Iran Demonstrations: Violent Clashes Between Protestors And Riot Police
NBC producer Ali Arouzi described the events on Saturday:
What started off as a small rally outside a pro-reformist newspaper swelled into a massive crowd of people chanting, "Death to the dictator, death to Ahmadinejad!"
Then, what started with a small amount of police pushing the crowd back turned into huge riot police in armored gear and motor bikes beating all the young students here with batons, knocking them back. The students responded by throwing stones, which the police then threw back. Now the police are coming off all the heart streets and main streets to try and disperse the crowd. But this is an unprecedented scene in Iran today.
Arouzi said that many of the demonstrators, afraid of reprisals, were wearing green scarves and surgical masks.
Asked if he believed the election results being reported by Iran's Interior Ministry, Arouzi sounded highly skeptical. "If you were in Tehran the last few days, you would think it impossible that Ahmadinejad won," he said. "Everybody we spoke to was a supporter of Mousavi."
He noted that Mousavi's supporters acknowledged that he was somewhat of a blank slate politically, but that the presidential election had become a referendum on Ahmadinejad.
Arouzi then described the protests in greater detail:
Initially, it was a peaceful demonstration. People were forming a human chain, saying they wanted their vote back... but the more the police came, the angrier the mob got. It became sort of a mob mentality here. Now the police have swelled in huge numbers. They are being very, very violent with the crowds.
Every young person I've spoken to here, I've asked them, 'do you think you coming out onto the streets is going to make a change?' They said, no, but we have to come out anyway if we want our voices to be heard, but they're sure this won't make a change.
Demonstrators have been injured. People have come up to us and they've shown us that their arms have been bruised, black eyes, broken noses, bloody heads. But they are fighting back as well. This is, I mean, I've been in Iran four years here and everything here has always been contained. Today we saw the demonstrators setting on the police. An hour ago, maybe 30, 40 demonstrators rushed the police, throwing stones at them. One of the policemen fell and they were kicking him in the head and some of his colleagues had to come and drag him away.
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- singrrr
- added this
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@hambricscurve on twitter says "What will come from the 'violent demonstrations' in Iran against Ahmadinejad? 'Death to the dictator' chants bode ill"
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- twitterbot
- 5 months ago
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@RonSupportsYou on twitter says "Election was stolen in Iran: "a massive crowd of people chanting, "Death to the dictator, death to Ahmadinejad"!""
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- twitterbot
- 5 months ago
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According to the official "results":
Mahmoud Ahmadinejad: 62.6%
Mir Hossein Mousavi: 33.8%
Mohsen Rezai: 1.7%
Mehdi Karroubi: 0.9%Compare this to the average of polls collected in Early June
Ahmadinejad: 40.8%
Mousavi: 36.7%
Rezai: 15.1%
Mehdi Karroubi: 8.1%Now: even if you think that Ahmadinejad picked up 20% in the final week, how did 3rd place candidate Mohsen Rezai also lose 98.1% of his voters? (falling from 15.1% in polling to 1.17% in the "results") Furthermore: the 4th place candidate Karroubi fell from 8.1% in polling to 0.9%.
(Sources: BBC.com and FiveThirtyEight.com)This is blatant election stealing and I hope that the people of Iran and the people of the world stay strong and together the will of the people will be respected (if this means a "Green Revolution" a la Ukraine, Georgia, Romania, Czechoslovakia, I hope that the people of Iran are brave enough to hold out, take the beatings and gassing in the streets until a runoff is forced or the government of Ahmadinejad is even more completely de-legitimized in the eyes of the world.
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here is video footage of the protests.
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is this the beginning?
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- onemalefla
- 5 months ago
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Check out some of these photos of the Protests, Demonstrations, and Riots.
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- joshuaheller
- 5 months ago
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This is the first real uprising and demand in the region by WOMEN for equal rights. It is coming. Tough road. America has to be cautious with it's stance on this, luckily, we have the right leader at the right time.
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I admire them , for their spirit and fearlessness . Very good luck to them .
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This is a massive mountain to climb for the people of Iran. I seriously wish them all the best.
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Wow, rumors of rigged elections!
Guess the phenomenon isn't just limited to the US!
And now a word from our sponsors in Florida...
"Doh"
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Tehran, a bus burns
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- arash_zlord
- 5 months ago
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This is what we need in America, people rising to the streets and take our government back. We must rise and take the streets like we did in the 60's. Our government lies to us make laws and goes to war unconstitutionally. The media and big news networks keeps us knowing what they want us to know and feed us the lies right to our heads. These people are evil, they literally sit in a conference room and plan how they are gonna keep us silent. The formers administration weapon of fear was terrorism and 911 for 8 yrs. The new administrations weapon of choice is the bad economy. Rise, any president or leader that has ever spoken on behalf of peace and love has been shot, Lincoln, Kennedy, Martin Luther King, Gandhi. Obama knows this and he doesn't wanna get shot so he's gonna operate on the countries agenda and he won't give power back to the people. Oh and by the way; God won't help you either...
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Tehran, CNN
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- arash_zlord
- 5 months ago
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Tehran riots
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- arash_zlord
- 5 months ago
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No matter who ends up filling the office of president, I think that these active displays of dissent reflect a serious desire for political efficacy in the people of Tehran that's more important than any single politician
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Jesus,...now is the perfect time for all you liberals to get over there and bitch about their rights. What are you all waiting for? Get going....
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- clownpuncher
- 5 months ago
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If you really want to understand Iranian Democracy you have to watch this video.
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- martiniuks
- 5 months ago
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I found this interesting clownpuncherhttp://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=clown%20puncher
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- kennymotown
- 5 months ago
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today protests still were going on strong, infact they closed down the bazaar in the city of Tabriz today, which is a very powerful bazaar in Iran
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- arash_zlord
- 5 months ago
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This is how real democracy is achieved. These are patriots demanding their rights. In the end their version of a supreme court will probably shaft them also. Still, you can't stop admiring them for this display of courage .
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- bluestranger
- 5 months ago
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Poor dear Iran.....always the trouble from outside.
The Shah's father was made to resign by the British.....and he was made to sail away to South Africa, where he died. This happened because they did not like his policies. Meanwhile the British put the young Shah on the throne................a young man that they sought to manipulate......"shut up or we'll send you same way as your father" was the inference.
Dr. Mohammad Mossadq was prime minister in Iran, and he convinced the Shah that Iran should be getting more than the 10% that the British begrudgingly paid the nation for its oil. The Shah had had the same thought himself, so he allowed Dr. Mossadeq to privatize the oil company. The British Empire was shocked and accused Iran of STEALING OUR OIL.................they actually referred to the Iranian oil wells as OUR OIL. The British hatched a plot to overthrow Dr. Mossadeq but before they could implement it Dr. Mossadeq got wind of it and he threw them all out.....closing down the British Embassy where their agents were.
With no agents in the country Britain could not stage a coup....so they went to their American friends (USA Government) who agreed to do so for a 40% cut of Iran's oil.
Ladies and gentleman, this was how America entered the oil arena in Iran.
They squeezed Dr. Mossadeq's government with sanctions and the Shah left the country ( hurting economically with no income) to exile in Rome.................during these days the Americans paid the mob with US Dollars to shout LONG LIVE THE SHAH in the streets as he returned from Rome. Troops fought in the streets and Dr. Mossadeq ended his days under house arrest..............and it was the coup that toppled Iran's only ever democratically elected government. (So much for exporting democracy). From then on America was top dog in Iran.
Dr. Mossadeq was under house arrest until he died. My friend's father was one of his men and he was brutally tortured because of that.......spending years in prison where he was put on the RACK..........he was literally cooked, and I saw firsthand his chest and back.....so mutilated. He never walked properly because his feet were tortured too. He told me he was ALL OVER like his back and chest. He had no more children so I assume he was like that ALL OVER. He told me the fact he was an engineer, in a country who only had 40, saved his life.Jimmy Carter had a crusade to bring HUMAN RIGHTS to Iran, and this forced the Shah to make some reform...............but as he loosened his iron grip the situation spun out of control.
Today Saudi Arabia is in the iron grip of the Al Saud royals, supported by America, and they have learnt from the Shah's experience not to give an inch. The people are oppressed in Saudi but we hear nothing. America would like regime change in Iran...........and Israel dearly misses the Shah who supplied them with oil when all other OPEC members refused to do so.
A horrid but true picture.
I lived in Iran.........I was young, but my family are interested in politics...........and so was I.
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- Highr0ller
- 5 months ago
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This is what the Iranians need.
Bare-chested female revolutionaries with French flags.
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- netstorm2k8
- 5 months ago
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The Shah's gruesome medical odyssey through the hospitals of central America, New York City and, eventually, Cairo gave grim satisfaction to the mullahs who had already ordered his assassination. Not long after his departure I had sat at the feet of Hojatolislam Sadeq Khalkhali, the "hanging judge", as he listed those of the Shah's family sentenced to death in absentia. Khalkhali it was who had sentenced a14-year-old boy to death, who had approved of the stoning to death of women in Kermanshah, who earlier, in a mental hospital, would strangle cats in his prison cell. "The Shah will be strung up; he will be cut down and smashed," he told me. "He is an instrument of Satan."
Weeks later, in Evin prison, he discoursed again on the finer details of stoning to death. I still have the cassette of our conversation, his lips smacking audibly on a tub of vanilla ice cream as he spoke. From where did this brutality come? One of the regime's new officials said the Shah's Savak intelligence men were Nazi-type criminals. And how could I argue with this when reporters such as Derek Ive of the AP had managed to look inside a Savak agent's house just before the revolution was successful? "There was a fishpond outside," he told me. "There were vases of flowers in the front hall. But downstairs there were cells. In each of them was a steel bed with straps and beneath it two domestic cookers. There were lowering devices on the bedframes so the people strapped to them could be brought down on the flames. In another cell, I found a machine with a contraption which held a human arm beneath a knife and next to it was a metal sheath into which a human hand could be fitted. At one end was a bacon slicer. They had been shaving off hands."
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- Highr0ller
- 5 months ago
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I hope these rioters are actual distressed citizens as a whole, and not a mixture of distressed citizens and CIA operatives stirring and flaming the flames... If "accurate," this wouldn't be the first time...
Be well. :)
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- JaedeSpira
- 5 months ago
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The Iranians have the courage to do what we in the USA should have done in 2000 and 2004. After all, we are in the land of the free and the home of the brave. Aren't we?
