Reflecting on the enormous anti-regime demonstrations in Iran following the death of the dissident cleric Grand Ayatollah Hossein Ali Montazeri, Stephen Suleyman Schwartzmakes an important point: If, in his death and its aftermath, Montazeri impels the Green Movement to a wider and more powerful challenge to the clique of Ahmadinejad and Khamenei, his life will not have been in vain. But Iran must move beyond debates between clerics and others loyal to the basic order, over the real nature of the Islamic Republic, and find new, younger leaders who do not depend on religious status or past service to the regime for their credibility. Iran needs the emergence and growth of a civil society that will subject the entire historical experience of the Islamic Republic to a rigorous examination, and will find a way to end its experiment in On December 17, Mr. Tabarzadi wrote in an op-ed article on these pages that ‘If the government continues to opt for violence, there very well may
Thursday, 31st December 2009
Raw courage -- but it must be focused
7:06am
...They do not stand alone
5:07pm
While the west has been on vacation, truly momentous events have been occurring in Iran. With stupendous courage, the people have been on the streets in enormous numbers demonstrating against the hated regime and declaring that the Supreme Leader Khamanei will be overthrown. In bloody street battles last Sunday, the nephew of the opposition leader Mir Hossein Mousavi was shot dead along with nine others. On Monday, the regime started rounding up opposition leaders as well as arresting hundreds of protesters, beating and shooting them and using vehicles to run them over. As the Wall Street Journalreports, one of the arrested dissidents was the veteran democratic activist Heshmat Tabarzadi:
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Thursday, 31 December 2009
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