Iran Vows to Stop Tehran Protest
The New York Times reports:
The Iranian leaders who cheered the popular overthrow of an Egyptian strongman last week have promised to crush an opposition march planned for Monday in solidarity with the Egyptian people.
“These elements are fully aware of the illegal nature of the request, ” Mehdi Alikhani Sadr, an Interior Ministry official, said of the permit request for the march in comments published Sunday by the semiofficial Fars news agency. “They know they will not be granted permission for riots.”
The Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps was blunt.
“The conspirators are nothing but corpses,” Hossein Hamadani, a top commander of the corps, said Wednesday in comments published by the official IRNA news agency. “Any incitement will be dealt with severely.”
But opposition supporters, hoping the democratic uprisings sweeping the region will rejuvenate their own movement, insisted the march would go forward. “There are no plans to cancel it,” Ardeshir Amir Arjomand, senior political adviser to the opposition leader Mir Hussein Moussavi, said in a statement published Sunday on opposition Web sites.
The opposition also hopes to capitalize on the contradiction between Iran’s embrace of democracy movements abroad — Foreign Minister Ali Akbar Salehi referred Friday to “the brave and justice-seeking movement in Egypt” — and its crackdown on a kindred movement at home.
“If they are not going to allow their own people to protest, it goes against everything they are saying, and all they are doing to welcome the protests in Egypt is fake,” another opposition leader, Mehdi Karroubi, said in an interview last week.
The United States has also seized on the apparent hypocrisy, issuing a statement on Sunday that seemed intended to encourage a revival of the protests in Iran. “By announcing that they will not allow opposition protests, the Iranian government has declared illegal for Iranians what it claimed was noble for Egyptians,” the statement, from the White House, said. “We call on the government of Iran to allow the Iranian people the universal right to peacefully assemble, demonstrate and communicate that’s being exercised in Cairo.”
Even as President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad of Iran was welcoming the emergence of what he called a “new Middle East” on Friday, his government had already taken steps to quash the protest planned here.
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