Army commander offers to help police crush agitations
Nobel peace laureate Ebadi urges Iranians to keep up demonstrations
DUBAI: Iranian Nobel Peace laureate Shirin Ebadi urged the people of Iran to engage in civil disobedience and press on with nationwide protests that are posing the boldest challenge to its leaders since proreform unrest in 2009.
Asharq Al-Awsat quoted Iran’s most famous human rights lawyer as saying Iranians should stay on the street and that the constitution gave them the right to hold demonstrations.
Following six days of protests that have rattled the clerical leadership and killed 21 people, the country’s elite Revolutionary Guards on Wednesday deployed forces to quell unrest in three provinces.
The anti-government demonstrations, which seem to be spontaneous and without a clear leader, began in working-class neighborhoods and smaller cities but seem also to be gaining traction among the educated middle class and activists who took part in the 2009 protests.
London-based Ebadi, awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 2003 and one of a number of exiled critics of Iran’s leadership, called on Iranians to stop paying water, gas and electricity bills and taxes.
She also urged them to withdraw their money from state banks to exert economic pressure on the regime and so force it to stop resorting to violence and to meet their demands.
“If the government has not listened to you for 38 years, your role has come to ignore what the government says to you now,” the Londonbased Asharq Al-Awsat quoted Ebadi as saying in an interview.
The unrest has drawn sharply varied responses internationally, with Europeans expressing unease at the delighted reaction by US and Israeli leaders to the display of opposition to Iran’s clerical establishment.
Iran’s army chief said on Thursday police forces had already quelled anti-government unrest that has killed 21 people but that his troops were ready to intervene if needed, official media reported.
“Although this blind sedition was so small that a portion of the police force was able to nip it in the bud... you can rest assured that your comrades in the Islamic Republic’s army would be ready to confront the dupes of the Great Satan (US),” Maj. Gen. Abdolrahim Mousavi was quoted as saying.
As the unrest spread across the country, protesters saying they were tired of anti-Western slogans and that it was time for both the clerical leadership and the government of President Hassan Rouhani to step down.
Following six days of demonstrations, the elite Revolutionary Guards Corps said on Wednesday that it had deployed forces to quell unrest in three provinces where most of the trouble had occurred.
That was the clearest sign yet that authorities were taking the protests seriously.
The Revolutionary Guards, the sword and shield of Iran’s Shiite theocracy, were instrumental in suppressing an uprising over alleged election fraud in 2009 in which dozens were killed.
“I don’t want to harm my country but when I see those who run this country are so corrupt, I feel like I am being suffocated. They just talk. They accuse ‘the enemies’ of everything,” said protester Reza, 43, a father of three in the city of Isfahan.
“I am not an enemy. I am an Iranian. I love my country. Stop stealing my money, my children’s money,” he told Reuters by telephone
Iran charged Wednesday that the US “has crossed every limit” in international relations by expressing support for protesters and said President Donald Trump’s “absurd tweets” have encouraged disruption.