Pro-govt rallies in Iranian cities
Thousands of supporters take to streets, state TV shows
Pro-government rallies in several Iranian cities drew thousands of marchers on Wednesday, following six days of rare unrest that took the country’s leaders off guard.
State television broadcast live pictures of rallies in Kermanshah, Ilam and Gorgan, where marchers waved Iranian flags and pictures of Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.
The boldest challenge to Iran’s established order in almost a decade had continued into Tuesday night, with postings and video footage on social media showing riot police deployed in force in several cities.
Hours earlier, Khamenei accused Iran’s foes of fomenting the unrest.
On Wednesday, marchers voiced their support for Khamenei, chanting: “The blood in our veins is a gift to our leader” and “We will not leave our leader alone.”
The protests, which began over economic hardships, have taken on a rare political dimension, with a growing number of young people calling on Khamenei to step down.
They are the biggest since unrest in 2009 that followed the disputed re-election of then-president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.
At least 21 people have been killed during the unrest, including two members of the security forces.
More than 450 protesters have been arrested in the capital Tehran in recent days, and hundreds of others were detained around the country, according to officials. A judicial official said some could face the death penalty.
“The seditionist rioters should be executed,” marchers chanted on Wednesday, while posters they carried said hostile “hidden hands” guided from the US, Israel and the UK should be cut off.
In at attempt to control the flow of information and calls for anti-government gatherings, Tehran authorities have restricted access to the Telegram messaging app and Instagram, owned by Facebook Inc.
High prices, alleged corruption and mismanagement are fuelling the anger.
President Hassan Rouhani championed a deal struck with world powers in 2015 to curb Iran’s nuclear program in return for the lifting of most international sanctions.
However, he has failed to deliver on promises of prosperity in the OPEC oil producer where youth unemployment reached 28.8 percent last year.
The nuclear deal is facing its biggest challenge since it was struck, with US President Donald Trump due to decide by mid-January whether to continue waiving US sanctions or
reimpose them.
US President Donald Trump has signaled support for antigovernment protests in Iran, but in just two weeks, he faces a decision on US policy toward the Islamic Republic that suddenly seems riskier than it did a week ago.
The six days of demonstrations in several Iranian cities began over economic conditions, and Trump must decide by mid-January whether to continue waiving US sanctions on Iran’s oil exports under the terms of an international nuclear deal.
If he re-imposes sanctions on Iranian oil, it could increase the economic pain for Iran’s leaders. But analysts said it could also send the wrong message about US support for Iran’s people in the middle of the boldest challenge to the country’s leadership in a decade.
The sanction waivers were included in the 2015 nuclear pact with Iran that eased economic pressure on Tehran in exchange for limits on its nuclear program.
Trump has repeatedly criticized the deal and promised to negotiate a better one. Re-imposing oil sanctions would essentially kill the agreement.
Reviving sanctions on Iran’s main export would allow Tehran to argue that the United States is ultimately the cause of Iran’s economic problems, said Richard Nephew, who worked on sanctions policy at the White House under president Barack Obama.
“Let’s say Trump was inclined not to renew the waivers. I think that [the protests] make it very hard for him to do that now because now that plays into the regime’s hands in a way that I don’t frankly think the administration is going to want to do,” said Nephew, now working at Columbia University’s Center on Global Energy Policy.
White House spokeswoman Sarah Sanders said on Tuesday that Trump has not made a final decision on whether to waive sanctions. When asked whether the protests had changed Trump’s calculation, she replied: “Not necessarily.”
Blaming the outsiders
Ray Takeyh, an Iran expert and senior fellow at the Council on
Foreign Relations, said Iran’s leaders will blame internal troubles on the United States and other outside powers, no matter what Washington does.
“The regime’s argument that the world is against us is a constant for 38 years,” Takeyh said during a telephone interview. “The optics of waiving sanctions in the midst of all this – it just doesn’t look good.”
Takeyh and three US officials who follow Iran said the protests undercut Iranian President Hassan Rouhani, a relative moderate who took office in 2013 after pledging to improve Iran’s economy, more than they threaten the country’s clerical rulers.
John Brennan, the former director of the CIA, said in a Twitter post that the Trump administration, with its condemnation of Iran and the nuclear deal over the last year, has squandered an opportunity to bolster reformists in Iran and promote peaceful political change.
“Bluster is neither a strategy nor a mechanism for exercise of US power and influence,” Brennan tweeted.
Yet in recent days, Trump and his top aides have charted a more careful course in reacting to the demonstrations, which have led to at least 21 deaths and hundreds of arrests.
Trump in a Tweet on Tuesday called the Tehran government a “brutal and corrupt regime.” But he and other US officials have shied away from suggesting that Washington seeks an overthrow of Iran’s Islamic theocracy, calling instead for Iranian authorities to respect protesters’ rights.
In the name of democracy
State Department spokeswoman Heather Nauert on Tuesday urged Iranian security forces to exercise restraint in dealing with protests and called on Tehran to restore access to social media sites that have been restricted.
Nauert suggested the US government could impose sanctions against Iranian officials who repress peaceful protests.
Another US official said a coherent policy response to events in Iran cannot be formulated until Washington has a better understanding of the composition of the protesters, the breadth of the economic and political grievances that are driving them as well as what threat they pose to the government.
The United States has had no diplomatic presence in Iran since its 1979 Islamic Revolution, limiting its ability to interpret events.
The official, speaking on condition of anonymity, said Washington’s main effort now is to try and “get a sense of who is mostly behind this, how large it is and does it have legs.”