Ebadi to Iranians: Keep up protests
dubai — Iranian Nobel Peace laureate Shirin Ebadi has 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 pro-reform unrest in 2009.
The pan-Arab daily Asharq Al Awsat quoted Iran’s most famous human rights lawyer as saying Iranians should stay on the street and that the constitution gives them the right to protest.
Iran’s elite Revolutionary Guards have deployed forces to three provinces to put down anti-government unrest after six days of protests that have rattled the clerical leadership and killed 21 people.
The protests, which began over economic hardships suffered by the young and working class, have evolved into a rising against the powers and privileges of a remote elite, especially supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.
The demonstrations seem to be spontaneous and without a clear leader, cropping up in working-class neighbourhoods and smaller cities, but the movement also seems to be gaining traction among the educated middle class and activists who took part in the 2009 protests
Ebadi called on Iranians to stop paying water, gas and electricity bills and taxes and to withdraw their money from state banks to exert economic pressure on the government and so force it to stop resorting to violence and 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,” Asharq Al Awsat quoted Ebadi as saying in
Stop paying water, gas and electricity bills and taxes. if the government has not listened to you for 38 years your role has come to ignore what the government says to you now Shirin Ebadi, Nobel Peace laureate
an interview. Ebadi, awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 2003, is one of a number of exiled critics of Iran’s leadership.
Meanwhile, Iran’s army chief declared on Thursday that police had already quelled anti-government unrest but that his troops were ready to intervene if needed.
“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 (United States),” Major General Abdolrahim Mousavi was quoted in official media as saying.
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.
In a sign of official concern about the resilience of the protests, Revolutionary Guards commander Major General Mohammed Ali Jafari said he had sent forces to Hamadan, Isfahan and Lorestan provinces to tackle “the new sedition”.
Most of the casualties among protesters have occurred in those regions of the sprawling country.
The Guards were instrumental in suppressing an uprising over alleged election fraud in 2009 in which dozens of mainly middle-class protesters were killed. —