Ayatollah: Protests acts of ‘enemies’
‘U.S. watching’ Iran, Trump tweets
TEHRAN, Iran — Breaking his silence over nationwide protests that included calls for his ouster, Iran’s supreme leader on Tuesday blamed the demonstrations on “enemies of Iran,” saying they were meddling in its internal affairs.
The remarks by Ayatollah Ali Khamenei on the demonstrations — the largest seen in Iran since its disputed 2009 presidential election — came after a bloody night that saw protesters try to storm a police station and the first deaths among its security forces. The unrest has killed at least 21 people in the past six days.
The protests began Thursday in Mashhad over the weak economy and a jump in food prices. They have since expanded to cities and towns in nearly every province. Hundreds have
been arrested, and a prominent judge warned that some could face the death penalty.
Speaking to black-chadorclad women who were relatives of veterans and war dead, the 78-year-old Khamenei warned of an enemy “waiting for an opportunity, for a crack through which it can infiltrate.”
“Look at the recent days’ incidents,” he said. “All those who are at odds with the Islamic Republic have utilized various means, including money, weapons, politics and [the] intelligence apparatus, to create problems for the Islamic system, the Islamic Republic and the Islamic Revolution.”
Khamenei avoided identifying any foreign countries, although he promised to elaborate in the coming days. Undoubtedly high on his list is the U.S., where President Donald Trump has tweeted his support for the protests for several days.
On Tuesday, he wrote that “the people of Iran are finally acting against the brutal and corrupt Iranian regime.”
“All of the money that President Obama so foolishly gave them went into terrorism and into their ‘pockets,’” Trump wrote, apparently referring to the nuclear deal reached under his predecessor. “The people have little food, big inflation and no human rights. The U.S. is watching!”
It is unclear what effect Trump’s tweets are having on the protests. Iran’s state TV reported on his tweets in its news broadcasts, and some people have shared them online, but many in Iran distrust him because he has refused to re-certify the 2015 nuclear deal and his travel bans have blocked Iranians from getting U.S. visas.
Bahram Ghasemi, Iran’s Foreign Ministry spokesman, urged Trump to stop tweeting and focus on his own country’s problems.
“It is better for him to try to address the U.S.’ internal issues like the murder of scores killed on a daily basis in the United States during armed clashes and shootings, as well as millions of the homeless and hungry people in the country,” Ghasemi said, according to the state-run Islamic Republic News Agency.
U.S. CALLS ON U.N.
The U.S. government called for the U.N. Security Council and U.N. Human Rights Council to hold emergency meetings on Iran, with the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations saying the world body “must speak” on the issue.
“Nowhere is the urgency of peace, security and freedom being tested more than in Iran,” U.S. Ambassador Nikki Haley said, adding that U.S. officials “applaud the tremendous courage of the Iranian people.”
Haley said the U.S. would be calling for emergency sessions in the coming days. Ambassador Kairat Umarov of Kazakhstan, whose country currently holds the Security Council presidency, said the requested meeting was under discussion but not yet scheduled.
Khamenei, who has final say over all state matters, has blamed foreign adversaries for domestic unrest in the past. In 2009, as Green Movement demonstrations rattled his government, he said the postelection unrest was calculated by Iran’s enemies “whether or not its leaders know.”
Iran does have foreign adversaries: Gulf Arab nations have been watching the protests carefully, with Saudi-funded satellite channels in particular playing up the unrest. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, long a foe, has praised the protesters.
Iranian President Hassan Rouhani said the exiled opposition group known as the Mujahedeen-e-Khalq was inciting the violence. According to his website, Rouhani spoke by telephone with his French counterpart, Emmanuel Macron, and urged France to stop hosting the opposition group, which fled after Iran’s 1979 Islamic Revolution.
The protests began over the economy, which has improved since Iran struck a deal in 2015 to limit its enrichment of uranium in exchange for the end of some international sanctions. Tehran now sells its oil on the global market and has signed deals to purchase tens of billions of dollars’ worth of Western aircraft.
Yet that improvement has not reached the average Iranian. Unemployment remains high, and official inflation has crept up to 10 percent again.
The Trump administration meanwhile has been considering imposing fresh sanctions against the Islamic Republic, as the U.S. president seized on the crisis to justify his long-standing opposition to the 2015 nuclear agreement.
Trump met Tuesday with Vice President Mike Pence and members of his national security team to discuss the protests amid deliberations already under way about reimposing suspended sanctions or adding new ones, according to two White House officials who asked not to be identified discussing internal deliberations.
The meeting came about 10 days before Trump must decide whether to continue waiving sanctions that were lifted under the nuclear deal.
“We certainly keep our options open” on adding to U.S. sanctions, White House press secretary Sarah Sanders told reporters Tuesday.
The crisis gives Trump an opportunity to pressure critics of his approach to Iran and the nuclear accord, which he has long criticized as the “worst deal ever.” And by publicly praising protesters, Trump is also separating himself from the approach President Barack Obama took to the street demonstrations that followed the 2009 Iranian elections. At the time, the Obama administration said too much American support for protesters would only delegitimize their cause.
Counselor to the president Kellyanne Conway made that point directly on Tuesday, telling Fox News that Trump “doesn’t want to remain silent the way too many people were silent in 2009.”
IRAN BANS TELEGRAM APP
Analysts suggest the protests starting in Mashhad mean conservatives pushed them forward as a way to challenge Rouhani, a relatively moderate cleric whose administration struck the nuclear deal.
The apparently leaderless protests, fanned in part by a messaging app called Telegram, then grew beyond their control to include violent confrontations, analysts say.
The government has since shut down access to Telegram and the photo-sharing app Instagram, which now join Facebook and Twitter in being banned.
The Trump administration called on Iran’s government to stop blocking Instagram and other popular social media sites. U.S. Undersecretary of State Steve Goldstein said Instagram, Telegram and other platforms are “legitimate avenues for communication.”
Iranians seeking to evade the blocks can use virtual private networks, Goldstein said. Known as VPNs, the services create encrypted data “tunnels” between computers and can be used to access overseas websites blocked by the local government.
Early Tuesday, Iran state TV reported that rioters tried to break into a police station in the town of Qahdarijan to steal guns, leading to clashes that killed six people. Two more were killed in the town of Khomeinishahr, while a member of Iran’s paramilitary Revolutionary Guard and a police officer were killed in the town of Najafabad, according to local media.
The towns are all in the central province of Isfahan, about 215 miles south of Tehran.
Rouhani and others have warned that the government wouldn’t hesitate to crack down on those it considers lawbreakers. None of the protest rallies so far have received permission from the Interior Ministry, making them illegal.
In Tehran alone, 450 protesters have been arrested in the last three days, the semiofficial Iranian Labour News Agency reported Tuesday. So far, authorities have not released a nationwide figure for arrests.
The head of Tehran’s Revolutionary Court also reportedly warned that arrested protesters could face the death penalty.
“Obviously one of their charges can be Moharebeh,” or waging war against God, Iran’s semiofficial Tasnim news agency quoted Mousa Ghazanfarabadi as saying. Moharebeh is punishable by death in Iran. Information for this article was contributed by Nasser Karimi, Jon Gambrell, Amir Vahdat, Jennifer Peltz and Josh Lederman of The Associated Press; by Erin Cunningham of The Washington Post; and by Golnar Motevalli and Margaret Talev of Bloomberg News.