Iranian urges calm in face of protests
Authorities put limits on social media
After four days of protests in Iran, President Hassan Rouhani tried to calm the nation Sunday, saying that people had the right to protest and acknowledging public worries over the economy and corruption.
“We are a free nation, and based on the constitution and citizenship rights, people are completely free to express their criticism and even their protest,” Rouhani said, according to the staterun PressTV.
He exhorted Iranians not to resort to violence, after reports of protesters attacking banks and municipal buildings across the nation, including a local government building in Tehran.
“The government will definitely not tolerate those groups who are after the destruction of public property or disrupting the public order or spark riots in the society,” Rouhani said.
The protests are the first major demonstrations in Iran
since 2009, when people took to the streets to challenge the results of a presidential election that kept a hard-liner in power and was widely regarded as fraudulent. Rouhani, a moderate, came to power in 2013.
The recent unrest, which began in the northeastern city of Mashhad, initially targeted the government’s handling of the economy. But it took less than a day for the focus to expand to include the state system, including the religious establishment and state security forces close to the hard-liners.
By Saturday, unverified video footage shared on Iran’s Telegram social media site, Twitter and Instagram from several cities across the country showed demonstrators calling for the ouster of Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.
Demonstrations, which extended to at least 20 locations late last week, continued on Sunday. In Tehran, photos published by the semiofficial Fars News Agency showed police deploying water cannons where people gathered on Vali Asr junction, one of the city’s busiest thoroughfares.
With Iran’s media tightly controlled, information about the protests had been shared through social media and messaging apps. But on Sunday, it appeared that authorities were trying to limit that spread.
Iran’s state TV news website said social media in the country was being temporarily limited as a safety measure.
“With a decision by the Supreme National Security Council, activities of Telegram and Instagram are temporarily limited,” the report said, without elaborating.
Telegram’s chief executive, Pavel Durov, confirmed that the app had been blocked, posting a statement on Twitter that said, “Iranian authorities started blocking Telegram in Iran today after we publicly refused to shut down channels of peaceful Iranian protesters.”
He added: “We are proud that Telegram is used by thousands of massive opposition channels all over the world. We consider freedom of speech an undeniable human right, and would rather get blocked in a country by its authorities than limit peaceful expression of alternative opinions.”
Instagram owner Facebook, based in Menlo Park, Calif., declined to comment.
Facebook itself has been banned in Iran since the 2009 protests that followed the re-election of hard-line President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. However, some people in Iran access it and other banned websites using virtual private networks.
Rouhani and other leaders made it a point to warn that the government wouldn’t hesitate to crack down on those it considers lawbreakers amid the demonstrations.
“Those who misused cyberspace and spread violence are absolutely known to us, and we will definitely confront them,” Iranian Interior Minister Abdolreza Rahmani Fazli said on state television.
President Donald Trump, whose travel bans have blocked Iranians from getting U.S. visas, continued his criticism of the Iranian government Sunday. He posted on Twitter: “The people are finally getting wise as to how their money and wealth is being stolen and squandered on terrorism. Looks like they will not take it any longer. The USA is watching very closely for human rights violations!”
He had previously tweeted, “The world is watching!”
In an apparent response to Trump on Sunday, Rouhani said: “This man who today in America wants to sympathize with our people has forgotten that a few months ago he called the Iranian nation terrorist,” according to PressTV. “This person who is against the Iranian nation from head to toe has no right to feel sorry for the people of Iran.”
The unauthorized protests have challenged authorities, with crowds turning revolutionary slogans against the government of the Islamic Republic, which took power after a revolution in 1979.
Protesters in Tehran and elsewhere have called for the resignation of Khamenei, and witnesses described crowds chanting, “Death to the dictator” and “Clerics should get lost.”
Meanwhile, authorities acknowledged the first fatalities in the protests. Habibollah Khojastepour, the security deputy of Lorestan province’s governor, said the deaths occurred during clashes late Saturday in Dorud, about 200 miles southwest of Tehran, where protesters had gathered for an unauthorized rally.
“The gathering was to be ended peacefully, but due to the presence of the [agitators], unfortunately, this happened,” Khojastepour said.
He did not offer a cause of death for the two protesters but said that “no bullets were shot from police and security forces at the people.”
However, the reformist Etemad newspaper quoted Hamid Reza Kazemi, a Lorestan lawmaker, as saying police did open fire during the clashes.
Videos circulating on social media late Saturday appeared to show fallen protesters in Dorud as gunshots sounded in the background. At least one of the videos was verified by BBC Persian.
Several hundred protesters have been arrested so far, beginning with more than 50 in Mashhad on Thursday. The semiofficial ILNA news agency reported Sunday that authorities had arrested some 80 protesters in the city of Arak, 175 miles south of Tehran, as well as another 200 in Tehran on Saturday night.
State TV also has reported that some protesters invoked the name of the U.S.-backed shah, who fled into exile just before Iran’s 1979 Islamic Revolution and later died.
The Revolutionary Guard — whose mandate is to safeguard the Islamic Revolution — warned late Saturday that it would respond with “a hard punch” if demonstrations didn’t stop.
Protesters “must certainly know that improper behavior will be to their detriment, and the nation will come out and stand against these actions and throw a hard punch in their faces,” the Revolutionary Guard’s commander for security in Tehran, Brig. Gen. Esmail Kowsari, said in a statement carried by the semiofficial Iranian Students’ News Agency late Saturday.