Tehran, June 16: As Iran’s embattled president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, arrived in Russia Tuesday, Iranian state radio reported that seven people were killed in clashes overnight, ramping up tensions after days of unprecedented demonstrations which have forced a formal review of elections results.
As dawn broke over this tense and divided nation, anticipation grew over what would come next, whether calls for a nationwide general strike and more protests would play out across the country, or if emotions would begin to cool.
Less than 24 hours earlier, Tehran had witnessed the largest demonstrations since the 1979 revolution with hundreds of thousands of people from across Iranian society pouring into the streets to protest what they charge were fraudulent results in Saturday’s presidential election.
The state radio announcement of the seven deaths provided no details of who the victims were or how they had died. Monday’s protests were believed to have been largely peaceful and only one death had been reported previously,
Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Iran’s supreme leader, was compelled to respond to the popular and sustained defiance and called Monday for a formal review of the results, the first hint that the government might fear it could not control the crowds.
But Mr. Ahmadinejad’s decision to leave the country on a previously scheduled visit to Russia and carry on as head of state, threatened to inflame voters, who already had grown incensed when the president compared them to angry soccer fans whose team had lost.
Hundreds of thousands of people marched in silence through central Tehran on Monday to protest Iran’s disputed presidential election in an extraordinary show of defiance from a broad cross section of society.
Having mustered the largest antigovernment demonstrations since the 1979 revolution, and defying an official ban, protesters began to sense the prospect that the leadership’s firm backing of Mr. Ahmadinejad had wavered.
The massive outpouring was mostly peaceful. But violence erupted after dark when protesters surrounded and attempted to set fire to the headquarters of the Basij volunteer militia, which is associated with the Revolutionary Guards, according to news agency reports.
The first death and several injuries were reported as a result of that confrontation.
In his first public comment on the situation in Iran, President Obama said he was deeply troubled by postelection violence and called on Iranian leaders to respect free speech and the democratic process.
He told reporters he would continue pursuing a direct dialogue with Tehran, but he urged that any Iranian investigation of election irregularities be conducted without bloodshed.
The protests showed how the government’s assertion that Mr. Ahmadinejad won re-election by a margin of almost two to one had further cleaved Iranian society into rival camps.
On one side are the most powerful arms of the Islamic system of government: Ayatollah Ali Khamenei; the military; the paramilitary; and the Guardian Council.
On the other is a diverse coalition that has grown emboldened by the day, with some clerics joining two former presidents and Mir Hussein Moussavi, the former prime minister and main opposition candidate, who addressed the crowd from the roof of a car near Freedom Square in downtown Tehran.
Protesters were especially enraged that Mr. Ahmadinejad on Sunday dismissed them as nothing more than soccer fans who had just lost a game and as “dust.”
One demonstrator fired off a Twitter message, one of thousands of brief electronic dispatches that kept the outside world up-to-the-minute on the protests, proclaiming: “Ahmadinejad called us dust, we showed him a sandstorm.”
Earlier Monday, Ayatollah Khamenei stepped in to try to calm a growing backlash, forcing him into a public role he generally seeks to avoid as the country’s top religious authority.
Under Iran’s dual system of government, with civil and religious institutions, the supreme leader can usually operate in the shadows, while elected officials serve as the public face of Iranian governance and policy.
He called for the Guardian Council to conduct an inquiry into the opposition’s claims that the election was rigged and then had that announcement repeated every 15 minutes on Iranian state radio throughout the day. It was a rare reversal.
Ayatollah Khamenei announced Saturday that the election results showing a landslide victory for Mr. Ahmadinejad were fair.
But on Sunday he met with Mr. Moussavi, a moderate, to listen to his concerns. And on Monday, he promised the inquiry into the results.
Nevertheless, his announcement could not calm the anger of the people. There was so much distrust that some people said they believed the leader was just trying to buy time and to calm the crowds, rather than attempting to really investigate the outcome.
–Agencies