DOMESTIC

Clashes with Guards extend to central Iran

Mojahedin's statement, Feb. 17 - According to a report by the Mojahedin's Command Headquarters in Iran, clashes between the Mojahedin and popular Resistance forces on the one hand and the regime's Intelligence Ministry and Guards Corps agents on the other, continued in various parts of the country. Clashes intensified in Isfahan province (central Iran) in recent days and a number of the regime's suppressive forces in Isfahan were killed.

The regime's Ministry of Intelligence is alarmed at the expansion of the Mojahedin's operations and activities throughout the country. It preposterously claimed that the Mojahedin had brought their "guns, grenades and weapons" from Iraq to Isfahan. The expansion of clashes to the northern and central Iranian regions in recent weeks which has forced the mullah regime to acknowledge them, indicates the escalation of the Iranian people's Resistance all across the country.

Oil workers' strike

NCR statement, Feb. 16 - Mr. Massoud Rajavi, President of the National Council of Resistance of Iran, hailed Tehran's oil refinery workers and called on Iranian oil workers and people across the country to rise to their aid and support.

Mr. Rajavi said: Like the heroic uprising of the people of Kermanshah, the strike today of Tehran's oil workers - which took place despite full control and brutal suppression by the regime's security and intelligence forces - denotes the explosive state of Iran's 70 million strong society and their general hatred towards the illegitimate ruling regime.

This morning, thousands of striking workers of Tehran's Oil Refinery converged on the Oil Ministry and chanted anti-government slogans. Tehran's oil workers protested suppression at the work environment, small salaries and lack of other facilities and resources for Iranian workers.

The terrified mullah regime dispatched the Special Forces of Greater Tehran to the site who clashed with the workers, arresting hundreds and taking them to unknown locations. No information is available on their fate.

Ali Nejad, director of the security division of Tehran's oil refinery, affiliated with the Intelligence Ministry, has submitted the list of today's absent workers to the Ministry of Intelligence and widespread arrests of workers has already begun.

Revolution anniversary

AFP, Feb. 11 - Massoud Rajavi, President of the National Council of Resistance of Iran believes that "from a political, social and economic stand point, the clerical regime is reaching the end of the line." In his view, "Khomeini's heirs, [who took advantage of the regional situation and the windfall from the Kuwaiti crisis to buy themselves some time,] are entering the final phase of their bloody religious theocracy's life."

The NCR announced that Mr. Rajavi sent a radio-televised message via satellite to the people Iran on the occasion of the 18th anniversary of the anti-monarchic revolution in Iran: "Thanks to the National Liberation Army of Iran and the support of our compatriots in and out of Iran, the Iranian Resistance enjoys vast political and military prowess. The ruling mullahs do not understand any language other than force. Hence, their regime shall and must be overthrown by the NLA."

Mullahs remain isolated

Reuters, Feb. 10, Dubai - Iran's ties with much of the outside world show little sign of improvement eighteen years after the country's tumultuous Islamic Revolution, analysts and Tehran-based Western diplomats said on Monday. With no thawing in relations between Washington and Tehran and nagging pains with its trade partners in Europe, Iran is one of the world's most diplomatically isolated states, they said. Even ties with it Gulf Arab neighbours, notably Saudi Arabia and Iraq, are riddled with suspicion, disputes over territorial sovereignty and accusations of meddling in domestic affairs....

Speculation that U.S. President Clinton's second term could see a revision and softening of U.S. containment policy towards Iran has been quickly dashed. U.S. officials over the weekend denying secret talks between the two countries....

Washington has slapped unprecedented economic sanctions against Tehran after branding it as a leading supporter of international terrorism intent on derailing the Middle East peace process and condemned it for seeking nuclear weapons and as a growing military threat to oil-rich Gulf Arab neighbours....

Iran's relationship with Germany -- Tehran's main European trading partner and a leading advocate of maintaining a "critical dialogue" with Iran -- is also under pressure from a pending German court decision on the 1992 killings of three Kurdish dissidents and their translator in a Berlin restaurant....

Several European Union diplomats are closely watching for the reaction of the German government to the court decision and said that they would be prepared to remove embassy personnel from Iran if they felt it was warranted....

Fuller diplomatic ties with the European Union are also being stalled by the fatwa against British author Salman Rushdie issued by Iran's late leader Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini in 1989 because of alleged blasphemy in Rushdie's "The Satanic Verses."

Domestic risks for any Iranian politician seeking any softening with Washington were highlighted by recent sermons by the country's supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei which have fanned calls for the death of the United States and Israel.

Analyzing like a cow!!!

Israeli radio, Feb. 13 - Tehran-based Jomhouri Islami newspaper today described some of the western media and specifically the Agence France Presse as "cow," and wrote: The report by AFP correspondent in Tehran on the popular demonstration on the anniversary of the revolution was indeed an analysis made by a cow!!

Jomhouri Islami explained that this description comes from remarks once made by Rafsanjani about the analyses of some western media. He said Westerners analyze like the Cow.

AFP's sin was that in a Feb. 10 report on the demonstration on the anniversary of the revolution, it had written that people seemed to have come to spend time and that a good number of balloon and sandwich peddlers had a good sale.

Opposition TV satellite broadcasting to Iran

AFP, Feb. 13 - The People's Mujahedeen announced that it was broadcasting by satellite to Iran. A spokesman for the Baghdad-based movement told AFP that the one-hour-a-day broadcasts began February 2....

According to the spokesman, the "information program is transmitted every night by two satellites, Pan Am Sat and Asia Sat, and covers all of Iran, the Gulf area and part of Iraq. He said his organization has received several messages from inside Iran confirming that the show was coming in and that the authorities have not succeeded in jamming it.

Replacements

AFP, Feb. 15 - Tehran radio announced that Guards Corps General Hedayat Lotfian was appointed as Chief of the Iranian Police. Tehran radio said Lotfian was a highranking official of the Guards Corps.

FOREIGN

German opposition postpones visit to Iran

Reuters, Feb. 11, Bonn - Germany's opposition Social Democrats (SPD) said on Tuesday they had postponed a visit of parliamentary deputies to Iran scheduled for the end of the week, but gave no reasons for the decision. [NCR representative office in Germany issued a statement on Feb. 11, which read in part: Cancellation of a Feb. 13-17 planned trip to Iran by a three man SPD delegation headed by Mr. Guenter Verheugen, is yet another blow to the isolated religious, terrorist dictatorship ruling Iran.

Representatives of the National Council of Resistance met with Dr. Christopher Soppel, a high-ranking member of the SPD delegation, and drew his attention to the latest developments in Iran.

The Resistance's representatives demanded cancellation of the SPD delegation's trip to Tehran. It should be noted that broad sectors of SPD had also opposed the trip.]

Clinton urged to raise pressure on mullahs

Reuters, Feb. 14, Washington - A group of senators, including Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott, urged President Bill Clinton, in a letter released on Friday, to intensify U.S. efforts to isolate Iran.

"We urge you to maintain and intensify your efforts to isolate the Iranian regime through diplomacy and multilateral fora, since there is simply no reasonable cause to believe this regime can be reformed from within," they said in the letter to Clinton, signed by 10 senators and dated Feb. 10.

The senators said they held the Tehran government responsible for "its use of terrorism as a tool of foreign policy, its efforts to subvert neighboring governments, its violent opposition to the Middle East peace process, its pursuit of a clandestine nuclear weapons program, and its abysmal human rights record."

Tokyo refused loan to Tehran

AFP, Feb. 12, Tehran - Rafsanjani condemned Japan's refusal to finance a Hydro-electric center under construction in southwestern Iran. In a press conference, he said, "The Japanese have made another mistake, canceling their contract to satisfy Israel and America."

Lenience towards terrorists protested

Reuters, Feb. 14, Paris - Several hundred opponents of Iran's government demonstrated in a Paris cemetery on Friday to protest against Tehran's alleged harassing of exiles, police said.

The protest in the Pere Lachaise cemetery marked the first anniversary of the assassination of Zahra Rajabi, a Paris-based leader of the National Council of Resistance of Iran. She was gunned down in Istanbul, Turkey, on February 20, 1996. Demonstrators denounced the "marked increase in Iranian-sponsored terrorism and Europe's lenient policy towards it", an NCR statement said.

German prosecutors accuse mullahs, again

Reuters, Feb. 14, Berlin - German prosecutors on Friday renewed accusations of "state terrorism" against Iran for allegedly ordering the killing of four Kurdish-Iranian opposition members....

Prosecutor Jost said Iran had attempted to discredit one of the witnesses with an "assortment of half-truths, slanders, lies and false accusations."

Bounty on Rushdie's head raised

AFP, Feb. 12, Tehran - An Iranian state-run religious foundation announced Wednesday in Tehran that it had raised the reward for murder of Salman Rushdie to $2.5 million. The decision was announced on the 8th anniversary of the death decree by Hassan Sane'i, president of the Panzdah-e Khordad Foundation.

AFP, Feb. 13 - Iran's elite Revolutionary Guards vowed Thursday to carry out a death sentence against British author Salman Rushdie. "The world's Moslems consider Rushdie to be an apostate and will not tire until they have carried out the imam's decree," the guards said.

AFP, Feb. 12 - The National Council of Resistance announced that it strongly condemns the increase in the bounty for Salman Rushdie, describing it as a "terrorist measure." The NCR said in its statement that "this is an attempt by the mullahs' regime to divert international public opinion from the domestic crises facing the mullahs' religious, terrorist dictatorship and the escalation of Resistance activities inside Iran."

The NCR President Massoud Rajavi has repeatedly announced that the anti-Islamic and inhuman fatwa for the murder of Salman Rushdie is contrary to the message of compassion, freedom, and tolerance of the great religion of Islam. The mullahs ruling Iran are the worst enemies of the Prophet and Muslims the world over.

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