Word: iran
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Amid the turmoil following the controversial June 12 presidential election, Iran's ruling hard-liners have escalated their showdown with the opposition by putting more than 100 political dissidents on what many outside the regime have denounced as a show trial. Among those "confessing" so far has been a reporter for Newsweek, Maziar Bahari, a Canadian citizen of Iranian descent, who said the foreign media helped cause the chaos following the vote. However, the regime's intentions can be seen from the array of political figures on trial, including several Deputy Ministers, a deputy speaker of parliament and many current...
...Sunday, Iran's state TV broadcast a wrenching and stunning 20-minute confession from a well-known public figure. But former Vice President Mohammad Ali Abtahi, a reformist cleric, was clearly not himself. For one, he was not allowed to wear his clerical robe, and he had lost visible weight. "I believe the reformists had prepared for two or three years for this election in order to limit the powers of the Supreme Leader," he declared, reading from a piece of paper. He went on to accuse three opposition leaders of forming an alliance in which they "promised to always...
Already on that Sunday, there were signs on the streets of Tehran that a harsh public campaign against Rafsanjani, Khatami and Mousavi was being orchestrated. Stacks of copies of the ultraconservative newspaper Kayhan blasted the headline "Evidence of Mousavi's Betrayal of Iran Exposed!" The newspaper, a favored mouthpiece for Supreme Leader Ayatullah Ali Khamenei, went on to call for the trial of Khatami and Mousavi for "acting against God," a crime punishable under Shari'a law by death. An expanding witch hunt would be reminiscent of a massive purge of dissidents in 1988, when thousands of leftist political prisoners...
Just as Wall Street is the embodiment of America's financial industry, "the bazaar" stands for the mercantile and commercial interests that form a core constituency in Iran. Both are physical and metaphorical locations of power. Indeed, the bazaar, the center of Iranian economic life stretching back centuries, has been key to the country's political history. In January 1984, Ayatullah Khomeini addressed bazaar leaders and, while pressing for their support, flattered their importance by proclaiming, "If the bazaars are not in step with the Islamic Republic, the public will suffer defeat." So which way is the bazaar leaning...
...story of the 1979 Islamic revolution cannot be told without recounting the numerous times bazaars in all major cities went on strike to protest the Shah's autocratic rule. The family networks of bazaaris as well as their business networks were so intertwined with the Shi'a clergy that Iran experts spoke of the "bazaar-mosque" alliance as the main reason for the toppling of the Pahlavi monarchy. But is that alliance still holding strong in the wake of the largest protests in Iran since 1979? Could opposition leader Mir-Hossein Mousavi persuade the bazaaris to strike in support...