Iran Government Attacks Civilians During Friday Prayers

18 July 2009 :: Denver Lessing

Pictures and video from Tehran yesterday showed government forces storming into huge crowds of unarmed civilians, many of them gathered to support the opposition leaders who had gone to Tehran University to listen to Ayatollah Rafsanjani, a leading cleric and former president, deliver a sermon at Friday prayers. The security forces rode motorcycles into crowds of demonstrators and used teargas and batons to assault those assembled.

Even as Rafsanjani was denouncing the government for violence against unarmed civilians, recalling how the Prophet Mohammed had “respected the rights” of the people and how revolutionary leader Khomeini had said the legitimacy of the system must be rooted in the consent of the governed, even as he warned that such brutal oppression as followed the disputed election could destabilize and embarrass the Republic, the Ahmedinejad/Khamene’i bloc ordered security forces to gas civilians.

That this reportedly occurred while Friday prayers were ongoing suggests the government will even attack and reject Islam itself in order to enforce the logic of intimidation and of undemocratic expressions of power. Rafsanjani urged that in order to return to a state of consensus and to found the role of government on a sense of legitimacy, all restrictions on the freedom of the press and the freedom of assembly be lifted and all political prisoners be released.

The immediate crackdown appears to be a sign that the power bloc represented by Pres. Ahmedinejad and Ayatollah Ali Khamene’i is ever more conscious that its leadership is democratically unsustainable. The crackdown was so extreme and indiscriminate that one of the opposition candidates, Mehdi Karoubi, was reportedly physically assaulted and beaten about the head as he emerged from Friday prayers.

A direct physical assault on one of the leaders of the reformist movement suggests the government has either lost control of its paramilitary militia or has decided to abandon constitutional processes and use violence to dissuade any continued dissent from the opposition. Rafsanjani said the nation is now in “crisis” and criticized the powerful Guardian Council for not adequately investigating evidence of election fraud.

He said the Council “did not use wisely the time the supreme leader gave it to investigate”, suggesting that the processes used by the government to affirm the legitimacy of the disputed vote-count have only further increased the widespread “doubt” across Iran about whether the election was free and fair.

As the New York Times reports:

He said he had discussed a possible solution with members of the Expediency Council and the Assembly of Experts, two powerful state institutions he leads. He said his proposal was based on two principles: that everything must be done within a legal framework; and that there must be a free and open debate.

Rafsanjani did not address the specifics of his proposed solution, but many have speculated the Expediency Council could reverse the findings of the Guardian Council and call for a new process to resolve the election dispute, or that Assembly of Experts might open hearings into the constitutional legitimacy of the supreme leader, given his brazen support for one candidate in a vote-count so fraught with irregularities and alleged fraud.

Khamene’i has been so vehement in his support for Ahmedinejad, calling his re-election a “divine assessment” within minutes of the polls being closed on election night, that he is seen to have lost the air of impartiality that was integral to his having the support of ordinary Iranians. Rafsanjani was critical of the government, but mostly on points of process, and his demand for a process based in law and open debate suggests he seeks to take the high ground of impartiality vacated by the supreme leader.

In what is perhaps the boldest and most high-profile defense of the opposition cause, and language so heavily pro-democracy that it must offend the very logic of the current leadership, Rafsanjani said “Everything in our Islamic republic is based on votes”, adding that “Without the people’s vote, things cannot go on”. He is clearly urging the government to recognize its mistakes in the dispute and join a serious, national process to resolve the facts of the presidential election in a way that is transparent and demonstrable.

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