Category: Reports on Iran and Democracy

Iran hangs alleged dissidents to warn opposition

Iran’s opposition spreads to heartland

Iran opposition leader shot at by mob

Iran: Tehran professors decry handling of protesters
— CNN: “Nearly 90 professors at Iran’s oldest and largest university signed a letter to Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, criticizing the government’s violent handling of student protesters.”

Reuters: Tens of thousands at pro-government rallies in Iran
— Reuters: “Tens of thousands of government supporters rallied in cities across Iran on Wednesday swearing allegiance to the clerical establishment and accusing opposition leaders of causing unrest in the Islamic state”
— ” ‘You should repent … otherwise the system will confront you as a ‘mohareb’ (enemy of God),” cleric Ahmad Alamolhoda told reformist leaders at a Tehran rally, state TV reported. Under Iran’s Islamic sharia law the sentence for a mohareb is death.”
— “In Tehran, crowds burned American and British flags.”

US: Iran Increasingly a ‘Police State’

— London Times reports:
— “A Tehran court has ordered that a teacher from Lille must remain under house arrest at the French Embassy after hopes for her release were set back by Franco-Iranian tensions over a prisoner swap.”
— “After a three-hour hearing, Clotilde Reiss was told that she would be summoned again before the conclusion of her trial on charges of spying and provoking unrest. President Ahmadinejad raised the prospect last week that Ms Reiss, who was arrested after the anti-government demonstrations in June, could be nearing the end of her ordeal as a pawn between Tehran and Paris. In Copenhagen on Friday President Ahmadinejad said that Tehran was eager to resolve the case, and that this would happen if French leaders ‘correct a little their behaviour’.”
— “French officials said this was a reference to Ali Vakili Rad, an Iranian serving a life sentence in France for the 1991 murder in Paris of the Shah’s former Prime Minister, Shapour Bakhtiar. At his trial, Rad said that he had been acting on orders from Tehran when he stabbed Bakhtiar more than 20 times.”