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Iran Stages Pro-Government Rallies After Days of Unrest As Iran Erupts in Protest, Tehran Is Notably Quiet
(about 4 hours later)
TEHRAN — Orchestrated, pro-government rallies were held throughout Iran on Wednesday, after nearly a week of protests over the ailing economy and the suppression of individual rights. TEHRAN — When they stepped through the gates of Tehran University last week, the student protesters had every expectation of igniting an impassioned rally against the government. After all, the university grounds had long been a flash point for demonstrations in the capital.
The demonstrations received copious coverage in the Iranian state media, apparently in an effort to demonstrate the clerical government’s depth of support, after 21 people were killed and hundreds more arrested as unrest erupted in provincial areas and, to a far lesser extent, in Tehran. But this time, their exhortations went unheeded. “Proud Iranians, support us,” they shouted, only to find pedestrians walking by, looking to see what the commotion was about but declining to join the protesters.
Demonstrators waved Iranian flags and photographs of the supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. Many carried placards saying “Death to seditionists” and chanted slogans like, “We offer the blood in our veins to our leader.” The protests that broke out a week ago in the northern city of Mashhad have shown some signs of abating, but demonstrators are still taking to the streets after dark in many outlying provinces. Elite forces with the Revolutionary Guards Corps were deployed to three of them on Wednesday — Hamadan, Isfahan and Lorestan — to help quell uprisings there.
Anti-government demonstrations started on Thursday in the city of Mashhad and quickly spread to other parts of the country. Dissatisfaction is running high over rampant unemployment, inflation and the general state of the economy, but also about the lack of freedoms in entertainment and personal matters. The government took another step on Wednesday to tamp down the uprising, staging pro-government rallies throughout the country and affording them generous coverage on state-controlled media.
The protests have surprised Iran’s establishment, which has been slow to respond. Organizing mass rallies with exhortations and various inducements is a favorite tactic, a tried-and-true method to bolster the state’s legitimacy. But little of the action, either for or against the government, has found its way to the capital.
While President Trump has been cheering on the protesters in a series of Twitter posts, other Western powers have been more circumspect, fearful of lending weight to hard-liners’ contentions that the unrest is being stirred by outside forces. In keeping with that approach, the European Union urged Tehran in a statement late Tuesday to recognize Iranians’ right to peaceful protest and to resolve the issues without resorting to violence. That stands in sharp contrast to 2009, when millions of middle-class people in Tehran erupted in anger over an election they saw as rigged, churning into the streets for months of anti-government protests that came to be called the Green Movement. But this time, as protests over the poor economy erupted in more than 80 cities over the past week and evolved into a condemnation of the political system and its clerical rulers, Tehran remained curiously muted.
“We expect all concerned to refrain from violence and the right of expression to be guaranteed, also in light of the statements made by the Iranian Government,” by the bloc’s foreign affairs chief, Federica Mogherini, said in the statement. There have been some gatherings, but relatively few and poorly attended, a lack of interest that has confounded many residents. To some extent, some say, it may reflect a divide between Iran’s urban and rural populations, with more sophisticated city dwellers dismissing the leaderless provincial protests as too violent and undisciplined.
There is no guarantee that warning will be heeded. A lawmaker from the provincial city of Shahin Shahr said on Wednesday that three protesters who died in a demonstration on New Year’s Eve had been shot execution style. Others see the chaos and violence in nearby Syria, and worry about what could happen if Iran suffered a similar breakdown in authority. Still others, having gone through the 2009 protests and the brutal repression that finally contained the uprising, say they are willing to work patiently to wring economic and political concessions from the clerical government.
“Forensic examination has shown that the slain individuals had been shot at close range,” the lawmaker, Hossein Ali Haji-Deligani, was told the Islamic Consultative Assembly News Agency. “According to the information we have, they were in their late 20s — between 29 to 30 years old — and they were from protesters’ groups.” In a series of interviews, Tehran residents said they were just as upset as anyone else over the country’s widespread corruption, high unemployment and lack of freedoms, but most also said they did not know anyone who had joined a protest in recent days.
In Isfahan, a central city, pro-government demonstrators on Wednesday marched and shouted slogans against the United States, which Ayatollah Khamenei has blamed, along with other “enemies of Iran,” for instigating the protests. “Maybe it’s the presence of security forces,” said Farhad, a 33-year cybersecurity expert who refused to give his surname for fear of reprisals by the authorities. “Or maybe Tehranis are just not interested.”
“In recent events, enemies of #Iran have allied & used the various means they possess, including money, weapons, politics &intelligence services, to trouble the Islamic Republic,” he said on Twitter. “The enemy is always looking for an opportunity & any crevice to infiltrate &strike the Iranian nation.” In 2009 they were interested. Millions marched in protest against the state, holding up green ribbons and posters asking, ‘‘Where is my vote?’’ Young people, women and intellectuals were all furious over President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s re-election, which they said was fraudulent. Led initially by two defeated opposition presidential candidates, Mir Hossein Mousavi and Mehdi Karroubi, they took to the streets, facing heavily armed security forces.
The government acted against one of those supposed enemies on Wednesday, with the arrest of an unidentified European citizen who “had been trained by espionage organizations in Europe,” according to the Tasnim news agency, a mouthpiece of the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps. The protests rocked the Islamic republic to its core. Around 150 people were killed, thousands were arrested, and intellectuals, journalists and politicians were tried in Stalinist-type mass proceedings, many of them forced to make humiliating public confessions of wrongdoing. Two protesters were executed.
Citing Hamid Reza Bolhassani, a judicial official in the western province of Lorestan, Tasnim reported that the individual had “led rioters” in the town of Borujerd. It did not say when the arrest was made. In those days, Ali Sabzevari, now 33, joined every protest. “We were fighting for our rights and our future, but we had structure and a plan,” he said. But this time around, older, a bit heavier and wiser, he said the protests held no attraction for him.
Mr. Khamenei has been a principal target of the anti-government demonstrators, who have torn down posters bearing his portrait and demanded his removal from power. That is a particularly dangerous challenge under the Iranian political system, in which the supreme leader is considered nearly sacred, the official representative of God on earth. “Those people do not know what they want. They have no clear idea, and I don’t like their slogans,” he said. “I want our society to open up, more democracy, but I don’t see how violent protests will achieve that.”
Iran’s state-run English-language broadcaster, Press TV, carried Wednesday’s pro-government rallies live on Wednesday, proclaiming that they were intended to “protest the violence that has taken place over the last few nights in cities.” Others shared that view, and worried about playing into the hands of widely detested Western leaders like President Trump and Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu. “These people definitely have the right to protest,” Shervin Bashari, 32, said of the Iranian demonstrators, “but I do not want to join something and have Trump and Nethanyahu exploit it for their own purposes.”
Anti-government demonstrations flared in several cities on Wednesday, videos posted on social media seemed to show. In Khomeynishahr, where a 13-year-old boy was killed on Monday, protesters set fire to a seminary; demonstrations were also reported in Shiraz, Kazerun, Lenjan and Rasht. Mr. Trump has posted several Twitter messages supporting the protesters, saying the United States will come to their aid at the right time.
In the six days since the protests broke out, demonstrators have appeared in more than 80 cities, human rights advocates say, but Tehran has by and large been an exception, and anti-government protesters have been frustrated by the lack of a large response there. “I don’t want to support chaos either,” said Mr. Bashari, who sells imported heating equipment. “Protest should be peaceful and with minimal costs. Now 21 people, including two children, have died, and for what?”
“I wanted to protest on Tuesday, and while opposition channels said people had gathered, I arrived at Vali-e Asr Square, and there was no one,” said Farhad, 33, a cybersecurity expert, who asked that his surname not be mentioned for safety reasons. “There were lots of police, however.” The Green Movement and the security clampdown that followed left a deep scar on all those involved. Many protest leaders spent years in jail under harsh conditions, and Tehran endured a heavy police presence.
In 2011, the leaders of the protest — Mr. Moussavi, his wife, Zahra Rahnavard, and Mr. Karroubi — were placed under house arrest without a trial. They have remained there since, and have only recently been allowed to receive selected visitors.
The election of a moderate president, Hassan Rouhani, in 2013, — celebrated with huge street parties in Tehran and other middle-class cities — was seen by many as an end to that period.
The subsequent signing of the nuclear agreement and the lifting of international sanctions was similarly celebrated by educated urbanites, who in many ways set the cultural and social norms in the country.
Many have since grown disillusioned with Mr. Rouhani, even after his re-election this year. He has failed to fulfill election promises like appointing three women as ministers (so far, none have been named), and the nuclear pact has not produced the economic boom he promised. Yet, no matter how sour their feelings about Mr. Rouhani, most reform-minded people in Tehran are sticking by him.
Leili Rashidi, a prominent Iranian actress, is typical of this group. One of the best-known figures to join the 2009 protests, a potentially career-threatening decision, Mrs. Rashidi says she has no interest in joining the current protests.
Having campaigned for Mr. Rouhani’s re-election in May, she says she is not ready to desert him. “He is not perfect,” she said, “but he is the only way forward.”
She said her friends all agreed with her that efforts to overthrow the system would lead nowhere. “I sympathize with the problems of the protesters who want a better standard of living, jobs and less economic hardship,” she said. “But change must come gradually, I’ve learned. With least pain, peacefully, not through violence.