Police officers and militia forces crowded the streets of Tehran on Tuesday, setting up checkpoints and making clear that the government had zero tolerance for any further public expressions of defiance to the re-election of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad a day after the powerful Guardian Council certified his landslide victory.
The government made a series of official moves to close the book on weeks of protest that represented the strongest challenge to its control since the Islamic Republic was founded in 1979. Parliament issued a statement expressing broad gratitude over the June 12 vote and thanking the police and the Basiji militia for maintaining security. President Ahmadinejad made a surprise visit to the Ministry of Intelligence, where he gave a speech to employees.
The government crushed the vast protests following the vote, dispatching armed police and militia and leaving 17 people dead and hundreds more injured. The authorities continued to detain hundreds of journalists, former government officials, political activists and even independent researchers, in the quest to prevent any further demonstrations.
There seemed little prospect for any chance for organized and sustained action against the government’s version of events, political analysts said, in part because the arrests that have starved the opposition of leadership, foot soldiers, and an effective means to communicate.
One of the most recent arrests, of Bijan Khajehpour, an independent political economist, sent a chill deeper yet into Iran’s civil society because he was not involved in the opposition demonstration, political analysts said.
Mr. Khajehpour had been detained at the airport coming into the country from Britain, and like so many others has disappeared into the notorious Evin prison, raising concerns over the scope of the crackdown and the prospect of a political purge, the analysts said. “Bijan was perhaps the last independent-minded analyst living in Tehran who continued to travel to Europe and the U.S. and give open lectures about Iran,” said Karim Sadjadpour, an Iran expert with the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. “He always believed that if he was totally transparent the government would understand he was not doing anything wrong, and had nothing to hide.”
The government has also over the past several days fired high ranking officials who had supported Mir Hussein Moussavi, the president’s main challenger, according to Iranian news reports.
Human rights groups said arrests had taken place around the nation, but there were particular fears for those held at Evin were in physical danger.
“Amnesty International is gravely concerned that several opposition leaders detained in the wake of the 12 June elections may be facing torture, possibly to force them to make televised ‘confessions’ as a prelude to unfair trials in which they could face the death penalty,” the human rights watchdog group said in a statement.
Reporters Without Borders, the press-freedom organization, said that the concern extended beyond opposition leaders. “Several witness accounts makes us fear that torture and ill-treatment are being systematically inflicted on prisoners who have demonstrated against the regime,” the group said in a statement. “Several journalists and bloggers were brutally treated by the guards and by men employed by the state prosecutor Saaed Mortazavi.”
A spokesman for the Guardian Council, Abbas-Ali Khadkhodaei, did not shed any new light on Tuesday on the questions raised by opposition candidates about the legitimacy of the vote, the vote count and the review process.
Instead, Mr. Khadkhodaei discussed the one discrepancy which had already been discussed — that in some districts there were more ballots cast than registered voters. He explained that Iranians can vote anywhere they choose, regardless of where they are registered, but did not address those who said areas that reported extra votes were unlikely to have had many people passing through.
“You are born in Tehran or any other town, and you belong to that area based on local statistics, but you are casting your vote outside the country or your town,” he said in comments reported by state run Press TV. “Who can separate these statistics? So, the population moves for various reasons.”
The Guardian Council’s sudden decision on Monday to validate the election followed days of promises that a committee would be formed to review the election and that a partial recount would occur. But the committee was never seated, nor the review process established. The recount effort involved what officials said was a random 10 percent of ballots in Tehran’s 22 electoral districts and in some provinces, and they concluded that in some areas, Mr. Ahmadinejad had won even more votes than initially stated.
With the vote now officially over, the government pressed forward with its efforts to rewrite a narrative of events that had been cast first by the millions who took to the streets, and then through independent and citizen journalism. The government has made reporting inside the country impossible, forcing foreign journalists to leave while arresting and threatening Iranians who challenged the government’s position.
The government maintains that Western agents, primarily Britain, have been responsible for the unrest. On Monday, the government sought to recast blame for the death of about 17 protesters. The commander of Iran’s Basiji militia, Hossein Taeb, said that imposters wearing Basiji uniforms were responsible for infiltrating crowds attacking unarmed citizens. He also suggested that a Basiji imposter was responsible for killing Neda Agha-Soltan, the young woman who became an international symbol when video of her shot and dying in the street went on the internet and was seen around the world.
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Full article: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/01/world/middleeast/01iran.html?hp
