Anti Govt Protests in Iran - Dec 2017 | Page 10 | World Defense

Anti Govt Protests in Iran - Dec 2017

Tps77

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https://www.nytimes.com/2018/01/02/...tests-khamenei.html?smid=tw-nytimes&smtyp=cur
Hard-Liners and Reformers Tapped Iranians’ Ire. Now, Both Are Protest Targets.
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By THOMAS ERDBRINKJAN. 2, 2018

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Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, blamed “enemies” for the antigovernment protests but did not specify who. Credit Atta Kenare/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
TEHRAN — Antigovernment protests roiled Iran on Tuesday, as the death toll rose to 21 and the nation’s supreme leader blamed foreign enemies for the unrest. But the protests that have spread to dozens of Iranian cities in the past six days were set off by miscalculations in a long-simmering power struggle between hard-liners and reformers.

By Tuesday, Iran’s leaders could no longer ignore the demonstrations and felt compelled to respond publicly. Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the supreme leader, blamed outside “enemies” but did not specify whom. President Hassan Rouhani, a moderate, appealed for calm while saying the protesters had a right to be heard.

But the anger behind the protests was directed against the entire political establishment.

While the protests that swept Iran in 2009 were led by the urban middle class, these protests have been largely driven by disaffected young people in rural areas, towns and small cities who have seized an opening to vent their frustrations with a political elite they say has hijacked the economy to serve its own interests.

Unemployment for young people — half the population — runs at 40 percent, analysts believe. Meanwhile, Iran has spent billions of dollars abroad in recent years to extend its influence in Iraq, Syria and Lebanon.

The initial catalyst for the anger appears to have been the leak by President Rouhani last month of a proposed government budget. For the first time, secret parts of the budget, including details of the country’s religious institutes, were exposed.

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Iranians discovered that billions of dollars were going to hard-line organizations, the military, the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps, and religious foundations that enrich the clerical elite. At the same time, the budget proposed to end cash subsidies for millions of citizens, increase fuel prices and privatize public schools.

The leak appeared to be intended to tap popular resentment, and it worked. Telegram, a social media messaging app used by over 40 million Iranians, blew up with angry comments.

“It made me angry,” said Mehdi, 33, from Izeh, a town in Iran’s poor Khuzestan Province, who asked that his family name not be used out of fear of retaliation. “There were all these religious organs that received high budgets, while we struggle with constant unemployment.”

Last Thursday, hard-liners tried to take back the initiative and embarrass the president, staging a demonstration in the holy city Mashhad, where hundreds chanted slogans against the weak economy and shouted “death to the dictator” and “death to Rouhani.”

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What’s Behind Iran’s Protests?
Widespread protests continue in Iran. It’s the largest unrest since the 2009 demonstrations against Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, then the president. But this time it’s different. Here’s why. By NILO TABRIZY and CHRIS CIRILLO on Publish Date January 2, 2018. Photo by Agence France-Presse — Getty Images. Watch in Times Video »
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An Iranian security official confirmed that the Friday prayer leader of the city, Ahmad Alamolhoda, a prominent hard-liner, had been summoned by Iran’s National Security Council to explain his role in the demonstration.

Videos of the gathering then went viral on social media, where people had for weeks been heatedly discussing the proposed budget. Frustrated Iranians elsewhere were emboldened.

In reaction to the protest in Mashhad, Hesamodin Ashna, a trusted adviser to President Rouhani, sent out a Twitter message on Friday, highlighting “the unbalanced distribution of the budget.”

Iran’s military forces, active in several countries in the Middle East, saw their budget increase to $11 billion, a nearly 20 percent rise, he said. The budget for representatives of the supreme leader in universities was increased. An institute run by the hard-line cleric Mohammad Taghi Meshbah-Yazdi was to receive eight times as much as a decade ago.

Online anger reached a boiling point.

For decades, those living in Iran’s provincial towns and villages were regarded as the backbone of the country’s Islamic regime. They tended to be conservative, averse to change and pious followers of the sober Islamic lifestyle promoted by the state.

In less than a decade, all that has changed. A 14-year drought has emptied villages, with residents moving to nearby cities where they often struggle to find jobs. Access to satellite television and, more important, the mobile internet has widened their world.

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“On Instagram, I saw a picture of a woman in Tehran with her S.U.V., who wrote she spends $3,000 on her pets each month,” Mehdi said. “A person can live here with that money for a year. I got angry.”

His city, Izeh, was famous for being home to many who had been exiled by the hard-line judiciary. “Izeh has changed a lot over the years — more people, but no entertainment, not even a cinema,” he said. “Many people use drugs.”

On Friday, protests broke out in Izeh. The government news agency said two protesters were killed there by security forces.

In Tehran, the capital, Mohammad Alinejad had been sitting behind the wheel of his dilapidated Peugeot when he heard of the protests in Mashhad. “I was cheering,” he said. “I want these clerics to go. They have destroyed my life.”

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A market in Tehran on Tuesday. The nation’s unemployment rate for young people — half the population — runs at 40 percent. Credit Atta Kenare/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
He had been hit by shrapnel during the eight-year Iran-Iraq war, and a piece had remained stuck in his head. His status as a handicapped veteran exempts his son from the mandatory 24-month military service, but when he tried to get the exemption papers he got stuck in a bureaucratic merry-go-round that is all too common for Iranians.

“I had to pay bribes, or else no one would help me, and in the end we didn’t get anywhere,” he said.

He blamed the clerics for everything: privatization, corruption, inequality and long days with low pay.

“I don’t care if our country becomes the next Iraq or Syria,” he said, “but I’m so frustrated with them, that I just want them gone and we can think about the consequences tomorrow.”

In Qom, the center of Iran’s theological educational institutes, one cleric said he was worried about the level of anger.

“People are angry when they see how much money some clerical institutions and Friday prayer leaders are being paid in the budget,” the cleric, Fazel Meybodi, said. “Many of them are old and have no appeal to the youths. They must be changed.”

As protests took off in about 40 cities across the country, Tehran remained largely quiet. In 2009, over three million people took to the streets disputing the elections.

But this time, many said they feared the raging, leaderless protests.

“They are angry, and have a right to be, but there is just nothing more, no plan for the day after,” said Hamidreza Faraji, a cosmetic and honey salesman who struggles to live a decent life.


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“We can’t keep on going on to change our leaders,” he said, standing in his shop, which like others nearby was empty of customers. No one he knew wanted Iran to become the next Syria or Iraq in the chaos that might follow, he explained.

“Many of the protesters shout, “Neither Gaza nor Lebanon, I will give my life for Iran,” Mr. Faraji said. “But we have entered this bad game in the region, so now we have to finish it. Just like we have no other option but to live with our leaders. Unless there is a better alternative.”
 

Atalay

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@khafee

I have a part time ass. lect. for international relations at an Institution. You can say "Analytics for Prevention".
Predicted them nothin will happen except "violence or some little reforms".
If I am wrong I'll loose my part time lectures. That won't happen, so sure I am.
 

Khafee

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The norm is NOT democracy -- the norm is extinction
BY DAVID P. GOLDMAN JANUARY 3, 2018

Before we wax too eloquent about the democratic aspirations of the great Iranian people, we should keep in the mind that the most probable scenario for Iran under any likely regime is a sickening spiral into poverty and depopulation. Iran has the fastest-aging population of any country in the world, indeed, the fast-aging population of any country in history. It has the highest rate ofvenereal disease infection and the highest rate of infertility of any country in the world. It has a youth unemployment rate of 35% (adjusted for warehousing young people in state-run diploma mills). And worst of all, it has run out of water.

We might be observing the birth of Iranian democracy in the protests of the past few weeks, but it is more likely that we are watching the slow-motion train wreck of a once-great nation in all its gory detail. As I noted in an Asia Times analysis this morning, the most violent protests, e.g. the burning of a police station near Isfahan captured on this video, happened in the boondocks where water has run out. The river that runs through Isfahan, a legendary city of gardens in the desert, literally has run dry. Some Iranian officials warn that tens of millions of Iranians will have to leave their homes for lack of water. The country has used up 70% of its groundwater and its literally drying up major rivers to maintain consumption. It's the worst ecological disaster in modern history.

The Islamic Revolution presided over an orgy of corruption, brutality and mismanagement. Despite the Obama administration's cash infusion and the lifting of sanctions on oil exports, the government is nearly bankrupt. It has allowed several major banks to fail, wiping out the savings of millions of depositors, after the banks lent vast sums to regime cronies for real estate speculation. 45% of Iranian bank loans are toxic and the cost of cleaning up the bank mess is estimated at half of GDP (to put that in perspective, the US Treasury set aside $700 billion, or 1/20th of US GDP, to bail out the banks in 2008, and needed only a fraction of it. The Iranian banking crisis is a full order of magnitude worse than the US 2008 crisis).

Iran's pension funds, as I report in Asia Times, are bankrupt. The civil service pension fund as only 100 employees paying in for every 120 employees receiving a pension. The government is on the hook for the rest.

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Add up the costs of dealing with the water emergency, the bank crisis and the pension crisis, and Iran is close to broke. And that's just the beginning: The average working-age Iranian today comes from a family of seven children, but has fewer than two children. That means that when the older generation retires, there will be fewer than two new entrants into the workforce to pay for the pensions of seven retirees. The demographic crisis hasn't hit yet, and when it does, it will be the financial equivalent of an asteroid hitting Iran.

In other words, Iran's exhaustion of physical as well as human capital may have pushed it past the point of no return.

Iran has plenty of smart people, and two of the best engineering universities in the world, except virtually all the top graduates leave the country. There probably is a theoretical way out of Iran's economic spiral, but no collection of Shi'ite mullahs is going to find it. The most likely outcome is that Iran will undergo economic and social collapse.

That, sadly, is the norm in human history. The democracy first practiced by the Greek city-state is exceptional, and classical Greece is Exhibit A for civilizational self-destruction. Of the nearly 150,000 languages once spoken on this planet, a couple of thousand are left, and 90% of those will fall silent forever during the next century or so. Sometimes the best thing you can do for dying civilizations is, don't be one of them, as I wrote in my 2011 book, How Civilizations Die.

This makes the mullahs all the more dangerous, like a bank robber with a brain tumor who takes hostages. I sincerely wish a happy outcome for the people of Persia. But we need to be prepared for a very unhappy one.

https://pjmedia.com/spengler/norm-not-democracy-norm-extinction/
 

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Protests in Tehran
 

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New kind of protest movement taking hold in Iran
By Meysam Tayebipour, Lancaster University
Jan. 03, 2018

New-kind-of-protest-movement-taking-hold-in-Iran.jpg

Iranian women hold Iran national flags as they take part in a stat organized rally against anti-government protests in Ahvaz, southwest Iran, on Wednesday. Photo by Morteza Jaberian/EPA-EFE

Jan. 3 (UPI) -- When the news broke about a protest in Mashhad, Iran's second-largest city and a stronghold for the country's religious hard-liners, in the waning days of 2017 no one thought it would lead to a national rally against the government. But since then the demonstrations have rapidly spread to Iran's other provinces and have left the political elite shocked and baffled.

It's hard to believe that a regime with such a strong regional position, and one that just recently held a successful presidential election with a wide range of participants, is in trouble. All parts of the Iranian establishment have duly responded with various forms of denial.

The country's political reformists see the protests as a plot by hard-liners against the president, Hasan Rouhani, and his moderate government. Iran's vice president, Eshaq Jahangiri, implicitly blamed hard-liners and said "those who are behind such events will burn their own fingers."

Similarly, hard-liners are ignoring the fact that the protesters are venting their anger against the religious regime as a whole. Instead, they are framing the protests as a spasm of rage against the elected government's economic policies. As the protests spread and grew, one of Iran's most conservative newspapers, Kayhan, denounced the Rouhani government and said the protesters were angry that it had "ignored" its own election slogans and promises.

But the last seven days have indicated that the protesters are neither lackeys of the hard-liners, as the reformists would have it, nor just unhappy with Rouhani's government, as the hard-liners claim. Indeed, they are representing a new movement: the "economically marginalized people movement." And this movement is unlike any other seen in post-revolutionary Iran.

Those who show up

Whereas 2009's Green Movement mostly comprised middle-class and affluent Iranians who demanded democracy and political reform, today's protests come mostly from working-class and low-income families fed up with Iran's unjust distribution of wealth and the corruption that exacerbates it. These Iranians know that their country has some of the world's richest natural resources, but they also know that the revenue that should be spent on them is instead siphoned off to fund the government's foreign adventurism. And so goes their chant: "Leave Syria, do something for us."

In addition, the current movement, unlike the Green Movement, has no specific leader, and its demonstrations are mostly organized via Telegram, Iran's most popular massaging app. While having no leadership can be a negative point for any movement, it also can have its benefits. The Green Movement came to an end when the regime placed its leaders under house arrest. But when Telegram was blocked in Iran to stymie the growing protests, the movement kept going; people have started to use virtual private networks and proxy servers, and they now have access to Telegram again.

Previous protests in post-revolutionary Iran were hardly national movements. The student protests in 1999 against the closure of Salam, a reformist newspaper, were confined to Tehran. Conversely, the current movement in Iran extends across the country; even in Qom, a very conservative city where unrest is usually thought highly unlikely, people have been out on the streets chanting against the regime.


Until these demonstrations began, big social movements in Iran were principally organized by reformists - but this time, reformist leaders are withholding their support. As the most powerful challenger to the hard-liners, whom they have to fight to win over the broad middle of Iranian public opinion, the reformists have no interest in backing what can be described as a left-wing movement, at least in terms of who its participants are. Equally, the protesters clearly don't think their economic grievances can be settled within the current reformist discourse.

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So if the protests continue to grow and the reformists still want to be Iran's main opposition voice, they may soon have no choice but to accommodate at least some of the demonstrators' demands in their political agenda. If they do not, their political struggle could soon be hijacked by something entirely new.

Meysam Tayebipouris a doctoral candidate in the Department of Politics, Philosophy and Religion at Lancaster University.

This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.

https://www.upi.com/Top_News/Voices...ment-taking-hold-in-Iran/9971514993576/?nll=1


@SOUTHie @Tps77 Pls note
 

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