Unrest in Iran Sharply Deepens Rift Among Clerics
Faezeh Hashemi, daughter of 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.
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 linking the defiant loser to “terrorist” elements for the first time and arresting relatives of his powerful backer, a founder of the Islamic republic.
Iranian Readers: Share Your Views on the Outcome
Iranian protesters covered their faces to protect themselves from tear gas during clashes with police in Tehran on Saturday. More Photos »
The loser, Mir Hussein Moussavi, the moderate reform candidate who contends the June 12 election was stolen from him, fired back at his accusers 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 direct challenge to Ayatollah Khamenei’s authority.
Earlier, the police arrested five relatives of Ali Akbar Heshemi 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 after violent protests in the capital and elsewhere were crushed by police and militia using guns, clubs, tear gas and water cannons, suggested that Ayatollah Khamenei was facing entrenched resistance among some members of the elite. Though rivalries among top clerics in Iran have been part of Iranian politics since the 1979 revolution, analysts said that open factional competition amid a major political crisis could hinder Mr. Khamenei’s ability to restore order.
There was no verifiable accounting of the death toll from the Saturday mayhem, partly because the government has imposed severe restrictions on news coverage and warned foreign reporters who remain in the country to stay off the street. It also ordered the BBC’s longtime correspondent expelled and ordered Newseek’s correspondent detained.
State television said that 10 had died, while radio reports said 19. The Iranian Student News Agency said 457 people had been arrested.
Vowing not to have a repeat of Saturday, the government 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 Sunday evening.
It was unclear whether protests, which began after the government declared that the conservative president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, had won a reelection 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 for how long it lasted.
But in the network of Internet postings and Twitterings that has become the opposition’s major tool for organizing and information-sharing, 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. But even 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 horrifying security apparatus.”
Mr. Moussavi’s Web site, which has become a clearing house for demonstration calls and opposition news, contained no call for another major demonstration on Sunday. But other opposition Web sites reported Sunday that Mr. Moussavi’s wife, Zahra Rahnavard, said his site had been hacked.
There were few signs that powerful political leaders had dropped their challenge to Mr. Khamenei. Mr. Moussavi, himself a former prime minister and longtime insider, has continued to demand the nullification of the presidential election.
Meanwhile, the moves against members of Mr. Rafsanjani’s family were seen as an attempt to put pressure on Mr. Rafsanjani to drop his challenge to Mr. Khamenei — pressure 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 the arrest of 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 Mr. Khamenei for many years.
But he remains a major establishment figure, and the arrest of his daughter comes as a surprise. In his sermon on Friday, in which he strongly backed Mr. Ahmadinejad and threatened a violent crackdown on protesters if they continued to demonstrates on the streets, Ayatollah Khamenei pointedly praised Mr. Rafsanjani as one of the pillars 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’s prosecutor’s office and demanded she be arrested for treason.
Mr. Rafsanjani, 75, heads two powerful institutions. One of them, Assembly of Experts, is a body of clerics that have the authority to oversee and, in theory, to replace the country’s supreme leader. He also runs the Expediency Council, which is given the power 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 Islamic Revolution founder Aytollah Ruhollah Khomeini in 1989. But the increasingly bitter confrontation between Mr. Khamenei and Mr. Rafsanjani has raised the prospect of a contest of political wills between the two revolutionary veterans.
The Iranian government continued its efforts to block all coverage of protests and the security crackdown. The BBC said on Sunday that the government ordered its reporter in Tehran, Jon Leyne, to leave the country, and other news organization said they were ordered by the authorities not to report on events on the streets.
Since the elections, the Iranian government has revoked foreign press credentials and told reporters not to venture outside to cover protests, and the media advocacy group Reporters Without Borders said Sunday that 23 Iranian journalists have been arrested since last week.
Newsweek’s correspondent in Tehran, Maziar Bahari, who is also a prominent documentary filmmaker and holds dual citizenship in Iran and Canada, was detained at his home on Sunday. And two other prominent Iranian journalists, Mohammad Ghoochani and Mashalah Shamsolvaezin, were also reported arrested on Sunday.
But information continued to flow from eyewitnesses and on social networking sites, much of it in the form of video said to show the brutality of the government crackdown Saturday. The most vivid image to emerge was contained in a video posted on several Web sites that showed a young woman with 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.
A group called The International Campaign for Human Rights in Iran reported on its Web site that injured protestors were being arrested as they sought medical treatment at hospitals. The group said that doctors had been ordered to report protest-related injuries to the authorities.
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 presidential election, Reuters reported.
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 on Saturday, President Obama called the government’s reaction “violent and unjust,” and, quoting Martin Luther King Jr., warned again that the world was watching what happened in Tehran.
The relative calm Sunday morning followed a day of violent clashes and extraordinary tension across Iran. The opposition leader, Mr. Moussavi, appeared at a demonstration in southern Tehran and called for a general strike if he were to be arrested. “I am ready for martyrdom,” he told supporters.
In an interview broadcast Sunday on Iranian television, Foreign Minister Manoucher 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," in remarks translated by Iran’s English-language Press TV.
With the police on the streets demonstrating a willingness to injure and even kill, one question political analysts and opposition members were beginning to ask was whether it was time to shift strategies, from street protests to some kind of national strike. It was unclear if the opposition had the support or organization, especially within the middle class, to carry out such a measure, but a strike would be immune to the heavy hand of the state and could wield leverage by crippling the already stumbling economy, analysts said