Iran Rises Again
I confess that I’d written off the Iranian protest movement for this year, but I was wrong: the movement actually appears to be spreading to new places and attracting support beyond its traditional base among the students.
Large-scale protests spread in central Iranian cities Wednesday, offering the starkest evidence yet that the opposition movement that emerged from the disputed June presidential election has expanded beyond its base of mostly young, educated Tehran residents to at least some segments of the country’s pious heartland.
Demonstrations took place in Esfahan, a provincial capital and Iran’s cultural center, and nearby Najafabad, the birthplace and hometown of Ayatollah Hossein Ali Montazeri, whose death Saturday triggered the latest round of confrontations between the opposition movement and the government.
The central region is considered by some as the conservative power base of the hard-liners in power.
Iranian authorities are clearly alarmed by the spread of the protests. Mojtaba Zolnour, a mid-ranking cleric serving as supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei’s representative to the elite and powerful Revolutionary Guard, acknowledged widespread unrest around the country.
“There were many [acts of] sedition after the Islamic Revolution,” he said, according to the website of the right-wing newspaper Resala. “But none of them spread the seeds of doubt and hesitation among various social layers as much as the recent one.” [L.A. Times, Ramin Mostaghim and Borzou Daragahi]
The regime’s latest move, the arrest of opposition activists, strikes me as the act of a regime in panic. It seems like something that would inflame, rather than suppress, protest.
Sunday’s violence erupted when security forces fired on stone-throwing protesters in the center of Tehran. Opposition Web sites and witnesses said five people were killed, but Iran’s state-run Press TV, quoting the Supreme National Security Council, said the death toll was eight. It gave no further details. The dead included a nephew of Mousavi, according to Mousavi’s Web site, Kaleme.ir. Police denied using firearms. [AP, Ali Akbar Dareini]
Every death means another political funeral for another political martyr.
When I watch events in Iran, I scour the usual news sources, of course, but I also watch Pejman Yousefzadah’s blog — Pejman is originally from Iran — and of course, some of the YouTube channels that show us what traditional media can’t anymore:
Crowds as large and as energetic as these suggest a movement that won’t be suppressed easily. I wonder if the security forces can maintain their cohesion as long as the protesters can maintain their courage.
The North Korean connection? Substantial, of course. Iran is probably the largest single customer of North Korean weapons, and the financier of what North Korea sells to Syria, Hezbollah, Hamas, and other places. The fall of the Iranian regime would shatter the Axis of Evil. It would be a devastating blow to the North Korean regime’s finances and expose more North Korean proliferation efforts in Iran, where numerous North Korean scientists currently reside doing God-knows-what. It would open the way for a negotiated end to Iran’s nuclear program, allowing a greater focus on containing North Korea. It would help to stabilize Iraq and Afghanistan, and it would reinvigorate the advance of representative government in the Middle East. It would strip Hezbollah, Syria, and Iraqi Shiite militias of a source of weapons and funding, also shifting more of our diplomatic attention to North Korea.