The news is sad - more than 17 people have been killed, hundreds injured. The deaths exceed the numbers killed during the revolution of 1979. When the final counts are made in the months and years that follow, we will learn that more than 3-4 dozen people have been killed, and more will follow. The Islamic Revolution is dead, and the artifacts of that oppression are about to be washed away.
The voices are loud.
Rafsanjani's family arrested - he is still a powerful man and his family is well respected. It raised the ante.
Ayatollah Sistani is standing against the actions the government is taking. A powerful figure in the Shia community.
The grandson of Ayatollah Khomeni - those who still adhere to their 'beloved' leader watched as his grandson was excluded.
Ayatollah Montazeri - has spoken out against the government and urged the soldiers to remember their religious faith and that their actions will be judged one day.
Khameni may well be the CURRENT leader, but the tides are changing and he will be gone as will Amindinejad.
Iran sits on the precipice of change. Change that will see Democracy again flourish in the land of beauty and culture. Liberty and freedom will reign where once fear and oppression dominated.
June 22, 2009
Relatives of Former Iranian President Are Arrested
By NAZILA FATHI and MICHAEL SLACKMAN
The New York Times
TEHRAN — As scattered protests and violence continued to grip Iran’s capital on Sunday, the government briefly detained relatives of Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, a former president who heads two influential councils, worsening a deep rift among the nation’s top clerics.
Mr. Rafsanjani, one of the fathers of the Iranian revolution, has been locked in a power struggle with Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, and worked closely with the reform movement during the disputed presidential election. Sunday morning, state television said five members of his family had been detained, including Mr. Rafsanjani’s daughter, Faezeh Hashemi. Later, family members said all had been released.
The detentions suggested that Mr. Khamenei was facing entrenched resistance among some members of the elite. Though rivalries among top clerics in Iran have been a feature of Iranian politics since the 1979 revolution, analysts said that open factional competition amid a major political crisis could hinder Mr. Khamenei’s ability to restore order.
A day after the police and militia forces used guns, truncheons, tear gas and water cannons to beat back thousands of demonstrators, violent clashes between protesters and security forces settled into a tense standoff.
Estimates of the death toll in clashes between security forces and demonstrators protesting what they called a fraudulent presidential election varied. State television said that 10 had died, while radio reports said 19 people had been killed.
Major streets and squares of Tehran were saturated with police and Basij militia forces. There were reports of scattered confrontations with the police, but there was no confirmation of any new injuries Sunday evening.
It was unclear whether protests, which began after the government declared that the hard-line president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, had won re-election in a landslide against the popular opposition leader, Mir Hussein Moussavi, would be sustained in the face of the tough security clampdown. Amateur video accounts showed at least one large protest gathering, on Shirazi Street, though it was unclear for how long it was sustained.
Mr. Moussavi’s Web site, which has become a clearing house for demonstration calls and opposition news, contained no call for another major demonstration on Sunday. But other opposition Web sites reported Sunday that Mr. Moussavi’s wife, Zahra Rahnavard, said his site had been hacked.There were few signs that powerful political leaders had dropped their challenge to Mr. Khamenei. Mr. Moussavi, himself a former prime minister and longtime insider, has continued to demand the nullification of the presidential election.
Meanwhile, the moves against members of Mr. Rajsanjani’s family were seen as an attempt to put pressure on Mr. Rajsanjani to drop his challenge to Mr. Khamenei — pressure Mr. Rafsanjani’s son, Mehdi Rafsanjani, said he would reject.
“My father was in jail for five years when we were young. We don’t care if they keep her even for a year,” Mehdi Rajsanjani said in an interview, referring to the arrest of his sister, Ms. Hashemi.
Mr. Rafsanjani was deeply critical of Mr. Ahmadinejad during the presidential campaign, and is thought to have had a strained relationship with Mr. Khamenei for many years.
But he remains a major establishment figure, and the arrest of his daughter comes as a surprise. In his sermon on Friday, in which he strongly backed Mr. Ahmadinejad and threatened a violent crackdown on protesters if they continued to demonstrates on the streets, Ayatollah Khamenei pointedly praised Mr. Rafsanjani as one of the pillars of the revolution, while acknowledging that the two have had "many differences of opinion."
Last week, state television showed images of Ms. Hashemi, 46, speaking to hundreds of people to rally support for Mr. Moussavi. After her appearance, state radio said. students who support Mr. Ahmadinejad gathered outside the Tehran’s prosecutor’s office and demanded she be arrested for treason.
Mr. Rafsanjani, 75, heads two powerful institutions. One of them, Assembly of Experts, is a body of clerics that have the authority to oversee and, in theory, to replace the country’s supreme leader. He also runs the Expediency Council, which is given the power to settle disagreements between the elected parliament and the unelected Guardian Council.
The Assembly of Experts has never publicly exercised its power over Ayatollah Khamenei since he succeeded Islamic Revolution founder Aytollah Ruhollah Khomeini in 1989. But the increasingly bitter confrontation between Mr. Khamenei and Mr. Rajsanjani has raised the prospect of a contest of political wills between the two revolutionary veterans.
The Iranian government continued its efforts to block all coverage of protests and the security crackdown. The BBC said on Sunday that the government ordered its reporter in Tehran, Jon Leyne, to leave the country, and other news organization said they were ordered by the authorities not to report on events on the streets.
Since the elections, the Iranian government has revoked foreign press credentials and told reporters not to venture outside to cover protests, and the media advocacy group Reporters Without Borders said Sunday that 23 Iranian journalists have been arrested since last week.
Newsweek’s correspondent in Tehran, Maziar Bahari, who is also a prominent documentary filmmaker and holds dual citizenship in Iran and Canada, was detained at his home on Sunday. And two other prominent Iranian journalists, Mohammad Ghoochani and Mashalah Shamsolvaezin, were also reported arrested on Sunday.
But information continued to flow from eyewitnesses and on social networking sites, much of it in the form of video said to show the brutality of the government crackdown Saturday. The most vivid image to emerge was contained in a video posted on several Web sites that showed a young woman with her face covered in blood. Text posted with the video said she had been shot. It was not possible to verify the authenticity of the video.
A group called The International Campaign for Human Rights in Iran reported on its Web site that injured protestors were being arrested as they sought medical treatment at hospitals. The group said that doctors had been ordered to report protest-related injuries to the authorities.
In a sign that the crisis in Iran threatened to spill far beyond the nation’s borders, the speaker of parliament, Ali Larijani, on Sunday called for reconsidering relations with Britain, France and Germany after their “shameful” statements about the presidential election, Reuters reported.
State radio reported that Mr. Larijani, who has his own aspirations to one day become president, made his comments in a speech to the full parliament. Mr. Larijani’s position, which reflects the anti-western orientation of the hard-liners in charge, could further undermine President Obama’s efforts to reach out to Iran and begin a diplomatic dialogue. The United States severed ties with Iran 30 years ago.
In Washington on Saturday, President Obama called the government’s reaction “violent and unjust,” and, quoting Martin Luther King Jr., warned again that the world was watching what happened in Tehran.
The relative calm Sunday morning followed a day of violent clashes and extraordinary tension across Iran. The opposition leader, Mr. Moussavi, appeared at a demonstration in southern Tehran and called for a general strike if he were to be arrested. “I am ready for martyrdom,” he told supporters.
In an interview broadcast Sunday on Iranian television, Foreign Minister Manoucher Mottaki said that officials were examining the charge of voting fraud and expected to issue their findings by the end of the week. But like Ayatollah Khamenei, Mr. Mottaki appeared to have already judged the vote as clean and fair. He said the "possibility of organized and comprehensive disruption and irregularities in the election , is almost close to zero," in remarks translated by Iran’s English-language Press TV.
With the police on the streets demonstrating a willingness to injure and even kill, one question political analysts and opposition members were beginning to ask was whether it was time to shift strategies, from street protests to some kind of national strike. It was unclear if the opposition had the support or organization, especially within the middle class, to carry out such a measure, but a strike would be immune to the heavy hand of the state and could wield leverage by crippling the already stumbling economy, analysts said.
Nazila Fathi reported from Tehran, and Michael Slackman from Cairo.
Iran
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