Word: protesters
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1990-1999
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...many of the irate parents who registered protest at Wednesday's school committee meeting said that the timing of the decision precluded important community discussion...
President Khatami is in a bind. Two days day after Iran?s moderate president warned that further democracy protests would not be tolerated, the streets of Tehran are firmly in the hands of militia bands sent by Iran's conservative clerical leaders to crush the pro-democracy protest movement, while pro-Khatami student activists run for their lives. The spectacle of Khatami denouncing the students who?d launched their protest to defend his own reforms from conservative attack captures the dilemma of a man trying to change Iran?s theocracy from within. "Khatami was caught between contending forces...
Khatami had urged the students to curb their demonstrations as they became increasingly violent, but is now forced to sit out the backlash as police and Islamic fundamentalist militias move to snuff out the largest protest movement seen in Iran since the revolution. Although he risks alienating some of his most committed supporters by backing away from the protesters who carried his portrait through the streets, Khatami knows from experience that conservative crackdowns tend to drive the broader Iranian public toward the reformist agenda. And with parliamentary elections looming next May, a conservative backlash may work in his favor...
...fear of the security forces. And when 10,000 students fought a sixth day of pitched battles against riot police in Tehran Tuesday despite dire warnings against demonstrating, Iran?s leaders ? who themselves made a revolution 20 years ago ? may be feeling history catching up with them. The student protesters are targeting the country?s hard-line religious leadership under Ayatollah Ali Khameini, the supreme ruler who also controls the security forces. Although many of the demonstrators are carrying portraits of President Mohamed Khatami, whose efforts at reform and democratization are being blocked by the hard-liners, they...
...Iran?s students are the children of the technocratic elite who keep the country running," says TIME correspondent William Dowell, who covered the 1979 revolution from Tehran. "Attacking them could deepen the crisis and even unite the population against Khameini. And if the protest movement expands, it can?t be assumed that the military would necessarily remain loyal to Khameini, in which case you could potentially see another revolution." For Khameini and Khatami, both veterans of the movement that overthrew the shah 20 years ago, the rapid spread of the protest movement from Tehran to at least 12 other Iranian...