Back to Brief on Iran
This month, Iranian students and others mounted the largest and most violent demonstrations since the 1979 Islamic revolution. Students, chanting "long live liberty, death to despotism," protested against government repression in Tehran and many other cities… Khalid Duran is a Middle East analyst and editor of the journal, TransIslam.
Khalid Duran: Khatami certainly is not what the world press has made him out to be over the last year or two… I worked in Hamburg in Germany for a number of years, and he was imam at the Iranian mosque over there… Khatami certainly did not impress us as an intellectual… he is a first-class conspirator,… he is an architect of this system, of this revolution…
… And these protest demonstrations now, they brought this whole thing to the fore. I mean, Khatami can play this game until a certain point, but here things went too far. And then he had to show his true colors. He had to reveal himself as a man of this regime, of the system, who just has that lovely smile, but nothing else than that.
… I think that some of the Iranian opposition forces have a hand in this protest. They have become stronger in recent years. The much maligned people's Mojahedin have turned out to be a force. They have been so many times declared to be almost non-existent. And it has been said that they are very propagandistic, and not as strong as they make themselves out to be. They have recently shown themselves to be a force to reckon with, inside Iran.
During the protests, with a number
of attacks also on the members of the regime. They have forced the regime
to take very strong action in Iraq, and have really made this regime very,
very nervous… now this regime is hitting back. In the beginning, they [Mojahedin]
suffered enormous numbers of victims, thousands of thousands of young women
and men were executed. I wonder how this is going to be now… Again this
regime will execute such large numbers of them… Otherwise these protests,
again, are not that unorganized as they are sometimes described here.
Further Attacks on Allies of Weakened Khatami, Reuters, July 25
TEHRAN - Iran's special clerical court on Sunday found the publisher of the leading pro-Khatami newspaper Salam guilty of printing classified material and defamation, the official IRNA news agency said, raising the prospects the influential daily will be silenced for good.
The agency said Mohammad Mousavi-Khoeiniha, had also been found guilty of publishing insulting language and misleading the public.
"From the very beginning I had no intention
of complaining or appealing the court's decision or even the court's jurisdiction.
These people are chosen by the supreme leader and I am not protesting anything,"
said Mousavi-Khoeiniha, a former prosecutor-general.
Khatami's Handpicked Intelligence Minister Busy Arresting Khatami's Supporters, Reuters, July 26
TEHRAN - The Intelligence Ministry said in a communiqué published in newspapers on Monday that three senior members of the small Iran Nation Party had been in custody since the outbreak of street riots in Tehran in mid-July.
The ministry, trying to keep a low
profile since the exposure of its role in the last year murders, has been
regularly issuing communiqués, revealing names of some of those
arrested and exposing their alleged role in the unrest.
Iran Under Mullahs Lags on Y2K Problem, Reuters, July 25
TEHRAN - An Iranian expert on information technology has warned that the country was ill-prepared for the millennium bug problem.
The official IRNA news agency, in a report over the weekend, quoted Mohammad Sepehri-Rad as saying the banking, transportation and telecommunications sectors were at special risk from the Y2K problem.
"Latest reports reveal that many institutions
have not yet taken the Y2K problem seriously. They have not understood
the disastrous aftermath of this negligence," Sepehri-Rad, secretary of
the Supreme Informatics Council of Iran, told a conference of heads
of state-run organizations.
34 Die in Flooding, Associated Press, July 26
DUBAI - Torrential rains flooded villages in northern Iran, killing 34 people and injuring more than 200, the official Islamic Republic News Agency reported today.
More than 5,000 homes, shops and government buildings were damaged or destroyed in the provinces of Neka, Behshahr and Sari, and thousands of acres of farmlands were inundated since the rain began Sunday, IRNA said. It said at least 30 villages were flooded.