Ahmadinejad Assails Obama as Opposition Urges Defiance
President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad during the opening ceremony of the Mehr petrochemical facility in southern Iran on Thursday. More Photos >
TEHRAN — As Iran’s embattled opposition leader said he would “not back down for a second” in challenging the disputed elections, President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad told President Obama on Thursday to avoid interfering in Iran’s affairs and demanded an apology from the American leader for striking the same critical tone as his predecessor, George W. Bush.
Iranian Readers: Share Your Views on the post-election unrest in Iran.Behind the Protests, Social Upheaval in Iran
What social forces have been unleashed in the aftermath of the disputed election in Iran?
Multimedia
Mr. Ahmadinejad demanded an apology from President Obama. More Photos »
The sharp words offered no prospect of eased tensions between Washington and Tehran at a time of profound differences over issues such as Iran’s nuclear program and its support for Hezbollah in Lebanon and Hamas in Gaza, which the United States calls terrorist organizations.
Mr. Ahmadinejad’s comments, quoted on the semi-official Fars news agency, came as at least three Iranian newspapers reported that only 105 of 290 members of the Iranian Parliament invited to a victory party for him Wednesday night actually attended the event, suggesting a deep divide within the political elite over the election and its aftermath. Neither the speaker of Parliament, Ali Larijani, nor the deputy speaker, Mohammed Reza Bahonar, an erstwhile ally of Mr. Ahmadinejad, made an appearance.
Opposition figures said Thursday that 70 academics had been arrested after meeting with the main opposition leader, Mir Hussein Moussavi, on Wednesday, adding to a wave of detentions that has been depicted as the most sweeping since the Iranian revolution in 1979. But Mr. Moussavi said Thursday in a Web posting: “’I will not back down even for a second, even for personal threats or interests.”
In his first public comments for several days, Mr. Moussavi called the recent election a “big fraud” and said government security forces had “attacked protesters inhumanely, killed, injured or arrested them.” In remarks on an opposition Web site, he said, “I am willing to show how election criminals have stood by those behind the recent riots and shed people’s blood.”
Mr. Moussavi said he was coming under pressure to withdraw his challenge to the election, which he says was stolen. Another opposition candidate, Mohsen Rezai, who won far fewer votes than Mr. Moussavi and was regarded as the most hard-line of the opposition candidates, formally withdrew complaints about electoral irregularities on Wednesday.
A representative of Mr. Rezai said that he had withdrawn the complaint in disgust because the Guardian Council and the Interior Ministry never undertook even the limited recount they said they would. The representative, Ali Ahmadi, said that more than 200 of Mr. Rezai’s men were ready to monitor the recount but “the Guardian Council and the Interior Ministry never started the recount in any of the provinces or polling stations,” the tabnak Web site reported.
Mr. Moussavi, who has not been seen in public for a week, said on his Web site, Kalemeh, that there were “recent pressures on me aimed at withdrawing” his challenge to the vote. He did not go into detail but he complained that his “access to people is completely restricted,” the Web site said.
He also rejected the government’s insistence that protest is unlawful and promoted by outsiders.
“I insist on the nation’s constitutional right to protest against the election result and its aftermath,” Mr. Moussavi said, criticizing the closure in recent days of an opposition newspaper and the arrest of those who worked here. “The illegal confrontation with the media opens the way for foreign interference,” he added.
Compared with the mass protests last week against the election results by hundreds of thousands of Iranians, the numbers have dwindled in the face of punishing reprisals by security forces. Mr. Moussavi urged followers on Thursday to assemble at the shrine of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, the leader of the Islamic revolution, on the outskirts of Tehran.
But the likely response to the call was initially unclear after security forces overwhelmed a small group of protesters on Wednesday with brutal beatings, tear gas and shots fired in the air. Another protest called for Thursday by the second-placed opposition candidate, former Parliament Speaker Mehdi Karroubi, to mourn protesters killed in the demonstrations was called off, Mr. Karroubi said on his Web site.
One of those who died was Neda Agha-Soltan, a 26-year-old woman whose death last Saturday, recorded on an amateur video clip, went around the world on Web sites as an emblem of official brutality. Seeking to turn that image around, Web sites supporting Mr. Ahmadinejad began reporting Thursday that she had been killed by “hooligans” commissioned by a BBC reporter who has been expelled from Iran.
As the authorities have clamped down on the protests there have been indications that people are turning to less confrontational ways to express their dissent. The 10 p.m. rooftop chants of “death to the dictator” and “Allahu Akbar,” a tactic borrowed from the 1979 Islamic revolution, seem to be growing stronger every night. On Friday, protesters have said they will release thousands of green and black balloons in memory of those killed in the clashes.
There were mounting fears in the opposition camp that the government was preparing the groundwork to detain Mr. Moussavi himself.
On Wednesday, the official Iranian news agency reported that intelligence and security agents in Tehran concluded that a Moussavi campaign office was used for “illegal gatherings, the promotion of unrest and efforts to undermine the country’s security.” The news agency reported that “the plotters have been arrested” and said the opposition office was a “headquarters for a psychological war.”
Some analysts raised questions about Mr. Moussavi’s leadership of the opposition. As a former prime minister who is essentially an insider thrust into the role of opposition, it has been difficult to gauge how far he would go to defy the system. But the latest posting seemed to suggest continued defiance.
As Iranian officials seek to crush the remaining resistance, American attitudes to their campaign have hardened.
After the official presidential results were announced, giving Mr. Ahmadinejad an 11 million-vote margin, President Obama was initially cautious in his response. But he has gradually adopted a much tougher stance, saying Tuesday he was “appalled and outraged” by events in Iran.
“Mr. Obama made a mistake to say those things,” Mr. Ahmadinejad said Thursday at a ceremony to open a petrochemical plant.
The election had brought a chance for a “new start in international relations” in which Iran would “speak from a different position based on dialogue and justice,” he said, according to the semi-official Fars news agency,
While Iran believed Britain and other European countries had a “bad record” in their relationship with Iran, he said, “we were not expecting Mr. Obama” to “fall into the same trap and continue the same path that Bush did.”
He also demanded an apology from President Obama for his most recent statement. “I hope you avoid the interfering in Iran’s affairs and express your regret in a way that the Iranian people find out about it,” he said.
But as he assailed the American leader, Mr. Ahmadinejad also faced a new challenge at home.
Analysts suggested that the unyielding response from lawmakers to his victory celebration showed that Iran’s leaders, backed by the supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, had lost patience and that Iran was now, more than ever, a state guided not by clerics of the revolution but by a powerful military and security apparatus.
Security agents have continued to fan out across the country, detaining former government officials, journalists, activists, young people and old, anyone seen as siding with those who reject the conclusion that Mr. Ahmadinejad won a landslide against Mr. Moussavi.
The government also stepped up its efforts to block independent news coverage of events all across the country. The government has banned foreign news media members from leaving their offices, suspended all press credentials for foreign correspondents, arrested a freelance writer for The Washington Times, continued to hold a reporter for Newsweek and forced other foreign journalists to leave the country.
That made it difficult to ascertain exactly what happened when several hundred protesters tried to gather outside the Parliament building Wednesday afternoon. Witnesses said they were met by a huge force of riot police officers and Basij vigilantes, some on motorcycles and some in pickup trucks, armed with sticks and chains. Witnesses said people were trapped and beaten as they tried to flee down side streets.
“It was not possible to wait and see what happened,” said one witness who asked for anonymity out of fear of arrest. “At one point we saw several riot police in black clothes walk towards a group of people who looked like passers-by. Suddenly they pulled out their batons and began hitting them without warning.”
The authorities said they were moving to impose order and secure the rule of law. “I was insisting and will insist on implementation of the law,” Ayatollah Khamenei said on national television. “That means we will not go one step beyond the law. Neither the system nor the people will yield to pressure at any price.”