The Iranian Officials confirmed that more than 250 have been arrested on 9th of July.
(( According to the latest news on BBC Persian Section ))
FORMER IRANIAN EMPRESS LAUDS IRANIAN STUDENTS AND PEOPLE
PARIS 11 July (IPS) Former Iranian Empress Farah Diba-Pahlavi praised the "courageous and brave" Iranian students and people "struggle for democracy and freedom in Iran and expressed her "full support" for their "admirable" action.
Talking briefly to some Iranian journalists covering her visit on Friday to an exhibition of photographs from old and contemporary Iranian painters, she assured "all her compatriots, all the fathers and mothers, sisters and brothers, old and younger ones, but mostly the students and all those who, in these days, fight for the restoration of freedom and democracy in Iran that they have the full support of all Iranians anywhere in the world".
Mr. Abdolhamid Eshraq, a Paris-based architect and political activist organized the Exhibition, a collection of some hundred of photographs of paintings covering the past century up to modern times, including some portraits of herself, her late husband at the age of 12, former kings and princes, political personalities and musicians, as well as portraits of female dancers, some of them with nude breasts, village and towns sceneries, religious festivities or scenes of beheading culprits or martyrs, representation of epic stories etc.
"On these days, when brave Iranian students and people, writers and intellectuals, artists and journalists who are in prison, I want to tell them that they are always in our thoughts, hearts and minds, that we fully support their struggle, each of us according to his possibilities and his position, and I’m sure and certain that the day freedom would return to our nation is not that far", she said, referring to the past weeks anti-regime and anti-clerical rulers protests, led by hundreds of students joined by thousands ordinary people.
As the former empress, better known by Iranians as "Shahbanoo" (the wife of the Shah) was describing the courage and tolerance of the Iranian youths as "a lesson of morality and struggle, "at least for myself", in Tehran, former president Ayatollah Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani tagged the protesters as "pawns and mercenaries" for American "plotters", saying that the protest movement was "so insignificant" that the authorities saw it enough to let unarmed Law Enforcement Forces deal with the demonstrators.
"It is unfortunate that some of our compatriots fall in traps laid by the Americans and the Britons, using some local tribunes, taking unwise moves in line with enemy wishes", the cleric said, acknowledging however that "mistakes on the part of the people or provocations by improper domestic elements for certain political and factional ends had given rise to the unrest".
"He also ridiculed certain publicity by Americans, Britons, and domestic media that people have given up support for the establishment", the official news agency IRNA quoted the Chairman of the influential Expediency Council, without explaining that why the authorities had arrested 8.000 demonstrators all over the country or shouts of "death to Khameneh'i, death to Hashemi" or "Khatami, resign, resign".
Meanwhile, Dr Abdolkarim Soroosh, a prominent Islamist thinker and philosopher in a letter to his old friend Mohammad Khatami, accused him to be "the main responsible" for the fiascos suffered by the reformists in the past years.
In his letter, entitled as "Soroosh’s Pains" the dissident intellectual says Iranian people’s peaceful revolt against religious dictatorship was a "sweet experience" that Mr. Khatami "did not honoured, respected nor understood it".
The open letter is a follow up to the past missives written by Iranian personalities, organisations or groups to Iranian clerical rulers or international community, the last one being the letter sent to the United Nations Secretary General Kofi Annan by 30 leaders of students associations covering all Iranian universities, in which they inform him that the Islamic Republic violates "systematically" the Universal Declaration for Human Rights.
"Here we are, prisons in full development and expansions and universities ruined; an ill society in the grips of the cancerous rogue elements of Ansar Hezbollah that suffocates breathing", Mr. Soroosh tells a lamed and powerless President
http://www.iran-press-service.com/articles_2003/Jul-2003/students_unrests_shahbanoo_11703.htm