Iran Protests Spread to 18 Cities; Police Crack Down
at University
By ELAINE SCIOLINO
The New York Times
July y 13, 1999
TEHERAN, Iran -- The most widespread and sustained protests since Iran's
revolution two decades ago spread throughout the country Monday, while
security police and their vigilante supporters moved to crush pro-democracy
student demonstrators outside Teheran University.
Students demonstrated in 18 cities and towns, including major cosmopolitan
cities like Tabriz, Shiraz and Isfahan and more traditional cities like
Mashad and Yazd, Iran's official news agency reported.
Wielding batons and lobbing tear gas canisters, the security forces
emptied Teheran University Monday evening in a campaign to crush the demonstrations.
In Teheran, students who had gathered inside the gates of the sprawling
university complex in the heart of the capital fainted from tear gas that
could be smelled more than a mile away.
"Filthy swine! Filthy swine!" one red-faced student screamed
over and over from inside the cramped quarters of one of the caged-in vehicles.
"Jerk!" yelled another. Others yelled obscenities that are seldom
heard in public in Iran.
One woman, wrapped in the all-encompassing black chador, cursed the
clergy with obscenities. A number of people were injured and received assistance
from health personnel in a blood transfusion truck and passersby.
Dozens of injured students were taken to the campus mosque for treatment,
and a parade of ambulances streamed in and out of the campus as a voice
on a loudspeaker called all medical students to help. Students set a huge
bonfire to try to neutralize the tear gas, one witness said.
The vigilantes, fervent revolutionaries who serve as volunteers for
the regime, carried cables, chains and batons as they emerged from the
government-owned buses that parked near the university, the witness said.
The students had intended to stage an all-night sit-in, but by midnight,
most of them had left the campus.
The demonstrations -- and the crackdown -- reflect a deep struggle over
the course of Iran's revolution. Students are impatient with the slow pace
of reforms promised by President Mohammed Khatami. The students are not
calling for a change in the Islamic system of government, rather for a
quickening of the movement towards democracy and the rule of law.
On the other side are the diehard Islamic revolutionaries, some of them
in positions of power, some of them veterans of Iran's long war with Iraq,
who take their lead from Iran's Supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei,
and believe that the country's moves towards democracy are a betrayal of
revolutionary purism.
Khatami does not control the police and security forces, who have enraged
and frightened many Iranians by a campaign of intimidation that included
the murders of prominent intellectuals as well as political attacks on
Khatami's allies in the government.
The demonstrations and the crackdowns do not mean that Iran's Islamic
Republic is in jeopardy. "We should not assume that this movement
could turn into a revolution," said an editorial Monday in the reformist
newspaper, Neshat. "It's neither nor possible nor desirable."
The five days of rage were sparked by the passage by Iran's parliament
of a tough new press law and by the closure of Salam, a popular left-leaning
Islamic newspaper.
Security forces and vigilantes stormed a dormitory at Teheran University
on Thursday night and beat students as they slept, pushing some from second-
and third-story windows. Although the official death toll stood at two,
Iran's newspapers, quoting students, claimed that between five and eight
students had died.
As striking as the extent of the protests throughout the country is
the form they are taking. Until now, criticisms of Ayatollah Khamenei,
who is in charge of the armed forces, the security and intelligence apparatus,
and radio and television, were made privately. Now the criticism of Khamenei,
who lacks the religious credentials of his predecessor, the Ayatollah Ruhollah
Khomeini, and has resisted any embrace of reform, has burst into the open.
In an effort to calm the highly charged atmosphere, Khamenei on Monday
delivered an emotional speech condemning the attack by security forces
on a dormitory last week after the first protests. He spoke to a hand-picked
crowd of thousands in a cavernous hall reserved solely for his use.
"This bitter incident has broken my heart," he said in the
speech, which was broadcast on both radio and television. He added that
it was un-Islamic to enter the private spaces of individuals.
In a stunning acknowledgment that some of the demonstrators had turned
against him, he added, "Even if things make you angry and they condemn
me, even if they set fire to my picture, remain silent. Take no action
until the day that the country needs it!"
Men and women in the crowd moaned and wept loudly.
In his speech he said, "The greatest dream and honor for me is
that I give my life in this honorable, glorious magnificent path"
-- a statement the security forces and the vigilantes may have interpreted
as a message that they should risk their lives instead.
Khamenei also blamed "enemies," including the United States,
for the attack on the dormitory. Over and over, the crowd chanted "Death
to America."
But at the university, there was no crying for the ayatollah. When a
speaker tried to read the text of Khamenei's speech, the crowd booed. "Commander-in-chief
resign!" and "Down with the dictator," they chanted.
There were posters of President Khatami but none of Ayatollah Khamenei,
whose photographs and portraits dominate public buildings, shops and landscapes
throughout Iran along with those of his predecessor.
Khatami called on students to exercise restraint, saying in a meeting
with education officials, "students should cooperate with the government
and allow law and order to be established in society."
In another incident Monday, uniformed and plainclothes security police
and anti-riot police protected by shields and helmets clashed with several
hundred student protesters. The police rounded up dozens of students in
Valiasr Square, one of Teheran's busiest intersections, beating some of
them and forcing them into cages mounted on the back of pickup trucks.
The crackdown came after a police car and two police motorcycles were
set on fire, apparently by students, one witness said.
Stone-throwing students smashed storefront windows. Many shopkeepers
pulled down the gates of their stores both to prevent looting and to get
a closer look at the action in the streets. Police froze traffic just
before rush hour. Helicopters kept watch overhead. Security police roamed
among the thousands of people gathered in the square arresting suspicious-looking
young people and rounding up photographers to prevent them from taking
pictures.
Throughout the day at the university, students stood up on a makeshift
dais near the law school and one after one explained their views and stated
their demands. Among them are the creation of a national day of mourning
in memory of the students who were killed, the holding of a public trial
for the people who ordered and carried out the dormitory attack, and the
return of the bodies of those killed.
One speaker in a black shirt criticized the lack of organization. "We
have to have a plan and a leader," said the man, who, like the other
speakers, did not identify himself. "We have to find out which of
our friends have been killed, and who they are."
Another speaker called for the execution of the perpetrators of last
Thursday's dormitory attack.
A number of student organizers said they believed that the all-day open
microphone was a trap set by infiltrators in their midst who both tried
to provoke the students into more radical action and ended up being part
of Monday night's crackdown. One speaker said that some in the crowd were
offering razor blades to students who might want to use violence.
"It was very strange that the students were allowed to speak so
freely," he said. "The whole thing is too suspicious."
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