ISLAMSHAHR -Some 4,000 Iranian women burned tires and blocked a main road southwest of Tehran Tuesday in protest at poor living conditions, including a lack of water, gas and electricity, an AFP correspondent witnessed.

The demonstration began when several hundred women from Shatareh, near Islamshahr, 20 miles from the capital, gathered on the highway shouting slogans of protest.

The crowd quickly grew with men and young people of both sexes joining the women. They totally blocked the road, burning tires and paper.

[Iran Zamin News Agency: Protesters chanted slogans against the Iranian regime's leaders.

[In an attempt to disperse the crowd, the State Security Forces attacked the protesters and arrested a number of them. Faced with the protesters' stiff resistance, they did not have much success.

[The Iranian Resistance's President-elect Maryam Rajavi hailed the defiant women in south Tehran and called on the people of Tehran, especially the young people, to expand their protests and demonstrations and rush to the aid of the impoverished people of this region.]
 

Riot Police Crackdowns Islamshahr Protest, BBC World Service, June 27

TEHRAN - …The protests are part of a rise in social unrest in Iran, with demonstrations being seen against unpaid wages, joblessness and bad basic services.

[There are reports that the demonstration was broken up by riot police with clubs and teargas.

The reports said firemen who rushed to the scene to put out blazes were repelled by protesters blocking the road.

"Our children have nothing, drugs are easily available for them, but no sports facilities, no parks or a library," protester Bibi Zahra Akbari told the Associated Press news agency.

"Our water is bad, we cannot drink it, we see some sand in the drinking water," she added.

Shatareh has no hospitals or recreations facilities, and its schools are old and neglected.

Riots broke out in Islamshahr several years ago after bus fares to Tehran were increased.

Correspondents say patchy reforms introduced by the government of President Mohammad Khatami have failed to take effect.
 

Woman Sentenced To Death, Agence France Presse, June 24

TEHRAN - Iran's Supreme Court Saturday upheld a lower court's execution order for a woman convicted of murdering her ex-husband after he beat the couple's children, the Tehran press reported.

Soussan Hajirian, 42 years old, was found guilty of the 1996 murder of her ex-husband, with a solid cooking dish following a violent altercation.

"… On the night of the incident he beat the children and kicked me out. I then hit him," she said.

The death penalty was initially handed down by Iran's Court of Appeal and was reaffirmed Saturday by the Supreme Court.
 

News Bites

Iran Zamin News Agency, June 27 - Mullah Mahmoud Hashemi Shahroudi, head of the regime's Judiciary, said yesterday: "Judicial development does not mean removing legal prohibitions and restrictions, allowing unruly and lewd conduct and accepting models and findings of judicial systems elsewhere in the world today labeled as human rights."

As the head of "Iraq's Supreme Council of Islamic Revolution," Shahroudi worked under Khomeini's supervision for many years and is one of the most important officials involved in the export of terrorism and fundamentalism. Khatami and his faction have frequently endorsed him as "a reformer" in the mullahs' judiciary.

Agence France Presse June 26 - Iran's factories, many of them operating in the red and unable to pay their workers, are facing a growing crisis that the government has failed to halt, the reformist head of a state-backed labor union said Monday.

Every day, in Tehran and in the provinces, unpaid workers assemble in front of a particular ministry or government office to seek redress, often resorting to civil disobedience or even violence.

And in a country with two million manufacturing workers, social movements are multiplying in number.

Agence France Presse June 26 - Ezzatollah Sahabi was arrested and jailed in Tehran Monday for taking part in an "anti-Islamic" political seminar in Berlin in May, the IRNA news agency reported.

"As part of the inquiry into those taking part in the Berlin seminar, and given that confidential documents were discovered during recent investigations, Sahabi was summoned by the revolutionary court which placed him in temporary custody," a court statement quoted by IRNA said.

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