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On 20th June the popular agitation to overturn the results of Iran's presidential election of eight days before, which millions of Iranians believe to have been rigged in favour of the incumbent, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, entered a new phase. The accommodation between non-violent protestors and the authorities, who had tacitly permitted a week of huge, and generally good-natured, demonstrations, has now ended. The protest of 20th June was violently broken up by the security forces, leading to fighting in the streets and at least ten deaths.
Forewarned of the demonstration and its route, the authorities deployed many thousands of Basijis, members of a ramshackle but highly ideological militia, armed riot police, and soldiers from the Revolutionary Guard, preventing most of the marchers from reaching Enghelab Square, the demonstration's starting point. Those who did make it to Enghelab Square were forced by truncheon-charge and teargas into nearby sidestreets. Azadi Street, the proposed route for the march, witnessed a massive mobilisation of Basijis, riot police and busloads of Revolutionary Guard members, many of them holding up their truncheons and yelling encomiums to Iran's supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.
The authorities achieved their aim of preventing a recurrence of the marches that had blocked off Tehran for much of the previous week. Some supporters of Mir Hossein Mousavi, the reformist politician who claims to have won the election, and demands its annulment, seem to have been dissuaded from participating by the warning delivered on Friday in a sermon by Ayatollah Khamenei, in which he sided unambiguously with Ahmadinejad against his domestic opponents and told Mousavi's supporters to end the protests or face "blood, violence and chaos."
By 7pm on 20th June, municipal buses were once more running down Azadi Street, and most of the city's other arteries were clear. The side alleys running off Azadi Street, however, told a different story. In modest neighbourhoods, youths staged pitched battles with the security forces, hurling rocks and wielding knives and screwdrivers, while the Basijis and their Revolutionary Guard comrades fired teargas canisters and, according to eyewitnesses, live rounds. (Western reporters have been banned from attending any of the protests).
Tehran has not seen such conflict since the early years of the revolution. Plumes of smoke rose from burning tyres and rubbish bins. At least one underground station was turned into a battleground. In places that had effectively become no-go areas for the security forces, Mousavi supporters assumed the role of traffic cops,?people gathered on the roofs of their houses to observe events, and residents, young and old, male and female, thronged the pavements to watch and shout encouragement. According to a second eyewitness, protesters stripped to the waist applied wet towels to parts of their torsos that had been inflamed by teargas.
Today's Tehrani youth, often derided as softies by an earlier, revolutionary generation are, in the words of one admiring middle-aged Iranian, "putting their lives on the line." Reports of Basiji deaths were confirmed by no less a source than Ayatollah Khamenei himself. In Mir Hossein Mousavi, the agitation has a figurehead who has shown unexpected mettle. Also on 20th June, Mousavi released a statement in which he challenged the main contentions made by the supreme leader in his sermon on Friday, notably that the opposition was being stoked by Iran's foreign enemies. Responsibility for all violence, Mousavi said, lay with "those who cannot tolerate non-violent actions." While calling on his supporters to continue their protests without violence, he said: "Rest assured that I will always be at your side."
The authorities may now be hoping that, by using the state media and friendly newspapers–most domestic outlets, for which Mousavi's views have been stifled by censorship and arrests–they can depict the agitation as a shot bolt, and reintroduce a sense of normalcy into people's lives. But the ability of the opposition to control, if only for a few hours, neighbourhoods in central Tehran, and to chase away groups of Basijis, hints at the development of a patchier, less predictable agitation. The ability of the protesters to organise themselves without mobile phone contact, text messaging and the internet, all of which have been severely disrupted by the authorities, has been proven.
Thirty years after a revolution that promised freedom for all, only to end in dull authoritarianism and factionalism, many Iranians remain profoundly suspicious of promises of change, and sceptical about their own ability to stay the course. Such doubts were not in evidence on the night of 20th June, however, when choruses of "Allahu Akbar," ("God is Great"), a revolutionary cry that has now been appropriated by the Mousavi camp, rang out, louder than ever, from the rooftops of many of Tehran's residential neighbourhoods.
The authorities now face a dilemma. They can continue to allow Mousavi his freedom, and the limited freedom he enjoys to be in contact with his supporters, or they can arrest him, which might give new focus to the crisis, and make irreparable the rift that now seems to have opened up between Khamenei and Ahmadinejad on one side, and Mousavi and his main backer, Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, on the other. In effect, there are two interlocking rifts, one within the elite, and one between the demonstrators and defenders of Iran's current system of government. In his statement Mousavi was at pains to emphasise that his is not a counter-revolutionary movement, and that the Basij and Revolutionary Guard are not "our enemies." On the contrary, he said, "we are confronting those liars" with a view to "reform by returning to the pure essence of the Islamic Revolution." Not everyone demonstrating in his name would agree.
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