Iran streets, campuses erupt in protest -- latimes.com
Reporting from Beirut - Campuses across Iran erupted in protests Monday as defiant college students chanting anti-government slogans clashed with security forces armed with clubs in a forceful new round of confrontations over the nation's disputed June presidential election.
The daylong protests on National Students Day were not as large in Tehran as those that broke out in the days after the reelection of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. But they took place in a larger number of cities and towns and followed weeks of ominous warnings by security officials. They continued through the day despite efforts by security forces arrayed on streets and inside campuses.
Outside of Tehran, the first large-scale civil unrest since early November broke out in ethnic Kurdish and Azeri regions, which have often clashed with the Tehran government. Those areas had thus far been relatively quiet in the election protest movement dominated by middle-class urbanites.
The protests received wide international coverage despite a government ban on foreign media and large-scale filtering of websites and the shutting down of some telecommunications services.
"Students were really brave," said one Iranian journalist who covered the events for the local reformist press. "They said all they needed to say today. The way ahead is long. But the goal is achievable."
But the protest movement born out of the disputed election loss of former Prime Minister Mir-Hossein Mousavi appears to have grown more radical. Fewer of the slogans were aimed at Ahmadinejad and more at Iran's theocracy-based political system, a shift that could alienate potential opposition supporters but also further galvanize protesters and serve to destabilize the Islamic Republic.
Reporting from Beirut - Campuses across Iran erupted in protests Monday as defiant college students chanting anti-government slogans clashed with security forces armed with clubs in a forceful new round of confrontations over the nation's disputed June presidential election.
The daylong protests on National Students Day were not as large in Tehran as those that broke out in the days after the reelection of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. But they took place in a larger number of cities and towns and followed weeks of ominous warnings by security officials. They continued through the day despite efforts by security forces arrayed on streets and inside campuses.
Outside of Tehran, the first large-scale civil unrest since early November broke out in ethnic Kurdish and Azeri regions, which have often clashed with the Tehran government. Those areas had thus far been relatively quiet in the election protest movement dominated by middle-class urbanites.
The protests received wide international coverage despite a government ban on foreign media and large-scale filtering of websites and the shutting down of some telecommunications services.
"Students were really brave," said one Iranian journalist who covered the events for the local reformist press. "They said all they needed to say today. The way ahead is long. But the goal is achievable."
But the protest movement born out of the disputed election loss of former Prime Minister Mir-Hossein Mousavi appears to have grown more radical. Fewer of the slogans were aimed at Ahmadinejad and more at Iran's theocracy-based political system, a shift that could alienate potential opposition supporters but also further galvanize protesters and serve to destabilize the Islamic Republic.
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