Is Iran on the verge of a popular explosion?

This week saw a widening of the scope of protests across the country.

Iason AthanasiadisDecember 26, 2009 09:33Updated May 30, 2010 12:17

Iranians follow a truck transporting the coffin of dissident cleric Ayatollah Hossein Ali Montazeri in the Shiite holy city of Qom, 75 miles south of Tehran, Dec. 21, 2009. Three days of street protests followed Montazeri’s eventful funeral, recalling the protests in June that left 11 demonstrators dead. But the past several days have also witnessed an unprecedented widening in the scope of protests across Iran. (Reuters)

ISTANBUL, Turkey — Hassan Beheshtpoor (not his real name) has been on the run since the summer. He is a Tehran University student whose political activism marked him out several years before this summer’s controversial presidential election triggered an ongoing campaign of opposition to the Iranian government. Beheshtpoor, 22, was arrested and cautioned about his activities back in 2007.

Now, this financially stretched student hailing from a traditional Azeri family from the provinces has been banned from the Tehran University dormitories. Along with yellow stars awarded to troublemakers, on-the-spot beatings by campus militiamen and even arrest, torture and long prison terms, these are the forms of pressure yielded by the regime in its campaign against the most vocal segment of the opposition movement that has surged in Iran over the past six months.

“I heard that the university’s guards identified me in one of their [surveillance] photos and I’m dying from stress,” Beheshtpoor wrote in an email from Tehran. “The government has turned into a desperate dog, it no longer recognizes any limits to its reactions.”

Now living in a house shared with other student activists, Beheshtpoor headed to Qom last week for the funeral of Grand Ayatollah Ali Montazeri, who was the spiritual leader of the opposition before passing away on Sunday.

“Qom’s streets were full of crowds shouting slogans opposed to the system and the Supreme Leader,” Beheshtpoor recounted. “The Bassijis [Islamic militiamen] were slack-jawed at the numbers and, not knowing what to do about the crowd, just watched us pass by.”

Three days of street protests followed Montazeri’s eventful funeral. Their length and intensity evoked the summer’s daily protests that were only suppressed after the government killed at least 11 demonstrators on one day in late June.

But the past several days have witnessed an unprecedented widening in the scope of protests across the country. In seeking to suppress commemoration ceremonies for the departed ayatollah, the government sparked off violence in heretofore quiet provincial cities.

On Thursday, a senior ayatollah called Jalaleddin Taheri was stopped by security forces from presiding over a memorial service in Esfahan. His son complained in an interview to BBC Persian of “very harsh treatment ... so he could not reach the place where the ceremony was scheduled for.”

There was more rioting on Wednesday in Najafabad, Ayatollah Montazeri’s birthplace. Esfahan and Najafabad belong to the Iranian plateau’s ultra-conservative central zone, long considered a bastion of the Islamic Republic. Esfahan’s extended bazaar-clerical families are a particularly popular recruitment zone for the Iranian intelligence apparatus. The city’s extensive Graveyard of Martyrs is studded with thousands of bearded men looking out at the visitor from the illustrated gravestones typical of Shiite Islam.

A more extraordinary challenge to state authority occurred in the sleepy southeastern Iranian city of Sirjan. A scheduled hanging was disrupted by a rioting crowd that took away the victims’ unconscious bodies, resuscitated them and rioted again when the execution was repeated later that day. Some Iranian news sources claimed that three people were killed and another 27 injured when members of a 5,000-strong police force opened fire on a crowd.