Thu Jun 18, 6:23 AM ET

A picture posted on Twitter's photo-sharing website TwitPic by the user madyar shows supporters of defeated Iranian presidential candidate Mir Hossein Mousavi marching on Krimkhan Bridge during a rally in Tehran. Iran's opposition stepped up its challenge to the Islamic regime on Wednesday holding another rally even as the authorities intensified a crackdown on the media.

(AFP/TWITPIC)






Play Video AP  – Hundreds of thousands mourn dead in Iran

A few days before the Iranian election, President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad held a big rally at the Mosallah Mosque - said to be the world's largest, if it is ever completed - in central Tehran. It was not very well organized. About 20,000 supporters of the President were inside the building, being entertained by a series of TV stars, athletes and religious singers. Many thousands more swirled outside. Inside, a TV host led the crowd in chanting "Death to Israel." "Squeeze your teeth and yell from the bottom of your heart," he implored. Later, the host said he had once asked Iran's President where he got the energy to travel to all the provinces. "My heart is powered by nuclear fuel," Ahmadinejad replied. The place was hot, and packed, and people were fainting. After several hours, the host announced that the President would not be speaking: he had gotten caught up in the crowds outside the mosque. And so Nahid Siamdoust, TIME's Tehran reporter, and I began a three-hour journey to get back to my hotel, which was only a few miles away. (See pictures of Iran's presidential election and its turbulent aftermath.)

We walked at first, then found a cab. But central Tehran had become an implacable traffic jam - and a gridlocked political debate. The Ahmadinejad supporters, many on motor scooters, skittered through the lines of automobiles, most of which were decked out with signs supporting the moderate challenger Mir-Hossein Mousavi. There was good-natured banter between the two groups. "Chist, chist, chist," the Ahmadinejad supporters chanted, referring to Mousavi's awkward, constant use of that word - Farsi for "y'know" - during his debate with Ahmadinejad. The Mousavi supporters chanted, "Ahmadi - bye, bye." After about an hour, our cabdriver gave up, and Nahid and I set out on foot.

The streets were getting very crowded now - and there was a giddiness to the scene. It was the sort of crowd that might gather after a football victory. The Ahmadinejad supporters, dressed in the red, white and green of the Iranian flag, seemed to be enjoying the freedom as much as the more flamboyant Mousavi supporters, who were draped in green. At one point, an Ahmadinejad supporter stuck his head out the window of his car and sang a lullaby, "Mousavi - lai, lai," in response to the students chanting "Ahmadi - bye, bye." The students laughed. It was as if someone had opened a door and an entire country had spilled out. It was possible to believe, for a moment, that these genial young people, from both sides, might be creating a new, more open Iran for themselves.

And then, the door slammed shut again.

It has to be assumed that the Iranian presidential election was rigged, but it is impossible to know how heavily the government's thumb rested on the scales. It is entirely possible that Ahmadinejad would have won anyway, but narrowly, perhaps with less than 50% of the vote, setting up a runoff election he might have lost as the other candidates united against him. It is possible that his government, perhaps acting in concert with Supreme Leader Ayatullah Ali Khamenei, decided to take no chances. (Read "The Man Who Could Beat Ahmadinejad: Mousavi Talks to TIME.")

But even if the election campaign, in the end, proves meaningless, it provided a rare look at the divisions in Iranian society, and not just between the working-class Ahmadinejad supporters and the wealthier, better-educated backers of Mousavi. It also put the internal rivalries at the highest levels of the Iranian government on public display for the first time, and in the most embarrassing fashion.

The President was, without question, the best politician in the race. His debates against the two reformers, Mousavi and Mehdi Karroubi, were routs. Both challengers were exemplars of the older generation - the generation that made the Islamic revolution in 1979 - and both were flummoxed by a candidate who seemed to have been trained by some Iranian equivalent of Karl Rove. They appeared paralyzed by what they considered his coarse impertinence; in American terms, these might have been debates between George Bush the Elder and Newt Gingrich, a gentlemanly establishmentarian against a rude populist brawler. Ahmadinejad was a slick combination of facts and accusations. He spoke directly into the camera. He deployed little charts, as Ross Perot did in the 1990s, to show that things weren't as bad as people thought. His statistics were heavily massaged and challenged by his opponents, but he had muddied his greatest vulnerability - the stagflating Iranian economy. The real jaw dropper, however, was Ahmadinejad's willingness to attack in the most personal terms. He attacked Mousavi for being supported by former President Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, whom he flatly called corrupt (a widespread belief among reformers and conservatives alike); he attacked Mousavi's wife Zahra Rahnavard, a famous artist and activist, for allegedly getting into college without taking the entrance exam; he attacked Karroubi for taking money from a convicted scam artist.

See TIME's Iran Covers.

The reformers - and even many of the more prominent conservatives (who call themselves principalists) - considered these attacks outrageous, outside the rules of Iranian politics. "The attacks might have worked with Ahmadinejad's supporters," said Amir Mohebbian, a prominent principalist thinker who backed Ahmadinejad with some reservations. "But they were not good for the system." Indeed, Ahmadinejad's toughest debate was with the other principalist candidate, Mohsen Rezaei, a former commander of the Revolutionary Guards, who challenged the President's inflationary tendency to spend money on direct wealth redistribution - all sorts of stipends for the working class and the poor - while neglecting a long-term investment strategy. Unlike the older reformers, Rezaei refuted the President's arguments effectively. He directly addressed the Iranian people: "You go to the store. You know the price of cheese ... The people know what the real story is."

But much of the cheese-buying public - the working class, the elderly, the women in chadors - seemed to adore Ahmadinejad. One of the favorite slogans of his supporters was "Ahmadinejad is love." On election day, Nahid and I went to Ahmadinejad's childhood neighborhood, Nazi Abad, and interviewed voters. The lines at the central mosque were every bit as long as they were at the voting stations in sophisticated north Tehran. There was a smattering of Mousavi supporters, but the Ahmadinejad worship was palpable. He was kind to the families of martyrs, one man said, which was true - Ahmadinejad had lavished attention on the veterans of the Iran-Iraq war and given special preferences for university admissions to their children. "He works so hard for us," an elderly woman in a chador said. "He doesn't sleep at night." A younger woman said, "He is the one person who really supports our class of people. Everyone has been insulting him, but I believe that the Messiah is supporting him. I saw it in a dream." (See pictures of Ahmadinejad.)

Mousavi, on the other hand, inspired little personal adoration. He was known as a tough and effective manager, and a favorite of Ayatullah Khomeini's during the early years of the Islamic republic - especially during the Iran-Iraq war - when he served as Prime Minister. But he had pretty much disappeared from public view for 20 years, living a quiet life as an artist and architect until he re-emerged as a polite prototype of the north Tehran Élite. These were people - like the two former Presidents who backed his campaign, Rafsanjani and Mohammed Khatami - who seemed as concerned with Ahmadinejad's crude populist style as with his crude populist economics. Mousavi's wife inadvertently made plain the mind-set when I asked her about her husband's art and she told me, "Artists exist at the very top of a society. When an artist becomes President, it is a step down. But there's no way out. For the happiness of the people, it is necessary."

Mousavi seemed less pretentious. On the day before the election, Nahid and I interviewed him in a building he had designed, part of an art school and gallery complex in central Tehran. He seemed an exceedingly gentle man, soft-spoken to a fault - whisper-spoken, in fact. His most emphatic moment came when we asked about Ahmadinejad's attack on his wife. "I think he went beyond our societal norms, and that is why he created a current against himself," Mousavi said. "In our country, they don't insult a man's wife [to] his face. It is also not expected of a President to tend to such small details."(See the top 10 Ahmadinejad-isms.)

He also criticized Ahmadinejad's incendiary rhetoric on international issues like Israel and the Holocaust, as he had during the campaign: "In our foreign policy we have confused fundamental issues ... that are in our national interest with sensationalism that is more of domestic use."

See TIME's Iran Covers.

And while it's the ultimate journalistic clichÉ to quote a cabdriver, I can't resist this one: on the Saturday before the election, I attended a large and metaphoric Mousavi rally - someone had cut the electricity, so the candidate couldn't speak - in the city of Kharaj, about an hour west of Tehran. The cabbie who drove us back to Tehran said his parents were divided on the election. "My mother supports Mousavi, and my father supports Ahmadinejad," he said. "I was uncertain until I saw them debate. Ahmadinejad seemed stronger. I don't think I would want Mousavi negotiating with other governments."

Which may be exactly what the Supreme Leader - who is the real power in Iran, with control over the military, the judiciary, foreign policy and the nuclear program - had in mind when, on June 13, he prematurely certified the phantasmic Ahmadinejad landslide. In the days before the election, reformers and principalists - including several Ahmadinejad advisers - told me that negotiations with the U.S. were likely, regardless of who won. "But it might be easier for the Supreme Leader to proceed if the tough guy is re-elected than if Mousavi is," said Mohebbian, the prominent principalist. "The negotiating team will be jointly decided by the Supreme Leader and the President. The Leader, who has great doubts about proceeding, will want a tough bargainer."

In truth, the reformers I spoke with seemed as unyielding as Ahmadinejad, if more politely so, when it came to discussing what Iran would be willing to concede in negotiations with the U.S. They were adamant on Iran's nuclear enrichment program, which is permitted for peaceful purposes under the nuclear nonproliferation treaty. None of them, except Mousavi, was willing to acknowledge that weaponization of uranium might be in the works and therefore be a subject for negotiation. (Mousavi told me that if such a program existed, it would be negotiable, but he didn't say, and may not know, that it actually exists.) The reformers were unanimous in the belief that Barack Obama's conciliatory words were not enough, that the U.S. had to take palpable actions before talks would be possible. I asked each of them what steps Iran was prepared to make for peace. The answer was always the same. "It's natural that the first step should be taken by the Americans," said Karroubi, the most progressive of the four presidential candidates. "We didn't stage a coup against your elected government," he said, referring to the CIA's participation in the 1953 overthrow of the Mohammed Mossadegh government. "We have not frozen your assets. We don't have sanctions against you." (Of all the reformers, only Mousavi seemed to think that Obama's acknowledgment of the 1953 coup in his Cairo speech was a "positive step.")

Ahmadinejad's advisers were even more adamant than the reformers. When I asked Mehdi Kalhor, Ahmadinejad's top communications adviser, what he thought of Obama, he made a crude attempt at humor. "Only the skin color has changed" from George W. Bush, he said. "Now the color is chocolate. Chocolate is sweet. Children like it, but I don't very much." We met in Kalhor's office. He was wearing a red golf shirt, and his long hair was tied in a ponytail. "We understand Obama is different from Bush," he said, more seriously. "But you need these negotiations more than we do." I asked him why the U.S. did, since Iran was the country that was isolated from the rest of the world. "You're more isolated than we are," he replied, directly reflecting his boss's public arrogance. Ahmadinejad has offered to debate Obama at the U.N. but has been silent about substantive negotiations. When this point was raised by an AP reporter at his postelection press conference, Ahmadinejad was dismissive. "That's a suggestion," he said. "Not a question."

Such intransigence - and the tarnished election results - makes the question of negotiations harder for Obama, but also easier in some ways. The U.S. President was appropriately cautious after the elections - criticizing the use of violence against the protesters, but not the results of the vote. It seems clear that his Administration will continue to seek negotiations that will, among other things, attempt to increase the transparency of Iran's nuclear program. If the Iranians are smart, they will respond quickly. If they continue to dally, Iran's electoral embarrassment will make it easier for Obama to rally other countries behind a tougher sanctions-and-deterrence plan that will further isolate Iran. But that may be exactly what the current regime wants. "Look, for the past 30 years, the Supreme Leader - first Khomeini, now Khamenei - has blamed all our problems on the Great Satan," a prominent conservative told me. "If you take away the Great Satan and we still have problems, how does he explain it? Almost everyone here is in favor of ending this war with America. But no one has less incentive to make peace than the Supreme Leader."

On the day after the election, two crowds gathered in front of the Ministry of Interior - Mousavi and Ahmadinejad supporters, several hundred of each, separated by the police. They chanted their slogans back and forth, and I was reminded of the wonderful street debates I'd seen several nights earlier. But suddenly the police, on motorcycles and on foot, dressed like starship troopers in body armor and brandishing billy clubs, charged into the Mousavi crowd. People began to run; some were knocked down; bodies were flying. And the Ahmadinejad crowd began to cheer.

It is impossible for an outsider, in Iran for 10 days, to sift through the governmental opacity, the contradictory demonstrations, and predict what comes next. It seems likely that no matter how many people flood the streets in protest, the Supreme Leader will continue to back Ahmadinejad. It also seems likely that while Barack Obama should continue to press for negotiations, he shouldn't be too optimistic about the prospect of success.

See TIME's Iran Covers.

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Article: HERE

18th June 2009

 
Opposition leader Mirhossein Mousavi joins thousands for a Day of Mourning
National football team wear green armbands during World Cup qualifier
Protestors claim at least 20 have died in bloody street clashes

Opposition leader Mirhossein Mousavi joined tens of thousands of black-clad in a vast rally in the streets of Tehran.

Huge numbers poured into a square  in the heart of the capital and the surrounding streets for what he described as a Day Of Mourning for those killed during bloody street battles earlier this week.

Demonstrators marched silently carrying candles and flowers until they arrived at the square, where some chanted 'Death to the Dictator!' and 'Where are our votes?'

Mourning: Mousavi's supporters have started to wear black in memory of those killed in the protests

A picture posted on Twitter yesterday shows thousands protesting for the fifth straight day

Witnesses said many wore green wristbands in support of the opposition party, as they filed into Iman Khomenei Square - named afterthe Islamic Revolution.

The official death toll stands at eight - but protesters say at least 20 people, including a number of students, have died.

'Where are our brothers?' read one banner in the crowd. 'Why did you kill our brothers?' read another.<:od>

Protesters had responded to Mousavi direct challenge to Iran's hardline rulers, asking his supporters to take to the streets en masse.

The move by the reformist leader defies a blanket ban on demonstrations imposed by the administration of his re-elected rival President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. 

Last night protests against Ahmadinejad's disputed election victory have moved to the sporting world.




             

Five Iranian footballers wore green bands during their World Cup qualifying match against South Korea in Seoul.

It was a gesture of solidarity with pro-democracy campaigners - green is the signature colour of  Mousavi.

The players, including captain Mehdi Mahdavikia, wore the colour on their wrists. One player, Ali Karimi, had green bands wrapped around both wrists.

Protesters at home who accuse the government of rigging Iran's June 12 election in favour of hard-line President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad have been wearing similar green wristbands.

But by the second half of the match, broadcast live on Iranian state television, some had removed the bands, amid speculation that they were ordered by their coach to do so.

The wristbands were clearly visible however by the second half most of the players had taken them off, reportedly on the coach's orders

However Mahdavikia kept his band on even during the second half.

Fans from Iran also showed their support for the demonstrations at home by staging a protest outside the stadium.

Some of the most disturbing images yet of the violent clashes in Iran emerged yesterday, defying the government's media blackout.

Graphic pictures sent out using the internet messaging service Twitter to beat media restrictions showed dead and injured. 

In one photograph the body of a man lay face up near a wall while in a second, a man, his face and body almost wholly stained in blood, is carried through a crowd. It is unclear if he is dead.

Supporters of Mr Mousavi and two other presidential candidates allege the vote was rigged so that Mr Ahmadinejad was re-elected with an overwhelming majority.

They are demanding a new poll and took to Tehran's streets again yesterday in their tens of thousands despite the potential for more violence.

The past few days have seen the biggest protests in the Islamic republic's 30-year history.

The ongoing upheaval prompted President Barack Obama to say it showed that 'Iranian people are not convinced with the legitimacy of the election'.

Britain's ambassador to Tehran was summoned to the Iranian Foreign Ministry yesterday after Gordon Brown and David Miliband urged Iran's rulers to show restraint.

Reports from within Iran said that the country's foreign ministry has denounced the comments by the Prime Minister and the Foreign Secretary, calling them 'interfering and rude'.

Social networking tools such as Twitter, Flickr, Facebook and YouTube, where videos have been uploaded from inside Iran, have all proved vital in the co-ordination of the anti-government protests.

While the Iranian government has been partially able to block access to some sites, citizens have managed to post messages and links on Twitter, which allows users to blog in short bursts from their phones.

One message from user '2Hamed', a student in Tehran, read: 'Dead students' bodies who were killed by Government were buried secretly.'

A student from Tehran's Sharif university wrote: 'In most of the cities the Revolutionary Guards attacked people and shot them with guns. They have announced they have the okay to shoot people, and more than 20 so far have been killed.'

Another poster, using the name 'Girlintehran' wrote: 'The Revolution Guard (sic) want us to stop posting messages. We want the world to know.'

A woman clad in colours of mourning and wearing an Iranian flag uses a mobile phone on the streets of Tehran






Article: HERE