Protests again rock Iran

Eyewitness accounts describe violent scenes and effective intimidation.

Iason AthanasiadisDecember 7, 2009 16:33Updated May 30, 2010 12:15

Masked students during protests in central Tehran Dec. 7, 2009. (Reuters via Your View)

BOSTON — Photographer Maziar Pourbeheshti was shaken as he logged onto his Facebook account in the early evening from his Tehran apartment. At the Tehran University campus Monday, he had witnessed teargas and beatings throughout a day of high drama. And when members of the Basij hardline morality militia tried to attack him and his friends, an unlikely savior came to their rescue.

“They tried to come in through the window but the dean with the help of campus security stopped them from entering,” Pourbeheshti said, writing from Tehran. “They went away and came back with a some of their comrades but still couldn’t get in so they broke the windows and left.”

At that point, one of Pourbeheshti’s friends was carried in by other students, covered in blood. “He claimed he’d been punched but it didn’t seem so from his bleeding, except if they’d been wearing a knuckle duster,” Pourbeheshti wrote.

This was just one of many violent scenes witnessed in Iranian cities today as the opposition movement took advantage of another date in the Islamic Republic’s calendar of state-orchestrated demonstrations to take to the streets and protest.

Amateur videos emerging from Iran showed hundreds of students singing nationalist songs as they marched through Tehran University. In the streets around the university, crowds fled security forces.

Police and Revolutionary Guard riot units stepped back and allowed university and neighborhood-based Basij militias to take the lead in repressing today’s protests. Some 2,000 Basij militants had camped out in the university since Sunday on the pretext of a major religious holiday. But despite strict identification controls at entry points to the campus and the arrest of up to 100 student leaders in a recent sweep, the university filled with student groups shouting for reform.

Repeated threats by the government that it would disperse protesters violently alongside an ongoing campaign of arrests and intimidation contributed to a lower turnout than on previous occasions when hundreds of thousands of demonstrators shouted and clashed with police in Tehran’s streets and squares. With the exception of a few blocks around Tehran University, the streets of the Iranian capital were mostly quiet.

"There is no governmental or public parade on Student Day, unlike Ghods (Jerusalem) Day for instance," wrote Kooshyar Haghighi, a student activist, in an email. "So the government had more excuses and an easier time in suppressing the protesters."

Student Day commemorates the killing by the Shah’s security forces in 1953 of three Tehran University students protesting against U.S. President Richard Nixon’s policies. But the occasion has been claimed by Iran’s vocal student reformist movement since 1999, the date of the last student uprising against the Islamic Republic.

Another Tehrani reached by telephone described how many of her friends had taken advantage of a three day holiday declared by the government for all school and university students and headed to the Caspian Sea for parties.

“One thing though has been miscalculated,” she said. “The economic situation which [is so bad] it does not permit people to get away.”