave, Agence France-Presse reported. "Pray for our future," an elderly man said.

Branigin reported from Washington.

Iran's Ahmadinejad Demands Apology From Obama

By Thomas Erdbrink and William Branigin
Washington Post Foreign Service
Friday, June 26, 2009

TEHRAN, June 25 -- Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad lashed out at President Obama on Thursday, warning him against "interfering" in Iranian affairs and demanding an apology for criticism of a government crackdown on demonstrators protesting alleged electoral fraud.

Despite an increasingly harsh response to the protests, opposition leader Mir Hossein Mousavi pledged to continue challenging official results that showed a landslide victory for Ahmadinejad in Iran's June 12 presidential election. He vowed to resist growing pressure to end his campaign and said he remains determined to prove that those who rigged the election are also responsible for the violence unleashed on opposition protesters.

The two rivals issued their dueling statements -- neither mentioning the other by name -- a day after security forces broke up the latest demonstrations, then temporarily detained university professors who had met with Mousavi.

Two grand ayatollahs, leading figures in Iran's predominant Shiite Muslim faith, also waded into the fray, as did European foreign ministers from the Group of Eight world powers at a meeting in Italy.

In a speech at a petrochemical plant in southern Iran, Ahmadinejad said Obama was behaving like his predecessor, George W. Bush, and suggested that talks with the United States on Iran's nuclear program would be pointless if Obama kept up his criticism. Obama, who has expressed interest in talking to the Iranian leadership about the nuclear issue, said at a news conference Tuesday that he was "appalled and outraged" by recent violence against demonstrators, and he accused the Iranian government of trying to "distract people" by blaming the unrest on the United States and other Western nations.

"Do you want to speak with this tone?" Ahmadinejad responded Thursday, addressing Obama. "If that is your stance, then what is left to talk about?"

He added: "I hope you avoid interfering in Iran's affairs and express your regret in a way that the Iranian nation is informed of it." He asked why Obama "has fallen into this trap and repeated the comments that Bush used to make" and told the U.S. president that such an attitude "will only make you another Bush in the eyes of the people."

Ahmadinejad also praised Iran's election as demonstrating "the great capabilities and grandeur of the Iranian nation" and declared that his country is practicing true "freedom," as opposed to "this unpopular democracy which is governing America and Europe." Americans and Europeans "have no right to choose and are restricted to . . . two or three parties" in voting for their leaders, he said.

In Washington, White House spokesman Robert Gibbs dismissed Ahmadinejad's criticism. Obama has said "that there are people in Iran who want to make this not about a debate among Iranians in Iran, but about the West and the United States," Gibbs said. "And I would add President Ahmadinejad to that list of people trying to make this about the United States."

Iran's government has declared that Ahmadinejad decisively won the election with nearly 63 percent of the vote, while Mousavi received less than 34 percent and two other candidates trailed far behind. Mousavi immediately challenged the results, charging that massive fraud "reversed" the outcome and cheated him of victory.

The 67-year-old former prime minister posted a statement on his Web site Thursday saying he was being pressed to withdraw his challenge and had been severely restricted in his ability to communicate with supporters.

"However, I am not prepared to give up under the pressure of threats or personal interest," he said.

"The truth . . . is that a major fraud has taken place in these elections, and the people who tried to show their dismay with this event were attacked, killed and arrested," Mousavi said. "Not only am I not scared of responding to their false accusations, but I'm ready to show how the people responsible for the presidential fraud" are also to blame for having "spilled the blood of the people." Mousavi asked his followers to "continue your legal and responsible protest, which is born out of the Islamic revolution, with calm and by avoiding trouble."

His Web site also said 70 academics were arrested Wednesday night and early Thursday after meeting with him. It said that authorities released all but four and that those still detained included Mousavi's former campaign manager.

The pro-government Fars News Agency denied the account. Quoting an "informed source," it said that prosecutors questioned "certain participants" after Mousavi's meeting with members of the Islamic Association of University Lecturers but that "none of the said people were arrested."

A senior Shiite cleric, Grand Ayatollah Nasser Makarem Shirazi, called for the election dispute to be settled through "national reconciliation," saying in a statement Thursday that recent events "have caused deep regret and sorrow in all Iranians loyal to the Islamic establishment and revolution . . . and have gladdened the enemy," state-run Press TV reported. "Definitively, something must be done to ensure that there are no embers burning under the ashes" and to turn "hostilities, antagonism and rivalries . . . into amity and cooperation" he said.

But a leading dissident cleric, Grand Ayatollah Hossein Ali Montazeri, said an "impartial" committee should resolve the election dispute, which he warned could ultimately undermine the government if it is not addressed. "If Iranians cannot talk about their legitimate rights at peaceful gatherings and are instead suppressed, complexities will build up which could possibly uproot the foundations of the government, no matter how powerful," Agence France-Presse quoted him as saying.

At a G-8 meeting in Trieste, Italy, foreign ministers sought to forge a united stand against the Iranian crackdown but ran into opposition from Russia. Italian Foreign Minister Franco Frattini said Iran "must now choose whether or not it wants to keep the door open to dialogue with the international community, because the open hand from the United States, that we supported, must not be greeted with a hand covered in blood."

British Foreign Secretary David Miliband deplored a "profound clampdown" in Iran and said a "crisis of credibility" is dividing Iran's government from its people.

But Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov opposed any condemnation of Tehran, saying after talks with Frattini that "isolating Iran is the wrong approach."

The streets of Tehran were largely quiet Thursday after another opposition presidential candidate, Mehdi Karroubi, postponed plans for a demonstration to mourn protesters killed by security forces. Karroubi said he has not "succeeded in booking a particular location" for a mourning ceremony, apparently because the government has banned demonstrations. He said he still wants to organize a gathering that would "match the dignity of the martyrs of the past few days."

Karroubi also charged that the government has acted illegally in banning demonstrations and arresting political activists. He called for the immediate release of political detainees, and he challenged the Interior Ministry to allow separate but simultaneous demonstrations by Ahmadinejad supporters and the opposition to see which side would draw more people.

At least 17 people have been reported killed in violence after the presidential election, state-run media have reported. But Press TV, an English-language version of state television, put the death toll at 20 and quoted "informed sources" as saying that eight of the dead were members of the pro-government Basij militia. There was no independent confirmation of the claim, which marked the first mention in official media of deaths among security forces in the recent violence.

Branigin reported from Washington.

Protesters in Tehran Met With Force Near Iran's Parliament

By Thomas Erdbrink and William Branigin
Washington Post Foreign Service
Thursday, June 25, 2009

TEHRAN, June 24 -- Riot police and pro-government militiamen used clubs and tear gas to break up an opposition demonstration in front of the Iranian parliament Wednesday after the nation's supreme leader denounced what he described as pressure tactics aimed at overturning the recent disputed presidential election and warned that "lawlessness" would not be tolerated.

Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Iran's ultimate political and religious authority, told a group of lawmakers that "neither the system nor the people will submit to bullying" over the election. In televised remarks, he called for the "restoration of order," adding that breaking the law would lead to "dictatorship."

"Everyone should respect the law. Once lawlessness becomes a norm, things will be complicated and the interests of people will be undermined," Khamenei said. "We will not step an inch beyond the law: our law, our country's law, the Islamic Republic's law."

Hours later, large numbers of security personnel, some riding motorcycles, used baton charges, beatings, tear gas and arrests to disperse several thousand people attempting to protest the proclaimed reelection of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, witnesses said. The demonstrators were trying to gather in front of the parliament building to show support for opposition presidential candidate Mir Hossein Mousavi, who says fraud in the June 12 election cheated him of victory.

Security forces -- including regular police from across Tehran, helmeted riot police and members of a force dubbed the Robocops for their full body armor and special equipment -- converged on Baharestan Square, blocked streets and beat people to head off a planned demonstration. They were supported by members of the pro-government Basij militia and plainclothes agents who infiltrated the protesters, witnesses said.

As a helicopter circled overhead, Robocops riding motorcycles fired large handguns into the air while charging up and down Republic Street and other nearby avenues, one witness said. He said it was unclear whether they were firing bullets or blanks. Some of the police officers carried paintball guns, which have been used in recent demonstrations to mark protesters for arrest.

"When people started to gather, [security forces] chased them into alleys and arrested anybody they could," the witness said. In one alley, police caught up with three men and started beating them, then attacked bystanders who tried to intervene, he said.

In one confrontation between protesters and Basij members, a middle-aged woman wearing a light-blue headscarf and a black coat angrily refused orders to leave. "I'm going to stay here and see how many people you kill today," she defiantly told the Basij. A plainclothes agent emerged from the crowd, cursed the woman and took out a pair of handcuffs to arrest her. Other people tried to stop the agent, but Basij members rushed them and beat them with clubs, the witness said.

In an unusual exchange, he said, a child walked up to a regular police colonel and, gesturing toward truckloads of riot police, asked him, "Who are those guys?" The colonel replied with apparent disdain, "They're cows."

Bystanders and protesters alike were caught up in the violence.

Near a corner of Republic Street known for its printing shops, a young engaged couple fled into an alley to escape a charge by club-wielding security forces. "Why are they attacking me?" the woman cried. "I only came here to print my wedding cards!"

The situation appeared to grow more violent as dusk fell, witnesses said.

In Twitter feeds, people who said they witnessed the crackdown described protesters with broken limbs and cracked heads, saying there was "blood everywhere" from the beatings. One said many people had been arrested. Another said people were being beaten "like animals."

Speaking on state television, Khamenei said he insisted on "implementation of the law." He vowed that Iran would not give in to pressure "at any price." He also appealed to lawmakers to temper criticism of Ahmadinejad, saying that the Majlis, or parliament, "should help the government in such a rough journey and must not be too hard on the administration."

On one of Mousavi's Web sites, the opposition leader's wife, Zahra Rahnavard, a former university dean who played an active role in her husband's presidential campaign, said that people have a constitutional right to protest and that the government should not treat them "as if martial law has been imposed in the streets." Saying it was her duty "to continue legal protests to preserve Iranian rights," she called for the immediate release of people detained since the election, including the editor and more than two dozen employees of her husband's banned newspaper.

Rahnavard later denied reports that she and her husband had been arrested. Mousavi has not been heard from in recent days, fueling rumors that he had been placed under house arrest.

"I am still active in my academic pursuits and . . . I continue to object to recent events," Rahnavard wrote. "The system should respect people's right to protest and refrain from violent clampdowns." She said she wished she could have been "executed" if it meant that no one else would be hurt.

Amid the turmoil, the outlines of a political coalition against Ahmadinejad appeared to be taking shape. The influential head of Iran's parliament, former nuclear negotiator Ali Larijani, joined other political figures in refusing to attend a dinner organized by Ahmadinejad, the opposition newspaper Etemaad-e Melli reported. Larijani has criticized the government's vilification of Mousavi and is encouraging state television to give him airtime to explain his views.

Another influential politician, Tehran Mayor Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf, also spoke out against official denunciations of opposition supporters as "anti-revolutionaries," a loaded term in Iran used for enemies of the state. Iranians who took to the streets June 15 "were part of the people, part of the voters, and they had doubts on the election," the Mehr News Agency quoted Ghalibaf as saying. "All of their slogans were in support of the system and the revolution, even though wrongful accusations were made about this. Everything must be explained to the people; you can't solve anything with force and violence."

Top government officials, however, continued to take a hard line on the protests. On Wednesday, Iran's interior minister, Sadegh Mahsouli, accused the CIA, Britain, Israel and an Iranian guerrilla group in exile, the Mujaheddin-e Khalq, of helping to fund "rioters." Mahsouli told the semiofficial Fars News Agency, "Britain, America and the Zionist regime were behind the recent unrest in Tehran."

Iran's intelligence minister, Gholam-Hossein Mohseni-Ejei, warned in a statement, "Whoever, under any name or title, collects information in Iran will be arrested, and so far a foreign journalist has been arrested." He did not identify the journalist. A Greek freelance reporter, Iason Athanasiadis, was picked up last week, and a Canadian Iranian filmmaker and journalist, Maziar Bahari, was arrested Sunday morning.

Mohseni-Ejei, a Shiite Muslim cleric, charged that one of those arrested was "disguised as a journalist, and he was collecting information needed by the enemies." He also asserted that "some people with British passports were involved in recent riots."

The governor of greater Tehran, Morteza Tamadon, a staunch Ahmadinejad ally, claimed Wednesday that 800 artists and academics who had visited the United States in recent years were trained to protest the election outcome.

Pro-government media even suggested that Neda Agha Soltan, a young woman whose violent death on a Tehran street on Saturday shocked the world after it was captured on cellphone cameras, was shot from behind by an unspecified terrorist. Bystanders said she was shot in the chest by a Basij sniper.

Branigin reported from Washington. Special correspondent Kay Armin Serjoie in Tehran contributed to this report.

Theocracy and Its Discontents

Fareed Zakaria

NEWSWEEK

Published Jun 20, 2009 | Updated: 11:02 p.m. ET Jun 20, 2009

From the magazine issue dated Jun 29, 2009

We are watching the fall of Islamic theocracy in Iran. I don't mean by this that the Iranian regime is about to collapse. It may—I certainly hope it will—but repressive regimes can stick around for a long time. We are watching the failure of the ideology that lay at the basis of the Iranian government. The regime's founder, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, laid out his special interpretation of political Islam in a series of lectures in 1970. In this interpretation of Shia Islam, Islamic jurists were presumed to have divinely ordained powers to rule as guardians of the society, supreme arbiters not only on matters of morality, but politics as well. When Khomeini established the Islamic Republic of Iran, this idea, velayat-e faqih, rule by the Supreme Jurist, was at its heart. Last week that ideology suffered a fatal blow.

When the current Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, declared the election of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad a "divine assessment," he was using the key weapon of velayat-e faqih, divine sanction. Millions of Iranians didn't buy it, convinced that their votes—one of the key secular rights allowed them under Iran's religious system—had been stolen. Soon Khamenei was forced to accept the need for an inquiry into the election. The Guardian Council, Iran's supreme constitutional body, promised to investigate, meet with the candidates and recount some votes. Khamenei has realized that the regime's existence is at stake and has now hardened his position, but that cannot put things back together. It has become clear that in Iran today, legitimacy does not flow from divine authority but from popular will. For three decades, the Iranian regime has wielded its power through its religious standing, effectively excommunicating those who defied it. This no longer works—and the mullahs know it. For millions, perhaps the majority of Iranians, the regime has lost its legitimacy.

Why is this happening? There have been protests in Iran before, but they always placed the street against the state, and the clerics all sided with the state. When the reformist president Mohammad Khatami was in power, he entertained the possibility of siding with the street after student riots broke out in 1999 and 2003, but in the end he stuck with the establishment. The street and state are at odds again—the difference this time is that the clerics are divided. Khatami has openly backed the challenger, Mir Hossein Mousavi, as has the reformist Grand Ayatollah Hussein Ali Montazeri. Even Parliament Speaker Ali Larijani, not a cleric himself but a man with strong family connections to the highest levels of the religious hierarchy, has expressed doubts about the election. Behind the scenes, former president Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani—the head of the Assembly of Experts, another important constitutional body—is reportedly waging a campaign against Ahmadinejad and even possibly the Supreme Leader. If senior clerics dispute Khamenei's divine assessment and argue that the Guardian Council is wrong, it would represent a death blow to the basic premise behind the Islamic Republic of Iran. It would be as though a senior Soviet leader had said in 1980 that Karl Marx was not the right guide to economic policy.

The Islamic Republic might endure but would be devoid of legitimacy. The regime could certainly prevail in this struggle; in fact, that would have to be the most likely outcome. But it will do so by using drastic means—banning all protests, arresting students, punishing senior leaders and shutting down civil society. No matter how things turn out—crackdown, co-optation—it is clear that millions in Iran no longer believe in the regime's governing ideology. If it holds on to power, it will do so like the Soviet Union in the late Brezhnev era, surviving only through military intimidation. "Iran will turn into Egypt," says the Iranian-born intellectual Reza Aslan, meaning a regime in which guns, rather than ideas, hold things together behind a façade of politics.

The Islamic Republic has been watching its legitimacy dwindle over the past decade. First came Khatami, the reformist, who won landslide victories and began some reforms before he was stymied by the Guardian Council. That experience made the mullahs decide they had to reverse course on the only element of democracy they'd permitted in Iran—reasonably open elections. The regime's method of control used to be to select permissible candidates, favor one or two, but allow genuine, secret balloting. In the parliamentary elections of 2004, however, the Guardian Council decided that normal methods would not achieve acceptable results. So it summarily banned 3,000 candidates, including many sitting parliamentarians. Because public support was even less certain this time, the regime went further, announcing the election results in two hours and giving Ahmadinejad victory by such a wide margin that it would preclude any dispute. Khamenei revealed the strategy in his sermon last Friday. "A difference of 11 million votes—how can there be vote rigging?" he asked.

How should the United States deal with the situation in Iran? First, it is worth pointing out that Washington is dealing with it. By reaching out to Iran, publicly and repeatedly, President Barack Obama has made it extremely difficult for the Iranian regime to claim that it is battling an aggressive America, bent on attacking Iran. A few years ago, this was a perfectly plausible claim. George W. Bush had repeatedly declared that the Iranian regime was a mortal enemy, that Iran was part of the Axis of Evil and that a military assault on the country was something he was considering. Obama has done the opposite, making clear that he views the Iranian people with warmth and would negotiate with whichever leaders they chose to represent them. In his Inaugural Address, his Persian New Year greetings and his Cairo speech, he has made a consistent effort to convey respect and friendship for Iranians. That is why Khamenei reacted so angrily throughout most of his response to the New Year message. It undermined the image of the Great Satan that he routinely paints in his sermons. (Of course, ever the ruthless pragmatist, he also carefully left open the door to negotiations with the United States.)

In his Friday sermon, Khamenei said that the United States, Israel and especially Britain were behind the street protests that have roiled Tehran, an accusation that will surely sound ridiculous to many Iranians. But not all: suspicion of meddling by outside powers is deeply ingrained among even the most Westernized citizens in Iran. The fact that Obama has been cautious in his reaction makes it all the harder for Khamenei and Ahmadinejad to wrap themselves in a nationalist flag.

Neoconservatives are already denouncing Obama for his caution. Paul Wolfowitz, deputy defense secretary under Donald Rumsfeld, has compared the White House reaction to Ronald Reagan's reticence when Ferdinand Marcos's regime was challenged on the streets of the Philippines. But the analogy makes no sense. Marcos was an American client—he was in power courtesy of the United States. The protesters were asking Reagan to withdraw that support and let events take their course. Iran, on the other hand, is an independent, fiercely nationalistic country with a history of British and U.S. interference in its politics and economy. Britain essentially took over Iran's oil industry in 1901; the United States engineered a coup in 1953. The chief criticism of the Shah of Iran was that he was an American puppet. As in many such countries—India is another example—this anti-imperial sentiment is quite powerful. Iranians know this is their fight, and they want it to be.

The appropriate analogy is actually to George H.W. Bush's cautious response to the cracks that started to appear in the Soviet empire in 1989. Then, as now with Obama, many neoconservatives were livid with Bush for not loudly supporting those trying to topple the communist regimes in Eastern Europe. But Bush's concern was that the situation was fragile. Those regimes could easily crack down on the protesters, and the Soviet Union could send in its own tanks. Handing the communists reasons to react forcefully would help no one, least of all the protesters. Bush's basic approach was correct and has been vindicated by history.

But there is one statement that I wish Obama had not made. Discussing the events taking place in Iran, he said that there was no important difference between Ahmadinejad and Mousavi, since they would both defend the Islamic Republic's key foreign-policy choices, from its nuclear ambitions to its support for organizations like Hamas and Hizbullah. That viewpoint has actually been voiced by some in the neoconservative camp who have openly preferred Ahmadinejad: a more threatening foe would more clearly highlight the dangers of the regime to the rest of the world. But even if this were true before the election, it is no longer true. Mousavi has become a symbol of change, anti-Ahmadinejad sentiment and even anti-regime aspirations. He is clearly aware of this and is embracing the support. A victory for him would mean a different Iran.

Even during the campaign, what did Mousavi say that resonated most with voters? That he would do a better job on the economy? That corruption had gotten out of hand? Perhaps, but every challenger says that, and Mousavi didn't really have many new ideas or an impressive recent record to make these claims credible. The theme that Mousavi constantly hit was that Ahmadinejad had isolated the country, engaged in an aggressive foreign policy and needlessly turned Iran into a pariah state. For many of his supporters, this was the key issue: they craved more engagement with the world, not less. Ahmadinejad's willful rejection of the West and constant references to America's supposed decline were insults to their ambition to be included again in the world community.

President Obama could look at these events and simply say, "Iran has a proud and long history of being actively involved with the world, not being isolated from it. The world has long wanted to extend the hand of engagement with the Iranian people. Watching the elections and the remarkable, peaceful demonstrations that are ongoing, it is clear that the Iranian people also want engagement with the world. We hear your voices and wish you well." That way, in a careful fashion, Obama could turn Iranian nationalism on the regime itself.

But the real issue here is not a few words from Obama, but events on the ground in Iran. The faltering of the Islamic Republic will have repercussions all over the Muslim world. Although Iran is Shia and most of the Islamic world is Sunni, Khomeini's rise to power was a shock to every Muslim country, a sign that Islamic fundamentalism was a force to be reckoned with. Some countries, like Saudi Arabia, tried to co-opt that force. Others, like Egypt, repressed it brutally. But everywhere, Iran was the symbol of the rise of political Islam. If it now fails, a 30-year-old tide will have turned.

URL: http://www.newsweek.com/id/202979

Unrest in Iran Sharply Deepens Rift Among Clerics

The New York Times

Faezeh Hashemi, daughter of the former president, Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, attended a rally for Mir Hussein Moussavi. Iranian state television reported on Sunday that Ms. Hashemi and four other members of the family had been arrested.

By NAZILA FATHI and MICHAEL SLACKMAN

Published: June 21, 2009

TEHRAN — A bitter rift among Iran’s ruling clerics deepened Sunday over the disputed presidential election that has convulsed Tehran in the worst violence in 30 years, with the government trying to link the defiant loser to terrorists and detaining relatives of his powerfulbacker, a founder of the Islamic republic.

Ali Safari/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

Iranian protesters covered their faces to protect themselves from tear gas during clashes with police in Tehran on Saturday.

The loser, Mir Hussein Moussavi, the moderate reform candidate who contends that the June 12 election was stolen from him, fired back at his accusers on Sunday night in a posting on his Web site, calling on his own supporters to demonstrate peacefully despite stern warnings from Iran’s top leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, that no protests of the vote would be allowed. “Protesting to lies and fraud is your right,” Mr. Moussavi said in a challenge to Ayatollah Khamenei’s authority.

Earlier, the police detained five relatives of Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, a former president who leads two influential councils and openly supported Mr. Moussavi’s election. The relatives, including Mr. Rafsanjani’s daughter, Faezeh Hashemi, were released after several hours.

The developments, coming one day after protests here in the capital and elsewhere were crushed by police officers and militia members using guns, clubs, tear gas and water cannons, suggested that Ayatollah Khamenei was facing entrenched resistance among some members of the elite. Though rivalries have been part of Iranian politics since the 1979 revolution, analysts said that open factional competition amid a major political crisis could hinder Ayatollah Khamenei’s ability to restore order.

There was no verifiable accounting of the death toll from the mayhem on Saturday, partly because the government has imposed severe restrictions on news coverage and warned foreign reporters who remained in the country to stay off the streets.

It also ordered the BBC’s longtime correspondent in Tehran expelled and ordered Newsweek’s correspondent detained.

State television said that 10 people had died in clashes, while radio reports said 19. The news agency ISNA said 457 people had been arrested.

Vowing not to have a repeat of Saturday, the government on Sunday saturated major streets and squares of Tehran with police and Basij militia forces. There were reports of scattered confrontations but no confirmation of any new injuries by evening. But as they had on previous nights, many residents of Tehran clambered to their rooftops and could be heard shouting “Death to the dictator!” and “God is great,” their rallying cries since the crisis began.

It was unclear whether protests, which began after the government declared that the conservative president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, had won re-election in a landslide against Mr. Moussavi, would be sustained in the face of the clampdown.

Amateur video accounts showed at least one large protest gathering, on Shirazi Street, though it was unclear how long it lasted.

But in the network of Internet postings and Twitter messages that has become the opposition’s major tool for organizing and sharing information, a powerful and vivid new image emerged: a video posted on several Web sites that showed a young woman, called Neda, her face covered in blood. Text posted with the video said she had been shot. It was not possible to verify the authenticity of the video.

The Web site of another reformist candidate, Mehdi Karoubi, referred to her as a martyr who did not “have a weapon in her soft hands or a grenade in her pocket but became a victim by thugs who are supported by a horrifying security apparatus.”

Accounts of the election’s aftermath in the state-run press suggested that the government might be laying the groundwork for discrediting and arresting Mr. Moussavi. IRNA, the official news agency, quoted Alireza Zahedi, a member of the Basij militia, as saying Mr. Moussavi had provoked the violence, sought help from outside the country to do so and should be put on trial. The Fars news agency quoted a Tehran University law professor as saying that Mr. Moussavi had acted against “the security of the nation.” State television suggested that at least some of the unrest was instigated by an outlawed terrorist group, the Mujahedeen Khalq, which does not have a strong following in Iran.

Mr. Moussavi was not seen in public on Sunday but showed no sign of yielding. In his Web posting, he urged followers to “avoid violence in your protest and behave as though you are the parents that have to tolerate your children’s misbehavior at the security forces.”

He also warned the government to “avoid mass arrests, which will only create distance between society and the security forces.”

The moves against members of Mr. Rafsanjani’s family were seen as an attempt to pressure him to drop his challenge to Ayatollah Khamenei — pressure that Mr. Rafsanjani’s son, Mehdi Rafsanjani, said he would reject.

“My father was in jail for five years when we were young. We don’t care if they keep her even for a year,” Mehdi Rafsanjani said in an interview, referring to his sister, Ms. Hashemi.

Mr. Rafsanjani was deeply critical of Mr. Ahmadinejad during the presidential campaign, and is thought to have had a strained relationship with Ayatollah Khamenei for many years.

But he remains a major establishment figure, and the detention of his daughter, albeit briefly, was a surprise. In Ayatollah Khamenei’s sermon on Friday, in which he backed Mr. Ahmadinejad and threatened a crackdown on further protests, he praised Mr. Rafsanjani as a pillar of the revolution while acknowledging that the two have had “many differences of opinion.”

Last week, state television showed images of Ms. Hashemi, 46, speaking to hundreds of people to rally support for Mr. Moussavi. After her appearance, state radio said, students who support Mr. Ahmadinejad gathered outside the Tehran prosecutor’s office and demanded that she be arrested for treason.

Mr. Rafsanjani, 75, heads two powerful institutions. One, the Assembly of Experts, is a body of clerics that has the authority to oversee and theoretically replace the country’s supreme leader. He also runs the Expediency Council, empowered to settle disagreements between the elected Parliament and the unelected Guardian Council.

The Assembly of Experts has never publicly exercised its power over Ayatollah Khamenei since he succeeded the Islamic Revolution’s founder, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, in 1989. But the increasingly bitter confrontation between Ayatollah Khamenei and Mr. Rafsanjani has raised the prospect of a contest of political wills between the two revolutionary veterans.

In a sign that the crisis in Iran threatened to spill far beyond the nation’s borders, the speaker of Parliament, Ali Larijani, on Sunday called for reconsidering relations with Britain, France and Germany after their “shameful” statements about the election.

State radio reported that Mr. Larijani, who has his own aspirations to one day become president, made his comments in a speech to the full Parliament. Mr. Larijani’s position, which reflects the anti-Western orientation of the hard-liners in charge, could further undermine President Obama’s efforts to reach out to Iran and begin a diplomatic dialogue. The United States severed ties with Iran 30 years ago.

In Washington, Mr. Obama resisted pressure from Republicans who have called his response to the Iranian crackdown too timid. On Saturday, Mr. Obama stepped up his criticism of Iran’s government, calling it “violent and unjust,” and said that the world was watching its behavior.

Mr. Obama has argued that a more aggressive White House stance against the Iranian government crackdown would be used by Tehran as anti-American propaganda. “The last thing that I want to do is to have the United States be a foil for those forces inside Iran who would love nothing better than to make this an argument about the United States,” Mr. Obama said in an interview with Harry Smith of CBS News broadcast Friday. “We shouldn’t be playing into that.”

In an interview broadcast Sunday on Iranian television, Foreign Minister Manouchehr Mottaki said that officials were examining the charge of voting fraud and expected to issue their findings by the end of the week. But like Ayatollah Khamenei, Mr. Mottaki appeared to have already judged the vote as clean and fair. He said the “possibility of organized and comprehensive disruption and irregularities in the election is almost close to zero,” according to Iran’s English-language Press TV.

At the same time, serious new questions about the vote’s integrity were raised outside of Iran. Chatham House, a London-based research organization, released a study done with the University of St. Andrews challenging the Iranian government’s declared results, based on a comparison with the 2005 elections as well as Iran’s own census data.

The study showed, for example, that in two provinces where Mr. Ahmadinejad won a week ago, a turnout of more than 100 percent was recorded.

The study also showed that in a third of all provinces, the official results, if true, would have required that Mr. Ahmadinejad win not only all conservative voters and all former centrist voters and all new voters, but up to 44 percent of formerly reformist voters.

With the police on the streets demonstrating a willingness to injure and even kill, one question political analysts and opposition members were beginning to ask was whether it was time to shift strategies, from street protests to some kind of national strike.

It was unclear if the opposition had the support or organization, especially within the middle class, to carry out such a measure, but a strike would be immune to the heavy hand of the state and could wield leverage by crippling the already stumbling economy, analysts said.

Nazila Fathi reported from Tehran, and Michael Slackman from Cairo.

Iran's Top Leader Endorses Election

By Thomas Erdbrink and William Branigin
Washington Post Foreign Service
Saturday, June 20, 2009

TEHRAN, June 19 -- Iran's supreme leader on Friday put his full authority behind the reelection of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, rejecting allegations of vote fraud and declaring that foreign "enemies," including the United States, were behind a week of massive street demonstrations.

By placing his personal seal of approval on the election's official result, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei significantly raised the stakes for Iran's political opposition, which must now either concede the election or be seen as challenging the supreme leader himself. So far, opposition presidential candidate Mir Hossein Mousavi and his supporters have questioned the validity of the June 12 election but not the country's theocratic system of governance.



In a dramatic speech before thousands of worshipers at a Friday prayer service, Khamenei warned that the leaders of the protests will be held "directly responsible" for any bloodshed that results from continued demonstrations.

The prospect of a violent crackdown poses a quandary not only for the Iranian opposition but also for the Obama administration. U.S. officials said Khamenei's speech would not change President Obama's hands-off approach toward Iran's internal turmoil or his policy of seeking dialogue with Iran on its nuclear program and other critical issues. But they said that violent repression could force a reevaluation of Obama's overtures to Tehran.

Iran's government should "recognize that the world is watching," Obama said Friday in an interview with CBS News. How Iranian leaders "deal with people who are, through peaceful means, trying to be heard" will signal "what Iran is and is not," he said, adding that he was concerned by the "tenor and tone" of the supreme leader's speech.

Both the House of Representatives and the Senate overwhelmingly passed nonbinding resolutions expressing support for the rights of the Iranian demonstrators. Republicans sought to portray the votes as criticism of the president's response to the events in Iran, but the administration publicly welcomed the congressional action. "It's consistent with what the president has said," White House spokesman Robert Gibbs said.

Gibbs added, however, that the United States will continue to try to avoid entanglement in the Iranian debate.

"We're not going to be used as political foils and political footballs in a debate that's happening by Iranians in Iran," he said. "There are many people in the leadership that would love us to get involved, and would love to trot out the same old foils they have for many years. That's not what we're going to do.

"Our interests remain the same," Gibbs continued. "We're concerned about the Islamic republic living up to its responsibilities, as it relates to nuclear weapons."

In a sign hours after Khamenei's remarks that at least some Tehran residents rejected his warnings, people took to their rooftops after dark across the city and chanted slogans such as "Death to the dictator" and "Allahu akbar," or "God is great." Their chants were similar to those at rallies this week against Ahmadinejad and in favor of Mousavi. And the rooftop tactic recalled a method that was used to voice anti-government sentiment three decades ago, during the opposition movement that ultimately succeeded in ousting the shah of Iran.

Mousavi, who appeared at a massive demonstration in South Tehran on Thursday to back his demands that the election be annulled, has called for another march Saturday in downtown Tehran. The 67-year-old former prime minister did not attend Khamenei's speech and did not immediately react to it publicly.

Pro-Mousavi Web sites were not updated, leaving it unclear whether the demonstration would be canceled or go ahead as planned, setting up a potential confrontation if security forces are ordered to intervene.

But another opposition presidential candidate, Mehdi Karroubi, implicitly defied Khamenei's stand, publicly supporting Mousavi's position by calling on Iran's powerful Guardian Council on Friday to nullify the election and order another one. In an open letter to the council, which is charged with confirming the election results, Karroubi urged its members to "accept the will of the nation" and throw out results announced by the Interior Ministry showing a landslide win for Ahmadinejad. The council has said it would investigate irregularities supported by evidence, but it has ruled out annulling the election.

Khamenei, 69, a Shiite Muslim cleric who holds ultimate political and religious authority under Iran's theocratic system, emphatically backed that view Friday. He told tens of thousands of people who spilled out of a covered pavilion at Tehran University that the election is over, and he expressed confidence in the vote tallies.

"Some of our enemies in different parts of the world intended to depict this absolute victory, this definitive victory, as a doubtful victory," he said. "It is your victory. They cannot manipulate it.

"The competition is over," he declared in response to calls for nullification. "Over 40 million people voted; they voted for the Islamic republic.

"The margin between the candidates is 11 million votes," Khamenei continued. "If it is 500,000, maybe fraud could be of influence. But for 11 million, how can you do that?"

He said the protests would not change the Iranian system.

In a warning to protest organizers, the supreme leader said, "If the elite breaks laws, they will be held responsible for violence and bloodshed."

He warned Iranians not to cause problems, because "Iran is at a sensitive juncture." And he asserted that foreign governments, especially the United States and Britain, were encouraging the opposition.

"American officials' remarks about human rights and limitations on people are not acceptable because they have no idea about human rights after what they have done in Afghanistan and Iraq and other parts of the world," Khamenei said. "We do not need advice over human rights from them."

Khamenei said the Guardian Council is looking into complaints of voting fraud. The council, a 12-member panel of senior Islamic clergy and jurists, has invited the four presidential candidates to a meeting Saturday to discuss their concerns about the balloting.

But Khamenei's comments rejecting significant irregularities appeared to preempt the council's probe. As Khamenei arrived to lead the Friday prayers, a sea of fists punched the air, and thousands of supporters roared their greetings: "Our blood in our veins is for you, O Leader!" Khamenei smiled, raising his hand, which was resting on the barrel of a gun, to calm the audience.

High officials sat cross-legged on a green carpet in a cordoned-off area in front of the stage. A choir of young men in suits sang a cappella. The rows quickly filled up with turbaned clerics, members of Iran's Revolutionary Guard Corps and influential politicians.

The crowd cheered as Ahmadinejad came in, late. Khamenei nodded at him as the president bowed forward with his hand on his chest. Ahmadinejad occupied a place of honor, sitting just behind the spot where Khamenei would lead the prayers.

Banners hanging from the pavilion roof bore messages such as "Don't speak to us with the tongue of old imperialism, BBC" and "Westerners get away from us."

In Washington, a senior administration figure called Khamenei's speech "a significant statement," adding, "The question is what becomes of it." He said that the protest movement has "taken on a life of its own" but that where it goes next remains unclear.

Another official dismissed criticism of Obama from U.S. conservatives who want him to publicly endorse the demonstrations. "I don't think we feel a lot of pressure to go a different way," the official said. "We're trying to promote a foreign policy that advances our interests, not that makes us feel good about ourselves."

A third official said the events in Iran were part of regional changes, noting the opposition's movement from preelection concerns about the Iranian economy to what could become a challenge to the country's theocratic system. "I think something bigger is going on," the official said, citing the recent defeat of the Hezbollah-led coalition in Lebanese elections and the sight of "people bravely speaking their minds in Iran."

The administration officials all emphasized that they want to keep the United States out of the Iranian debate. But, as one noted, "the United States has an important place in their historical narrative."

Obama has repeatedly denied that the United States is "meddling" in Iranian politics. But in an interview with CNBC on Tuesday, Obama said he hoped "the regime responds not with violence, but with a recognition that the universal principles of peaceful expression and democracy are ones that should be affirmed."

Khamenei on Friday compared Obama's comments about Iran to the tragic conclusion of the Branch Davidian standoff with federal agents in Waco, Tex., during President Bill Clinton's administration. The leader of that group, David Koresh, and at least 74 supporters died in a fire at their compound. A federal probe concluded that the Davidians committed suicide, but survivors said it was started by tear gas rounds fired by government agents into the buildings.

"People affiliated with the Davidians were burned alive," Khamenei said. "You were responsible -- the Democrats. The administration was angered and 80 were burned. And do you know the true meaning of human rights? The Islamic Republic of Iran is the flag-bearer of human rights. We defend the oppressed."

Branigin reported from Washington. Staff writer Lexie Verdon in Washington contributed to this report.