Mullahs' terror regime will be gone in one year

Aftenposten Norwegian daily

December 3, 2009

(Translated from original Norwegian text to English)

The Iranian Resistance movement is optimistic about the future: The revolt in Iran last summer made a regime change achievable and not just a matter for political visionaries. After the movement was driven out of the country in the wake of the Islamic revolution in 1979-80, it has lived in exile. Now it can see the possibility of returning home.

“I hope that the next time I give an interview to Aftenposten, will be in Tehran,” said Maryam Rajavi smiling to Aftenposten's reporter and photographer. The charismatic female leader of the movement People's Mujahedin of Iran and National Council of Resistance of Iran is in Norway to talk with Norwegian politicians about the situation of several thousand supporters who are in a camp in Iraq, near Iranian border. Today she was received by the Parliament's Foreign Affairs Committee, and tomorrow she will meet a number of parliamentary representatives who are interested in the situation in Iran.

 

Like a Queen

A meeting with Maryam Rajavi is always special: The movement she leads has for decades been pursued either by the Shah's secret police or the mullahs’ regime aggressive troops. Thousands of the movement's followers have been jailed and killed. To keep Western countries away from the group has been for years a priority target for Iranian foreign policy.

Today, it is difficult to say how much support the movement has inside Iran. But outside the country, the group has appeared as a competing state apparatus to the mullah regime, with Maryam Rajavi as the movement's leader and public face.

That Maryam Rajavi is a special leader, is something that you can realize when you meet her, she speaks with tremendous enthusiasm about the situation in her country. In the great circle of accompanying supporters, she stands at the center point. There is no queen like her, both in the way she acts and the way the fans associate with her.

 

Female

Not least, it is especially that she is a female leader in a political movement that aims to take power in a Muslim country. When we get into the role of women in society, she becomes even more involved:

“Women play an important role at all levels of our movement. Women have been at the forefront of opposition to the mullah regime," she says. In the new Iran there must be an end to discrimination against women, once and for all. Therefore, it is inspiring to come to you in Scandinavia, she said.

But it is the situation in the Ashraf camp in Iraq that is closest to her heart.

“This summer, the regime caused a bloodbath in Iraq in Ashraf. The regime has set the 15th December as a deadline to clear the camp. We fear for the massacre and an endless variety of human tragedies against the 3,500 who live there.

Norway is a country with a strong voice in the world. I appeal to you Norwegians, as strongly as I can, to take up this issue in all international forums as far as you can. One must not turn away from what is happening, "she says.

 

Threat

Time and again she talks about the mullah regime in Tehran, and the threat she believes it poses to world peace.

“What is happening is that a fanatical, fundamentalist Islamic regime is on the verge of obtaining nuclear weapons. The West has proved to be naive and seeking appeasement. Under the guise of negotiations mullahs have only continued the process to produce nuclear weapons. Mullahs have reason to smile. The tactic has so far been successful,” she says.

But the uprising in Iran in summer and autumn is about to overturn the game, believes Maryam Rajavi: “Fear of mullahs’ suppression has disappeared. The countdown has begun. I do not think the regime has more than one year left to live,” she says.

 

Iranian Students Clash With Police

The New York Times

By Robert Worth and Nazila Fathi

December 8, 2009

Thousands of people rallied against the government on Monday at universities across Iran, defying a wide-ranging effort to suppress the protests and bringing a new ferocity to the opposition movement’s confrontation with the state.

The protests, taking place on National Student Day, set off battles in and around campuses, witnesses said. Protesters hurled rocks and set fires amid clouds of tear gas, while a vast deployment of police officers and plainclothes Basij militia members used chains, truncheons and stun guns to beat back chanting protesters.

There were reports of dozens of arrests and injuries. Many witnesses said the day’s confrontations were the most violent since the rallies after last June’s disputed presidential election.

The protests — the opposition’s first major street showing in more than a month — also included the most aggressive gestures aimed at the Islamic republic yet, witnesses said, with some protesters burning posters of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the country’s supreme leader.

Other marchers carried an Iranian flag from which the signature emblem of Allah — added after Iran’s 1979 Islamic Revolution — had been removed. At Sharif University in Tehran, protesters could be seen on a video clip posted on YouTube chanting “death to the oppressor, whether shah or supreme leader.”

The authorities had barricaded and surrounded universities in an effort to forestall dissent on an official holiday commemorating the killing of three students by the shah’s forces in 1953. They arrested dozens of student leaders, ordered foreign news outlets to stay away and reduced the Internet to a trickle to limit the opposition’s main link to its supporters.

Nevertheless, large crowds of university students gathered on campuses across Iran on Monday morning, many holding banners or wearing armbands in the opposition’s trademark bright-green, to chant “God is great!” and “Death to the dictator!” Twitter and opposition Web sites featured video clips of rallies in Tehran, Mashhad, Isfahan, Tabriz and other cities.

One video showed hundreds of students at Amirkabir University of Technology in Tehran waving bank notes in the air to ridicule the Basij members, who are officially volunteers but who are widely said to receive money for cracking down on protesters. Another video showed students breaking down the university’s front gates, which the authorities had locked to prevent the protests from spreading.

Another group of protesters near Tehran University waved a Russian flag at the police and then set it on fire, in a gesture mocking the Iranian government’s ritual anti-Americanism. Russia was quick to recognize Mr. Ahmadinejad as president after the election, prompting protests from opposition supporters, who believe the election was stolen through extensive fraud.

The renewed protests come at a delicate time for Iran’s government, which recently rejected an international proposal to transport the country’s uranium abroad for processing. On Sunday, Ayatollah Khamenei lashed out angrily at the United States and Britain, warning that they “will launch propaganda to say there is division” inside Iran.

Web sites reported that the opposition leaders Mir Hussein Moussavi and Mehdi Karroubi had been blocked from attending the protests. When Mr. Moussavi’s wife, Zahra Rahnavard, arrived at Tehran University’s art school, where she is a professor, female Basij members harassed her and attacked her and her entourage with pepper spray as they left, opposition Web sites reported, citing witnesses.

Faezeh Hashemi, the daughter of former President Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, could be seen at the protests in Tehran on one video clip. She was later detained, opposition Web sites said.

Mr. Rafsanjani and Mr. Moussavi issued strong criticisms of the government over the weekend. Mr. Moussavi, the leading challenger to Mr. Ahmadinejad in the June elections, issued a statement on Sunday saying that the opposition movement was “still alive” and that the authorities would not be able to stop the protests by arresting students.

Mr. Rafsanjani, a pragmatic figure who provided crucial support to the opposition over the summer but has been silent lately, criticized the government on Sunday for using the Basij militia and the Revolutionary Guards against crowds, and complained that “constructive criticism is not tolerated in the country.”

Iran’s official IRNA news agency, which had played down protests during two national holidays in September and November, took a different tack on Monday, broadcasting images of street fires and angry youths that suggested that the protests were nothing more than riots by hooligans. That message was in keeping with the government’s new emphasis on fighting the opposition through the news media.

But the government itself relied on large numbers of Basij militia members who often seemed to get out of control, hurling rocks at protesters and attacking passers-by. According to one report widely circulated on Iranian Web sites, a group of militia members with chains and truncheons attacked a bus full of riot police officers. It was not clear why they would have done so.

On Monday morning, police officers were deployed in huge numbers around universities across the country to forestall the expected protests. At the gate of Tehran University, temporary fencing blocked off much of the main square, and hundreds of officers stood guard. A banner at least 150 feet long had been placed on scaffolding over the university gate. The gate was emblazoned with large festive letters with a message about an Islamic holiday, but its purpose was clear: to block passers-by from seeing anything inside the university grounds.

By midmorning the crowds near Tehran University had swelled to the thousands, and the police could no longer easily control them. As the protesters began chanting “death to the dictator,” the police periodically beat them back with batons.

Not far away, a middle-aged woman turned furiously on a young Basij militia member who was filming the protesters — a common intimidation tactic during protests. As the woman beat him with her pocketbook and screamed curses, a second Basij member tried to restrain her, but a male protester grappled with him in turn, and a fistfight broke out between the two men.

The protests lasted through the afternoon, and after nightfall, groups of students on a number of campuses began holding candlelight vigils for those who had been arrested during the day.

 

In Iran, protests gaining a radical tinge      

December 11, 2009 

The New York Times

By Robert Worth

BEIRUT, Lebanon — In the video, one of hundreds filmed during Iran’s nationwide demonstrations on Monday, an enraged woman’s voice can be heard as a paramilitary truck runs a motorbike off the road amid a crowd of fleeing protesters.

“This is the Islamic Republic!” she shouts, gesturing at the vehicle.

That message has grown increasingly common in recent protests, as demonstrators have made it clear that their target is not just President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, or the disputed election that returned him to power in June, but the entire foundation of Iran’s theocracy.

During Monday’s demonstrations, the civil tone of many earlier rallies was noticeably absent. There was no sign of the opposition leader Mir Hussein Moussavi, a moderate figure who supports change within the system, and few were wearing the signature bright green of his campaign.

Instead, the protesters, most of them young people, took direct aim at Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, chanting, “Khamenei knows his time is up!” They held up flags from which the “Allah” symbol — added after Iran’s 1979 revolution — had been removed. Most shocking of all, some burned an image of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, the father of the revolution.

That creeping radicalization has underscored the rift within Iran’s opposition movement, analysts say, and poses a problem for its leaders, including Mr. Moussavi and the reformist cleric Mehdi Karroubi.

“The longer this goes on, the more difficult will it be for the likes of Moussavi and Karroubi to sustain their current position,” said Ray Takeyh, an Iran expert at the Council on Foreign Relations who has worked for the State Department. “They have to at some point opt for regime survival or become the leaders of an opposition movement calling for more than reform.”

Some in Iran have even speculated that Mr. Moussavi and Mr. Karroubi were uncomfortable with the most recent round of protests, which were timed to coincide with a holiday commemorating the killing of three students by the shah’s forces in 1953. While they were involved with earlier protests, the opposition leaders did not organize the most recent ones. They do not appear to have attended any of them and have been silent since. It is not clear how much influence they have over the movement, which often seems to be built more around semi-spontaneous mobilizations over Facebook and Web networks than with the aid of any clear leadership.

The aggressive tone of Monday’s protests may partly reflect the fact that they took place on and around university campuses, where radical sentiment is more common.

But students have long been central to social movements in Iran, where the population is now overwhelmingly young; as Mr. Moussavi himself pointed out last weekend, 1 in 20 Iranians is a student. And this week’s protests, in at least a dozen cities and towns across Iran, were much broader than the ones that shook Iran in 1999, said Rasool Nafisi, an academic and Iran expert at Strayer University in Virginia.

Even before the latest round of protests, a number of high-ranking figures in Iran had taken note of the opposition’s trend toward radicalism. Over the weekend, Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, an influential former president, warned in a speech that “the young and the elite have been estranged from the regime” and criticized the government for using the Revolutionary Guards and the Basij militia against protesters.

Mr. Rafsanjani, a founder of the Islamic Republic who has provided crucial support for the opposition since the election, added pointedly that “there are some conservatives who think the people’s vote is just a decoration.” He admonished this group, saying, “If they want us to rule, we will; if they don’t, we will go.”

Other leaders have also called for a greater spirit of compromise from the government. Among them is a prominent conservative cleric, Grand Ayatollah Naser Makarem Shirazi, who noted last week in remarks to I.S.N.A., a semiofficial news agency, that a “large number” of people had voted against Mr. Ahmadinejad and that “we should sit together and negotiate.”

But the government’s response to Monday’s demonstrations was anything but conciliatory. Many witnesses said the police and Basij militia members were more aggressive than at any time since last summer, beating protesters with chains and truncheons and arresting hundreds of them in cities across Iran.

In the days after the protests, hard-liners stepped up their warnings. On Thursday, the intelligence minister, Heidar Moslehi, lashed out at Mr. Rafsanjani and accused him of siding with those who oppose the Islamic system, in comments reported by Fars, another semiofficial news agency.

“Shockingly, Rafsanjani expresses the same ideas as the leaders of the conspiracy,” Mr. Moslehi said.

The intelligence minister also seemed to throw down the gauntlet to moderates, accusing them of joining the assault on Ayatollah Khamenei.

“A lot of forces that were expected to support the supreme leader instead went with those who rose against the supreme leader,” he said.

One prominent conservative who has been critical of Mr. Ahmadinejad, Habibollah Asgaroladi, said the opposition had grown more “antirevolutionary,” the Khabar Online Web site reported.

Many in the opposition have echoed those warnings, from the other side.

“The regime is on a path which threatens its own survival,” declared the Iranian Writers’ Society, in a statement released Tuesday and posted on opposition Web sites. “Those who sow the wind will harvest a typhoon.” 

 

Iran Cracks Down on Women's Rights Activists

MS Magazine

December 14, 2009

Somayeh Rashidi, an Iranian women's rights activist with the One Million Signatures Campaign, was targeted this morning with a search of her home and a summons to court. She told Change for Equality, that she "asked the security officials to provide me with identification, but they refused, claiming instead that [she] will find out in the future what intelligence agency they are working with. [She] also objected to the search and seizure of property belonging to [her] roommates, but the security officials did not pay any attention to [her] protests." Rashidi was also arrested in November in connection to public protests and spent two days in prison. Today's search is just the latest in a series of arrests of or attacks/threats towards Iranian women's rights activists.

The One Million Signatures Campaign, which seeks to collect one million signatures against the legal discrimination women face under Iranian law, has been particularly targeted. A number of activists associated with the campaign have been arrested and imprisoned in recent years, including American graduate student and feminist activist Esha Momeni.

Shirin Ebadi, Nobel Laureate and one of Iran's leading human rights defenders, is also being harassed and her family is being targeted. Iranian authorities not only froze her bank account, but also broke into Ebadi's safe deposit box and stole her Nobel medal, which has since been returned, according to the LA Times.

Omid Memarian, an exiled Iranian journalist, told the Daily Beast, "I talked to Shirin Ebadi just a few days ago. The authorities have summoned her husband, brother, and sister...Her organization in Iran cannot operate freely. She has been the most significant voice for human rights in Iran over the last five months. Harassing her is a very intimidating signal to others."

According to the Daily Beast, in addition to the continued harassment of women's rights activists, last month "Iranian state television ran a documentary attacking the nation's women's rights movement." Airing of the documentary preceded an announcement earlier this month from the head of Iran's state television, Ezatollah Zarghami, who declared that state-sponsored television programs will henceforth prohibit women who appear on air from using make-up. Zarghami told the newspaper Eternad that "make-up by women during television programs is illegal and against Islamic Sharia law. There should not be a single case of a woman wearing make-up during a program."

 

Backers of Iranian student say authorities forced him into women's clothing to humiliate him

By Jason Keyser

The Canadian Press

December 14, 2009

Supporters of Iran's opposition have posted hundreds of photos online of men in women's clothing to mock what they say was a government attempt to discredit a student leader by photographing him in a head scraf and woman's robe.

Majid Tavakoli was arrested in last week's large student-led protests after he gave a speech urging students to reject "tyranny," a call greeted by chants of "Death to the dictator." Pro-government media said he put on women's clothing in an attempt to escape authorities around his campus but was caught.

The Fars news agency, which is close to the elite Revolutionary Guard military force, published photos of Tavakoli wearing a black chador, the all-covering dress worn by devout Muslim women, and a blue head scarf around his unshaven, downcast face.

Iran's opposition fired back over the past week by inundating Web sites such as Facebook with pictures of men wearing head scarves and chadors.

Tavakoli's supporters accused authorities of forcing him into women's clothing and photographing him in an attempt to humiliate the activist and discredit the opposition.

Tavakoli is a member of the largest student organization advocating greater social and political freedoms in Iran and is a student at Tehran's Amir Kabir University, the site of one of the Dec. 7 protests the drew tens of thousand out on campuses and city squares around the country.

Students have been at the core of the pro-reform movement, which has accused authorities of rigging hard-line President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's June re-election, and last week's protests were the first significant show of force in about a month.

In the Web campaigns calling for Tavakoli's release, male supporters donned Islamic-style women's dress in hundreds of whimsical self-portraits. Many of them were bearded and smirking. Others held up V-for-victory signs and wore the green colour that has become the opposition's emblem.

Some of the photos were clumsily altered to underscore opposition claims that the pictures of Tavakoli might have been digitally manipulated.

The Fars report quoted a pro-government student activist as saying that Tavakoli tried to flee in women's clothing and that his actions were a "permanent stain on the illegal student movement."

"He was always introduced as a brave guy, but this move proved his lack of power to resist and avoid paying the price for his own ideas," the activist, Abbas Ensani, was quoted as saying.

Fars is linked to the Revolutionary Guard, which played the lead role in putting down post-election demonstrations.

Tavakoli has been arrested on two previous occasions. After one of them, he was jailed for 15 months in 2007-2008 on a conviction of insulting Islam in a student newsletter.

He and two other students put on trial in that case told the court that the newsletter containing insults against an Islamic saint had been fabricated by hard-line students and attributed to reformist students in effort to defame them.