In streets again, Iranians call on ayatollah to go
Iran’s leaders were confronted by unauthorized protests in major cities for the third-straight day Saturday, with crowds aiming their anger at the supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, and some demanding that he step down.
Demonstrators protesting price increases and high unemployment turned out in cities and towns across the country, defying police and voicing anger at the cleric-ruled government.
Officials warned Saturday that citizens should stay away from “illegal gatherings,” even as protests spread to new regions.
The demonstrators first took to the streets of Mash-
had, one of the holiest places in Shiite Islam, on Thursday. By Saturday, dozens of people had been arrested and police had fired tear gas to disperse crowds.
On Saturday night, the protests turned violent, with at least two demonstrators shot in the western town of Dorud, according to a series of videos posted on social media. At least one of the videos was verified by BBC Persian. It could not be determined who was responsible for the gunfire.
The protests, which broke out over declining economic conditions, corruption and a lack of personal freedoms, presented a serious challenge to the government of President Hassan Rouhani, who won re-election on promises to revitalize the economy.
Officials and state media outlets made a point Saturday of saying Iranians have the right to protest and have their voices heard on social issues.
However, protesters in Tehran on Saturday chanted against high-ranking government officials and made other political statements, according to the semiofficial Fars news agency.
The angry crowds turned out on the same day that an annual pro-government rally took place in Tehran to commemorate counterdemonstrations against those who had challenged the re-election of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad as president in 2009.
But the pro-government rallies, planned for 1,200 cities and towns, according to the state media, were overshadowed in intensity by protesters in Tehran shouting, “Death to the dictator” and “Clerics should get lost,” witnesses said.
Others chanted: “Shame on you, Seyyed Ali Khamenei,” using an honorific for the supreme leader. “Let the country go.” Some protesters burned a banner with an image of his face.
The demonstrations appear to be the largest showing in the Islamic Republic since the 2009 protests.
Video on social media Saturday showed Iranians directly calling for Khamenei to step down, and also chanting, “Referendum, referendum, this is the slogan of the people.” After the 1979 revolution, the Islamic Republic was established with a referendum.
Overtly political demonstrations are rare in Iran, where security services are omnipresent, and officials called on the crowds to halt them.
The Interior Ministry urged Iranians on Saturday “not to participate in these illegal gatherings as they will create problems for themselves and other citizens,” according to the BBC.
The Revolutionary Guards, which along with its Basij militia spearheaded a crackdown against protesters in 2009, said in a statement carried Saturday by state media outlets that efforts were underway to replicate that unrest, and that Iran “will not allow the country to be hurt.”
Later in the evening, police fired tear gas to disperse crowds protesting at Tehran’s central Vali-e Asr Square, a witness said.
“Young people are angry and frustrated, without a hope in the future,” said Nader Karimi Juni, a reformist journalist. “If they join these small groups of determined students, there could be a real problem.”
SUPPORT FROM TRUMP
President Donald Trump tweeted support for the protesters, saying the government should respect the people’s right to express themselves.
“The entire world understands that the good people of Iran want change, and, other than the vast military power of the United States, that Iran’s people are what their leaders fear the most….” he tweeted. “Oppressive regimes cannot endure forever, and the day will come when the Iranian people will face a choice. The world is watching!”
The State Department issued a statement Friday supporting the protests.
“Iran’s leaders have turned a wealthy country with a rich history and culture into an economically depleted rogue state whose chief exports are violence, bloodshed and chaos,” the statement said.
A spokesman for the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Bahram Ghasemi, condemned the statements as “meddlesome” and “opportunistic.”
The protests in the Iranian capital, as well as Trump’s tweets about them, raised the stakes. They also apparently forced state television to break its silence, acknowledging it hadn’t reported on them on orders from security officials.
“Counterrevolution groups and foreign media are continuing their organized efforts to misuse the people’s economic and livelihood problems and their legitimate demands to provide an opportunity for unlawful gatherings and possibly chaos,” state TV said.
State television broadcast images of the protests Saturday, acknowledging that some people were chanting the name of Iran’s one-time shah, who fled into exile before the 1979 Islamic Revolution.
As some social media users called for more anti-government rallies in Tehran and other cities later Saturday, demonstrations broke out in cities like Karaj and Zanjan, where a crowd tore down a billboard with a portrait of Khamenei.
On Saturday night, the messaging app Telegram closed the account of the Iranian channel Amad News after government officials complained directly to the company’s chief executive that the channel was encouraging violence.
The messaging app is widely used in the country, and some analysts said the protesters were organized in part on the platform and others like it.
Mohammad-Javad Azari Jahromi, Iran’s minister of information and communications technology, in a tweet urged the head of Telegram, Pavel Durov, to shut down the channel.
The channel was shut down, and Durov offered an explanation, also on Twitter, saying that Amad News had
broken the messaging app’s rules against encouraging violence.
Early Saturday afternoon, about 30 students standing behind the fences of Tehran University shouted at passers-by, asking them to join in the protest, witnesses said. The students chanted a slogan against both reformists and hard-liners: “This is the end of their adventure,” meaning the Islamic Republic.
The Fars news agency tweeted a response, saying that “opportunists are trying to raise unrest in front of Tehran University.”
Security forces arrested a few people from a crowd of hundreds that had gathered on sidewalks in the capital. Some protesters threw stones.
U.S. GETS BLAME
Rouhani’s re-election has emboldened Iranians seeking change. But his pledges to improve the economy have been hampered by the cumulative effect of sanctions and decades of government mismanagement.
At the pro-government rally, one demonstrator, Ali Ahmadi, 27, blamed the United States for Iran’s economic problems.
“They always say that we are supporting Iranian people, but who should pay the costs?” he said.
Mohsen Araki, a Shiite cleric who serves in Iran’s Assembly of Experts, praised Rouhani’s efforts at improving the economy. However, he said Rouhani needed to do more to challenge “enemy pressures.”
“We must go back to the pre-nuclear deal situation,” Araki said. “The enemy has not kept with its commitments.”
That agreement with the United States and five other world powers curbed Iran’s nuclear program in exchange for providing relief from international sanctions. But rampant corruption, problems in the banking sector, and unilateral U.S. sanctions have hindered the country’s economic advance.
Iran’s economy has improved since the nuclear deal, though. Tehran now sells its oil on the global market and has signed deals for tens of billions of dollars of Western aircraft.
But that improvement has not reached the average Iranian. Unemployment remains high. Official inflation has crept up to 10 percent again. A recent increase in egg and poultry prices by as much as 40 percent, which a government spokesman has blamed on a cull over avian-flu fears, appears to have been the spark for the economic protests, analysts said.
In addition, Rouhani’s proposed budget released this month called for slashing cash subsidies to the poor and increasing fuel prices. New and added fees for things like car registration and an unpopular departure tax sparked fierce public debate.
When the unauthorized protests began Thursday in Mashhad, a city of 2 million in the northeast, some protesters shouted, “Death to Rouhani.”
Vice President Eshaq Jahangiri, a reformist ally of the president, said that hard-line conservative opponents of Rouhani might have galvanized the first protests but lost control of them.
“Those who are behind such events will burn their own fingers,” state media quoted him as saying.
Overtly political demonstrations are rare in Iran, where security services are omnipresent, and officials called on the crowds to halt them.
Information for this article was contributed by Thomas Erdbrink of The New York Times; by Amir Vahdat and Jon Gambrell of The Associated Press; and by Erin Cunningham of The Washington Post.