News from Iran? Good? Bad? Who knows?

[Sheilbh]

As I say the anger hasn't gone away.  The various reformist forces are taking their struggle inside the system, for the most part, though the nightly chants are, I believe, continuing as strong as ever and there are impromptu and subtle displays of opposition on the streets.

I think the internal nature of it now makes it all the more linked to the first decade or so of the Republic's history.  What make Mousavi threatening to Khamenei is that Mousavi was once Khomeini's favourite political leader.  I believe Khomeini said of Mousavi that 'those who oppose you couldn't run a bakery' (this was regularly quoted in reference to Ahmedinejad).  Because of that Mousavi's very difficult to dismiss.  This is the only man with similar revolutionary standing as Khamenei.

It's also worth remembering that within the clerical establishment Khamenei isn't really that respected.  No-one expected him to emerge as Supreme Leader after Khomeini died and it's generally been read as a mark of his political skills because he's not a real Ayatollah.  He became an Ayatollah at the clerical equivalent of a degree mill.

What's also interesting is the degree to which this seems to prefigure the succession to Khamenei.  I believe the assumption had always been that Khamenei would be the last Supreme Leader and that a triumvirate of senior clerics, or something similar, would take over when he died.  Recently though we're seeing signs that this might not be the case.  It looks like Yazdi (Ahmedinejad's spiritual mentor and a hugely divisive figure who some in the clerical establishment consider heretical), Rafsanjani and possibly Montazani are all making a play as real Ayatollahs to succeed or replace Khamenei.

Of course because the fight's now internal it's very difficult to get a rid on it.  It looks like the government's preparing to try and destroy Mousavi and Khatami.  At the same time it looks like they're not willing to back down and this could be the result of Rafsanjani's rumoured lobbying in Qom.

It was difficult for the media to report on the protests because they were restricted by the Iranian state.  It's nigh on impossible for them to report what's happening within the Iranian state.  I believe it was seen as significant that Ahmedinejad has cancelled a number of foreign trips, since his appearance at the Shanghai Cooperation group. 

It's also interesting to note that two can play at the foreign paranoia game.  The opposition have used pictures of Ahmedinejad in the Kremlin against him.  After the British and the Americans the Russians are seen as a similarly baleful and meddling power in Iran's history.  As with the British and the Americans there's a lot of good reasons for that.

[Sheilbh]

And I think the threats against Mousavi and Khatami are a sign of how nervous the regime remains.  Though Iran's been knocked off the front page things are still clearly going on there that are making the regime skittish.  I wonder the degree to which what's happening in Qom is just the tip of the iceberg.  Basically I don't think we know whether the regime is nervous for a good reason or not.

[KRonn]

And the beat goes on....



http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/31828921/ns/world_news-mideastn_africa/

Iranian police charge at defiant protesters
Security forces wield batons as hundreds chant 'death to the dictator'

[Sheilbh]

Latest news:

Iran opposition leader, wife visit slain man's family
Mir-Hossein Mousavi and his wife are swarmed by supporters near the home. His plans to form a political front wins the backing of powerful cleric Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani and a key conservative.
By Borzou Daragahi
July 15, 2009
Reporting from Beirut -- Iran's leading opposition figure and his wife emerged Tuesday night to pay their respects to the family of a 19-year-old man slain during recent weeks of violence, according to witnesses and reports on news websites.

Mir-Hossein Mousavi and his popular wife, Zahra Rahnavard, visited the family of Sohrab Aarabi in Tehran, paying tribute to the teenager whose death and whose mother's desperate weeks-long quest to find her son have emerged as a symbol of the protest movement against President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.



    * Upheaval after Iranian election
      Photos: Upheaval after Iranian...
    * Iran's presidential election at a glance
      Iran's presidential election at a glance

    *
      Slain Iranian teenager becomes symbol of protests
    *
      After a long absence, pro-Mousavi cleric Rafsanjani to lead prayers
    *
      Advisor to Iran supreme leader calls for tolerance of dissent

Photographs posted on the Gooya website showed the couple swarmed by supporters as they approached the family's home in the city's north-central Apadana district.

Mousavi has been relatively quiet in recent days as authorities successfully put down protests that erupted when Ahmadinejad was declared the winner of their election faceoff last month. But Mousavi plans to forge a new reformist political front that would challenge the country's dominant conservatives, and will have most of the rights given to a political party, his top aide Ali-Reza Beheshti said Tuesday.

"Establishing the front is on the agenda of Mir-Hossein Mousavi, and we will announce the relevant news in the near future," Beheshti, the son of a famous cleric, told the semiofficial Iranian Labor News Agency, or ILNA.

Hundreds of thousands of Mousavi's green-clad supporters took to the streets last month in displays of civil disobedience, asserting that the June 12 election was rigged. Mousavi could build on the momentum created by the so-called green wave to create a formidable force.

The deputy chief of Iran's parliament said Tuesday that Ahmadinejad will be sworn in for a second term on or after Aug. 2 and propose a Cabinet for parliament's approval by Aug. 6, another period where analysts predict protests will erupt.

Iran blames the weeks of postelection unrest on the West. On Tuesday, authorities hanged 13 members of the outlawed ethnic Baluch militant group Jundallah in southeastern Iran for their part in attacks against security forces, but held off on the execution of Abdulhamid Rigi, the brother of the group's leader, Abdulmalak Rigi.  Iran accuses the U.S. of funding the group.

Reformists have tried for years to break through Iran's legal and political restrictions and fend off ideological challenges and accusations of complicity with the West to obtain and exercisepower. The Islamic Iran Participation Front, a reformist political grouping, has been operating for years without gaining influence. Unlike a party, a front cannot call political rallies.

But Mousavi's new organization could gain political muscle with the help of Ayatollah Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, a powerful cleric who is a pillar of Mousavi's support.

Rafsanjani said he would endorse Mousavi's plan for a "united moderation front," according to Mohammad Hashemi, his brother. "He had even formulated the charter to a certain extent, but this front did not materialize for certain reasons," he told ILNA.

At least one prominent conservative, Habibollah Asgaroladi, head of the decades-old Islamic Coalition Party, endorsed the creation of a Mousavi-led political group. "Establishing a party to voice one's ideas and political perceptions is a wise move," he said, according to the website of the state-owned Press TV channel.

Still, most Iranian conservatives close to the elite and increasingly powerful Revolutionary Guard have demanded that Mousavi and his supporters be barred from further participation in Iranian electoral politics.

Iran tightly regulates its political sphere. Candidates for higher public office must be vetted by the conservative Guardian Council, a 12-member panel of clerics and jurists.

But Hamid-Reza Fouladgar, a member of a parliament committee on political parties, said "activity within the framework of a political front does not require official permission," according to ILNA.

Though authorities have clamped down on journalists and news outlets reporting on the still-simmering anger over Ahmadinejad's reelection, Iranians on both sides of the dispute are gearing up for a potential conflict between supporters of Mousavi and Ahmadinejad at Friday prayers in Tehran, where Rafsanjani is scheduled to deliver the nation's keynote religious sermon for the first time since the election.

News reports on reformist websites have said Mousavi and former President Mohammad Khatami, another prominent reformer, would attend the sermon, bringing their army of supporters with them.

Ahmadinejad is heading to the eastern city of Mashhad on Thursday, shunning Friday prayers this week. But pro-Ahmadinejad media reported that worshipers will protest Rafsanjani's presence, setting the stage for a potential confrontation, according to the conservative news website Shafaf.ir.

[KRonn]

And, apparently, the beat of protests goes on...


http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/31960928/ns/world_news-mideastn_africa/

Police tear-gas Iran protesters during prayer
Top cleric Rafsanjani uses sermon to lambast leadership over crackdown

[Queequeg]

Moussavi was there.

Looks like the Regime hasn't really done much to quell popular unrest.  Not sure if they CAN do anything. They're in one hell of a pickle. 

[Grallon]

What's funny is that originally the protests were only about the election; however the longer this goes on it'll fester and turn against the regime itself.

Watch for the moment security forces refuse to enact a supressing order... that'll be the tipping point.



G.

[Neil]

Moussavi was there.

Looks like the Regime hasn't really done much to quell popular unrest.  Not sure if they CAN do anything. They're in one hell of a pickle.

Shoot Moussavi.  No man, no problem.

[Valmy]

Shoot Moussavi.  No man, no problem.

Yeah the Iranians never follow bloody martyrs...oh wait.

[Norgy]

Omar Djalili is good news from Iran.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=haz3i35vV8A

[Fireblade]

Is Neil secretly directing the protesters in Iran?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=InKo75c-l1A

Basically, the guy with a loudspeaker is shouting "Death to America, Death to Israel, Death to England, Death to Infidels", and the crowd is yelling "Death to Russia" back to him.

[jimmy olsen]

Rafsanjani rips the government in a sermon. http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/31992045/ns/world_news-the_new_york_times/

[Hansmeister]

Just a little moral clarity on what type of regime we're dealing with here:

'I wed Iranian girls before execution'

Jul. 19, 2009
SABINA AMIDI, Special to The Jerusalem Post , THE JERUSALEM POST
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."

Too bad Obama can't seem to see anything wrong with this.

[jimmy olsen]

Fucked up, but then we knew that all ready.

[Valmy]

Too bad Obama can't seem to see anything wrong with this.

I did like how the Iranian experts here at the University are still encouraging 'diplomacy'.

I am all like 'diplomacy to do what?'

But, of course we fundamentally disagree in this situation.  You want Obama to do...something or another...like say Iran is very very bad and like we don't like it.  I don't really see what good empty gestures will do.  Unless you see something decisive we can do to bring down the Mullahs I think it is best to await events.