There is, however, no sign that the regime is willing to tempt fate by arresting and jailing Mir-Hossain Musavi and Mehdi Karrubi, the chief voices of the opposition, despite vocal demands from hardliners to do so.
What the regime has done is to effectively imprison the two men inside their own homes in a modern version of the 1846 Edgar Allen Poe short story, “The Cask of Amontillado,” in which one man takes revenge on an enemy by bricking him up behind a wall.
At Musavi’s home, which lies at the end of blind alley, Kouche Akhtar off Pasteur Street, the authorities first dismissed the bodyguards that have been assigned to Musavi for years by virtue of his having been prime minister in the 1980s.
They then built an iron gate across the alley to bar entry to the Musavi home. No one is allowed in or out without the say-so of a new set of guards assigned to the alley. Even food deliveries are said to be dependent upon the good will of the guards.
Karrubi’s website, sahamnews.org, reported three separate security actions against Karrubi and his family Monday. In one, security forces invaded his home, confined him and his wife to separate rooms, then searched the house, removed books and documents and replaced all the locks. The homes of Karrubi’s two sons were raided later and one son, Ali, was arrested.
Hardliners continue to demand that Musavi and Karrubi—sometimes former President Khatami is also named—be arrested. Many hardliners openly call for them to be hanged. But Sadeq Larijani, the chairman of the Judiciary, last week urged everyone to calm down and insisted that the law be carefully applied. His tone indicated no interest in having the pair incarcerated in a state prison. “The Judiciary can do one thing now,” he said, “Put them under house arrest.… Cut all their communications, telephone, Internet, everything.”
Ayatollah Ahmad Jannati, the secretary of the Council of Guardians who is generally considered the hardest of hardliners in the senior ranks of the regime, also dismissed the idea of punishing the pair. “To those who call for their execution,” he said at Friday prayers, “I should say they have already been executed. They have lost all their credibility and prestige—everything.”
An opposition rally February 14 surprised the government as it drew tens of thousands into the streets. Two men were killed that day. The regime said they were government supporters gunned down by the opposition. The government even held a massive funeral for its “martyrs.”
But relatives and friends of the dead subsequently came forward to say the government was lying and both men were supporters of the opposition. One of the men had even worked in Musavi’s campaign office in 2009.
The opposition then called for a public march for February 20, the traditional morning day seven days after a death. But this time, the government flooded the streets with security men and flooded the media with barely disguised threats to kill protesters. (The propaganda said the Mojahedin-e Khalq had sent armed men into Tehran to kill protesters in order to create martyrs.) This appeared to work.
Some Tehranis reported squares jammed packed with people—but added that the security forces appeared to outnumber all the civilians.
Many protesters probably did turn out. They were urged to walk in silence, but that made it impossible to tell whether a person walking silently down a street was protesting or intent on making an appointment.
The Tehran police said nothing happened anywhere in the city, which was certainly an exaggeration. The police moved to break up knots of people and there were scattered reports of tear gas. The police said they arrested two people, one carrying a handgun with a silencer and the other a Molotov cocktail. Later, they admitted to having arrested and briefly detailed Faezeh Hashemi, the feminist daughter of former President Ali-Akbar Hashemi-Rafsanjani, for chanting protest slogans. It was difficult to believe that Faezeh was the sole person arrested that day for protesting.
There were reports of one or two people being shot to death. But the government denied that and no names or bodies have been produced.