It appeared that tens of thousands of protesters were out in the streets. The demonstration was nowhere near the scale of the major protests of 2009 when hundreds of thousands of angry Tehranis were often seen in the streets. But it was a substantial protest.
A new chant rose from the streets, targeted directly at Khamenehi, known as Seyyed Ali. The chant was: “Mubarak, Ben Ali; it’s your turn now, Seyyed Ali.” Chants of “Death to the dictator” were also heard. Chants aimed at Khamenehi began in 2009 a few months after the protests began.
The demonstrations Monday did not cause the regime to collapse, but they did make mincemeat of the regime claim last year that it had made a “corpse” of the opposition.
The police were seen and photographed Monday firing tear gas to disperse the crowds.
Gunshots were also heard. The regime has tried to discourage the use of gunfire by the police so as to avoid creating martyrs for the opposition.
Deputy Tehran Police Chief Ahmad-Reza Radan asserted that the gunfire came from the opposition, not the police. He said some people fired into the crowds and at lines of police officers. He said all the shooting took place at one location on Navvab and Towhid Streets.
Radan said “several” people were arrested. But on Tuesday, the Human Rights Reporters Committee said the Judiciary had confirmed the arrests of 1,500 people, which is a huge number compared to the arrests at protests in 2009. The Iran Times could not find any confirmation of that number, however, in the Iranian media.
Radan said damage to public property was minor, mainly involving trash bins and bus shelters.
He said one protester was killed and nine police officers wounded. He did not say how many civilian were hospitalized, but reported that one such person was in critical condition. The next day, Majlis Deputy Kazem Jalali said the Interior Ministry had told him that injured person had died.
It remained unclear if the first man to die was a supporter or opponent of the government.
The security director at the Culture Ministry said the man killed Monday was a 26-year-old art student, Sane Jaleh, from Tehran’s University of Art. The security director said Jaleh was a government supporter.
Earlier, the pro-government Society of Islamic Students said the art student had been “taken in by the corruption and conspiracy of the two sedition leaders,” a reference to the defeated reformist candidates in the 2009 presidential elections, Mir-Hossain Musavi and Mehdi Karrubi.
Others in the government were quoted as saying Jaleh was shot by regime opponents looking to create a martyr.
The opposition said he was beaten to death by the regime’s hezbollahi thugs who patrol the city on motorcycles and back up the police, often using chains as their enforcement mechanism.
Police also used paintball guns to mark protesters for later arrest. The police have used paintball guns since a few weeks after the protests broke out just after the June 12, 2009, presidential elections.
Cellphone coverage went dead in the central areas of the city, as the government sought to disrupt communications among protesters.
The Metro system was ordered not to stop at stations where protesters were seen to be gathering. Metro drivers simply sailed right through those stations without halting. The Green Voice of Freedom opposition website identified the following six stations as being closed: Imam Hossain; Ferdowsi; Vali-Asr; Enqilab; Azadi and Navvab. These are widely spaced stations all across the east-west central belt of the capital.
The violence didn’t all originate with the authorities. One video showed a man trying to rescue a poster bearing pictures of Ayatollah Khomeini and Khamenehi. When the crowd saw what he was doing, it lit into the man, who was all alone. The man was beaten and viciously kicked as he fell to the ground. No one was seen coming to his rescue.
Both Karrubi and Musavi were under house arrest and unable to join the Monday protest. Karrubi’s home had been surrounded and shut off three days before the Monday protest. Musavi’s house and the cul de sac where it is located were blocked by police early Monday morning. No one was allowed in or out. Opposition groups said telephone contact with both men was also shut down.
The pair had jointly called last week for a march to support the anti-regime demonstrations in Egypt and Tunisia. They said at the time that they would only march if they received a permit from the Interior Ministry.
The ministry refused to issue a permit and said people should show their support for the protesters in the Arab world by joining marchers after Friday prayers, February 11.
Musavi and Karrubi then scrapped their insistence on a permit and decided to push ahead with the protest anyway. For the past year, the pair has used the denial of permits after repeated requests to justify their declining to call on followers to come into the streets. So, the action this week was a major tactical shift by the two men. That shift also likely will put them in the crosshairs of many hardliners who have long called on the government to arrest and try both men.
The government has preferred to largely ignore Musavi and Karrubi—and avoid making political martyrs of them—while arresting dozens of other figures in the second and third tiers of the opposition. Analysts have generally seen the regime’s tactics as more rational than the emotional calls of the hardliners, many of whom even publicly say the two men should be hanged.
It was difficult to get a handle on the size of the protests because there was no single location. Protests were seen at many city squares and quite probably occurred at many lesser squares that weren’t being monitored. As in the past, trash dumpsters were overturned and the trash set afire. That action is partly a dramatic way to for the protesters to show their presence, partly to create an obstruction for the police, and partly to generate smoke that helps to negate tear gas.
One new poster made expressly for the Monday march showed side-by-side photos of Ahmadi-nejad and ex-Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak, each in the same pose with his arms raised high above his head, a clear effort to damn Ahmadi-nejad as a clone of Mubarak.
One new tactic promoted for those reluctant to march and risk a beating was to encourage them to drive to the demonstrations, The New York Times reported. It said that produced horrendous traffic jams. The government said the traffic jams actually showed that life was normal in most parts of the city and that the demonstrations did not discourage the public from carrying out their normal activities.
Echoing the Arab protests, sympathizers outside Iran set up a Facebook page, 25 Bahman, the date of the protest on the Persian calendar, to collect videos, eyewitness reports and other information.
During the day, Twitter feeds were used to urge protesters to gather quickly at a named square, then disperse quickly as the police arrived, providing for a kind of mobile protest that hopped and skipped from one square to another all day long.
Some protesters were reported still on the street until 11 p.m. Monday night, but, after nightfall, most of the protest initiative shifted to the rooftops where shouts of “Allahu Akbar” echoed across the city.
Demonstrations were reported from many other cities around the country, but there was no way to check the accuracy of those reports.
The last major demonstration in Tehran was on Ashura, December 27, 2009. That is a day when the religious normally fill the streets with processions. The opposition turned out in force, as did the police and Basiji. There was considerable violence at scattered points around the capital. Videos taken that day show two police vehicles running over a man in the street.
Afterward, the police said eight people had been killed, a number it later revised downward to seven when it said one of the deaths was from a drug overdose. One of the seven was Ali Habibi Musavi, a nephew of Mir-Hossain Musavi. Those were the first known deaths since June, when the government said 36 people had been killed and the opposition produced the names of 72 people it said had died.
There was a failed protest on February 11, 2010, the 31st anniversary of the collapse of the monarchy. As is the norm for that day, hundreds of thousands of Tehranis marched on foot to Azadi Square, the focal point of pro-regime events each year. The police presence was massive and protesters could not reach the square, which was both the locus of local media coverage and the target of the protests. Elsewhere in the capital, there were scattered protests and clashes. The uniform conclusion was that the authorities had skillfully won the day.
On June 12, 2010, the first anniversary of the disputed election, only hundreds came into the streets. There were widely scattered protests, but the scale was a mere shadow of the past. Police said they arrested 91 people. It was widely assumed that this spelled the end of the effort to mount large street protests as the authorities had finally mastered the techniques to intimidate the bulk of the public into staying home.
That interpretation held for eight months, until Monday.