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Robert Fisk: Fear has gone in a land that has tasted freedom

In defiance of the ban on foreign reporters, The Independent's Middle East correspondent ventures out to witness an extraordinary stand-off on the streets of Tehran

Wednesday, 17 June 2009

The fate of Iran rested last night in a grubby north Tehran highway interchange called Vanak Square where – after days of violence – supporters of the official President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad at last confronted the screaming, angry Iranians who have decided that Mirhossein Mousavi should be the president of their country. Unbelievably – and I am a witness because I stood beside them – just 400 Iranian special forces police were keeping these two armies apart. There were stones and tear gas but for the first time in this epic crisis the cops promised to protect both sides.

"Please, please, keep the Basiji from us," one middle-aged lady pleaded with a special forces officer in flak jacket and helmet as the Islamic Republic's thug-like militia appeared in their camouflage trousers and purity-white shirts only a few metres away. The cop smiled at her. "With God's help," he said. Two other policemen were lifted shoulder-high. "Tashakor, tashakor," – "thank you, thank you" – the crowd roared at them.

This was phenomenal. The armed special forces of the Islamic Republic, hitherto always allies of the Basiji, were prepared for once, it seemed, to protect all Iranians, not just Ahmadinejad's henchmen. The precedent for this sudden neutrality is known to everyone – it was when the Shah's army refused to fire on the millions of demonstrators demanding his overthrow in 1979.

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TEHRAN, Iran (CNN) -- Iran on Wednesday accused international journalists in the country of being the "mouthpiece" of "hooligans" who have created unrest at post-election rallies in Tehran.

"Hundreds" of international reporters were allowed into Iran to cover last week's election as "a sign of the total transparency in the trends of the elections and the effective performance of the system of religious democracy," the foreign ministry said in a statement.

"But certain countries have rushed to judgment and have supported the illegal gatherings and the disturbances that a number of opportunists had created," the ministry said.

"They have turned themselves into the mouthpiece for these hooligans, and have damaged and targeted the radiant face of the Islamic republic."

Iran's Revolutionary Guard corps said Wednesday it will pursue legal action against Web sites that it said were inciting people to riot.

The Guard also blamed U.S. and Canadian companies, including American intelligence agencies, for financially and technically supporting the Web sites. iReport.com: On the ground in Iran

"We will very soon inform the public the details of these destructive Internet networks and we warn the people who want to use cyberspace to incite riot, threaten people and create rumors that legal action will be taken against them and the penalty they will pay is very heavy," the Guard said in a statement carried by the official Islamic Republic News Agency. VideoWatch how cyberspace is used by opposition »

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It's the counting.

At least, it is my understanding is that photoshop is not an Iranian business.....

Photoshop your way to larger rallies!

and realized that opinions had the potential to weaken the hold the mullahs exerted on their society? Regardless of who becomes the President of Iran, the population realized the underlying structure is possibly amenable to change. That's a giant leap in the population's thinking!

The Basiji act as the personal militia of Ahmadinejad. Their unprovoked violence has horrified millions of Iranians, who are already familiar with the moralizing and intimidation these thugs mete out everyday to average citizens.

Then there are the local police, who tend to be loyal to the national government, which pays them. So too the Revolutionary Guard, who like the Basiji have their identity wrapped up in their sacrifices during the Iraq-Iran war.

Strangest of all is Hezbollah, or Army of God, which was sent to Lebanon to organize the Shi'ites into opposition against Israel when Israel occupied southern Lebanon. Hezbollah in Lebanon survives, but interestingly they have kept Lebanese stationed in Iran, working for Hezbollah there. The cry on the street is "watch out for the Arab speakers" - meaning the Lebanese militia who have no reluctance to crack heads open.

Mousavi has nothing but hundreds of thousands of ordinary people willing to stand up to the police state militias, for the first time. Ahmadinejad terribly overplayed his hand right after the election when he called these storm troopers out to attack anyone who protested the electoral "decision" to reelect him president. For that matter, Khameni has overplayed his hand as well in supporting Ahmadinejad so quickly, without the due process required of him to at least count the votes. He can never really recover from this. He has shown that the theocracy is not interested in anything but its own power and prerogatives, much of it at the expense of the people they are governing.

If the mullahs and ayatollahs really wanted to stay in power they would throw out Khameni and Ahmadinejad. Both of them have been shown as corrupt beyond redemption.

By Hossein Jaseb and Hashem Kalantari

Thursday, 18 June 2009

Iran's top legislative body has invited the three defeated candidates in last week's disputed presidential election to a meeting on Saturday to discuss their complaints, state radio said today.

The election has provoked Iran's worst unrest since the 1979 Islamic revolution. Bloodshed, protests, arrests and a media crackdown have rocked the world's fifth biggest oil exporter, embroiled in a dispute with the West over its nuclear programme.

A spokesman for the 12-member Guardian Council said it had begun "careful examination" of 646 complaints submitted after the June 12 vote. President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was declared winner with nearly 63 percent of the vote against 34 percent for his closest rival, Mirhossein Mousavi.

Mousavi wants the vote annulled and held again. The council has said it is ready only to recount disputed ballot boxes.

Council spokesman Abbasali Kadkhodai said Mousavi and fellow-candidates Mehdi Karoubi and Mohsen Rezaie could raise their problems at an extraordinary council meeting on Saturday.

Mousavi's supporters prepared to heed his call for a day of mourning today for those killed in mass demonstrations against what the former prime minister says was a rigged poll.

Iran's English-language state television has reported eight people killed in five days of protests in Tehran and elsewhere.

Security agents have detained opposition politician Ebrahim Yazdi while he was in hospital, an ally of his said today.

Yazdi, who heads the banned Freedom Movement and was foreign minister in Iran's first government after the revolution, was among scores of reformists rounded up since the election.

On his website, Mousavi called on Iranians to demonstrate peacefully or gather in mosques wearing the colour of mourning - black as opposed to the green of his election campaign.

He urged them to show solidarity with the families of those wounded or martyred "as a consequence of illegal and violent encounters" with people protesting against the election result.

Ahmadinejad defended the legitimacy of the vote, telling a cabinet meeting on Wednesday that it had "posed a great challenge to the West's democracy," Mehr news agency reported.

"The ideals of the Islamic Revolution were the winners of the election," Ahmadinejad said, adding that 25 million of 42 million voters had approved the way he was running the country.

The authorities reject charges that they rigged the vote, but scores of thousands of Iranians have braved riot police and religious militia to show their anger on the streets, ignoring Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei's call for national unity.

"The friendly atmosphere that existed prior to the election should not turn into an atmosphere of confrontation and enmity afterwards, since both groups of voters believe in the Islamic system," Khamenei was quoted as saying in Kayhan newspaper.

The supreme leader is due to lead Friday prayers, when Ahmadinejad supporters are expected to show their strength.

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words of wisdom from The Traveller Within

h/t Moon of Alabama

TIME

9:40 AM ET -- Mousavi camp makes a translation request. Mousavi's spokesperson on Facebook has made a personal appeal asking for a version of this video to be produced with English subtitles. If you come across one (or produce it yourself), let me know.

Nico Pitney
pitney@huffingtonpost.com | HuffPost Reporting

Iran Updates (VIDEO): Live-Blogging The Uprising

Iran: Who's Diddling Democracy?

    Does my reading of the tea leaves prove conclusively that the Obama administration was hell-bent on regime change? Not conclusively, but all the evidence points in that direction, especially now that many extremely reputable scholars are suggesting that Ahmadinejad probably did win more than a majority of the votes cast.

    Ahmadinejad is a very bad guy, as I have recently written elsewhere. But our opposition to him does not justify meddling in another country's election while proclaiming "universal democratic values."

History suggests the coup will fail

Patrick Cockburn, who reported from Iran during the 1979 revolution, reflects on the fall of the Shah and explains why the current uprising is very different

Friday, 19 June 2009

At first sight, what is happening in Tehran today looks very like the extraordinary events of the Islamic Revolution 30 years ago. But how deep do the similarities go? On 2 December 1978, two million Iranians filled the streets of central Tehran to demand an end to the rule of the Shah and the return of Ayatollah Khomeini. It was the most popular revolution in history. At night, people gathered on rooftops to chant "Allahu Akbar – God is Great". In the daytime, mass rallies commemorated as martyrs the protesters who had been killed by the security forces.

The methods of protest are very similar. This is hardly surprising because the demonstrators seeking to get rid of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad understandably hope the type of unarmed mass protest that worked against the Shah will succeed again. Mass rally and public martyrdom are part of the Iranian revolutionary tradition, just as the barricade is part of the tradition in France. A difference between 1978-9 and today is that the Iranian government has no intention of letting history repeat itself.

Nor is it likely to do so. The Iranian revolution was carried out by a broad coalition from right to left which had religious conservatives at one end and Marxist revolutionaries at the other. The Shah and his regime had a unique ability to alienate simultaneously different parts of the Iranian population which had nothing in common. His cruel but poorly informed Savak security men convinced themselves that communists and revolutionary leftists were the danger to the throne and not the Shia clergy. They were not alone in their delusion. President Jimmy Carter recalls an August 1978 CIA memo, drafted five months before the Shah took flight, firmly concluding that Iran "is not in a revolutionary or even a pre-revolutionary situation".
Related articles

* Robert Fisk: The dead of Iran are mourned – but the fight goes on
* Michael Axworthy: The Islamic Republic may need Mousavi to survive

Crucially, the Iranian revolution had a messianic leader in Ayatollah Khomeini who was a visible alternative to the Shah, a leader whose claims to legitimacy were compromised even before he came to the throne: his father Reza Shah, an army general who seized power in the 1920s, was deposed by British and Soviet troops in 1941. His son was forced to flee in 1953 when Mohammed Mossadeq was elected prime minister, only to be restored by a CIA-run coup for which President Barack Obama has apologised.

More astute rulers might have tried to burnish their nationalist credentials but instead the Shah indulged in historical fantasies such as abolishing the Islamic calendar and celebrating the 2,500th anniversary of the founding of the Persian Empire at Persepolis in 1971. Foreign dignitaries and celebrities sipped drinks behind security cordons while Iranians were excluded.

What makes the Iranian revolution different from previous revolutions in the 19th and 20th centuries is that it was a religious revolution in terms of its leadership and inspiration. Thirty years later, when "Islamic revolution" is seen as such a menace in the West, it is difficult to recall what a surprising development it was in the late 1970s. Revolutions were supposed to follow roughly in the footsteps of the French, Russian or Chinese revolutions. Their tone was secular and anti-religious. Priests were the defenders of the established order.

There had been Islamic anti-colonial movements against the European empires and later against the nationalist regimes which succeeded them. But the record of these Islamic parties was one of failure. It was the Iranian revolution that made political Islam such a potent and, to its enemies, such a menacing force.

The revolution was not only Islamic, but was rooted in the theology and beliefs of one particular Islamic sect. At a moment when intelligence services were looking at Moscow, Peking and Havana as the inspiration for revolution, none of them foresaw the danger to the status quo that was brewing in the clerical seminaries of Najaf in Iraq and Qom in Iran. The birth of revolutionary Shi'ism surprised the world. In theory, Shia theology is more likely to spawn revolution than the Sunni because so many of its beliefs and ceremonies revolve around the lost battle of Kerbala in AD680. It was here that Imam Hussain, the grandson of the Prophet, and 72 of his companions and relatives, were massacred by the soldiers of the second Umayyad caliph Yazid 1.

It is a story of refusal to bow to injustice, of resistance to oppression and martyrdom. But this alone did not make Shi'ism a revolutionary ideology. Iran became Shia by the fiat of the Safavid dynasty in the 16th century. It was only in the 1950s and 1960s, in response to triumphant secularism, leftist revolutionary ideology and persecution by the Shah, that the Shia clergy of Iran and Iraq began to develop their own Islamic "liberation theology" which enabled them to take power in 1979.

The Iranian revolution was more deeply rooted than it appeared to be. It sprang from a coherent ideology. It succeeded partly because it caught its enemies, as well as most of its supporters, by surprise. But it was not a spontaneous event. Khomeini and the clergy who supported him were committed revolutionaries. They had thought out how to take power and how to keep it. They might decry nationalism, but it was their commitment to defending the Iranian nation from foreign encroachments which was so crucial to their success.

In 1964, Khomeini was expelled from Iran, to take refuge in Najaf, because of his opposition to extra-territorial rights for US government employees. The present Iranian leadership does not have the great weakness of the Shah, which was to be seen as the puppet of foreign powers.

By the time the Shah left Iran on 16 January 1979 he had almost no support. This again is very different from the present situation. President Ahmadinejad was re-elected with 62.6 per cent of the vote last week. His opponents claim the poll was rigged, although this is almost exactly the same as his vote in 2005, when he won 61.7 per cent. The point is that Mr Ahmadinejad is a popular politician and the Shah was not. He is very unlikely to be forced from power. Nor is he likely to surrender as the Shah did when he found he was unable to cope with the uprising.

The weakness of the Shah was not evident when the first demonstrations against him began in October 1977, after the death of Khomeini's son. The first demonstrators, religious students, were killed in early 1978 after an article in a government newspaper attacked Khomeini. Their deaths were commemorated 40 days later, according to Shia religious custom, and protests spread across Iran.

These demonstrations in some ways resembled civil rights marches in the US but they had greater impact because they were wedded to religious ritual and the commemoration of martyrdom. Politically, this was a potent blend. It appealed to the most conservative cleric and the most radical student alike. Even so, the marches and demonstrations might have run out of steam over the summer of 1978 if they had not been sustained by a network of clerical supporters of Khomeini in the mosques. Iranians from the slums and villages who had not benefited from the oil boom began to join in.

No crime was so bad that Iranians did not think that the Shah and his security men capable of it. When the Rex Cinema in Abadan caught fire and 400 people burned to death, it was widely believed Savak had started it.

The Shah, who appeared demoralized from an early stage in the crisis, used enough repression to make his regime detested but not enough to create lasting fear. His concessions conveyed confusion and weakness. Martial law was declared. On 8 September, so-called Black Friday, soldiers opened fire on demonstrators and were accused of killing thousands (though the real figure may have been much lower). These were the days when the Shah lost his last chance of staying in power.

He made one further unforced error which had disastrous consequences for himself. Khomeini had been in exile in Najaf, from which he could communicate with Iran but with some difficulty. Cassettes of his sermons had to be smuggled across the border. There was no international press corps in Iraq. But with self-destructive zeal, the Shah's emissaries persuaded the Iraqi government, in which Saddam Hussein was already the strongest figure, to expel Khomeini, who, after being refused entry to Kuwait, took up residence in a suburb of Paris in October.

In Paris, he had better access to the international press than the Shah and was able to communicate easily with Iran.

By the end of 1978, Iranians, even those opposed to the revolution, could see that the Shah was finished. His core military support began to waver. The clergy made every effort to infiltrate and propagandize his armed forces. In any case, he did not want to fight. By mid-January, he and his wife had left Iran forever.

On 1 February 1979, Khomeini returned to Iran to be greeted by several million Iranians and swiftly completed the takeover of power. He marginalised his secular allies from the year before and began to radicalise the revolution, culminating in November 1979 when clerical students took over the US embassy.

Recalling how the Shah had come back from exile with US support in 1953, any potential Shah supporters were imprisoned or shot.

The leaders of the new regime were intent on staying in power. They have not changed much today. The spectacle, the symbols, and the language in Iran in 2009 are similar to those present in 1978-9, but the political forces at work could not be more different. The protesters then were much stronger than they looked; those of today have the odds heavily stacked against them.

Social networks offer Iran protest coverage, but come with price

By Gillian Shaw, Vancouver SunJune 18, 2009 6:01 PM

Ramin Mahjouri is editor of the Paivand newspaper, part of the Canadian-based Paivand Media Group that serves Iranian and Persian-speaking communities here and abroad.

VANCOUVER -- Ramin Mahjouri is in the Lower Mainland, but he is getting first-hand accounts of the protests in Iran through his social networks in cyberspace.

But even for Mahjouri, who is sifting through the flood of information with the practised eye of a journalist, it is difficult to sort the facts from the fiction and the sometimes deliberate misinformation.

“It is phenomenal what Facebook and Twitter have been doing,” said Mahjouri, editor of the Paivand newspaper, part of the Canadian-based Paivand Media Group that serves Iranian and Persian-speaking communities here and abroad. “From the moment [post-election protests] started, the easiest and fastest way to get information has been through Facebook and Twitter.”

Soldiers may be in the streets of Iran, but they’re being outgunned in cyberspace where millions of Iranians and their supporters are fighting back.

While the Internet’s anonymity and speed of communication are providing an avenue for the free speech quelled by the government’s stranglehold on Iranian media and its block on foreign journalists in the country, those factors can also contribute to the spread of misinformation and put Iranians who are speaking out at risk.

“There are two dangers,” said Mahjouri. “One is the anonymity of people who put these things on.

“You don’t know what purpose the information is serving. That’s why if you read all these messages, depending on your network, there will be a lot of warnings like — ‘that piece of news has come up but don’t trust it because it has come from the other camp.’

The second problem is the credibility of sources.

“You don’t know where it is coming from so you can’t trust it,” said Mahjouri. “I have come across a lot of nonsense.

“People are excited; they don’t know how to check the validity of documents so they put them on.”

As an example, Mahjouri cites the photo of a dead baby with a stab womb being lifted from the womb of its dead mother. A gruesome reality of the protests in the aftermath of the Iranian election? Or is it from another time and place, altered with photo editing software and totally unrelated to the tragedies of current-day Iran?

The crowd shots purporting to be supporters at a rally for victorious President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad? Exposed not only as a digitally enhanced sham but as a poor attempt at photo editing.

While social networks are circumventing the Iranian government’s attempt to muzzle dissent, they are also being used by both sides in the battle.

Messages and warnings are tripping over each other in cyberspace. On Twitter, the 140-character micro-blogging service, messages are grouped by topics under ‘hash’ tags, with #IranElection leading Twitter’s top topics in the election aftermath. From Facebook to Flickr, YouTube and others, social networks have been mobilized in an assault that ranges from messages of sympathy and support to news of protest gatherings both in Iran and around the world.

It is all interspersed with warnings and news of global supporters foiling Iranian government attempts to filter news and block access to Twitter and Facebook. Often the messages are conflicting — one announcing a gathering, another contradicting it minutes later.

Twitter has even received high-level backing, with the U.S. State Department stepping in to ask the San Francisco-based Twitter to delay scheduled maintenance that would have cut its service to Iran. There’s a plethora of online instructions for newbies and veterans alike in cyberwarfare and the Voice of America has broadcast instructions to Iranians about how to evade government Internet restrictions.

“We believe that it is a fundamental human right for people to be able to communicate, to express their opinions, to take positions, and this is a view that goes back to the founding of our country and we stand firmly behind it,” U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton told journalists in speaking about the use of Twitter by the Iranian people.

“And therefore we promote the right of free expression and it is the case that one of the means of expression, the use of Twitter, is a very important one not only to the Iranian people but now increasingly to people around the world, most particularly young people."

Davood Ghavami, president of the Iranian Canadian Congress of BC, said while the Iranian government controls the media there, it can’t control the cellphones and the computers of the people.

“The people are the main source of communication and messages,” he said. “They are the main sources for the general public within the community and connecting to overseas.

“It is very crucial.”

In Vancouver, social networks like Facebook and Twitter have mobilized support for Iranians, with thousands of people turning out every night this week for candlelight vigils.

Some 3,000 people showed up at the Art Gallery Wednesday, with another vigil planned for the same place Thursday night as part of a 10-day protest over the Iranian election.

“The bottom line is it is good, it is fast and we can get the word out but at the same time it can confuse people,” Mahjouri said of the advantages and the pitfalls of social networks.

Al Jazeera, June 18

Hundreds of protesters, politicians and activists have been detained in Iran after mass protests over the disputed re-election of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the Iranian president.

Hadi Ghaemi, the director of the New York-based International Campaign for Human Rights in Iran, said on Thursday that he had been told that about 200 people were being held across the country.

He told the Associated Press news agency that he had spoken to family members and colleagues of people who had been arrested or had disappeared.

Supporters of Mir Hossein Mousavi, a defeated reformist candidate, have staged demonstrations every day since Ahmadinejad was declared to have won the presidential election by a landslide.

Al Jazeera, By Mark LeVine, June 18

In 15 years of writing about the Middle East, I have never encountered a situation that changed so fast that one could write an article that becomes outdated in the time it takes to write it.

It seems that the Iranian elite has been caught similarly off-guard, and is still trying to read its own society to understand how broad is the societal discontent reflected in the mass protests.

This calculus is crucial - in some ways more so than whether the results are legitimate or, as some claim, electoral fraud.

It will determine whether the Iranian power elite - that is, the political-religious-military-security leadership who control the levers of state violence - moves towards negotiation and reconciliation between the increasingly distant sides, or moves to crush the mounting opposition with large-scale violence.

New York Times, Neil MacFarquhar, June 18

The daytime protests across the Islamic republic have been largely peaceful. But Iranians shudder at the violence unleashed in their cities at night, with the shadowy vigilantes known as Basijis beating, looting and sometimes gunning down protesters they tracked during the day.

The vigilantes plan to take their fight into the daylight on Friday, with the public relations department of Ansar Hezbollah, the most public face of the Basij, announcing that they planned a public demonstration to expose the “seditious conspiracy” being carried out by “agitating hooligans.”

“We invite the vigilant people who are always in the arena to make their loud objections heard in response to the babbling of this tribe,” said the announcement, carried on the Web site Parsine.

The announcement could be the first indication that the government was taking its gloves off, Iranian analysts noted, because up to this point the Basijis, usually deployed as the shock troops to end any public protests, have been working in stealth.

youtube says it will allow videos showing violence for documentary purpose, will they start showing Chinese ones next?

"I am urging them to end street protests, otherwise they will be responsible for its consequences, and consequences of any chaos," Khamenei said in his first address to the nation since the protests broke out

Doesn't sound like he is willing to compromise

_{Tolerating prostitution is tolerating abuse and torture of women and children.}

NYTIME JOHN F. BURNS writes from LONDON — When Ayatollah Ali Khamenei used his speech at Friday Prayer in Tehran to denounce Britain as “the most evil” of Iran’s enemies, he was striking a chord with a deep resonance in the psyche of Iranians, the legacy of a long history of British imperial intrusions into their country’s affairs.

Singling out Britain, and not the “great Satan” of the United States, so often the bugaboo for Iran’s leadership since the Islamic Revolution of 1979, might seem an odd choice for Iran’s supreme leader, when the government he leads faces its greatest crisis in 30 years.

But British scholars on Iran said Ayatollah Khamenei’s attack on Britain was characteristic of a Tehran leadership that resorts under pressure to a mix of crude stereotypes that play well at home. They said it might also reflect a concern not to slam the door opened by President Obama, who is offering a new dialogue in his search for a diplomatic solution to the impasse over Iran’s nuclear program.

If that were the calculation, Ayatollah Khamenei may have correctly concluded that going after Britain would cost Iran little, judging by the carefully hedged response to the Tehran speech by Britain’s prime minister, Gordon Brown. At a European summit meeting in Brussels, Mr. Brown noted the ayatollah’s speech, but offered only a modest sharpening of Britain’s previous admonitions to Tehran’s leaders over their handling of the election crisis. Like Mr. Obama, Mr. Brown seemed determined not to give the Iranian leadership the excuse of foreign meddling to justify a crackdown on the protesters filling the streets of Iranian cities. {snip}
In focusing on Britain, the experts said, Mr. Khamenei was playing to popular resentment of Britain’s long history of intervention in Iran, and perhaps avoiding confronting, at least for now, the renewed appeal America holds among many Iranians with Mr. Obama in the White House.

Still, Mr. Khamenei’s attack on Britain surprised some scholars. Ali Ansari, a professor of Iranian history at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland, said the attack suggested that Mr. Khamenei might be more beholden to President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the official winner of the presidential election, than many Iran experts had thought. Animosity toward Britain is strongest among the working class and agrarian Iranians — Mr. Ahmadinejad’s political base, he said.

“I think it just reflects the really quite bizarre view that Ahmadinejad and his supporters have,” said Professor Ansari, whose father was an Iranian diplomat under the monarch ousted in 1979, Shah Mohammed Reza Pahlavi. He added, “Britain has always been a bogeyman, but going back to that now, resorting to the villain of choice, if they really believe it, just shows how out of touch they really are.”

Iranian popular culture has kept alive suspicions dating to the 18th century, when Britain, protecting its empire in India, began competing with Russia for influence in Iran. Britain’s strategic interest deepened with the development of Iran’s oil fields.

Antipathies sharpened when Britain invaded Iran in 1941 and exiled the Iranian ruler, Reza Shah Pahlavi, suspected of pro-German sympathies. In 1953, British secret services worked with the Central Intelligence Agency to overthrow Mohammed Mossadegh, the nationalist prime minister. The issue then was the Mossadegh government’s nationalization of Iran’s oil fields, ending the monopoly of the British-owned Anglo-Iranian Oil Company.

More recently, Britain’s relations with Tehran were strained by the confrontation over the author Salman Rushdie. His novel “The Satanic Verses” prompted Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, leader of the Islamic Revolution, to issue a call in 1989 for Muslims to kill Mr. Rushdie for what the ayatollah deemed to be the book’s blasphemy. That led to a lengthy freeze in diplomatic relations, and to years in which Mr. Rushdie, a British citizen, lived in hiding under police protection.

But perhaps the sharpest thorn in Tehran’s side has been the BBC’s Persian-language services, by radio since the early 1940s, and by a recently established television channel. Millions of Iranians have come to rely on the BBC’s reporting on Iran, regarding it, Professor Ansari said, as the “most trustworthy” account of what is happening in their country.

On Friday, the BBC said it had decided to use two extra satellites to combat intensive jamming efforts by Iran, a step likely to be seen by Tehran as a direct challenge, given its assertions in recent days that foreign broadcasters — and Web services like Facebook and Twitter — are being used to foment unrest over the disputed election.

But Rosemary Hollis, a professor of Middle East studies at City University London, said Mr. Khamenei’s attack on Britain may have been prompted by something more basic to the Iranian psyche, an old shibboleth in which Britain remains the dark force behind American power. “Strange as it seems, they’re convinced that the British are the clever ones, manipulating things behind the scenes,” she said.

reuters - Iran's highest legislative body said on Saturday it was ready to recount a tenth of the votes in a disputed presidential election and one reformist party said it was calling off a protest rally planned for later in the day.

Good luck to all iranians today, it will probably be a crucial day for the future of the country.

Showing up today is both brave and neccesary.

Sky news, with salt

Supporters of defeated election candidate Mirhossein Mousavi have reportedly lit a fire at the headquarters of the Iranian president's backers in Tehran.

Police have fired shots in the air to prevent clashes between those who favour pro-reformer Mr Mousavi and those who support hardline President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, witnesses say.

Mr Ahmadinejad was the named the winner in the June 12 vote, but opposition candidates claimed there had been vote rigging and this led to major protests.

In the latest rally, officers have apparently been using tear gas and water cannon on opposition protesters.

Reports said thousands of people have defied Government warnings that any protests would be suppressed.

The head of the police warned Mr Mousavi of "firm action" against any "illegal" demonstration.

Eyewitnesses say some 3,000 protesters chanted "Death to the dictator!" and "Death to dictatorship!" near Revolution Square in the city centre.

Riot police were sent out on to the streets following a demand by Iran's supreme leader for the demonstrations to end.

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TEHRAN, June 20 (Reuters) - Iran's defeated candidate Mirhossein Mousavi in a letter to the country's top legislative body on Saturday insisted the June presidential election should be annulled, his website said.

"These irritating measures (election rigging) was planned months ahead of the vote ... considering all the violations ... the election should be annulled," Mousavi said in the letter.

Fisk

Robert Fisk’s World: In Tehran, fantasy and reality make uneasy bedfellows

It’s said that the cruel ‘Iranian’ cops aren’t Iranian at all. They’re Hizbollah militia

At around 4.35 last Monday morning, my Beirut mobile phone rang in my Tehran hotel room. "Mr Fisk, I am a computer science student in Lebanon. I have just heard that students are being massacred in their dorms at Tehran University. Do you know about this?" The Fisk notebook is lifted wearily from the bedside table. "And can you tell me why," he continued, "the BBC and other media are not reporting that the Iranian authorities have closed down SMS calls and local mobile phones and have shut down the internet in Tehran? I am learning what is happening only from Twitters and Facebook."
Related articles

When I arrived at the university, the students were shrieking abuse through the iron gates of the campus. "Massacre, massacre," they cried. Gunfire in the dorms. Correct. Blood on the floor. Correct. Seven dead? Ten dead, one student told me through the fence. We don't know. The cops arrived minutes later amid a shower of stones. Filtering truth out of Tehran these days is as frustrating as it is dangerous.

A day earlier, an Iranian woman muttered to me in an office lift that the first fatality of the street violence was a young student. Was she sure, I asked? "Yes," she said. "I have seen the photograph of his body. It is terrible." I never saw her again. Nor the photograph. Nor had anyone seen the body. It was a fantasy. Earnest reporters check this out – in fact, I have been spending at least a third of my working days in Tehran this past week not reporting what might prove to be true but disproving what is clearly untrue.

Take the call I had five hours before the early-hour phone call, from a radio station in California. Could I describe the street fighting I was witnessing at that moment? Now, it happened that I was standing on the roof of the al-Jazeera office in north Tehran, speaking in a late-night live interview with the Qatar television station. I could indeed describe the scene to California. What I could see were teenagers on motorcycles, whooping with delight as they set light to the contents of a litter bin on the corner of the highway.

Two policemen ran up to them with night-sticks and they raced away on their bikes with shouts of derision. Then the Tehran fire brigade turned up to put out – as one of the firemen later told me with infinite exhaustion – their 79th litter-bin fire of the night. I knew how he felt. A report that Basiji militia had taken over one of Mir-Hossein Mousavi's main election campaign office was a classic. Yes, there were uniformed men in the building – belonging to Mousavi's own hired security company.

Now for the very latest on the fantasy circuit. The cruel "Iranian" cops aren't Iranian at all. They are members of Lebanon's Hizbollah militia. I've had this one from two reporters, three phone callers (one from Lebanon) and a British politician. I've tried to talk to the cops. They cannot understand Arabic. They don't even look like Arabs, let alone Lebanese. The reality is that many of these street thugs have been brought in from Baluch areas and Zobal province, close to the Afghan border. Even more are Iranian Azeris. Their accents sound as strange to Tehranis as would a Belfast accent to a Cornishman hearing it for the first time.

Fantasy and reality make uneasy bedfellows, but once they are combined and spread with high-speed inaccuracy around the world, they are also lethal. Sham elections, the takeover of party offices, a massacre on a university campus, an imminent coup d'état, the possible overthrow of the whole 30-year old Islamic Republic, the isolation of an entire country as its communications are systematically shut down.

I am reminded of Eisenhower's comment to Foster Dulles when he sent him to London to close down Anthony Eden's crazed war in Suez. The secretary of state's job, Eisenhower instructed Dulles, was to say "Whoah, boy!" Good advice for those who believe in the Twitterers.

But the no-smoke-without-fire brigade has a point. Look at the extraordinary, million-strong march against the regime by Mousavi's supporters on Monday. Even the Iranian press was forced to report it, albeit on inside pages. Yes, the authorities have indeed closed down the local SMS service. Yes, they have slowed down – but not closed – the internet. My Beirut roaming phone now rarely reaches London, although incoming calls arrive – unfortunately for me – round the clock. The Iranian government is obviously trying to interfere with the communications of Mousavi supporters to prevent them from organising further marches. Outrageous in any normal country, perhaps. But this is not a normal country. It is a state as obsessed with the dangers of counter-revolution as the West is obsessed with Iran's nuclear ambitions. The Supreme Leader's speech yesterday was proof of that.

But then we had the famous instruction to journalists in Tehran from the Ministry of Islamic Guidance that they could no longer report opposition street demonstrations. I heard nothing of this. Indeed, the first clue came when I refused to be interviewed by CNN (because their coverage of the Middle East is so biased) and the woman calling me asked: "Why? Are you worried about your safety?" Fisk continued to spend 12 hours a day on the streets. I discovered there was a ban only when I read about it in The Independent. Maybe the Guidance lads and lassies couldn't get through on my mobile. But then, who had cut the phone lines?

We have, in fact, reported all the censorship – of local newspapers as well as communications. The footage of a brutal police force assaulting the political opposition on the streets of the capital has shocked the world. Rightly so, although no one has made comparison with police forces who batter demonstrators on the streets of Western Europe, who beat women with night-sticks, who have kicked over an innocent middle-aged man who immediately suffered a fatal heart attack, who have shot down an innocent passenger on the London Tube... There are special codes of morality to be applied to Middle East countries which definitely must not apply to us.

So let's take a look at those Iranian elections. A fraud, we believe. And I have the darkest doubts about those election figures which gave Mousavi a paltry 33.75 per cent of the vote. Indeed, I and a few Iranian friends calculated that if the government's polling-night statistics were correct, the Iranian election committee would have had to have counted five million votes in just two hours. But our coverage of this poll has been deeply flawed. Most visiting Western journalists stay in hotels in the wealthy, north Tehran suburbs, where tens of thousands of Mousavi supporters live, where it's easy to find educated translators who love Mousavi, where interviewees speak fluent English and readily denounce the spiritual and cultural and social stagnation of Iran's – let us speak frankly – semi-dictatorship.

But few news organisations have the facilities or the time or the money to travel around this 659,278 square-mile country – seven times the size of Britain – and interview even the tiniest fraction of its 71 million people. When I visited the slums of south Tehran on Friday, for example, I found that the number of Ahmadinejad supporters grew as Mousavi's support dribbled away. And I wondered whether, across the huge cities and vast deserts of Iran, a similar phenomenon might be discovered. A Channel 4 television crew, to its great credit, went down to Isfahan and the villages around that beautiful city and came back with a suspicion – unprovable, of course, anecdotal, but real – that Ahmadinejad just might have won the election.

This is also my suspicion: that Ahmadinejad might have scraped in, but not with the huge majority he was awarded. For with their usual, clumsy, autocratic behaviour, the clerics behind the Islamic Republic may have decreed that only a greater majority for the winner could decisively annihilate the reputation of its secular opponents. Perhaps Ahmadinejad got 51 per cent or 52 per cent and this was preposterously increased to 63 per cent. Perhaps Mousavi picked up 44 per cent or 45 per cent. I don't know. The Iranians will never know, even though the Supreme Leader told us yesterday that the incredible 63 per cent was credible. That is Iran's tragedy.

Yes, Ahmadinejad remains for me an outrageous president, one of those cracked political leaders – like Colonel Ghaddafi or Lebanon's General Michel Aoun – which this region sadly throws up, to the curses of its friends and to the delight of its enemies in the West. And the Islamic Republic itself – while it has understandable historical roots in the savagery of the Shah's regime which preceded it, not to mention the bravery of its people – is a dangerously contrived and inherently unfree state which was locked into immobility by an unworldly and now long-dead ayatollah.

And those nuclear arms? How many of us reported a blunt statement which the Supreme Leader and the man who ultimately controls all nuclear development in Iran made on 4 June, just eight days before the elections? "Nuclear weapons," he said in a speech in which he encouraged Iranians to vote, "are religiously forbidden (haram) in Islam and the Iranian people do not have such a weapon. But the Western countries and the US in particular, through false propaganda, claim that Iran seeks to build nuclear bombs – which is totally false..."

There are few provable assurances in the Middle East, often few facts and a lot of lies. Dangers are as thick as snakes in the desert. As I write, I have just received another call from Lebanon. "Mr Fisk, a girl has been shot in Iran. I have a video from the internet. You can see her body..." And you know what? I think he might be right.

Election crisis adds more risks to free speech in Iran

Chicago Tribune, By Roxana Saberi, June 21

"Just a moment," an Iranian friend typed as we chatted online, "while I upload my photos of today's protest onto Facebook." He is only one of many ordinary Iranians informing the world about the momentous events taking place in Iran since the country's disputed June 12 presidential election. As traditional media outlets and foreign journalists have faced mounting government restrictions on their reporting, "citizen journalists" have stepped in.

Through e-mails, blogs and social-networking Web sites such as Facebook and Twitter, they have been disseminating photos, video and eyewitness accounts of street clashes and violence between anti-government demonstrators and Iranian security forces and militiamen.

But this kind of reporting is not without risk. The press freedom group Reporters Without Borders says bloggers have been arrested, as have people who simply took pictures with their cell phones. All journalists, the organization's secretary general says, are "under threat."

It is not the first time that the Islamic Republic has tried to limit the reporting of internal unrest in recent years.

Al Jazeera, June 20

Riot police in Iran have used tear gas, water cannon and batons to disperse about 3,000 people attempting to protest over the disputed presidential election of Mahmoud Ahmdinejad, the president.

Witnesses said that dozens of people were hospitalised after being beaten by police and pro-government militia in the capital, Tehran, on Saturday.

"Lots of guards on motorbikes closed in on us and beat us brutally," one protester said.

"As we were running away the Basiji [militia] were waiting in side alleys with batons, but people opened their doors to us trapped in alleys."

Police used tear gas, water cannons and batons Saturday to disperse thousands of protesters rallying in the central part of Iran's capital to demand a new presidential election, witnesses said.

They said about 100 people were hurt after riot police charged the crowd of nearly 3,000 in Tehran's Revolution Square and began beating demonstrators.

Amateur video taken in the area showed a fiery barricade that protesters put up to block police.

There are also reports that opposition supporters set fire to a building used by backers of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

Canadian freelance journalist George McLeod, one of the few foreign reporters remaining in the country, told CBC News he saw fires burning in the streets and heard small explosions.

"Tehran is quickly becoming very violent. There are protests all over the city," he said. "I saw three people being carried into ambulances. One had a head wound, the other seemed semi-unconscious. I don't know whether they were protesters, security forces or bystanders."

TEHRAN - With tens of thousands of police deployed Saturday to suppress the massive crowds that have been demanding new elections, it appears that the political crisis touched off by the disputed victory of Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has entered a new phase.

Police were quick to attack groups of protestors as they moved from various parts of Tehran to rally at Enqelab (Revolution) Square in the afternoon, apparently in hopes of dispersing demonstrators in advance and thus preempting the opposition protests that have filled the streets for much of the past week.

It now appears that the highly anticipated speech by Ayatollah Ali Khamenei’s at the Friday Prayer marked a major hardening of the regime’s attitude toward the protests.

Iranians of all walks were glued to their television sets, listening for hints about ways to calm the mayhem that has engulfed Iran since Election Day, particularly in large cities.

Some were disappointed but said they really did not expect more; others watched in disbelief the leader’s seeming inability to address the popular anger.

June 21, 2009

By NOAM COHEN

Political revolutions are often closely linked to communication tools. The American Revolution wasn’t caused by the proliferation of pamphlets, written to whip colonists into a frenzy against the British. But it sure helped.

Social networking, a distinctly 21st-century phenomenon, has already been credited with aiding protests from the Republic of Georgia to Egypt to Iceland. And Twitter, the newest social-networking tool, has been identified with two mass protests in a matter of months — in Moldova in April and in Iran last week, when hundreds of thousands of people took to the streets to oppose the official results of the presidential election.

But does the label Twitter Revolution, which has been slapped on the two most recent events, oversell the technology? Skeptics note that only a small number of people used Twitter to organize protests in Iran and that other means — individual text messaging, old-fashioned word of mouth and Farsi-language Web sites — were more influential. But Twitter did prove to be a crucial tool in the cat-and-mouse game between the opposition and the government over enlisting world opinion. As the Iranian government restricts journalists’ access to events, the protesters have used Twitter’s agile communication system to direct the public and journalists alike to video, photographs and written material related to the protests. (As has become established custom on Twitter, users have agreed to mark, or “tag,” each of their tweets with the same bit of type — #IranElection — so that users can find them more easily). So maybe there was no Twitter Revolution. But over the last week, we learned a few lessons about the strengths and weaknesses of a technology that is less than three years old and is experiencing explosive growth.

1. Twitter Is a Tool and Thus Difficult to Censor

Twitter aspires to be something different from social-networking sites like Facebook or MySpace: rather than being a vast self-contained world centered on one Web site, Twitter dreams of being a tool that people can use to communicate with each other from a multitude of locations, like e-mail. You do not have to visit the home site to send a message, or tweet. Tweets can originate from text-messaging on a cellphone or even blogging software. Likewise, tweets can be read remotely, whether as text messages or, say, “status updates” on a friend’s Facebook page.

Unlike Facebook, which operates solely as a Web site that can be, in a sense, impounded, shutting down Twitter.com does little to stop the offending Twittering. You’d have to shut down the entire service, which is done occasionally for maintenance.

2. Tweets Are Generally Banal, but Watch Out

“The qualities that make Twitter seem inane and half-baked are what makes it so powerful,” says Jonathan Zittrain, a Harvard law professor who is an expert on the Internet. That is, tweets by their nature seem trivial, with little that is original or menacing. Even Twitter accounts seen as promoting the protest movement in Iran are largely a series of links to photographs hosted on other sites or brief updates on strategy. Each update may not be important. Collectively, however, the tweets can create a personality or environment that reflects the emotions of the moment and helps drive opinion.

3. Buyer Beware

Nothing on Twitter has been verified. While users can learn from experience to trust a certain Twitter account, it is still a matter of trust. And just as Twitter has helped get out first-hand reports from Tehran, it has also spread inaccurate information, perhaps even disinformation. An article published by the Web site True/Slant highlighted some of the biggest errors on Twitter that were quickly repeated and amplified by bloggers: that three million protested in Tehran last weekend (more like a few hundred thousand); that the opposition candidate Mir Hussein Moussavi was under house arrest (he was being watched); that the president of the election monitoring committee declared the election invalid last Saturday (not so).

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2009-06-21 15:25:22 Print

TEHRAN, June 21 (Xinhua) -- Iran has accused Voice of America (VOA) and the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) of stirring up unrest in the country amid a dispute over the recent presidential election, the satellite channel Press TV reported Sunday.

The two news outlets sought to stir up ethnic discord across Iran in the hope of fomenting the country's disintegration, Press TV quoted Iran's Foreign Ministry spokesman Hassan Qashqavi as saying on Saturday.

"The channels act as command posts engineering the ongoing post-election riots," he said.

The Foreign Ministry spokesman also said that the two media served as the mouthpieces of the United States and Britain.

"VOA and BBC are state-funded channels and not privately-run. Their budgets are ratified in the U.S. Congress, as well as the British Parliament," Qashqavi said.

He warned that any sort of contact with the two channels either through e-mail or telephone "runs against Iranian national sovereignty and is considered as an act of enmity towards the Iranian nation."

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Xinhua- A daughter and four other family members of Iran's influential former President Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani have been arrested for provoking "riots," Iran's satellite channel Press TV reported on Sunday.

Faezeh Rafsanjani and four other unidentified family members of Rafsanjani were arrested after they allegedly took part in "unauthorized protest rallies" in central Tehran, Press TV said.

"The detainees have been accused of provoking the riots," the channel said, without giving more details.

State television has shown pictures of Faezeh Rafsanjani attending a rally and speaking to opposition supporters last week.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/8111695.stm

"State television also reported that the government had arrested five members of the family of Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, the former president who heads two influential councils in Iran, a move that escalates the government’s crackdown against the reform movement."

This certainly supports the theory of an insider coup that got out of hand. Good to have simple clarity of hostages. There's blood in the water, and the Tree of Liberty has pearly white teeth...
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Good times for Smiley! :-D

Firm floods country with links to secure servers around globe

Canadian technology is playing a key role in the current political upheaval in Iran and an Ottawa man is leading the charge.

Rafal Rohozinski, CEO of Psiphon Inc. -- the man who recently led the team that busted an international cyber espionage network known as Ghostnet -- and his team have been flooding Iran with secure network connections to servers located in other countries.

The Iranian government strictly monitors and filters Internet connections within Iran, blocking websites such as YouTube and Twitter as well as foreign sources of news.

Psiphon's unfiltered connections are allowing Iranian citizens to get news from outside sources such as the BBC and to connect to online social media services, including Twitter and Facebook, which are being used to arrange demonstrations against the Iranian government.

"We have gone on the offensive," said Rohozinski. "Ensuring that Iranians have access to the information they need and deserve so that they can make informed decisions for themselves during this time of crisis."

Psiphon was well received by irate Iranians who wanted to surf the Internet without restrictions in the days following the June 12 election, which saw President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad win a disputed victory.

The service has become so popular that it is now adding a new user every minute.

"These guys (Iran) just came alive. There were over 4,000 right away," said Rohozinski. "Now we are seeing one every minute, in terms of new people coming onboard. It's quite a surge we are seeing."

On Wednesday, Canada's envoy to Iran was called before Iranian officials who expressed displeasure that Canada would be helping to destabilize Iran by supporting social networking sites such as Youtube, Twitter and Facebook.

A spokesman for Canada's Department of Foreign Affairs and International Trade would not comment on the meeting or Psiphon specifically.

However, he said Canada is committed to freedom of speech and does not condone Iran's Internet filtering technologies.

Ron Deibert, Psiphon's vice-president of policy and director of the Citizen Lab at the Munk Centre for International Studies at the University of Toronto, said while Iran may be Psiphon's first real battleground, there are other countries (where Internet filtering takes place) that should be concerned.

"Our aim is to ensure that citizens can choose for themselves what information they access," he said. "The Iranian media space is the latest, but it will not be the last, forum within which we actively engage in that mission."

Psiphon works by pushing out hundreds of links to content that the Iranian government doesn't want its people to see.

If a person in Iran searches the Internet for BBC News, one of Psiphon's links will pop up in the results saying something like, "for BBC news in Iran click here." When the person clicks on the link they are automatically connected to the content through a secure server located in a country where no filtering takes place.

The company works quickly to stay ahead of Iranian officials who are blocking Psiphon's links. The idea is to flood so many links into Iran that the government simply can't shut them down fast enough. Psiphon is employing people both in Iran and elsewhere, working 24 hours a day, seven days a week.

While there are other services and programs that help people in countries such as Iran surf the Internet without government filters, Psiphon is the only one that doesn't require any technical expertise. Simply clicking on a link takes that person to the content they want. According to its creators, Psiphon is also the only service of its kind to work on cellular phones.

More than 60 per cent of Iranians own a cellular phone. About half of the country's 70 million people are under the age of 25.

Friday marked the seventh day of mass protests and demonstrations in Iran. Supporters of opposition candidate Mirhossein Mousavi believe the election was rigged in Ahmadinejad's favour.

They have been turning to the Internet to voice their displeasure. In response to increased demand from Iran, both Facebook and Twitter rushed out Farsi versions of their websites Friday.

Google also announced that it has upgraded its online translation tool to include Farsi so Iranians can access blogs and news websites from around the world.

While this isn't the first time social networking platforms and Internet technologies have been used to challenge a government, the protests in Iran have raised the bar.

"I think we've seen bits of this in the past ... but this one takes it to another level," said Michael Geist, a professor with the University of

Ottawa and Canada Research Chair in Internet and E-commerce law.

Recent protests in Moldova, which also filters its citizen's access to the Internet, saw people take to Twitter to organize protests against the government.

During the Ukraine's "Orange Revolution" in 2004, which saw president Viktor Yushchenko swept to power after waves of protests, protesters used text messaging on cellphones to help organize their demonstrations.

"This is a global environment in which the lessons learned in one place can immediately be used and adapted in another place," said Geist. "What we've seen in Iran isn't going to stop in Iran. We are going to see this replicated in other places."

_{Tolerating prostitution is tolerating abuse and torture of women and children.}

This situation is just sad. There are human rights afforded to all and clearly these rights are being violated. casino en ligne

this narrative works well for the Iranian govt, it allows them to say the protesters were just miscreants led astray and were used by enemies of Iran--- a page out of the Pakistani book

Iran probes into Tehran Saturday casualties
Mon, 22 Jun 2009 09:19:58 GMT
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Tehran's prosecutor general office says it has launched an investigation into the killing of several people in Saturday's violence in the Iranian capital.

One of the perpetrators, who was an armed terrorist, has been arrested, the office said on Monday.

According the officials, a probe is underway and other elements which were involved in Saturday's violence will soon be brought to justice.

Thirteen people lost their lives and 20 others were wounded in the post-election unrest in the Iranian capital Tehran on Saturday.

According the Iranian officials, the casualties occurred after some armed terrorists infiltrated the rallies and torched a mosque and two gas stations and attacked a military post.

Meanwhile, Iran's police arrested 457 in the post-election violence that erupted in Tehran on Saturday.

Police officials say they have successfully managed to restore security in the main streets of Tehran, adding that calm has returned to the Iranian capital.

Presidential contenders Mir-Hossein Mousavi and Mehdi Karroubi have rejected the result of the country's 10th presidential elections as fraudulent, demanding an annulment of the election.

ROME, June 22 (Reuters) - Italy is willing to open its embassy in Tehran to wounded protesters in coordination with other European nations, the Italian Foreign Ministry said in a statement on Monday.

The move follows a Swedish initiative to look into whether European Union nations can put together a plan to take in and provide aid to demonstrators at their embassies in Iran, the ministry said.

"The Italian embassy will be able to accept requests, despite the fact that the proper place for the care of the injured remains the hospital," Maurizio Massari, a spokesman for the foreign ministry, told reporters. more

Western Nations Deny 'Meddling' in Iran's Post-Election Violence
By VOA News
21 June 2009

Britain is strongly denying allegations by the Iranian government that Western nations are encouraging Iran's post-election violence.

British Foreign Secretary David Miliband said Sunday that he "categorically" rejects the idea that foreign countries are manipulating protesters in Iran.

Iran's Foreign Ministry has accused Britain of trying to sabotage the June 12 vote, while Parliament Speaker Ali Larijani has accused the United States, Britain, France and Germany of interfering in Iran's affairs.

Meanwhile, Iran expelled the British Broadcasting Corporation's permanent correspondent in Tehran Sunday after blaming the BBC and the Voice of America of "engineering the ongoing post-election riots."

VOA Director Dan Austin rejected Iran's accusations, saying "the Voice of America is working hard to provide the people of Iran with news and information that is accurate, comprehensive and credible."

He also urged Iran's government to cease efforts "to restrict the free flow of information to their citizens."

Iranian authorities have severely restricted independent media coverage of opposition protests. Witnesse to these events are reaching out online and by telephone to report what they see on the streets.

They are relying on social media Web sites, such as Twitter, Facebook and YouTube to tell the world about demonstrations and crackdowns in their cities -- and news agencies find themselves relying on the information these citizens' publish.

One video broadcast on CNN Sunday, found on YouTube, appears to show a nighttime home invasion. The video is dark, but a woman can be heard screaming in Farsi, "they are coming from the balcony!" and shouting "get out!"

The topic of Iran's election (under the searchable term, or hashtag, "#IranElection") also remains one of the most popular trends on Twitter. Many people posting on the theme of "Tehran" also have tinted their profile pictures green, the color of the opposition.

And Facebook has announced it is making its Web site available in Persian, so Iranians can use the service in their native language.

Google also introduced a new Persian translating tool.

BBC - Iran's legislative body, the Guardian Council, has said there were no major polling irregularities in the 12 June election and ruled out an annulment.
Opposition supporters called for the vote to be set aside and the elections re-run amid claims of vote tampering.
But Guardian Council spokesman Abbas Ali Kadkhoda'i said there was "no major fraud or breach in the election".
Meanwhile, opposition candidate Mehdi Karoubi urged Iranians to mourn for dead protesters on Thursday.

Gordon Brown announces move to parliament after Tehran's 'unjustified' expulsion of two UK diplomats

* Julian Borger, diplomatic editor
* guardian.co.uk, Tuesday 23 June 2009 16.51 BST

Britain has ordered the expulsion of two Iranian diplomats, in tit-for-tat response to the expulsion of two British diplomats from Tehran yesterday.

The Iranian government said it was throwing out the two Britons, who have not been named, for "activities incompatible with their diplomatic status" – a claim Gordon Brown described as "unjustified".

This morning, the Iranian ambassador to London, Rasoul Movahedian Attar, was summoned to be informed of Britain's response by the permanent under-secretary at the Foreign Office, Sir Peter Ricketts. The Iranian diplomats, who have also not been identified, have been given a week to leave the country.

"I am disappointed that Iran has placed us in this position but we will continue to seek good relations with Iran and to call for the regime to respect the human rights and democratic freedoms of the Iranian people," Brown told the House of Commons.

The prime minister said Britain expected Iran to "meet its obligations to the international community", and said "the onus is on Iran to show the Iranian people" that the presidential elections this month were credible.

A Foreign Office spokeswoman said: "The government of Iran is seeking to blame the UK and other outsiders for what is an Iranian reaction to an Iranian issue. This has a potential impact on our staff's safety and is unacceptable."

The developments come as Iranian media reported that the president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, would be sworn in again by mid-August. IRNA, the official Iranian news agency, said Ahmadinejad, who won a "closely contested and disputed 10th presidential election", would be sworn in before parliament between 26 July and 19 August.

The news will sharpen the dilemma for the defeated reformist candidate, Mir Hossein Mousavi, who maintains that the 12 June vote was fraudulent and that he was the true winner. He must now decide whether to accept an apparent fait accompli or keep up the protest movement that has brought hundreds of thousands out on to the streets of Tehran. more