Anti-Regime Violence Erupting in Iran As Crowds Burn Pictures of Khamenei
New York Sun - By Eli Lake
Mar 17, 2004
WASHINGTON—Iranians reportedly took to the streets in protest of their government last night as a Persian fire ritual in Tehran turned into a pretext for anti-regime violence.
The Iranian Student News Agency, a wire service affiliated with the government there, reported yesterday that explosions could be heard throughout the city after celebrations of a pre-Islamic feast in Iran known as Chaharshambeh Soori turned violent.
According to KRSI, an exile radio station based in California, a crowd of people in Iran’s capital began kindling fires for the holiday with pictures of Iran’s supreme ruler, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, in front of the headquarters of the Sepah Pasdaran, the state’s security service. In some clashes in Tehran neighborhoods, KRSI reported from eyewitnesses calling the station on cell phones, crowds of demonstrators threw homemade explosives at the feet of anti-riot police and set patrol cars ablaze.
The Iranian Student News Agency said 44 police garrisons and 60 ambulances had been readied in response to the angry crowds.
Last month, Iran’s unelected Guardian Council disqualified more than 2,000 reformist candidates from running for election to the country’s legislative body, known as the Majlis. The decision led many legislators willing to work within the system to begin to question the utility of pushing for liberal reform, which has been stymied by the country’s clerical elites.
Since the Islamic revolution in 1979, the celebration of Persian holidays such as Chaharshambeh Soori and the New Year festival of Nowruz has been discouraged and at times banned by the Iranian authorities.
Tehran’s police angered the country’s hard-liners by cordoning off 40 areas of the city this year to observe the holiday, where people traditionally jump over bonfires and set small bushes on fire to mark the last Wednesday of the Persian year. But the decision was not without controversy, as the holiday this year fell in the same Islamic month that Imam Hussein was martyred, a period Iran’s ruling clerics said should be marked without gaiety.
“In all Iranian cities without exception, Iranians celebrated this tradition even when they were attacked by plainclothed officers of the regime,” a spokesman in America for the Student Movement Coordination Committee for Democracy in Iran, Aryo Pirooznia, told The New York Sun yesterday.“They resisted fiercely by using the materials used in celebration of the fire feast.”
Mr. Pirooznia said he had received more than two-dozen witness reports yesterday of demonstrators clashing with the government in Tehran alone. He said that some violent demonstrators had devised explosives from yellow and white powder wrapped in cardboard.
“The authorities started to charge in neighborhoods of Sarsabil, Sadeghieh and Shahrak Gharb,” he said. “The celebrations turned into demonstrations, with chanting, dancing, and booing and cursing at the security forces sent there. The crowds started to throw pictures of Ayatollah Khamenei into the fire.”
The Iranian Student News Agency reported eight people were seriously injured. The agency also reported that 20 people were taken to the emergency room of Motahari and 50 people were taken to the Towhid hospital in the Tehran metropolitan area. Cab drivers, the news agency said, were volunteering to take injured citizens to hospitals free of charge. The Associated Press and CNN did not report anti-regime violence yesterday.
“It is our view that the human-rights situation in Iran has been taking a turn for the worse,” a State Department official told the Sun yesterday. “On the whole it would seem Iran is less democratic now than it was three to four years ago. We take domestic developments in Iran very seriously and we will be talking to other countries that do have diplomatic representation in Iran to find out about these reports.”
The State Department was particularly critical last month of the elections to the Majlis. More recently, Secretary of State Powell has criticized the Iranian regime for threatening to end cooperation with the International Atomic Energy Agency, after pledging to allow unannounced inspections in the fall.
The IAEA has recently disclosed that Iran’s nuclear energy program was almost definitely a cover for weapons research, a position shared by the American intelligence community.
The president of the Washington based International Center on Nonviolent Conflict, Jack DuVall, said the violent demonstrations in Tehran were a troubling development. “If the regime is authoritarian any domestic violence reinforces the regime’s position because ultimately their power derives from their armed defenders.When violence occurs in the public space those defenders do reflexively what they are hired and expected to do and that reinforces both the authority as well as the control mechanisms of the regime.”
Mr.DuVall was the executive producer of “A Force More Powerful,” a documentary on the history of nonviolent conflict in the 20th century that has ended up in the hands of Iranian activists.
Chaharshambeh Soori celebrations are expected to continue today in the run-up to Nowruz festivities this weekend.
http://www.daneshjoo.org/generalnews/article/publish/article_5381.shtmlBush meeting with U-N nuclear chief amid new standoff with Iran
March 16, 2004
KFOR News
White House-AP -- President Bush meets with the U-N's nuclear chief today amid new worries over Iran's nuclear program.
After a critical report from the U-N agency, Tehran suspended inspections of its facilities. That move has been denounced by the Bush administration, which thinks the Iranians are trying to build a bomb. A State Department spokesman says Tehran continues "a pattern of delay and deception and denial."
However, Mohamed ElBaradei (ehl-BEHR'-uh-day) -- head of the International Atomic Energy Agency -- says he thinks the Iranians know they have to come clean.
Also today, Bush is meeting with Ireland's prime minister, Bertie Ahern, to mark St. Patrick's Day. The two are expected to discuss an upcoming June summit in Ireland -- which anti-Iraq War protesters have vowed to target.
http://www.kfor.com/Global/story.asp?S=1716701