June 23, 2009
Iran expels 2 British diplomats,
refuses new vote
Reuters – EDITORS’ NOTE: Reuters and other foreign media are subject to Iranian restrictions on their ability …
By KARIN LAUB, Associated Press Writer
CAIRO – Iran expelled two British diplomats Tuesday after bitterly accusing Britain of meddling and spying. The government also dealt a fresh blow to the opposition by making clear it will not hold a new vote despite charges of fraud.
State TV said hard-line students protested outside the British Embassy in Tehran, where they burned U.S., British and Israeli flags, pelted the building with tomatoes and chanted: “Down with Britain!” and “Down with USA!” Witnesses said about 100 people took part.
Iran’s Foreign Ministry said it expelled the two Britons for “unconventional behavior,” state television reported, and Britain announced it was sending two Iranian diplomats home in retaliation.
Tensions between Iran and Britain, which has urged the Islamic regime to respect human rights, have soared in recent days.
During Friday prayers at Tehran University, Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei lashed out against Western countries he said were displaying their “enmity” against the Islamic state, “and the most evil of them is the British government.” And Iranian Foreign Minister Manouchehr Mottaki has accused Britain of sending spies to manipulate the June 12 election.
Iran’s expulsions came a day after Britain sent home 12 dependents of diplomatic staff because the unrest had disrupted their lives.
Opposition leader Mir Hossein Mousavi claims he was the true winner of the June 12 election, but the electoral commission declared President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad won by a landslide.
Mousavi has been out of sight in recent days and there were no reports of violent clashes Tuesday, possibly a measure of the effectiveness of the crackdown.
However, protesters came up with new techniques, such as turning on the lights in their cars at certain hours of the day and honking their horns or holding up posters.
“People are calmly protesting, more symbolically than with their voices,” a Tehran resident said in a telephone interview, speaking on condition of anonymity for fear of government retribution.
In recent days, members of the elite Revolutionary Guard, the Basij militia and other security forces in riot gear have been heavily deployed across Tehran, preventing any gatherings and ordering people to keep moving. A protest of some 200 people Monday was quickly broken up with tear gas and shots in the air, while helicopters hovered overhead.
A short message posted on Mousavi’s Web site asserted that “all the reports of violations in the elections will be published soon.”
Another opposition figure, reformist presidential candidate Mahdi Karroubi, called for a day of mourning for the at least 17 people killed in protests since the election.
Across the world, governments and diplomats were increasingly lining up on opposite sides in the Iranian showdown, the strongest challenge to the rule of Islamic clerics in 30 years.
In a boost for the embattled regime, Russia said Tuesday that it respects the declared election result. But France summoned Iran’s ambassador to express concern about what it called “brutal repression” of protesters in Tehran.
The U.S. and many European countries have refrained from challenging the election outcome directly, but have issued increasingly stern warnings against continuing violence meted out to demonstrators. U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki-moon has demanded an immediate end to “arrests, threats and use of force.”
In Washington, President Barack Obama said Tuesday the U.S. and the rest of the world was “appalled and outraged” by Iran’s violent efforts to crush dissent.
“I have made it clear that the United States respects the sovereignty of the Islamic Republic of Iran, and is not interfering in Iran’s affairs,” Obama said. “But we must also bear witness to the courage and dignity of the Iranian people, and to a remarkable opening within Iranian society. And we deplore violence against innocent civilians anywhere that it takes place.”
Iran’s official news agency, IRNA, reported that the Iranian Foreign Ministry rejected Ban’s remarks and accused the U.N. chief of meddling.
State television said Khamenei agreed to extend by five days a deadline for making election complaints. But overall, the Iranian regime appeared determined to crush the post-election protesters, rather than compromise.
Mousavi has charged massive vote fraud and insisted he is the true winner. However, Iran’s top electoral body, Guardian Council, found “no major fraud or breach in the election,” a spokesman, Abbas Ali Kadkhodaei, was quoted by Press TV as saying Tuesday. “Therefore, there is no possibility of an annulment taking place.”
The 12-member council has the authority to annul or validate the election. On Monday, it acknowledged in a rare step that it found voting irregularities in 50 of 170 districts, including vote counts that exceeded the number of eligible voters. Still, it said the discrepancies, involving some 3 million votes, were not widespread enough to affect the outcome.
Iran has 46.2 million eligible voters, one-third of them under 30. The final tally was 62.6 percent of the vote for Ahmadinejad and 33.75 percent for Mousavi, a landslide victory in a race that was perceived to be much closer. The huge margin went against the expectation that the record 85 percent turnout would boost Mousavi.
In another sign of the regime’s crackdown, Ebrahim Raisi, a top judicial official, confirmed Tuesday that a special court has been set up to deal with detained protesters.
“Elements of riots must be dealt with to set an example. The judiciary will do that,” he was quoted as saying by the state-run radio, which gave no further details. The judiciary is controlled by Iran’s ruling clerics.
Ahmadinejad, meanwhile, won crucial backing from Russia on Tuesday, with the Foreign Ministry in Moscow saying it respects the declared election result. In a statement on its Web site, the ministry said that disputes about the vote “should be settled in strict compliance with Iran’s Constitution and law” and are “exclusively an internal matter.”
Russia, a permanent member of the U.N. Security Council, has longtime political and economic ties with Iran where it is helping build a nuclear power plan at Bushehr. In his only trip abroad since the vote, Ahmadinejad traveled to Russia last week for a conference where he was seen prominently shaking hands with Russian President Dmitry Medvedev.
Many Western democracies, including the U.S., have criticized Iran’s campaign to crush dissent.
German Chancellor Angela Merkel has called on Iran to recount the votes, but stopped short of alleging electoral fraud. French President Nicolas Sarkozy has been outspoken in his criticism of Iran’s response to the demonstrations, but said doors must remain open to continue talks on the country’s nuclear program.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, on a visit to Rome, praised the courage of Iranian protesters “in facing bullets in the streets.”
Two prominent Iranian opposition figures took their case to Europe on Tuesday.
Iranian Nobel Peace laureate Shirin Ebadi asked EU officials in Brussels not to negotiate or hold meetings with Iranian leaders until the crackdown stops.
In Rome, Iranian filmmaker Mohsen Makhmalbaf held a news conference, saying he had been asked by Mousavi’s aides to spread the word on what is happening in Iran. Makhmalbaf said that even if Ahmadinejad manages to govern for the next four years, “he will not have one day of quietness.” He said protesters would resort to general strikes and what he called civil resistance.
Iranian leaders have accused the West of meddling in its affairs. Press TV said Tuesday that despite such complaints, the government refused to grant a permit for a protest by university students outside the British embassy in Tehran.
Opposition protests have become smaller, after a huge opposition rally a week ago, though demonstrators have been more willing to confront Iranian troops.
On Monday, Tehran riot police fired tear gas and live bullets to break up about 200 protesters paying tribute to those killed in the protests, including a young women, Neda Agha Soltan, whose apparent shooting death was captured on video and circulated worldwide. Witnesses said helicopters hovered overhead.
Caspian Makan, a 37-year-old photojournalist in Tehran who identified himself as Soltan’s boyfriend, said she had not been deterred by the risk of joining protests.
“She only ever said that she wanted one thing, she wanted democracy and freedom for the people of Iran,” he told an Associated Press reporter during a telephone call from Tehran.
Severe restrictions on reporters have made it almost impossible to independently verify reports on demonstrations, clashes and casualties. Iran has ordered reporters for international news agencies to stay in their offices, barring them from reporting on the streets.
A number of journalists have been detained since the protests began, though there have been conflicting accounts. The Paris-based Reporters Without Borders put the figure of reporters detained at 34.
The New York-based Committee to Protect Journalists said 13 were still in custody, including Newsweek correspondent Maziar Bahari.
State-run TV on Tuesday confirmed the arrest of Iason Athanasiadis, a Greek national reporting for the Washington Times.
The Iranian government must release all journalists and halt “unreasonable and arbitrary measures that are restricting the flow of information,” the committee said. “Detaining journalists for reporting news and commentary indicates the government has something to hide.”
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Associated Press Writer William J. Kole in Cairo contributed to this report.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
June 23, 2009
Britain expels 2 Iranian
diplomats in retaliation
LONDON – Britain expelled two Iranian diplomats Tuesday in retaliation for Iran’s decision to order out two staff members from the British Embassy in Tehran.
Prime Minister Gordon Brown told lawmakers that Tehran’s decision was unjustified.
“I am disappointed that Iran has placed us in this position, but we will continue to seek good relations with Iran and to call for the regime to respect the human rights and democratic freedoms of the Iranian people,” Brown said.
The Foreign Office said Iran was seeking to blame the U.K. and other outsiders for what is an Iranian reaction to an Iranian issue.
Iran’s rulers have firmly rejected the demands of protesters to annul the recent election over fraud allegations, and have kept troops in riot gear on the streets to break up any gatherings.
Iran informed the British government on Monday that is was expelling two diplomats whom it accused of “engaging in activities incompatible with diplomatic duties” — a euphemism for spying.
Iran’s ambassador to London was called to a meeting at the Foreign Office and was told the allegation was unjustified, a Foreign Office spokesman said.
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June 24, 2009
Mousavi wife compares Iran
state to martial law
AP – Iran promises swift action on protesters
AP – This photo released by the official website of the Iranian supreme leader’s office shows Iranian supreme …By MICHAEL WEISSENSTEIN, Associated Press Writer
CAIRO – Iran’s supreme leader said Wednesday that the government would not yield to demonstrators who want a disputed presidential election annulled, effectively closing the door to compromise with the opposition.
The wife of opposition leader Mir Hossein Mousavi was defiant, saying protesters refused to buckle under a situation she compared to martial law. Mousavi’s official Web site said a protest was planned outside Iran’s parliament Wednesday afternoon.
Amateur video posted on YouTube by people saying it was taken at protests Wednesday showed groups of young people chanting on a Tehran street. One showed men and women throwing rocks and pushing barricades, one blazing, in the street. Others shouted: “Death to the dictator!”
The time and place the video was taken could not be immediately confirmed due to restrictions on foreign media in Iran.
A helicopter could be seen hovering over central Tehran. A witness who walked through Baharestan Square in front of the parliament building around 7 p.m., three hours after the scheduled start of the protest, told The Associated Press it was swarmed by hundreds of riot police who did not allow people to even briefly gather.
Thousands more security officers filled the surrounding streets, said the witness, who declined to give his name for fear of government reprisals.
Severe restrictions on reporters have made it almost impossible to independently verify reports on demonstrations, clashes and casualties. Iran has ordered journalists for international news agencies to stay in their offices, barring them from reporting on the streets.
Mousavi’s Web site had distanced him from the planned protest, calling it independent and saying it had not been organized by the reformist candidate.
But his wife, Zahra Rahnavard, a former university dean who campaigned beside him, said on another of his Web sites that his followers had the constitutional right to protest and the government should not deal with them “as if martial law has been imposed in the streets.”
She called for the release of all activists and others arrested at protests.
Mousavi, a former prime minister, saw his campaign transform into a protest movement after the government declared that hardline President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad won the June 12 election. Mousavi says the result was fraudulent, and Western analysts who have examined available data on the vote said there were indications of manipulation.
Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei has ordered protests to end, leaving Mousavi with the choice of restraining followers or continuing to directly challenge the country’s ultimate authority despite threats of escalating force.
“On the current situation, I was insisting and will insist on implementation of the law. That means, we will not go one step beyond the law,” Khamenei said on state television. “For sure, neither the system nor the people will yield to pressure at any price.” He used language that indicated he was referring to domestic pressures.
He told opposition supporters once again to halt their protests and accused the U.S., Britain and other foreign powers of fomenting days of unprecedented street protests over the vote.
Meanwhile Wednesday, a conservative candidate in the disputed presidential election said he was withdrawing his complaints about voting fraud for the sake of the country, state television reported.
The announcement by Mohsen Rezaie, a former commander of the elite Revolutionary Guards, moved the cleric-led government one step closer to a final declaration of victory for Ahmadinejad. State TV reported that Ahmadinejad would be sworn in sometime between July 26 and Aug. 19.
Iran also said that it was considering downgrading ties with Britain, which it has directly accused of spying in recent days.
The government accused Britain of using spies to foment the protests and Iran expelled two British diplomats Tuesday. Prime Minister Gordon Brown announced that two Iranian diplomats were being sent home in retaliation.
Foreign Minister Manouchehr Mottaki was asked about the option of reducing diplomatic relations with London after a Cabinet meeting in Tehran.
“We are studying it,” Mottaki said, according to state television.
State media have said that at least 17 people have been killed in postelection unrest, including 10 protesters shot during the largest demonstration on Saturday.
Mousavi’s supporters flooded the streets of Tehran and other cities after the presidential vote, massing by the hundreds of thousands in protests larger than any since Iran’s 1979 Islamic Revolution. Security forces initially stood by and permitted the demonstrations.
Amateur footage of a 27-year-old woman bleeding to death from a gunshot on a Tehran street unleashed outrage at home and abroad.
Despite the heavy security, a few Iranians apparently dared to venture onto the streets to pay tribute to that victim, who has been identified as Neda Agha Soltan.
On Wednesday, smoldering embers of candles were clearly visible on a street corner in central Tehran, where a vigil was held the night before for the slain young woman.
Another opposition figure, reformist presidential candidate Mahdi Karroubi, had called for a day of mourning Thursday for those killed in protests since the election.
Saeed Razavi, the spokesman for Karroubi’s campaign, said on the candidate’s official Web site later that any mourning was canceled because authorities hadn’t given permission.
He said the mourning would be next week at the University of Tehran or near where those slain were buried.
Also, a Mousavi aide confirmed that police had raided offices of a newspaper owned by the candidate and detained 25 editorial employees.
Ali Reza Beheshti said the raid took place Monday evening in central Tehran as editorial members were preparing to relaunch the newspaper, Kalemeh Sabz, or the Green Word. The paper had been absent from newsstands for more than a week.
“Police in uniform raided the office and detained 25 members of the editorial staff,” Beheshti said.
Amnesty International said Wednesday it was concerned that arrested demonstrators were at risk of torture or other ill treatment. It urged Iranian authorities to give the detainees access to their families, lawyers and any medical treatment they might need.
“Anyone detained solely for their peaceful expression of their views regarding the outcome of the election should be released immediately and unconditionally,” it said.
Two players on Iran’s national soccer team, Mehdi Mahdavikia and Ali Karimi, resigned for personal reasons, the semi-official ISNA news agency reported. The pair were among several team members who wore wrist bands in green — the color of Mousavi’s opposition movement — before a World Cup qualifying match played last week against South Korea in Seoul.
___
Associated Press Writer William J. Kole in Cairo contributed to this report.
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June 24, 2009
Fresh Clashes in Tehran as
Cleric Says Iran Will Not Yield
By NAZILA FATHI and ALAN COWELL
Published: June 24, 2009
TEHRAN — Hundreds of protesters clashed with waves of riot police and paramilitary militia in Tehran on Wednesday, witnesses said, as Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, insisted that the authorities would not yield to pressure from opponents demanding a new election following allegations of electoral fraud.
Office of the Supreme Leader, via Associated Press
This photo released by the official website of the Iranian supreme leader’s office shows Iranian supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei during a meeting with Iranian parliamentarians in Tehran on Wednesday. More Photos »
Defying government warnings, hundreds, if not thousands of protesters, had attempted to gather in front of the parliament on Baharestan Square, witnesses said. They were met with riot police and paramilitary militia, who struck at them with truncheons, tear gas and guns. One witness said he saw a 19-year-old woman shot in the neck.
Some opposition supporters said that presidential candidate and opposition leader Mir Hussein Moussavi had been scheduled to address the crowd, but initial reports indicated that he had not appeared.
The violence came as additional details emerged about the sweeping scale of arrests that have accompanied the nation’s worst political crisis the 1979 revolution. A New York-based human rights group, International Campaign for Human Rights in Iran, listed the names Wednesday of 240 of the 645 people Iranian state media have reported detained in the crackdown. The total number of detained, the organization said, citing human rights activists in Iran, may be as high as 2,000.
Among them are people arrested in a Monday night raid of a campaign office for Mr. Moussavi in Tehran, Press TV, state television’s English-language satellite broadcaster, reported Wednesday. The government said the office was being used as “a headquarters for psychological war against the country’s security,” and claimed that evidence had been found of “the role of foreign elements in planning post-election unrest.”
Also detained are 102 political figures, 23 journalists, 79 university students and 7 university faculty, the human rights organization said. By official reckonings, at least 17 demonstrators have been killed.
Earlier Wednesday, Ayatollah Khamenei told legislators that he “insisted and will insist on implementing the law on the election issue,” according to accounts in the state-run media. “Neither the establishment nor the nation will yield to pressure at any cost.”
Coupled with the clampdown on the new demonstration, arrests and other developments, the Ayatollah’s comments reinforced the impression that the authorities have resolved to use all levers of power to choke off protest.
The coalition opposed to the election results suffered a setback Wednesday when one candidate formally withdrew his complaints of vote-rigging, opening a rift among those who had challenged the outcome of the June 12 election.
Some opponents maintained their defiance, calling for continued protests and the release of detainees. Despite efforts to silence dissent and despite an appearance of disarray in opposition ranks, Zahra Rahnavard, Mr. Moussavi’s wife who has played an influential role in the opposition, issued a call Wednesday for the immediate release of Iranians detained in election protests, his Web site reported.
“I regret the arrest of many politicians and people and want their immediate release,” Ms. Rahnavard declared. “It is my duty to continue legal protests to preserve Iranian rights.”
The candidate who withdrew his complaint of election fraud, Mohsen Rezai, had initially complained that while the official count gave him 680,000 votes, he had evidence that 900,000 people voted for him. But on Wednesday, Press TV reported, he decided to abandon the complaint, saying the current “political, social and security situation has entered a sensitive and decisive phase which is more important than the election.”
Trailing Mr. Moussavi and the former Parliament speaker, Mehdi Karroubi, Mr. Rezai was the most conservative of the losing candidates and had been under strong pressure from Iran’s rulers to pull back from the confrontation.
Mr. Rezai was quoted as calling the ballot a “clear sample of religious democracy,” sharing language with a powerful defense of the ballot in a sermon last Friday by Ayatollah Khamenei.
Mr. Rezai’s decision to withdraw, regional analysts said, represented an incremental but significant step back for the opposition, since his status as being part of and loyal to the system adding credibility to the overall electoral challenge.
The electoral controversy continued to boil, spilling over Iran’s own borders, as President Obama issued on Tuesday his harshest condemnation of events there yet, saying he was “appalled and outraged” by the attacks on civilian protesters.
“I strongly condemn these unjust actions,” Mr. Obama said during a news conference at the White House.
Iran’s leadership pressed its own charges that foreign powers had meddled in its internal affairs and instigated the widespread protests. State television showed people identified as protesters saying they had been influenced by foreign news media, Reuters reported.
“I think we were provoked by networks like the BBC and the Voice of America to take such immoral actions,” one young man said.
The government has also worked to underscore that it is under attack by terrorists seeking to take advantage of the post-election turmoil. Press TV, quoting the national intelligence minister, said Wednesday that dozens of alleged terrorists have been arrested in the past week, including suspects in the alleged bombing last Saturday of the shine of Ayatollah Imam Khomeini in Tehran that wounded three.
The arrested were linked with “the Zionist and non-Zionist regimes outside the county,” the intelligence minister, Gholam-Hossein Mohseni-Ejei, was quoted as saying.Britain announced it had expelled two Iranian diplomats in a tit-for-tat response to Iran’s decision a day earlier to expel two British diplomats. Iran also lashed out at the United Nations secretary general, Ban Ki-moon, for his call to end “arrests, threats and use of force.”
Iran’s foreign minister, Manouchehr Mottaki, said on Wednesday Tehran was reviewing whether to downgrade ties with Britain, which Iran has accused of interference in its disputed presidential election, the ISNA semi-official news agency said.
“We are reviewing this issue,” Manouchehr Mottaki said, according to ISNA. He was also quoted as saying Iran would not participate in a meeting of the G-8 countries this week in Italy to discuss Afghanistan with regional powers. The G-8 brings together industrialized nations including the United States and Britain along with other western countries, Japan and Russia.
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Nazila Fathi reported from Tehran and Alan Cowell from London. Michael Slackman and Mona el-Naggar contributed reporting from Cairo, and Sharon Otterman from New York.
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June 24, 2009
Amid Crackdown,
Iran Admits Voting Errors
Published: June 22, 2009
CAIRO — Iran’s most powerful oversight council announced on Monday that the number of votes recorded in 50 cities exceeded the number of eligible voters there by three million, further tarnishing a presidential election that has set off the most sustained challenge to Iran’s leadership in 30 years.
The New York Times
Members of the Basij militia marching Monday toward Haft-e-tir Square in central Tehran. More Photos »
The government continued with a two-track approach in its showdown over the re-election of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. Even as the powerful Guardian Council acknowledged some irregularities in the June 12 election, it insisted that the overall vote was valid. At the same time, security forces stepped up their threats to treat protesters as criminals seeking to destabilize the country.
A group of as many as a thousand demonstrators at Haft-e-tir Square in central Tehran was quickly overwhelmed Monday by baton-wielding riot police and tear gas shortly after the Revolutionary Guards issued an ominous warning on their Web site saying that protesters would face “revolutionary confrontation.” Opposition leaders said the next move may be civil disobedience or a general strike.
The legitimacy of the vote remains at the core of the dispute. On Monday, the Guardian Council sought to help validate the outcome when it announced there had been discrepancies in 50 cities, which it said involved up to three million votes, not enough to overturn the landslide election margin that the government had announced for Mr. Ahmadinejad. But the recognition of a broad discrepancy between the number of recorded votes and registered voters in some districts only fueled suspicions that the election — and the Guardian Council’s arbitration of it — was unfair.
“I don’t think they actually counted the votes, though that’s hard to prove,” said Ali Ansari, a professor at the Institute of Iranian Studies at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland and one of the authors of a study of the election results issued by Chatham House, a London-based research group.
The Guardian Council is scheduled to certify or nullify the vote on Wednesday, or, some speculated, call for a runoff between the two top vote-getters. It has so far appeared to prejudge the race as fair and legitimate.
“Statistics provided by the candidates, who claim more than 100 percent of those eligible have cast their ballot in 80 to 170 cities are not accurate — the incident has happened in only 50 cities,” said the council spokesman, Abbas-Ali Kadkhodaei. He said this outcome could occur because people may vote anywhere they choose, not necessarily only in their district of registration.
But many districts where the excess votes were recorded are small, remote places rarely visited by business travelers or tourists, analysts said, raising questions about how so many extra votes could have been counted in so many different areas.
The extra votes add to a list of complaints leveled against the election by the reform candidate, Mir Hussein Moussavi, and other challengers inside and outside Iran. Among them:
How did the government manage to count enough of the 40 million paper ballots to be able to announce results within two hours of the polls closing? How is it that Mr. Ahmadinejad’s margin of victory remained constant throughout the ballot count? Why did the government order polls closed at 10 p.m. when they often stay open until midnight for presidential races? Why were some ballot boxes sealed before candidates’ inspectors could validate they were empty? Why were votes counted centrally, by the Interior Ministry, instead of locally, as in the past? Why did some polling places lock their doors at 6 p.m. after running out of ballots?
In specific terms, analysts who have scrutinized the election results available in Persian and English said that for Mr. Ahmadinejad to have won 63 percent to Mr. Moussavi’s 34 percent, he would have had to have won over most people who four years ago supported the liberal reform candidate, Mehdi Karroubi, a former speaker of the Parliament who ran again this year. They said the president also would have had to have garnered the votes in that 2005 race that went to Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, a bitter opponent of Mr. Ahmadinejad who backed Mr. Moussavi this time.
“In the province where Karroubi did best in 2005, his home province of Lorestan, Ahmadinejad got some 71 percent of the vote,” wrote Nate Silver in an analysis that was posted on fivethirtyeight.com, a politics and polling Web site. He added, “If Ahmadinejad won the election, he did it by winning over these rural Karroubi voters. And if he stole it, those were the votes he stole or intimidated.”
The review of voting statistics released this week by St. Andrews University and Chatham House reached a similar conclusion.
“The plausibility of Mr. Ahmadinejad’s claimed victory is called into question by figures that show that in several provinces he would have had to attract the votes of all new voters, all the votes of his former centrist opponent, and up to 44 percent of those who voted for reformist candidates in 2005,” said Thomas Rintoul, one of the study’s authors.
The leadership of the Islamic republic takes voting very seriously as a symbol of legitimacy and loyalty to the system. Voting always occurs on a day off, to maximize turnout.
Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the country’s supreme leader, said that Mr. Ahmadinejad’s margin of victory was so great — 11 million votes — that there could be no doubt it was legitimate. He never addressed any of the specific charges of fraud.
“Sometimes the difference is 100,000, 500,000 or even 1 million,” Ayatollah Khamenei said in his speech to the nation during Friday Prayer. “In that case, one could say that there might have been vote-rigging. But how can they rig 11 million votes?”
To vote, all citizens must show their shenasnameh, a wallet-sized folder holding all important documents, including birth certificates and proofs of marriage and divorce. Iranians can visit any polling site they choose to with their shenasnameh, which is why some districts end up with more ballots cast than eligible voters. People with summer or weekend houses, for example, often do not go home to vote.
Polling sites are run by the Interior Ministry and supervised by the Guardian Council, which also adds to the skepticism, since both have expressed their loyalty to the supreme leader and Mr. Ahmadinejad.
Even the conservative speaker of Iran’s Parliament, Ali Larijani, who has sided with the supreme leader in support of Mr. Ahmadinejad, acknowledged that skepticism about the vote was wide and deep, unlikely to be dispelled by continued claims of a landslide victory for the president.
“A majority of people are of the opinion that the actual election results are different than what was officially announced,” Mr. Larijani said in comments broadcast on Iranian television over the weekend.
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June 24, 2009
Women in Iran’s protests:
head scarves and rocks
AP – FILE – In this Tuesday, June 9, 2009 file photo, a supporter of main challenger and reformist candidate …
By REBECCA SANTANA, Associated Press Writer
EDITOR’S NOTE: Iranian authorities have barred journalists for international news organizations from reporting on the streets and ordered them to stay in their offices. This report is based on the accounts of witnesses reached in Iran and official statements carried on Iranian media.
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For years, women’s defiance in Iran came in carefully planned flashes of hair under their head scarves, brightly painted fingernails and trendy clothing that could be glimpsed under bulky coats and cloaks.
But these small acts of rebellion against the theocratic government have been quickly eclipsed in the wake of the disputed June 12 presidential elections. In their place came images of Iranian women marching alongside men, of their scuffles with burly militiamen, of the sobering footage of a young woman named Neda, blood pouring from her mouth and nose minutes after her fatal shooting.
In a part of the Muslim world where women are often repressed, these images have catapulted Iran’s female demonstrators to the forefront of the country’s opposition movement. It is a role, say Iranian women and experts, that few seem willing to give up, and one that will likely present President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s hardline government with even greater challenges in the wake of the recent violence and protests.
“Iranian women are very powerful and they want their freedom,” said one woman in Tehran who said she’s been taking part in the protests. Like all women in Iran interviewed for this story, she did not want to be named, fearing government retribution. “They’re really, really repressed, and they need to talk about it.”
The election seemed to open the floodgates for airing that sense of frustration.
Claims by Ahmadinejad’s chief rival for the presidency, Mir Hossein Mousavi, that the election was riddled with fraud were the catalyst for days of protest following the vote. The government’s harsh response — evidenced in hundreds of arrests, the deaths of over a dozen demonstrators, clampdowns on the media, the refusal of the country’s theocratic leaders to entertain the possibility of a re-count — fueled popular discontent across wide swaths of the population.
But there is an extra layer of resentment and anger among many of Iran’s 35 million women. Many fear that a second term for a man who was first elected in 2005 in part on a platform of restoring “Islamic values” will only prove to be worse than the first.
“The root of the current unrest is the people’s dissatisfaction and frustration at their plight going back before the election,” said Iranian Nobel Peace laureate Shirin Ebadi. “Because women are the most dissatisfied people in society, that is why their presence is more prominent..”
Across the Muslim Middle East, women have often joined men in protest movements.
When Iraq invaded Kuwait in 1990, women took part in street demonstrations in the tiny Gulf country. Over the years, images of Palestinian women, fists raised in anger against Israel and tears flowing in despair over children and husbands killed, have become a staple of that conflict.
But Iran’s protests have elevated such images to a new level.
While Iranian women have been politically active in the past, coming out in large numbers in support of the 1979 Islamic Revolution, the latest demonstrations showed them standing shoulder-to-shoulder with their male counterparts, enduring the same blows and threats.
“We were all together, and we helped each other despite our sexuality, and we will be together,” said one 34-year-old Tehran woman who is active in the protests.
They have also given the movement some of its most high-profile arrests — former President Hashemi Rasfanjani’s 46-year-old activist daughter — and its first martyr, Neda Agha Soltan.
Soltan, who was allegedly shot by pro-government militia as she walked through a protest Saturday, became the public face of the government’s repression — a female martyr in a culture that celebrates such symbols, but usually relegates women to the role of the martyr’s mother or wife.
Video images of Soltan lying on the street, blood pouring from her mouth and nose as a few men crouch down, struggling to save her, quickly made their way onto the Internet. From there, they bounced around the world.
“She represents this youth who went there with such hope and idealism,” said Ziba Mir-Hosseini, who researches the situation of women in Iran, at the University of London’s School of Oriental and African Studies. “In a way, she is the first woman martyr. She is a martyr for democracy.”
President Barack Obama on Tuesday summed it up as such: “We have seen courageous women stand up to brutality and threats, and we have experienced the searing image of a woman bleeding to death on the streets.”
In the convoluted, and fluid, calculus of Iranian politics, it remains to be seen how the government will deal with these challenges. Also unclear is how these developments will shape policy.
Under previous reformist regimes, Iranian women secured a wink-and-a-nod attitude from the government that allowed them to adopt more casual hair coverings and more freedoms than those seen in other conservative Muslim countries in the region, such as Saudi Arabia.
Although they are barred from the presidency and religious posts, many Iranian women are in parliament and other political offices. About 65 percent of university students are women.
In 2006, a group of women launched a campaign to gather a million signatures in favor of equal rights for women. And, in the run-up to the presidential election, a coalition of women from diverse economic and social classes worked to ensure that the candidates focused their platforms on efforts to improve women’s lives.
Mousavi’s bid for the presidency further encouraged them, with women buoyed in no small part by his progressive stance on women’s issues and his unorthodox — at least for Iran — campaign appearances alongside his wife, Zahra Rahnavard.
Rahnavard, who was forced out of the chancellor’s position at Al-Zahra University by conservatives in 2006, campaigned by her husband’s side, appeared in campaign videos and even drew political attacks from opponents.
“For the first time in a presidential campaign you could see a man campaigning with his wife,” said the University of London’s Mir-Hosseini. “At many of these meetings they were holding hands, and that was breaking a big taboo.”
On Wednesday, Rahnavard made her voice heard again, saying on one of her husband’s Web sites that his followers had the right to protest and the government should not deal with them harshly.
It remains to be seen how women, particularly after the days of violence, will demonstrate their dissatisfaction with the regime, especially if its headed by a man whose earlier actions were seen as limiting their rights..
Under Ahmadinejad’s first term, rules were set in place that made it difficult for women to work late or take on extra hours, and pushing many into part-time jobs. Last year, his government proposed a law that would have made it easier for men to take additional wives — a practice allowed under Islam but generally frowned upon in Iran. More than 60 women activists who took part in the signature campaign were arrested, some of whom are still in jail, said Nayereh Tohidi, a professor at California State University, Northridge.
Then, there is the issue of clothes. Under Ahmadinejad the rules are being tightly enforced, women are required to cover their hair and wear loose and long garments over pants. They face arrest if their fashion is deemed too risque — a qualification that has even included pants tucked into boots during the winter.
“It is the biggest insult to a woman that somebody can tell her what she should wear,” said the 34-year-old Tehran woman active in the protests. “Nowadays many people can see the world easily, how they live peacefully in their countries without any enforcement, so we know our basic rights as a human and especially as a woman.”
 Wednesday 24 June 2009 18.00 BST
June 25, 2009
Mousavi Web site: 70 professors detained in Iran AFP – West condemns Iran crackdown but Khamenei ‘will not back down’
 AP – Iranian security forces are seen sitting near the parliament building Wednesday, June 24, 2009 in Tehran, …
EDITOR’S NOTE: Iranian authorities have barred journalists for international news organizations from reporting on the streets and ordered them to stay in their offices. This report is based on the accounts of witnesses reached in Iran and official statements carried on Iranian media.
___
Seventy university professors were detained in Iran in a widening government crackdown on protesters, according to a Web site affiliated with Iran’s key opposition figure, Mir Hossein Mousavi, who says he was robbed of victory in a rigged presidential election.
The professors were detained on Wednesday, immediately after meeting with Mousavi, said the Kalemeh site, which is affiliated with the opposition leader. The report said it is not clear where the detainees were taken.
Hundreds protesters and activists are believed to have been taken into custody since the June 12 vote, in which Iran’s ruling clerics declared hard-line President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad the winner by a landslide. The government has also set up a special court to deal with the cases of people arrested in more than a week of unrest and threatened harsh sentences.
Widespread protests erupted after the election, amid allegations of massive fraud. Since then, at least 17 people have been killed as authorities gradually intensified their crackdown.
The state-owned newspaper, Iran, reported Thursday that in addition to the 17, seven members of the pro-government Basij militia were killed in post-election clashes, and dozens more injured by weapons and knives. The report could not be independently verified.
The professors detained Wednesday were believed to be among a group that has been pushing for a more liberal form of government. The detentions signal that the authorities are increasingly targeting members of Iran’s elite.
In recent days, demonstrators have found themselves more and more scattered and struggling under a blanket crackdown that Mousavi’s wife compared to martial law.
In clashes Wednesday near Iran’s parliament, thousands of police crushed hundreds of Mousavi supporters, using tear gas and clubs.
Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, has said the election of Ahmadinejad will not be reversed. He has said the nation’s rulers would never yield to demands from the streets.
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June 25, 2009
Iran’s Ahmadinejad compares
Obama to Bush
Australia 7 News – Reports of ‘massacre’ in latest Iran protest 
AFP – Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad smiles during a meeting in Tehran. A top Iranian dissident cleric …
By Parisa Hafezi and Fredrik Dahl Parisa
TEHRAN (Reuters) – President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad accused Barack Obama on Thursday of behaving like his predecessor toward Iran and said there was not much point in talking to Washington unless the U.S. president apologized.
(EDITORS’ NOTE: Reuters and other foreign media are subject to Iranian restrictions on their ability to report, film or take pictures in Tehran.)
Obama said on Tuesday he was “appalled and outraged” by a post-election crackdown and Washington withdrew invitations to Iranian diplomats to attend Independence Day celebrations on July 4 — stalling efforts to improve ties with Tehran.
“Mr Obama made a mistake to say those things … our question is why he fell into this trap and said things that previously (former president George W.) Bush used to say,” the semi-official Fars News Agency quoted Ahmadinejad as saying.
“Do you want to speak with this tone? If that is your stance then what is left to talk about … 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 said.
Iran has crushed anti-government protests, flooding the streets of Tehran with police and militia to quell the most widespread unrest since the 1979 Islamic revolution.
About 20 people have been killed in protests after Ahmadinejad was re-elected in a disputed June 12 poll which opposition leader Mirhossein Mousavi says was rigged.
In what appeared to be further evidence of the government’s determination to crush resistance, 70 professors were detained after meeting Mousavi, his website said on Thursday.
Mousavi said he was under pressure to stop challenging the election result and also complained about the closure of his Kalameh-ye Sabz daily newspaper and arrest of its staff.
The row over the election has exposed an unprecedented public rift in within Iran’s ruling elite.
With street protests fading, analysts say the battle has moved off the street into a behind-the-scenes struggle which has divided the clerical establishment into two camps.
Mousavi has the backing of such influential figures as former presidents Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani and Mohammad Khatami, along with senior cleric Grand Ayatollah Hossein Ali Montazeri.
Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, who normally stays above the political fray, has sided strongly with Ahmadinejad.
CORROSIVE PATH
“Neither side can claim victory now,” said an analyst in Tehran, who declined to be named. “This path is very corrosive. Both sides are tired.”
“What the system needs is to have some mediators, who can convince both sides to agree over a middle way,” he said.
Khamenei has upheld the result and Iran’s top legislative body, the Guardian Council, has refused to annul the elections. State Press TV quoted a spokesman for the council as saying they were “among the healthiest elections ever held in the country.”
Mousavi said he was determined to keep challenging the election results despite pressure to stop.
“A major rigging has happened,” his website reported him as saying. “I am prepared to prove that those behind the rigging are responsible for the bloodshed.”
He called on his supporters to continue “legal” protests and said restrictions on the opposition could lead to more violence.
Mousavi supporters said they would release thousands of balloons on Friday imprinted with the message “Neda you will always remain in our hearts” — a reference to the young woman killed last week who has become an icon of the protests.
Obama had previously been muted in his criticism.
AP – Lit candles encompass a picture of Neda Agha Soltan, the young Iranian protester bled to death on the …
But on Tuesday he said that, “the United States and the international community have been appalled and outraged by the threats, the beatings, and imprisonments of the last few days.”
Before the election, Obama had tried to improve ties with Iran — branded by Bush as part of an “axis of evil.”
Washington had been hoping to convince Tehran to drop what it suspects are plans to develop nuclear bombs, while also seeking its cooperation in stabilizing Afghanistan and Iraq.
It had invited Iranian diplomats to attend Independence Day celebrations for the first time since Washington cut diplomatic ties with Tehran in 1980. The move to withdraw the invites was largely symbolic as no Iranians had even responded.
British Foreign Secretary David Miliband said it was wrong to blame the outside world for the troubles in Iran.
“I think the truth is that there is a crisis of credibility between the Iranian government and their own people. It’s not a crisis between Iran and America or Iran and Britain, however much the Iranian government wants to suggest that,” he said.
—–
AFP/HO – A handout picture posted on the Iranian Supreme Leader’s website shows Iran’s supreme leader …
Reuters – Ahmadinejad demands Obama apology
(Additional reporting by Zahra Hosseinian and Hossein Jaseb; Writing by Myra MacDonald; Editing by Jon Hemming)
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June 25, 2009
Iran’s Embattled Supreme Leader:
A Test for Ayatullah Khamenei
AFP/HO – A handout picture posted on the Iranian Supreme Leader’s website shows Iran’s supreme leader …
By ROBIN WRIGHT
The fate of Iran’s Islamic revolution now rests in the hands of an enigmatic cleric who is little understood at home, let alone by the outside world. For the past 20 years, pictures of Ayatullah Ali Khamenei, with his oversize glasses, black turban and untrimmed white beard, have adorned shops, government offices and living-room walls throughout Iran. His modest childhood home in Mashhad has become a virtual shrine, his edicts are binding and his powers absolute. Yet protesters forced from the streets this week have taken to shouting “Death to the dictator” and “Death to Khamenei” from their rooftops. Endowed with the infallible powers of a political pope, Iran’s leader has suddenly discovered that his authority has also made him vulnerable.
Since June 19, Khamenei’s controversial decision to dismiss all allegations of vote rigging and throw his weight behind President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has produced the most serious challenge to his rule – and ultimately to the very concept of a Supreme Leader – since the 1979 revolution. Protesters have spurned his claim that foreign powers are behind the demonstrations, while opposition leader Mir-Hossein Mousavi continues to demand that the disputed election be annulled. Khamenei once again warned on June 24 that “neither the establishment nor the nation will yield to pressure at any cost.” Demonstrations have abated under the unprecedented show of force by riot police and the paramilitary Basij vigilantes, but amid signs that the cost is a growing crisis of confidence in the Supreme Leader. (See pictures of the Iranian election and its turbulent aftermath.)
Despite his powers to overturn parliamentary laws, judicial decisions or presidential decrees, Khamenei has never been a very public figure, either as President between 1981 and 1989 or as Supreme Leader since then.
“There is perhaps no leader in the world more important to current world affairs but less known and understood than Ayatollah Ali Khamenei,” writes Karim Sadjadpour in Reading Khamenei, a publication of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. “Neither a dictator nor a democrat – but with traits of both – Khamenei is the single most important individual in a highly factionalized, autocratic regime.”(See pictures of people protesting Iran’s election around the world.)
Khamenei first emerged in politics as the Islamic republic’s third President in 1981, during a period of violent political turmoil that saw a President, a Prime Minister, 10 Cabinet officials and 27 members of parliament killed in massive bomb attacks. He was among the victims. He has walked with a cane, his right hand dangling uselessly at his side, ever since a small bomb inside a tape recorder went off as he was giving a Friday prayer sermon in 1981. He depends on aides or family to cut up his food.
Khamenei’s election marked the consolidation of clerical control over the state. Revolutionary leader Imam Khomeini originally banned the clergy from running for the presidency, but as he lost confidence in squabbling technocrats, he urged his protÉgÉ to run for office. The result was Iran’s first “government of God.” Tensions with Mousavi, who at the time held the more powerful position, of Prime Minister, date back to this period. Throughout the 1980s, Khamenei and Mousavi clashed repeatedly on key political and economic issues.
It was also during those early years that Iran’s political spectrum began to take shape. At one end were ideologues like Khamenei, who wanted Iran to play the role of a revolutionary “redeemer state,” championing the cause of the world’s downtrodden, pursuing Islamic political rule throughout the Muslim world and creating a new Islamic geopolitical bloc capable of challenging both East and West. (See TIME’s photo-essay “In Tehran, Terror in Plain Clothes.”)
At the other end were realists and leftists, like Mousavi, who favored institutionalizing the revolution and creating a model Islamic government. Although they supported an Islamist political system and social order as well as independence from the great powers, they also called for a pragmatic foreign policy. The difference boiled down to whether the Islamic republic’s top priority was the revolution or the state. That debate remains at the heart of the current crisis.
Khamenei became Iran’s second Supreme Leader after Imam Khomeini died in 1989. As a midlevel cleric with little theological standing among his peers, he was in many ways an unlikely choice. Because he inherited the Imam’s political powers but little of the religious authority, Khamenei tried to compensate by forging alliances with the security establishment, particularly among the commanders of the Revolutionary Guard and the Basij militia. That relationship has been central to the attempts to put down the uprising since June 20.
Khamenei has also exerted his influence on Iranian society through thousands of fatwas aimed at regulating everyday life. Although he is widely reported to like poetry and play an instrument, Khamenei ruled that music can cause deviant behavior and moral corruption among the young. Foreign news, he ruled, should be outlawed if it in any way “lessens trust in Islamic government,” while he deemed neckties part of a “cultural assault” on Muslims. When riding bicycles or motorcycles, Khamenei ruled, women must avoid actions that lead to the wrong kind of attention. He sanctioned clapping on “joyful occasions” but forbade it where religion is involved. Nose piercings, while not forbidden, would have to be covered.
Some of Khamenei’s micromanaging of the everyday was very practical: he condoned oral contraception for women and vasectomies for men to help bring down Iran’s high birthrate. And he allowed stem-cell research and cloning, which led to the birth of Iran’s first cloned sheep in 2006.
The Supreme Leader’s traditional role has been to balance rival factions. Having aligned himself so closely with one political faction in a fiercely contested election, however, Khamenei’s greatest challenge may now also come from some of his fellow clerics who have long questioned both the principle of a Supreme Leader as well as the role for the clergy in government.
In the current crisis, most of the senior Ayatullahs in the theological city of Qum have refrained from either endorsing Ahmadinejad’s re-election or publicly supporting Khamenei’s handling of the crisis. The diversity of opinion among Iran’s clerics is reflected in Khamenei’s younger brother Hadi, a cleric and former member of parliament who has long advocated cutting back the powers of the Supreme Leader.
“The most important thing we’re looking for today in Iran is the rule of law,” Hadi Khamenei said in 1999. “And that means no one, whatever his position, is above it. Unfortunately for the rest of us, there are still people at the top who don’t accept that basic right.”
Despite the challenge to his rule, Khamenei appears prepared to take an increasingly tough stand, leaving little room for retreat or political compromise and forcing him to rely even more heavily on both hard-line allies and Iran’s security forces. The outcome of Iran’s crisis is likely to affect his political standing as well as whoever ends up as President.
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June 26, 2009
Iranian cleric: harsh punishment
for riot leaders
Reuters – Ahmadinejad demands Obama apology
AP – Lit candles encompass a picture of Neda Agha Soltan, the young Iranian protester bled to death on the …
By The Associated Press
A senior Iranian cleric has called on the government to harshly punish the leaders of post-election protests.
Ayatollah Ahmed Khatami spoke during Muslim Friday prayers at Tehran University. His comments were broadcast nationwide.
Iran’s ruling clerics have widened a clampdown following two weeks of unrest over a disputed presidential election.
Authorities declared hardline President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad the winner but opposition candidate Mir Hossein Mousavi insists he was cheated of out victory by massive fraud.
Khatami said the government should punish the leaders of the protests “strongly and with cruelty.”
He also alleged that that an Iranian woman, Neda Agha Soltan, who has become an icon of the protests since her death a week ago, was killed by protesters.
THIS IS A BREAKING NEWS UPDATE. Check back soon for further information. AP’s earlier story is below.
EDITOR’S NOTE: Iranian authorities have barred journalists for international news organizations from reporting on the streets and ordered them to stay in their offices. This report is based on the accounts of witnesses reached in Iran and official statements carried on Iranian media.
___
Iran’s increasingly isolated opposition leader said he’ll seek government approval for future protests, even as he complained of unfair restrictions — a new sign that he is backing away from confrontation with Iran’s rulers over a bitterly disputed election.
Mir Hossein Mousavi, who says he is the real winner of the June 12 presidential vote, has sent mixed messages to supporters, as protests have become scattered amid a tough government clampdown.
Mousavi has urged supporters not to break the law, but also insisted he won’t drop his challenge of the proclaimed victory of hardline President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. Mousavi has alleged massive fraud, but Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, has ruled out a revote.
Khamenei has unleashed the Basij militia and the Revolutionary Guard, authorizing them to use whatever force is deemed necessary to squelch dissent. The militiamen have broken up even small groups of people walking together to prevent any possible gathering.
Still, dozens of friends and relatives of Neda Agha Soltan managed to pay tribute Friday to the 27-year-old woman who was shot dead Saturday and has become the iconic symbol of the protests.
The mourners arrived at Tehran’s Behesht-e Zahra cemetery in groups of two and three, muttered brief prayers, left flowers on Soltan’s grave and then left, witnesses said.
Vigils for Soltan have been held around the world.
Mousavi said in a post late Thursday on his official Web site, Kalemeh, that he would seek permission for future protests, even though he said unfair restrictions were being imposed. He said he has been asked by the Interior Ministry to apply in person, a week ahead of time.
The opposition leader noted that his rival, Ahmadinejad, has been able to hold two post-election marches and a Tehran rally “that were well publicized on state television, seeming to encourage participation with their regularly advertised march routes.”
Mousavi has said the authorities are pressuring him to withdraw his challenge by attempting to isolate and discredit him. He hasn’t led a rally in more than a week.
Khamenei has ordered a large security detail around Mousavi — ostensibly to protect him, but presumably also to restrict his movements. Authorities have also targeted those close to Mousavi.
Late Thursday, state TV reported that the head of Mousavi’s information committee, Abolfazl Fateh, was banned from leaving Iran for Britain. The report, which could not be verified independently, identified Fateh as a doctoral student in Britain.
The semiofficial Fars news agency said Fateh was banned from travel so authorities could investigate “some of the recent gatherings,” a reference to election protests.
At least 11 Mousavi campaign workers and 25 staffers on his newspaper have been detained since the election.
On Wednesday, 70 university professors were detained immediately after meeting with the opposition leader. All but four have been released. Those still in custody included Qorban Behzadiannejad, Mousavi’s former campaign manager.
In all, at least 17 people have been killed in postelection protests, in addition to eight members of the Basij, the government has said.
_____
AP – G8 foreign ministers gather for a photo, with from left: Javier Solana EU foreign policy chief; David …
Laub reported from Cairo; Associated Press Writer Shaya Tayefe Mohajer contributed to this report from Cairo.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
June 26, 2009
G8 to Iran: end violence,
reflect will of people
AP – G8 foreign ministers gather for a photo, with from left: Javier Solana EU foreign policy chief; David …
By ALESSANDRA RIZZO, Associated Press Writer
TRIESTE, Italy – Group of Eight foreign ministers criticized Iran’s postelection violence, and urged its ruling clergy on Friday to ensure the outcome of the disputed ballot reflects the will of the Iranian people.
A statement by the ministers from the industrialized countries also said the door must remain open to dialogue on Iran’s nuclear program but expressed “deep concern” over the proliferation risk.
The statement from the meeting in the northeastern Italian city of Trieste was the result of negotiations between countries such as Italy and France, which wanted to send a tough message to Iran to halt the postelection crackdown, and Russia, which has said it backs the results that returned President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to power.
The statement, issued on the second day of the three-day meeting, said the G-8 ministers deplored the violence that followed Iran’s June 12 presidential vote. At least 17 people have been killed during protests, in addition to eight members of the Basij militiamen, and hundreds of people have been detained in a clampdown on the opposition.
“We express our solidarity with those who have suffered repression while peacefully demonstrating and urge Iran to respect human rights, including freedom of expression,” the G8 ministers said, and they urged Iran “to guarantee that the will of the Iranian people is reflected in the electoral process.”
Italian Foreign Minister Franco Frattini said this appeal was a key part of the G-8 message but stopped short of demanding a recount in the election because outsiders would have no way of confirming it was legitimate.
“If today I were to say with great clarity who the victor of the elections is, I couldn’t, because I don’t have the elements in my hands that the Iranian government has,” Frattini said at a news conference, with other G-8 officials by his side. “On this, the G-8 agrees.”
Frattini pointed to “worrying elements” such as the fact that in some voting districts the number of ballots cast and counted was higher than the number of registered voters. “We aren’t in a position to control what happened,” he said. “The message is that the game as of today isn’t considered over.”
German Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier said, “Whether the election results as announced are correct is highly doubtful.” He called Iran’s crackdown “intolerable” and “brutal.”
Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said Moscow wanted to express its “most serious concern” over the use of force by Iran and the death of peaceful protesters.
“At the same time, we will not interfere in Iran’s internal affairs. Our position is that all issues that have emerged in the context of the elections will be sorted out in line with democratic procedures,” he said.
Officials sought to balance the need to criticize Iran’s handling of the election with the effort to prevent it from slipping into further isolation, particularly regarding its nuclear program. Iran is enriching uranium that it says it wants only as nuclear fuel. The U.S. and other nations fear it could be used in nuclear weapons.
The statement recognized Iran’s right to a civilian nuclear program but urged it “to restore confidence in the exclusively peaceful nature of its nuclear activities” and to seize the opportunity to “give diplomacy a chance to find a negotiated solution.”
The G-8 talks at the 19th-century Palazzo in Trieste also are to focus on Afghanistan and Pakistan, and peace in the Mideast.
Italy originally invited Iran to attend the three-day gathering as a special guest, arguing that it could play an important role in talks on Afghan stabilization. But Rome retracted the invitation after Iran failed to respond.
The G-8 statement said the Iran crisis “should be settled soon through democratic dialogue and peaceful means.”
President Barack Obama has condemned the violence against protesters and lent his strongest support yet to their accusations the hardline victory was a fraud. But the United States has been careful not to become a scapegoat for Iran’s cleric-led government.
“It is clear that there is a significant percentage of Iranians who have significant concerns about the fairness and legitimacy of the elections,” said William Burns, the U.S. undersecretary of state for political affairs.
“The United States is deeply troubled by the use of violence against innocent people,” said Burns, who replaced the injured Secretary of State Hillary Clinton as head of the U.S. delegation.
British Foreign Secretary David Miliband, whose government expelled two Iranian diplomats earlier this week after Iran did the same to two British envoys, said Iran’s claim that the protests were mobilized by Western powers is “completely without foundation.”
“I think now there are big questions being asked within Iran,” said Miliband. “We deplore violence, but we remain committed to engagement as a means to an end.”
Friday’s talks on regional security in Afghanistan and Pakistan were being attended by their foreign ministers and by U.S. envoy Richard Holbrooke.
Also meeting Friday on the sidelines of the summit is the Mideast Quartet — the United States, Russia, the European Union and the United Nations — to try to help move the Israeli-Palestinian peace process forward. The participants included the U.S. Mideast envoy, former Sen. George Mitchell, and U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon.
A range of Arab League nations will join in a follow-on session Friday afternoon. The Quartet decided not to invite Israel, Italy’s Foreign Ministry said.
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AP – President Barack Obama and German Chancellor Angela Merkel participate in a joint news conference, Friday, …
AP writer Nicole Winfield in Trieste, Italy, contributed to this report.
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June 26, 2009
Obama scoffs at Ahmadinejad’s
demand for apology
AP – President Barack Obama and German Chancellor Angela Merkel participate in a joint news conference, Friday, …
By JENNIFER LOVEN, AP White House Correspondent
WASHINGTON – President Barack Obama’s criticism of Iran escalated Friday into an unusually personal war of words. To Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s demand he apologize for meddling, Obama shot back that the regime should “think carefully” about answers owed to protesters it has arrested, bludgeoned and killed.
“The violence perpetrated against them is outrageous,” Obama said. “We see it and we condemn it.”
The president spoke at an East Room news conference capping his third set of meetings with German Chancellor Angela Merkel, one of several European leaders who spoke out more forcefully, more quickly than Obama on the unrest in Iran that followed the disputed June 12 elections.
“We will not forget,” Merkel said.
Turning to Iraq, where a deadline for U.S. combat troops to leave all cities was just four days away, Obama offered no support for allowing a spate of recent violence to push back the withdrawal. “If you look at the overall trend, despite some of these high-profile bombings, Iraq’s security situation has continued to dramatically improve,” Obama said.
Of bigger concern than the violence, Obama said, is the lack of movement on laws to share oil revenues and other matters that keep Iraq deeply fractured along sectarian lines. He called on Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki to step up his leadership.
Merkel’s visit happened to coincide with the day that a sweeping global warming bill came up for a vote in the House amid contentious partisan sniping about its effect on jobs and consumer costs. With the vote still hours away and the outcome in doubt, Obama and Merkel, who has made climate change a top priority, presented the rare sight of an American president and a visiting foreign leader together urging the U.S. Congress to act.
Obama said he had been “very blunt and frank” with Merkel that it will take significant time to turn the U.S. into a world leader on climate change but that the “critical” bill before the House was a good start.
Merkel sympathized with the difficulty of approving such legislation, which would impose the first-ever limits on greenhouse gas pollution and force a shift to cleaner energy sources. “I know what’s at stake, when you talk about reduction targets, how tricky that is,” Merkel said.
In Iran, the government proclaimed the incumbent hardline president, Ahmadinejad, the landslide winner of the June 12 voting over opposition leader Mir Hossein Mousavi, prompting widespread protests followed by a brutal state-led crackdown.
Ahmadinejad told Obama Thursday to “show your repentance” for criticizing Tehran’s response.
“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,” Obama responded sternly.
“I would suggest that Mr. Ahmadinejad think carefully about the obligations he owes to his own people,” he added. “And he might want to consider looking at the families of those who’ve been beaten or shot or detained. And, you know, that’s where I think Mr. Ahmadinejad and others need to answer their questions.”
It was Obama’s first direct criticism of any of Iran’s leaders. Even more, it was coupled with his first specific boost for Mousavi. “Mousavi has shown to have captured the imagination or the spirit of forces within Iran that were interested in opening up,” Obama said.
The remark sought to clarify what many view as Obama’s biggest misstep — saying last week in a television interview that there may not be much difference between Ahmadinejad and Mousavi. But it appeared to swing over to an outright endorsement of Mousavi, though White House press secretary Robert Gibbs denied it was meant that way.
Obama also said for the first time that his offer to loosen the decades-old U.S. diplomatic freeze with Iran through direct talks is now in question.
“There is no doubt that any direct dialogue or diplomacy with Iran is going to be affected by the events of the last several weeks,” Obama said, without elaborating.
Gibbs said Obama was “more stating the obvious” that no talks are possible while developments are still unfolding. And Obama said that an existing system of multilateral talks with Iran over its suspected goal of building a nuclear bomb, involving nations including the U.S., Europe, China and Russia, must continue.
“The clock is ticking. Iran is developing a nuclear capacity at a fairly rapid clip,” he said.
Reuters – Iranian cleric calls for executions
AP – Iranian senior hard-line cleric Ayatollah Ahmad Khatami, delivers a Friday prayer sermon, under the pictures …
Merkel agreed there must be no letup among nations trying to stop Iran’s nuclear development, which Tehran insists is aimed at providing only electric power, not weapons. She said “we have to bring Russia and China alongside,” referring to the two nations most historically unwilling to get tough with Iran over the nuclear standoff.
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June 26, 2009
Iranian cleric urges executing
some protesters
Reuters – Iranian cleric calls for executions
AP – Iranian senior hard-line cleric Ayatollah Ahmad Khatami, delivers a Friday prayer sermon, under the pictures …
By WILLIAM J. KOLE, Associated Press Writer
EDITOR’S NOTE: Iranian authorities have barred journalists for international news organizations from reporting on the streets and ordered them to stay in their offices. This report is based on the accounts of witnesses reached in Iran and official statements carried on Iranian media.
___
A senior cleric on Friday urged Iran’s protest leaders to be punished “without mercy” and said some should face execution — harsh calls that signal a nasty new turn in the regime’s crackdown on demonstrators two weeks after its disputed election.
Hard-liners have ordered long sentences and hangings before, and some fear those awaiting trial by a judiciary whose verdicts reflect the will of supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei could face the most severe punishments the Islamic system can dish out.
“Anyone who takes up arms to fight with the people, they are worthy of execution,” Ayatollah Ahmed Khatami, a ranking cleric, said in a nationally broadcast sermon at Tehran University.
Khatami said those who disturbed the peace and destroyed public property were “at war with God” and should be “dealt with without mercy.”
His call for merciless retribution for those who stirred up Iran’s largest wave of dissent since the 1979 Islamic Revolution came as Mir Hossein Mousavi, the nation’s increasingly isolated opposition leader, has been under heavy pressure to give up his fight and slipped even further from view.
Mousavi said he would seek official permission for any future rallies, effectively ending his role in street protests organized by supporters who insist he — not hard-line incumbent President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad — won the June 12 election. And an aide said Mousavi’s Web site, his primary means of staying in touch with supporters, was taken down by unknown hackers.
Mousavi alleges he was robbed of victory through widespread and systematic fraud. The regime rejects the claim, refusing to consider new balloting, and on Friday, the Guardian Council — Iran’s top electoral body — proclaimed the vote the “healthiest” held since the revolution.
Since the election, opposition protesters repeatedly have clashed with security forces who arrested hundreds of people, including journalists, academics and university students. At least 17 people have been killed, in addition to eight members of the pro-government Basij militia, officials have said.
President Barack Obama, joined at the White House by German Chancellor Angela Merkel, hailed the demonstrators in Iran and condemned the violence against them.
“Their bravery in the face of brutality is a testament to their enduring pursuit of justice,” Obama said. “The violence perpetrated against them is outrageous. In spite of the government’s efforts to keep the world from bearing witness to that violence, we see it and we condemn it.”
Obama scoffed at accusations of U.S. meddling in Iran by Ahmadinejad, who on Thursday called for “repentance” from the U.S. leader. Obama added that Mousavi has “captured the imagination or spirit” of those in Iran who are “interested in opening up.”
The demonstrations petered out this week under an ever-intensifying crackdown. Mousavi, meanwhile, has sent mixed signals to supporters, asking them not to break the law while pledging not to drop his challenge.
Amnesty International called the prospect of quick trials and capital punishment for some detainees “a very worrying development.” It said Iran was the world’s No. 2 executioner after China last year, with at least 346 known instances of people put to death. The group also called on the regime to release dozens of detained journalists it said faced possible torture.
Khatami’s call for harsh penalties and even death for those who are found to have defied the Islamic system “is certainly an attempt to instill fear in people,” said Ann Harrison, an Iran researcher at Amnesty.
Whether the regime will actually follow through — or need to — was unclear. After Iran’s 1999 student uprising, the regime sentenced scores to death, but many of those eventually were commuted to prison terms.
Either way, detainees face a fearsome, cleric-controlled judiciary. Courts often convene behind closed doors, rights groups complain that defendants sometimes have little access to lawyers, and the world learns of their fate only if a verdict happens to be announced on state TV.
“Any chances of a trial that meets standards of due process would be very slim,” said Aaron Rhodes, spokesman for the New York-based International Campaign for Human Rights in Iran.
“What the regime is really saying is that any Iranian citizen who has dared express views which aren’t consistent with the views of a small hard-line clique is at risk of the most severe punishment the system can deal out,” he said. “They are really at the mercy of the system at this point.”
In his sermon, Khatami asked the judiciary to “confront the leaders of the protests, leaders of the violations, and those who are supported by the United States and Israel strongly, and without mercy to provide a lesson for all.”
He reminded worshippers that Khamenei, the supreme leader, rules by God’s design and must not be defied.
The cleric also lashed out at foreign journalists, accusing them of false reporting, and singled out Britain for new criticism. Earlier this week, Iran expelled two British diplomats, prompting the expulsion of two Iranian diplomats by Britain.
“In this unrest, Britons have behaved very mischievously and it is fair to add the slogan of ‘down with England’ to the slogan of ‘down with USA,’” he said.
In Trieste, Italy, foreign ministers of the Group of Eight countries called for an end to the violence in Iran and urged the authorities to find a peaceful solution.
Also Friday, more than 150 demonstrators attacked the Iranian Embassy outside the Swedish capital of Stockholm, throwing stones, breaking windows and injuring one worker, police said. Officers evicted the few demonstrators who climbed in through broken windows and arrested one person, said police spokesman Ulf Hoglund.
Khatami alleged that the icon of the opposition, slain protester Neda Agha Soltan, was killed by demonstrators, not the Iranian security forces. Soltan, 27, was killed by a shot to the chest last week, on the sidelines of a protest.
In London, an Iranian doctor who said he tried to save Soltan as the young woman bled to death, told the BBC she apparently was shot by a member of the Basij militia. Protesters spotted an armed member of the militia on a motorcycle, and stopped and disarmed him, said Dr. Arash Hejazi.
In quelling protests, Basij militiamen have broken up even small groups of people walking together to prevent any possible gathering. Still, dozens of friends and relatives of Soltan managed to pay tribute Friday, arriving at Tehran’s Behesht-e Zahra cemetery in groups of two and three, uttering brief prayers and placing flowers on her grave, witnesses said.
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Kole reported from Cairo; Associated Press writers Shaya Tayefe Mohajer in Cairo, Louise Nordstrom in Stockholm, and Ben Feller in Washington contributed to this report.
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