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Iranians demonstrate outside US embassy compound Iranian hardliners mark 1979 hostage crisis anniversary with huge protests
(about 9 hours later)
Iranian hardliners have demonstrated in their tens of thousands outside the US embassy building in Tehran, holding anti-American placards, waving flags and shouting "Death to America", according to Iranian media. Thousands of Iranian hardliners have rallied in front of the former US embassy in Tehran to commemorate the 1979 US hostage crisis, highlighting the domestic challenges President Hassan Rouhani faces in his bid to mend ties with the west.
The crowd gathered to mark the anniversary of 1979 seizure of the embassy. The protests highlight the considerable obstacles President Hassan Rouhani faces in his diplomatic initiatives to ease tensions with Washington. In a nationwide event marking the anniversary of the day angry students stormed the American embasssy 34 years ago and took 52 diplomats hostage for 444 days, large crowds sympathetic to the Revolutionary Guards and its informal voluntary basij milita took to the streets on Monday chanting "death to America" and burning US flags.
Such protests take place every year outside the former embassy compound to mark the anniversary, but Monday's rally was the largest in years after calls by groups including the Revolutionary Guard for a major demonstration. The demonstrations, a familar scene for over three decades, have been held annually on the "national day against global arrogance". But this year, with Rouhani's new administration attempting to improve relations with Washington, it became a show of defiance by hardliners adamantly opposed to any thawing of relations.
The 1979 siege began when student activists stormed the embassy, taking 52 embassy staff hostage for 444 days. The two countries have not re-established diplomatic relations since. However, many senior officials failed to turn up for Monday's rallies and there was no sign of Rouhani or his cabinet members. Instead, Saeed Jalili, a former nuclear negotiator who ran as the most anti-western candidate but was defeated in the last presidential election, took to the podium in Tehran.
This year's protests have taken on greater significance because of the new government's attempts to ease tensions with the west, exacerbated during the presidency of Rouhani's predecessor, hardliner Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. "Death to America means death to arrogance, death to violence … Death to America is a symbol," he said, according to local media. "The Iranian people turned it into a symbol for seeking freedom and seeking independence."
Rouhani was elected in June on a platform of establishing better diplomatic relations and jump-starting talks over Iran's controversial nuclear programme. Witnesses said demonstrators appeared to be part of organised groups bussed in by the guards or the basij. Hundreds of students from various schools and universities in the Iranian capital were also given a day off to attend the rallies. Some were carrying cardboard models of a uranium enrichment centrifuge. "America can't do a damn thing," said a banner, which is a famous quote by the late founder of the Islamic republic, Ayatollah Rouhollah Khomeini.
A short telephone conversation between him and the US president, Barack Obama, after the UN general assembly in September was applauded by many Iranians but met with suspicion by hardliners in the country. A Tehran-based journalist allowed to cover Monday's demonsrations for the American network NBC tweeted a picture of his official press card issued by the Iranian officials, which had "Down with USA" printed on it.
On Sunday, the Islamic Republic's most powerful figure, Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, gave strong backing to Iran's nuclear negotiators, an apparent warning to hardliners against accusing Rouhani of compromising with its old enemy. Many of the students who played a key role in the 1979 takeover of the American embassy have now become reformists and largely marginalised, including Ebrahim Asgharzadeh, Habibollah Bitaraf and Mohsen Mirdamadi, who was jailed in 2009.
"No one should consider our negotiators as compromisers," Khamenei said in a speech. "They have a difficult mission and no one must weaken an official who is busy with work." Before Monday's rallies, Asgharzadeh, one of the five key students behind the hostage-taking, told local website Ghanoon that they had intended to occupy the embassy for no more than 48 hours but its control fell out of their hands. "We only wanted to stage a sit-in protest and did not anticipate such resistance from them; we did not intend to take anyone hostage," he said. "But [later] we became hostages ourselves of this hostage-taking." To the dismay of Iranian authorities, the 1979 hostage crisis became the subject of the Oscar-winning Argo, a 2012 thriller by Ben Affleck. Iran has since promised to retaliate by producing its own version of the events.
On Saturday, an editorial by conservative newspaper Kayhan warned against trusting the US in current nuclear negotiations and said there were signs that "the Americans are aiming to trick the Islamic Republic" in the next round of talks this week. In his speech, Jalili said the seizure of "the nest of spies", a reference to the former American embassy, showed to the world that American embassies were a base for spying. The ex-embassy's compound, situated in central Tehran, has been transformed into a museum run by the basij which exhibits some of the documents and belongings confiscated in 1979.
The new mood of Iranian diplomacy has also brought into question the use of the slogan "Death to America". While moderate figures have suggested it is time to drop the phrase, conservatives say it is as important now as ever before. Despite his anti-US rhetoric, Jalili said Iranians are united behind Iran's current negotiating team.
In a state TV interview, the head of the parliamentary committee for national security, Alaeddin Boroujerdi, described the chant as the "mildest response" to US global interference. Iran's supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, also made a speech on Sunday in which he said he was not optimistic about the ongoing negotiations between Iran and the west over Tehran's nuclear programme, but at the same time issued strong support for Rouhani's diplomacy.
"No one should consider our negotiators as compromisers," Khamenei said. "They have a difficult mission and no one must weaken an official who is busy with work." Iran and the six major powers – Britain, China, France, Russia, the US and Germany – are due to resume nuclear talks in Geneva later this week within a month of holding a similar event in October.
In his speech, without naming Edward Snowden and his revelations, Khamenei also alluded to the furore over the scale of American intelligence surveillance.
"On that day, our youths named the US embassy the 'den of espionage' and today, after over three decades, US embassies in the European countries, which are American allies, are called nest of espionage," said Khamenei. "This shows that our youths were over 30 years ahead of the world calendar."
Rouhani issued a statement on Sunday night thanking Khamenei for his support for the negotating team and added that Iran was not at odds with the American people.
In September, Rouhani travelled to New York for the UN general assembly, launching a largely successful charm offensive. That visit featured a historic phone conversation between Rouhani and Barack Obama, the first direct talks between American and Iranian presidents since the 1979 Islamic revolution.
But the backlash from the visit is still creating ripples at home, where anti-US sentiment is the very bedrock of the Islamic republic's ideology for many of its conservatives and fundamentalists. After Rouhani's return from New York, a debate began to grow on whether the authorities should officially drop the "death to America" slogans, but opposition from hardliners mean they will not disappear any time soon.
Last month, Tehrani citizens noticed a series of billboards in streets showing an Iranian negotiator talking face to face behind a table to his American counterpart, pictured as a half-civilian, half-military man with a pump-action shotgun in his lap.
Opponents of the billboards said they were installed to undermine Rouhani's diplomacy with Washington, which led to Tehran city officials taking them off the streets. But in what highlights the high-level internal disagreements in Iran, the billboards have since returned.
Meanwhile, in the early hours of Monday, as demonstrators prepared for the anti-US rallies, judicial authorities executed Sherko Moarefi, an Iranian Kurdish activist who had been in jail since 2008. Human rights activists, concerned about Iran's alarming rate of executions, had for a long time urged Iran to halt his death sentence, saying he did not get a fair trial and charges against him could have been politically motivated.
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