Language of Resistance Intensifies Amid New Reports of Demonstrators Attacked

25 June 2009 :: staff

There is increasing evidence of a brutal campaign of violence and suppression being waged against the opposition and against demonstrators calling for a full accounting of the votes cast on 12 June. Ahmedinejad’s chief rival Mir Hossein Mousavi, the leading reformist candidate, has said “I will not leave the scene in response to the deception, the essence of which has become clear to the people”.

Another reformist challenger, Mehdi Karoubi, who has been increasingly vocal in his support for the pro-democracy demonstrators, released a statement using some of the strongest resistance language yet: “There is strong syndicated electoral mafia in Iran that has interfered and changed the results of the elections. We must locate the cancerous leadership of this syndicate and destroy it”.

Yesterday, demonstrators massing in Tehran’s Baharestan Square were brutally attacked by security forces. A number of unverified reports cite scenes of a woman beaten until she was drenched in her own blood, students assaulted with axes, and security forces shooting live rounds at demonstrators. One woman’s panicked account of what she saw there called the scene “a massacre” and has been widely circulated.

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Reports across the web are citing a CNN interview with an eyewitness to the Baharestan violence, who said:

They beat a woman so savagely that she was drenched in blood, and her husband who was watching the scene, he just fainted. I also saw [the security forces] shooting young people. This was a massacre. They were trying to beat people so that they would die. They were cursing… they were beating old men. This was exactly a massacre. You should stop this. You should help the people of Iran who demand freedom. There were thousands of people on the street. I heard the shooting and we just ran away. I didn’t see what happened but I’m sure people are dead there.

One witness is reported to have alleged “In the previous days they are killing students with axes, they put the axe through the heart of young men, and it’s so devastating I don’t know how to describe it”, calling the crackdown a massacre and saying “This is Hitler”.

The “war of words” has intensified as Iranian state television has begun spreading rumors that civilian deaths were caused by protesters. Opposition supporters and rights advocates have said they believe such propaganda is intended to serve as justification for a bloody military operation to end the unrest. There are reports of “hackers” supporting both factions attacking or defacing websites ranging from Iranian government sites to the University of Oregon.

Efforts to crush support for the opposition, which complains the election was rigged, have gone as far as to target the family of Neda Agha Soltan, preventing them from obtaining her body, removing them from their home, and barring any public demonstration of mourning for her death. Neighbors report being directly threatened by unnamed callers and/or agents seeking to stop any public grieving for Soltan’s shooting death.

UPDATE, 23:39 GMT: Even as opposition leaders contemplate how they can rally public support and pursue their charges of electoral fraud, with the system and the security forces aligning behind the supreme leader and Pres. Ahmedinejad, there is evidence of deepening divisions among even staunch conservatives across the Iranian political spectrum.

The New York Times is reporting:

A few conservatives have expressed revulsion at the sight of unarmed protesters being beaten, even shot, by government forces. Only 105 out of the 290 members of Parliament took part in a victory celebration for Mr. Ahmadinejad on Tuesday, newspapers reported Thursday. Although Parliament has often clashed with Mr. Ahmadinejad, the absence of so many lawmakers, including the speaker, Ali Larijani, a powerful conservative, was striking.

While some see the regime leaders as hardening their stance and ramping up the use of violence to suppress dissent, powerful political figures like former president and rival to both Khamene’i and Ahmedinejad, Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, have yet to announce their strategies for moving forward. Rafsanjani is head of the Assembly of Experts, the body of clerics which has sole authority to install or remove the supreme leader.

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