[Today's Newspaper] from [The New York Times]
[Middle East]
Unrest in Iran Sharply Deepens Rift Among Clerics
Faezeh Hashemi, daughter of the former president, Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, attended a rally for Mir Hussein Moussavi. Iranian state television reported on Sunday that Ms. Hashemi and four other members of the family had been arrested.
By NAZILA FATHI and MICHAEL SLACKMAN
Published: June 21, 2009
TEHRAN — A bitter rift among Iran’s ruling clerics deepened Sunday over the disputed presidential election that has convulsed Tehran in the worst violence in 30 years, with the government trying to link the defiant loser to terrorists and detaining relatives of his powerful backer, a founder of the Islamic republic.
The loser, Mir Hussein Moussavi, the moderate reform candidate who contends that the June 12 election was stolen from him, fired back at his accusers on Sunday night in a posting on his Web site, calling on his own supporters to demonstrate peacefully despite stern warnings from Iran’s top leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, that no protests of the vote would be allowed. “Protesting to lies and fraud is your right,” Mr. Moussavi said in a challenge to Ayatollah Khamenei’s authority.
Earlier, the police detained five relatives of Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, a former president who leads two influential councils and openly supported Mr. Moussavi’s election. The relatives, including Mr. Rafsanjani’s daughter, Faezeh Hashemi, were released after several hours.
The developments, coming one day after protests here in the capital and elsewhere were crushed by police officers and militia members using guns, clubs, tear gas and water cannons, suggested that Ayatollah Khamenei was facing entrenched resistance among some members of the elite. Though rivalries have been part of Iranian politics since the 1979 revolution, analysts said that open factional competition amid a major political crisis could hinder Ayatollah Khamenei’s ability to restore order.
There was no verifiable accounting of the death toll from the mayhem on Saturday, partly because the government has imposed severe restrictions on news coverage and warned foreign reporters who remained in the country to stay off the streets.
It also ordered the BBC’s longtime correspondent in Tehran expelled and ordered Newsweek’s correspondent detained.
State television said that 10 people had died in clashes, while radio reports said 19. The news agency ISNA said 457 people had been arrested.
Vowing not to have a repeat of Saturday, the government on Sunday saturated major streets and squares of Tehran with police and Basij militia forces. There were reports of scattered confrontations but no confirmation of any new injuries by evening. But as they had on previous nights, many residents of Tehran clambered to their rooftops and could be heard shouting “Death to the dictator!” and “God is great,” their rallying cries since the crisis began.
It was unclear whether protests, which began after the government declared that the conservative president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, had won re-election in a landslide against Mr. Moussavi, would be sustained in the face of the clampdown.
Amateur video accounts showed at least one large protest gathering, on Shirazi Street, though it was unclear how long it lasted.
But in the network of Internet postings and Twitter messages that has become the opposition’s major tool for organizing and sharing information, a powerful and vivid new image emerged: a video posted on several Web sites that showed a young woman, called Neda, her face covered in blood. Text posted with the video said she had been shot. It was not possible to verify the authenticity of the video.
The Web site of another reformist candidate, Mehdi Karoubi, referred to her as a martyr who did not “have a weapon in her soft hands or a grenade in her pocket but became a victim by thugs who are supported by a horrifying security apparatus.”
Accounts of the election’s aftermath in the state-run press suggested that the government might be laying the groundwork for discrediting and arresting Mr. Moussavi. IRNA, the official news agency, quoted Alireza Zahedi, a member of the Basij militia, as saying Mr. Moussavi had provoked the violence, sought help from outside the country to do so and should be put on trial. The Fars news agency quoted a Tehran University law professor as saying that Mr. Moussavi had acted against “the security of the nation.” State television suggested that at least some of the unrest was instigated by an outlawed terrorist group, the Mujahedeen Khalq, which does not have a strong following in Iran.
Mr. Moussavi was not seen in public on Sunday but showed no sign of yielding. In his Web posting, he urged followers to “avoid violence in your protest and behave as though you are the parents that have to tolerate your children’s misbehavior at the security forces.”
He also warned the government to “avoid mass arrests, which will only create distance between society and the security forces.”
The moves against members of Mr. Rafsanjani’s family were seen as an attempt to pressure him to drop his challenge to Ayatollah Khamenei — pressure that Mr. Rafsanjani’s son, Mehdi Rafsanjani, said he would reject.
“My father was in jail for five years when we were young. We don’t care if they keep her even for a year,” Mehdi Rafsanjani said in an interview, referring to his sister, Ms. Hashemi.
Mr. Rafsanjani was deeply critical of Mr. Ahmadinejad during the presidential campaign, and is thought to have had a strained relationship with Ayatollah Khamenei for many years.
But he remains a major establishment figure, and the detention of his daughter, albeit briefly, was a surprise. In Ayatollah Khamenei’s sermon on Friday, in which he backed Mr. Ahmadinejad and threatened a crackdown on further protests, he praised Mr. Rafsanjani as a pillar of the revolution while acknowledging that the two have had “many differences of opinion.”
Last week, state television showed images of Ms. Hashemi, 46, speaking to hundreds of people to rally support for Mr. Moussavi. After her appearance, state radio said, students who support Mr. Ahmadinejad gathered outside the Tehran prosecutor’s office and demanded that she be arrested for treason.
Mr. Rafsanjani, 75, heads two powerful institutions. One, the Assembly of Experts, is a body of clerics that has the authority to oversee and theoretically replace the country’s supreme leader. He also runs the Expediency Council, empowered to settle disagreements between the elected Parliament and the unelected Guardian Council.
The Assembly of Experts has never publicly exercised its power over Ayatollah Khamenei since he succeeded the Islamic Revolution’s founder, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, in 1989. But the increasingly bitter confrontation between Ayatollah Khamenei and Mr. Rafsanjani has raised the prospect of a contest of political wills between the two revolutionary veterans.
In a sign that the crisis in Iran threatened to spill far beyond the nation’s borders, the speaker of Parliament, Ali Larijani, on Sunday called for reconsidering relations with Britain, France and Germany after their “shameful” statements about the election.
State radio reported that Mr. Larijani, who has his own aspirations to one day become president, made his comments in a speech to the full Parliament. Mr. Larijani’s position, which reflects the anti-Western orientation of the hard-liners in charge, could further undermine President Obama’s efforts to reach out to Iran and begin a diplomatic dialogue. The United States severed ties with Iran 30 years ago.
In Washington, Mr. Obama resisted pressure from Republicans who have called his response to the Iranian crackdown too timid. On Saturday, Mr. Obama stepped up his criticism of Iran’s government, calling it “violent and unjust,” and said that the world was watching its behavior.
Mr. Obama has argued that a more aggressive White House stance against the Iranian government crackdown would be used by Tehran as anti-American propaganda. “The last thing that I want to do is to have the United States be a foil for those forces inside Iran who would love nothing better than to make this an argument about the United States,” Mr. Obama said in an interview with Harry Smith of CBS News broadcast Friday. “We shouldn’t be playing into that.”
In an interview broadcast Sunday on Iranian television, Foreign Minister Manouchehr Mottaki said that officials were examining the charge of voting fraud and expected to issue their findings by the end of the week. But like Ayatollah Khamenei, Mr. Mottaki appeared to have already judged the vote as clean and fair. He said the “possibility of organized and comprehensive disruption and irregularities in the election is almost close to zero,” according to Iran’s English-language Press TV.
At the same time, serious new questions about the vote’s integrity were raised outside of Iran. Chatham House, a London-based research organization, released a study done with the University of St. Andrews challenging the Iranian government’s declared results, based on a comparison with the 2005 elections as well as Iran’s own census data.
The study showed, for example, that in two provinces where Mr. Ahmadinejad won a week ago, a turnout of more than 100 percent was recorded.
The study also showed that in a third of all provinces, the official results, if true, would have required that Mr. Ahmadinejad win not only all conservative voters and all former centrist voters and all new voters, but up to 44 percent of formerly reformist voters.
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