Iran: Thousands of Iranians, demanding political reform and liberalisation, took to the streets of Tehran yesterday, clashing with riot police and militiamen loyal to the conservative clerics who have ruled Iran for 34 years, writes Michael Jansen in Nicosia
Some 3,000 people responded to a call by a US-based Iranian exile satellite television channel to join a small student demonstration against the privatisation of universities. This transformed the rally into an all-out protest against the clerical regime.
Demonstrators called for the release of political prisoners and the resignation of the reformist President, Mr Muhammad Khatami, who has failed to deliver on pledges since being swept into office in 1997.
Commentators say the slogans adopted by the demonstrators are the most anti-regime heard since Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini's Islamic revolution seized power in 1979. According to Iran's Intelligence Minister, Mr Ali Yunesi, about 80 arrests were made.
"These people, instigated by local radicals and foreign agents, chanted illegal slogans," he charged. This was the largest public protest since late last year and is expected to initiate a series of demonstrations commemorating student riots which shook the country in July 1999.
During those protests students clashed with police, the Basij militia and Hizbullah activists for three days following a raid on a Tehran University hostel during which one student was killed. The 1999 unrest was the worst since the popular insurrection which brought down the Shah 20 years earlier.
On Tuesday Iran's largest student organisation castigated the country's spiritual guide, Ayatollah Muhammad Khamenei, for obstructing the democratic reforms Mr Khatami and his liberal parliament have been trying to introduce over the past three years.
The students warned that the Islamic Republic risked being overthrown if the conservative clerics who dominate its institutions, the judiciary and the armed forces do not accept changes demanded by the majority of Iranians who want reform. Dozens of pro-reform intellectuals, newspaper editors, politicians and student leaders have been jailed by the conservatives since the 1999 protests while clerical committees have blocked liberal legislation.
Economic stagnation, high unemployment and opposition to Iran's strict Islamic social codes have led to mass disaffection and discontent amongst the country's young, who constitute 70 per cent of the populace. The demonstration erupted during a war of words between Iran's conservative clerical rulers and neo-conservatives in the Bush administration, who accuse Tehran of developing nuclear weapons, supporting terrorism and backing Shia militants in Iraq.
While the clerics have cracked down on dissent and tightened their grip on power since Washington toppled the Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein, US hawks have renewed their demand for the overthrow of the Iranian Islamic Republic.
The US Secretary of State, Mr Colin Powell, who has adopted a somewhat less confrontational line, said on Sunday that Washington was trying to persuade Iranians to instigate change from within to make Iran a "less troublesome member of the world community".