Green movement protesters defied official warnings and paramilitary violence to demonstrate against the regime today.
Police and paramilitary militia failed to halt the latest wave of anti-government demonstrations today, as Green movement supporters again hijacked an officially-sanctioned day of protest to denounce the regime.
Taking advantage of the official Students Day, the fourth time opposition groups have exploited official holidays, thousands of demonstrators shouted “Death to the dictator!” and “What happened to the oil revenue? It went into the pockets of the Basiji!”
Security forces fired live rounds and tear gas, but video footage of the demonstrations confirms that thousands defied official warnings to attend rallies, sit-ins and protest marches in Tehran and other major cities.
“Don’t be afraid! Don’t be afraid!” protesters chanted. “We are all together.”
The security forces detained 23 members of a protest group, Mourning Mothers of Iran, including the mother of Neda Agha-Soltan, the “Angel of Freedom” shot by Basiji militia while demonstrating against Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s re-election in June.
Green movement leader Mir Hossein Mousavi warned the regime’s leadership that repression would not stop the growing protest movement.
“You fight people on the streets, but you are constantly losing your dignity in people’s minds,” the former premier wrote on his Kaleme.com Web site. “Even if you silence all the universities, what are you going to do with the society?”
“Student movements are signs of realities greater than themselves,” he wrote. “Our society is now experiencing the strangest changes.”
The authorities disrupted Internet and cell phone connections in an attempt to stifle communications between protesters. “The network in central Tehran and near Tehran university is completely down,” one website reported.
The day usually commemorates three students killed by Shah Mohamed Reza Pahlavi’s security forces on December 7, 1953, as they protested the dismissal of prime minister Mohammed Mossadegh.
Protesters converted the regime’s militant Islamist slogans into secular democratic demands. The Islamic Revolution’s revolutionary slogan “Estaghlal, Azadi, Jomhuriye Eslami” (Independence, Freedom, Islamic Republic) is changed to “Estaghlal, Azadi, Jomhuriye Irani” (Independence, Freedom, Iranian Republic) in an explicit call for a secular state and individual liberties.
The state-funded Press TV tried to ignore the protests but issued a report claiming that “anti-government protesters have attempted to hijack the occasion” of Student Day but “their efforts were foiled by anti-riot forces”.
Rumors of growing tensions within the security services appeared to be confirmed by open conflicts between the regular police and the paramilitary Basij militia. “The Basij seem to have gotten a free hand,” a witness said. “The police are not doing much, but the Basij are arresting people and hitting demonstrators with chains and sticks.”
Some elements of the Basiji and the Revolutionary Guards are known to sympathize with the Green Movement and to have relatives amongst those killed or detained by the regime.
The protests confirm that the Green movement has regained some of its momentum. While there is little prospect of a dramatic democratic breakthrough along the lines of a color revolution, the opposition remains resilient and is settling into a long-term strategy of attrition.
“The opposition movement is not in any way a passing phase, it is a permanent part of the political dynamic inside Iran,” Geneive Abdo, said today. “People are in this for the long term,” said the editor of Inside Iran.
Reformist cleric Mehdi Karoubi defended today’s street protests and cautioned the regime against intensifying repression. While many opposition elements want to see an end to the Islamic Republic, Karoubi and Mousavi aspire to save the system by reforming it.
“The solution to arrive at reconciliation is tolerance and acceptance of criticism. We need to work to restore the trust between the authorities and the people,” he told the French daily Le Monde.
“We have to work on restoring confidence between the people and authorities. Some fundamentalists, the more moderate ones, share this view but unfortunately they don’t have a lot of power.”
“Certain people don’t want to yield at all, and hold on to everything,” he said, suggesting that moderates on both sides sought national reconciliation, but hard-line regime elements were vetoing dialogue.
The Green movement encompassed all those who felt that “two basic principles of the regime, the Republic and Islam, have been turned on their head.”
The protest movement has adapted to the regime’s crackdown and to the limitations of its professed leadership by rejecting centralized leadership in favor of a flat, decentralized organization.
“Communication is all through [personal] networking — they have adjusted so that they do not make decisions as a single group,” says Ali Akbar Mousavi-Khoeini, a former leader of the country’s principal student organization.
“They have changed to do networking activities, so that decision-making is not longer taking place at a top level,” he says. “The decision-making process has changed to avoid having to meet and vote.”
The regime is deeply divided on a range of policy issues and appears incapable of giving a coherent response to Western overtures to resolve the issue of Iran’s nuclear aspirations.
Hard-line elements are convinced that the opposition is part of a Western conspiracy. Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei recently told a Basiji rally that the regime’s enemies were using “soft war - a war using cultural tools, infiltration, lies, rumor-mongering” to overthrow the Islamic republic.
“They use advanced tools that exist today, communications tools that did not exist 10, 15, 30 years ago,” he said.
The Revolutionary Guards’ Brigadier General Masoud Jazayeri, recently called for “a system to retaliate against the psychological war that has been launched by our enemies” and described overseas supporters of the Green Movement as “foreign extensions of a soft coup”.
The Green movement will likely now focus its mobilizing efforts on Ashura – 27 December – the 10th day of the sacred Muslim month of Muharram, held in remembrance of the martyred Shia Imam, Hussein, grandson of the Muslim prophet.
Today’s demonstrations have prompted renewed demands for the democratic West, and the Obama administration in particular, to make democracy and human rights a more central and overt priority of its currently abortive attempts to engage Tehran.
The Green movement in the streets of Iran is reminiscent of the Gdansk shipyards in 1979 Poland. Americans came to the aid of the Poles in many ways then, none more important than our public declaration of support and solidarity. Imagine the world’s response had the Soviet surrogates begun killing shipyard workers, arresting their families who subsequently disappeared.
The time for official American public support of the courageous Iranian Green opposition is now. Perhaps the U.S. students and women will lead the way in speaking out, standing with their Iranian counterparts to get Washington to act in support.
Further silence from America can no longer be rationalized as soft-shoe diplomacy; at some point, we become accessories, albeit after the fact, to murder. The streets of Iran have called to us; America and our President need to answer.
[...] and they are the largest demonstrations since this summer. Michael Allen of Democracy Digest quotes insideIran’s Geneive Abdo, who contends the protests show, “the opposition movement [...]