WHAT more can Iran’s rulers do to squash their opponents? Since nationwide protests broke out in June over the disputed results of presidential elections, the ostensible winner of that poll, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, has pulled few punches. His security apparatus has beaten and arrested hundreds, subjected scores of dissidents to show trials, chased others into exile, throttled the press and jammed the airwaves. But as the massive, violent demonstrations that engulfed the capital, Tehran, and other cities on December 26th and 27th showed, repression seems only to deepen and broaden the opposition.
Footage of the protests, shot by phones and spread online,revealed scenes of mayhem unseen since the 1979 revolution that toppled the shah. Mobs of youths, including many women, attacked and in some cases overcame squads of riot police. The rioters, mostly unmasked in contrast to previous protests, and chanting slogans against Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Khamenei more often than against Mr Ahmadinejad, set police vehicles on fire and torched at least one police station.
Plainclothes government thugs fought back, bludgeoning isolated protesters and apparently shooting several at close range. At least eight people died in Tehran alone, including a nephew of Mir Hosein Mousavi, a former prime minister and reformist runner-up in the June election who has become a figurehead for the opposition. Opposition sources describe his killing as an execution-style operation, implying it was intended as a deliberate warning to Mr Mousavi. Kayhan, a newspaper that is a mouthpiece for regime hard-liners, countered with the charge that Mr Mousavi himself had orchestrated his nephew’s shooting.
The violence was seen as particularly shocking because the protests coincided with Ashura, a solemn day in the Shia calendar that commemorates the martyrdom of Hosein, a grandson of the prophet Muhammad. Reflecting Iran’s stark polarisation, both government supporters and opponents accused each other of desecrating the memory of Hosein. Reflecting a fear of generating new martyrs to fuel further protests, security forces saturated Tehran’s cemeteries, and took possession of the bodies of those killed, preventing their immediate burial in accordance with Islamic rites.
State news agencies say police arrested more than 1,000 protesters during the riots. Dozens more opposition activists have been jailed in the days since, in a dramatic widening of the purge against reformists that began in June. They include luminaries such as 78-year-old Ibrahim Yazdi, the Islamic Republic’s first foreign minister and current head of a banned liberal party, as well as numerous close relatives of prominent dissidents, including a sister of Shireen Ebadi, a Nobel Prize-winning human-rights lawyer. This is a tactic that has often been used in Iran as a means of pressuring prominent people, without stoking more public anger by detaining them directly. So far, the authorities have refrained from arresting opposition figureheads such as Mr Mousavi himself, but waves of detentions have swept up many of their close associates.
As in the past, conservatives have blamed foreign powers for supposedly stirring up the protests. Yet with the clashes continuing over six months despite Iran’s increasing isolation from the world, this charge appears to carry ever less weight with the public. On the contrary, the government’s tactics, accompanied by silence from Mr Khamenei and the increasingly ungloved intervention of the Revolutionary Guards, the elite military corps that commands the plainclothes baseej militia used for crowd control, seem to reflect a growing sense of desperation.
Signs of the regime’s fading legitimacy are numerous. In December, for instance, the head of Iran’s central bank issued a stern warning that beginning on January 7th, it would no longer accept bank notes defaced by “extra words”. In practice, this would mean taking millions of notes out of circulation, following a quiet campaign by oppositionists to mark them with anti-regime slogans. Enraged citizens in the provincial town of Rafsanjan recently took the law into their own hands, and rescued two condemned criminals from a scaffold in a city square, in a telling rebuke to Mr Ahmadinejad’s reintroduction of public executions, a punishment that has proliferated.
More embarrassing still for a regime that describes itself as Islamic is the government’s treatment of dissident clerics, including senior ayatollahs. The most high-ranking of these was Grand Ayatollah Hosein Montazeri, a close associate of the Islamic Republic’s founding father, Ayatollah Khomeini, who fell out of favour shortly before Mr Khomeni’s death in 1989. Placed under house arrest for a decade, Mr Montazeri continued to critique the government, and sided openly with reformists following the June elections.
Despite his isolation, Mr Montazeri remained popular, and his death provided yet another occasion for protest. Rather than risk demonstrations, the government saturated an official funeral ceremony with baseej agents, and banned funeral rites elsewhere, sparking clashes in several cities. In recent days, baseej forces have surrounded the homes of two other dissident ayatollahs, in a blunt effort to block them from becoming focuses for protest.
Perhaps worse yet for Iran’s government, its troubles at home have complicated its foreign policy, at a time when pressure is rising over its controversial nuclear programme. Western countries that had shied from too strong a condemnation of Iran’s human-rights record, for fear of empowering nationalists and threatening nuclear diplomacy, have lost patience. Even the harsher pragmatists among Iran’s friends, such as Russia and China, may come to fear that their longer term, potentially lucrative interests in Iran may be damaged by too close an embrace of the current regime.
Source: Economist
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