Iran’s regime is backtracking slightly on its repression of the protests that have sprung up since President Ahmadinejad won a staggeringly large (and unexpected and not believed ) victory by nearly two thirds of the votes cast at the polls. Well, maybe not backtracking, but one can certainly call it a strategic retreat in the ongoing election crisis that has consumed the country since June 12th:
Seeking to defuse one of the most explosive issues facing the Iranian government, Iranian officials said Tuesday that they would release 140 of the hundreds of people detained in the broad government crackdown that followed the nation’s disputed presidential election.
The release of the detainees, which was due to happen later Tuesday night, was reported by Iran’s semiofficial Press TV, quoting the an influential member of a Parliamentary commission charged with investigating the detainee situation.
I’m not sure this will have the desired effect Iran’s current rulers hope it will have. If anything it might signal weakness by the regime and encourage greater participation in the ongoing demonstrations, planned and unplanned, that are still occurring. More importantly, it shows signs of a developing rift among conservatives (conservative being a relative term, of course) for, as the Times report indicates, the reason for the prisoner release may be more to tamp down opposition within conservative ranks as much as to throw a bone to the moderates:
The issue of the arrests and deaths of protesters has been seized on by opposition leader Mir Hussein Moussavi, who has remained defiant and claims fraud led to Mr. Ahmadinejad’s victory. But criticism of the handling of the detainees has also spread to highest levels of the conservative establishment.
The circle of those touched widened last week when Mohsen Ruholamini, the son of an adviser to conservative presidential candidate Mohsen Rezai, was reported by his family to have died in prison after a severe beating. Some senior members of Parliament have complained about the case. On Monday, Saeed Mortazavi, the prosecutor general of Tehran, said a special judge had been appointed to investigate the death, Iranian news agencies reported.
One thing for certain, we know this is far from over. Read the following, beginning with the remarks of Mr. Moussavi on Monday, and you can see that little movement toward a resolution of the crisis acceptable to the entire society has been made:
“How can it be that the leaders of our country do not cry out and shed tears about these tragedies? Can they not see it, feel it? These things are blackening our country, blackening all our hearts. If we remain silent, it will destroy us all and take us to hell.”
Mr. Moussavi’s angry tone appeared to reflect the steadily rising toll of the number of protesters, activists, and opposition figures killed after the election — some after being beaten in prison. A funeral was held in Tehran on Monday for Amir Javadi-Far, a student activist who died in prison after being arrested, and reports emerged of still more deaths.
Mr. Moussavi and other opposition leaders have asked permission to hold a public mourning ceremony for the dead on Thursday. That day has great symbolic importance, because it is 40 days after the shooting of Neda Agha-Soltan, the young woman whose death ignited widespread outrage in Iran and beyond.
We are in the same 40 day cycle of mourning demonstrations that occurred in the original 1979 revolution that brought down the Shah’s regime, as Booman noted here in June. Moussavi is not as powerful or commanding a figure as Ayatollah Khomeini was in 1979, but it may not matter if the regime continue to kill kill and arrest large numbers of demonstrators, creating more martyrs for the opposition. They would be better off allowing the protests to go forward without the mass arrests and repression. But something tells me that isn’t what’s going to happen. Not yet, anyway.
