Iranian students defy ban on protest

MSNBC ^ | July 9, 2002

[Redcloak]

Iranian students defy ban on protest
Anniversary of ‘days of rage’ marked by clashes with police, militia
An Iranian hard-liner raises his hand to hit a reformist woman demonstrating near Tehran University Tuesday.
MSNBC NEWS SERVICES

TEHRAN, Iran, July 9 —  Marking the anniversary of a 1999 student uprising, several thousand Iranian students came out to protest near Tehran University Tuesday, and clashed with plainclothes security officers. It was the biggest show of defiance since unrest three years earlier, when students rallied against the Islamic Republic’s hard-line government.

 

It was the biggest show of student wrath at the slow pace of change in Iran since the demonstrations three years ago.

       SPORADIC CLASHES between some of the 4,000 youths and officers broke out in streets and squares around the university, where hard-line vigilantes launched a bloody attack on a student dormitory in 1999, sparking six “days of rage.”
       Some plainclothes men beat protesters and at least one journalist was injured, witnesses said. Some of the students were carried away by the agents in unmarked cars, they added.
       The ISNA student news agency said security forces fired tear gas to try to disperse the crowds, but this could not be confirmed by witnesses.
       The gates of Tehran University were guarded by police, plainclothes agents and vigilante volunteers while Revolutionary Guards mounted on pick-ups and armed with batons and machine-guns patrolled the streets nearby, witnesses said.
       “Unity, unity, political prisoners should be freed,” the youths chanted.
       It was the biggest show of student wrath at the slow pace of change in Iran since the demonstrations three years ago and similar unrest in the western city of Khoramabad in August 2000.
       
MASS ARRESTS REPORTED
       The Moscow human rights agency Prima, citing student democracy activists, reported that Iranian security forces conducted mass arrests on the eve of the student uprising anniversary.

Iran's Tortured Path
		MSNBC Interactive

       According to the Student Movement Coordination Committee for Democracy in Iran, 2000 people were arrested by Islamic militia in the town of Isfahan alone on July 8 and taken away to an unknown destination.
       Several days ago the student organization formally applied to Tehran authorities for a permission to hold on July 9 a procession to commemorate victims of those tragic events.
       The official news agency IRNA reported that all rallies and demonstrations had been banned by the interior minister “in order to prevent abuse by trouble-makers.”
       Iran’s students, once the powerhouse behind the 1979 Islamic revolution, became galvanized behind growing calls for reform in the mid-1990s. But since 1999 the movement has been rent by prosecutions, imprisonment and bitter factional feuds.
       Earlier, student leaders said they had called off a planned meeting following an Interior Ministry order banning the protest for fear “opportunist elements” would take advantage of the situation to stoke tension.

       During the demonstration, some youths urged police to join them in an echo of calls which helped neutralize the shah’s security forces in 1979.
       “Police, police, join us,” they chanted.
       Some officers responded and prevented plainclothes agents seizing a young woman dressed in a loose-fitting headscarf popular with those disgruntled with Iran’s strict Islamic dress code, witnesses said.
       Witnesses said many of the students, hugely outnumbered by security forces, had dispersed by mid-evening.
       
REFORM CHALLENGED
       President Mohammad Khatami, re-elected last year with the overwhelming support of students, young people and women, has struggled to implement reforms in the face of concerted opposition from the Islamic Republic’s conservative powers.

       The hard-line judiciary has cracked down on dissent, banning dozens of newspapers and jailing reformist journalists and intellectuals who have argued for reform.
       Conservatives entrenched in powerful posts within the state have blocked and parried Khatami’s stabs at reform, leading to growing disillusionment amongst his natural supporters.
       “Some of the students, after the unrest, have become disappointed and dismayed. Some of them kissed goodbye to politics and some of them left their motherland,” Aftab-e Yazd newspaper quoted publisher Mashallah Shamsolvaezin as saying.
       Iran’s population nearly doubled in the wake of the 1979 Islamic revolution as families responded to clerical calls to swell the ranks of a proposed 20 million-man army.
       Now the state is home to around 63 million people, and it is struggling to provide for the children of the revolution.
       Iran needs to create some 700,000 new jobs a year just to keep the high jobless figures stable, and many graduates opt to leave the country altogether.
       Analysts say Iran’s demography will inevitably lead to change one day. “The effects of the unrest will come to the surface in the future,” said reformist academic Hamidreza Jalaipour.
       
       MSNBC and Reuters contributed to this story.

[Redcloak]

Sounds like the boy and girls at Foggybottom ought to be sponsoring some "intramural shooting sports teams" at these universities.

[Psalm 73]

Best thing we can do for the Pro-Democracy movement in Iran is kick the snot out of Iraq.
Iran will either reform, or it's people will transform it - and US troops on it's borders (Iraq and Afghanistan) will surely help it along.
We could change the whole face of the Middle East in one fell swoop - with or without the Euro-weenies.

[ChadGore]

[ChadGore]

[ChadGore]

[ChadGore]

[ChadGore]

[ChadGore]

[Movemout]

There are no current Iranian students by those names.

[ChadGore]

THEOCRACY = TYRANY

[Steve0113]

THEOCRACY = TYRANY

Not inherently, just usually. Vatican City is a theocracy, and not remotely tyrannical.

[Redcloak]

That's rumored to be a long term plan of Bush's. Topple Saddam, install a western, democratic government in Baghdad, and use that "new and improved" Iraq as a tool to foment democratic revolutions throughout the Islamic world. A westernized Iraq and a westernized Iran would become economic powerhouses in the region. Their prosperity alone would cause in uproar in places like Saudi Arabia, Libya, and Syria.

[Psalm 73]

"...a long term plan of Bush's."

Bush has a strategic vision for the Middle east?
If one reads only the NYTs and Wash Post, one would think Bush is a bumbling idiot.
Next thing you'll probably claim is Ronald Reagan was a genius that brought the Soviet Union to it's knees! (sarcasm off>)

[Psalm 73]

(Of course, everyone knows Democrat = smart, Republican = stupid. Carter genius, Reagan dumb; Clinton brilliant, George Bush dumb, LBJ visionary, Nixon dumb, etc)