Bracing for New Protests, Iran Issues Media Warning
TEHRAN — Tehran braced for a possible third day of defiance by opposition supporters on Wednesday after Iran’s leaders failed to halt huge demonstrations against last week’s disputed election results.
But there were signs on Wednesday that the authorities were preparing to deepen a crackdown on the way news about the protest is being spread. On Tuesday, the government revoked press credentials for foreign journalists and ordered journalists not to report from the streets.
And on Wednesday, The Associated Press reported, the powerful Revolutionary Guards went further, threatening restrictions on the digital online media that many Iranians use to communicate among themselves and to send news of their protests overseas.
In a first statement since last Friday’s vote, the Revolutionary Guards said Iranian Web site operators and bloggers must remove content deemed to “create tension” or face legal action, the A.P. said. Despite that warning, new amateur video surfaced outside of Iran on Wednesday, apparently showing a government militia rampaging through a dormitory area of Tehran University late Tuesday or early on Wednesday.
Reuters reported, meanwhile, that Mohammadreza Habibi, the senior prosecutor in the central province of Isfahan, had warned demonstrators that they could be executed under Islamic law.
“We warn the few elements controlled by foreigners who try to disrupt domestic security by inciting individuals to destroy and to commit arson that the Islamic penal code for such individuals waging war against God is execution,” Mr. Habibi said, according to the Fars news agency. It was not clear if his warning applied only to Isfahan or the country as a whole, Reuters said.
The developments came a day after supporters of the defeated opposition presidential candidate, Mir Hussein Moussavi, jammed into a line more than a mile long in Tehran. They marched mostly in silence, some carrying signs in English asking, “Where is my vote?”
The numbers of opposition protesters did not match those on Monday, when hundreds of thousands of Iranians joined the demonstrations, enraged that the conservative president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, was declared the winner of Friday’s election with 63 percent of the votes.
Fear, many said, was a factor. Seven protesters were killed following the demonstrations on Monday. Gritty and uncensored images, some taken by cellphone cameras, were beamed around the world via various Web sites.
“Nothing will change if we don’t come,” said one protester, Madjid, 26, an employee of the Foreign Ministry who was afraid to give his family name. “We need to become a big force to achieve what we want.”
Worry over the future of Iran, a country crucially important for its oil, its proximity to Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan, its nuclear program and its ties to extremist groups, spilled over its borders.
In Washington, President Obama said that it would be counterproductive for the United States “to be seen as meddling” in the disputed presidential election. He dismissed criticism that he had failed to speak out forcefully enough about the growing unrest in Iran.
“I have deep concerns about the election,” Mr. Obama told reporters at the White House. “I think that the world has deep concerns about the election.”
In Vienna, Mohamed ElBaradei, the head of the United Nations atomic energy watchdog, said in a BBC interview that he believed Iran wanted to develop nuclear weapons technology “to be recognized as a major power in the Middle East.”
As the confrontation inside Iran continued to build momentum on Tuesday, each side laid down more cards.
Reformers, with substantial popular support but without the power of the state, worked to gain religious backers, urging clerics to break with the government. “No one in his sane mind can accept these results,” a senior opposition cleric, Hassan-Ali Montazeri, said in a public letter posted on his Web site.
Supporters of Mr. Ahmadinejad — though apparently fewer than 10,000 of them — marched through Tehran’s streets proclaiming their candidate the election’s fair winner and chanting, “Rioters should be executed!”
In an intervention that suggested a growing concern over the scale of the protests, the nation’s supreme religious leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, took the unusual step of meeting with representatives of the four presidential candidates, urging national unity for the second time in recent days. He did not address the protesters’ demands for a new election.
Nazila Fathi reported from Tehran and Alan Cowell from Paris. Reporting was contributed by Bill Keller from Tehran; Clifford J. Levy from Moscow; Andrew E. Kramer from Yekaterinburg, Russia; and Sharon Otterman from New York.
The Guardian Council, the watchdog body that must certify the results, said it was willing to conduct a partial recount of the votes, the IRNA news agency reported. Ayatollah Khamenei, who had urged the council on Monday to examine the vote-rigging claims, said Tuesday that the candidates needed to resolve the issue through legal channels.
What do the mass protests mean for American interests?
Mr. Moussavi’s representative, Ali Akbar Mohtashamipour, said a recount would not meet the demands of the protesters, Ghalamnews, a Web site linked to Mr. Moussavi, reported.
“We believe there has been fraud because our representatives were not allowed to supervise the elections, and we have evidence of many irregularities,” he was quoted as saying.
He gave an example: votes cast at some polling places, he said, exceeded the number of eligible voters in those areas. He also said the Guardian Council had not been impartial before the election because some of its members campaigned for Mr. Ahmadinejad.
Despite the crackdown on the news media, an extraordinary amount of information about the protests in Tehran and other cities has reached the outside world. On Tuesday, many Web sites posted a wrenching video that purported to show the death of a student in Isfahan in a shooting by pro-government militia members. Other videos showed bleeding and inert demonstrators from Tehran after the large protests on Monday.
In Tuesday’s demonstration here, a witness saw a member of the Basij militia loyal to Mr. Ahmadinejad opening fire on a group of people, hitting one person in the neck. Protesters attacked a group of the militia members and set one of their motorcycles on fire.
There were reports that at least two moderate politicians, Mohammad Ali Abtahi and Saeed Hajarian, as well as two other activists, were arrested on Tuesday. The government arrested more than 100 politicians and activists on Sunday. Some have been released.
The English-language Press TV wing of state-owned television said Behzad Nabavi, another reformist politician, had also been arrested. The detainees include politicians, intellectuals, activists and journalists, the A.P. reported.
In Paris, Soazig Dollet, a spokeswoman for Reporters Without Borders, a press freedom advocacy group, said at least 11 reporters had been arrested since the elections and the fate of 10 more was unclear since they may either be in hiding or under arrest.
On its Web site, the organization said Aldolfatah Soltani, a lawyer and human rights activist, had been detained along with “10 or so opposition activists, politicians and civil society figures” in Tehran and three other cities — Tabriz, Isfahan and Shiraz.