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From:

Opposition website: Rahesabz English Translation

Opposition website: Rahesabz Persian Language

“Death to the dictator,”

The Huffington Post December 29, 2009

The protests began with thousands of opposition supporters chanting “Death to the dictator,” a reference to hard-line President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, as they marched in defiance of official warnings of a harsh crackdown on any demonstrations coinciding with Shiite Islam’s most important observance, Ashoura. The observance commemorates the seventh-century death in battle of one of Shiite Islam’s most beloved saints.

Security forces tried but failed to disperse protesters on a central Tehran street with tear gas, baton charges and warning shots. They then opened fire on protesters, said witnesses and the Rah-e-Sabz Web site.

WARNING: The following images are violent. Some may contain blood and dead bodies.

This photo, taken by an individual not employed by the Associated Press and obtained by the AP outside Iran shows an Iranian protestor, left, throwing a rock at anti-riot police officers, as their bikes are set on fire by protestors, during anti-government protest at the Enqelab (Revolution) St. in Tehran, Iran, Sunday, Dec. 27, 2009. (AP Photo)

WARNING: The following video contains extremely graphic images after the 1:50 mark.

Photo by AFP

Juan Cole sees yet more trouble ahead in Iran, and more problems for the administration:

For the regime to create a member of the Mousavi family as a martyr on Ashura was most unwise. Shiite Islam even more than traditional Catholicism thrives on the blood of martyrs. [...] Junior or middle-ranking Ayatollahs favorable to the ideas of Montazeri show up in a number of these reports about protests in provincial cities, suggesting a generational split in the clerical corps and trouble for Khamenei ahead.

The Enduring America blog maintains a comprehensive (if a little messy) near-real-time listing of the developments in Iran, and the blog’s “keeper”, Scott Lucas, teases 5 key points from the Ashura riots, including,

For first time, I can see Government (not just President) falling and Supreme Leader having to compromise to save position.

Stephen Walt at Foreign Policy surmises:

The outcome of this sort of challenge is inherently difficult to forecast, as it is nearly impossible to know ex ante when a critical “tipping point” might be reached. At a minimum, the regime has clearly gotten significantly weaker since the contested election last summer.

At Tehran Bureau, Meir Javedanfar says

the protests now seem to carry the potential to turn into a full-scale civil disobedience campaign, not unlike the first intifada the Palestinians initiated against Israel in 1987.

And Andrew Sullivan asks are some Basij defecting?

It’s obviously too early to declare a “tipping point”, but certainly overseas observers are inching towards the conclusion that the reform movement has not only maintained its momentum but has evolved, and now presents a  much more serious and enduring challenge to the regime.

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Iran seizes opposition figures

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Iran Cleric’s Funeral Becomes Opposition Protest

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Reuter:
An Iranian opposition website says security forces have clashed with supporters of late dissident cleric Grand Ayatollah Hossein Ali Montazeri in at least two cities, including his birthplace.

“Sporadic clashes started from Tuesday night in Najafabad and still continued. The situation is tense in the city. People are chanting anti-government slogans,” the Jaras website reported.

It also said “many” demonstrators were injured during clashes with the security forces in the central city of Isfahan.

“Security forces clashed with pro-reform protesters … who gathered to commemorate … Montazeri’s demise,” Jaras reported.

“Police fired teargas to disperse people … many people were injured … some arrested.”

“Over 50 protesters, including four Iranian journalists have been arrested in Isfahan during clashes with the security forces,” the Parlemannews website said.

In Isfahan, plainclothes security agents surrounded the house of a leading pro-reform cleric Ayatollah Jalaleddin Taheri, Jaras reported.

The reported incidents took place two days after huge crowds turned out in the Shiite holy city of Qom for the funeral of Montazeri and many chanted anti-government slogans, websites reported.

The reports from the two cities could not be verified independently because foreign media are banned from reporting directly on protests.

Iran’s government supporters staged counter rallies in Qom on Tuesday, official Iranian media reported.

Montazeri, who died on Saturday at the age of 87, was an architect of the 1979 revolution that overthrew the US-backed shah and was once named to succeed Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini as supreme leader of the Islamic state.

But Montazeri fell from grace after criticising the mass execution of prisoners.

The June 12 presidential election, which the opposition leaders say was rigged to secure President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s re-election, has plunged the Islamic Republic into a crisis of legitimacy.

Supporters of the opposition, who have seized occasions marked in the Islamic revolutionary calendar to raise their voices, staged fresh anti-government rallies in Iran after Montazeri’s death.

Iranian authorities deny any vote-rigging.

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Iran Protestes Flip a Van December 27th Ashoora

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Iran – Tehran – Ashura protest – Gunfire in Colleg Junction (27.Dec.2009)

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Deadly clashes rock Iran – 27 Dec 09

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“We have been dying for nine long, miserable years in Vietnam in an undeclared war,” it read. “How many more lives do you wish to sacrifice because of your SILENCE?”

Article, By SARA CORBETT

1917-2009

ANTIWAR PATH The future activist with her son Michael in 1944.

Peg Mullen was at her sewing machine making a new set of drapes when the men showed up with their message. It was February 1970 in Black Hawk County, Iowa — a bright Saturday morning on the empty rural road where she lived. A fresh layer of snow sat on the cornfields; the sky seemed perversely clear. Gene, her husband, a gentle, white-haired man who farmed by day and worked nights at a nearby John Deere factory, was doing his weekend chores outside when the two men walked up the drive. One sergeant, one local priest. Both silent. Gene knew, but he didn’t know. The question, when he asked it, was almost inaudible: “Is my boy dead?”

It was Peg who read the official note, while Gene beat the walls, while he yelled. He made a motion to throw a chair through a picture window, but thought better of it. Finally, he sat at the kitchen table, put his head down and sobbed. The oldest of their five children — Michael — had been killed two nights earlier on a hilltop near a village in Vietnam called Tu Chanh, a victim of what the government called “friendly fire,” his heart pierced by shrapnel from a misdirected howitzer blast fired by an American artillery unit nearby. All this happened in the dark, in the jungle, at 2:50 a.m. Michael, who was 25 and previously a graduate student in biochemistry, was asleep in a foxhole.

Peg Mullen hadn’t liked the Vietnam War from the start, but she was also a churchgoing Iowa farm wife busy raising children, cattle, hogs, corn and soybeans in what she called a “conservative community in the heartland of America.” She knew virtually nothing of the antiwar protests that were happening on the East and West Coasts. Her opposition was, until this point, relatively quiet. She would later chastise herself for the obedient way she allowed her son to be drafted and sent to war.

C. D. B. Bryan (who died this month) wrote in “Friendly Fire,” his book about Michael’s death, that Peg’s grief was not a teary grief. It was an “arid furied Medean grief, one in which anguish is indistinguishable from rage.”

An angry mother is, of course, most dangerous to her enemies. Peg Mullen started calling the Pentagon relentlessly, demanding more information about the circumstances of her son’s death. She called newspaper reporters and her senators; and anybody in Black Hawk County who tried to console her simply got an earful about how the war needed to end. In town, people started avoiding her. She prided herself on not crumpling, on keeping military officials on the telephone long after they wanted to hang up. She imagined they stood around asking one another: Why isn’t this woman behaving like a grieving mother is supposed to?

After Michael’s coffin landed at the airstrip in Waterloo, Iowa, she spent a night sitting numbly alone on the davenport in her living room with her son’s body close by. Really, how was she supposed to behave?

“In Vietnam today,” Gen. William C. Westmoreland wrote in the pro forma condolence letter, “brave Americans are defending the rights of men to choose their own destiny and to live in dignity and freedom.” Peg Mullen read it and scoffed, the same way she scoffed when another bland letter of sympathy came a week later from Michael’s battalion commander, Lt. Col. Norman Schwarzkopf. She began writing letters almost weekly to President Richard Nixon. When an aide responded, sending one of the president’s speeches on Vietnam, Mullen said she returned it with a note: “Send it to the next damn fool.”

The Mullens refused a military funeral for their son. They refused the posthumously awarded Bronze Star and Good Conduct Medal. When they buried Michael in the family plot with their surviving children gathered around them, Gene — himself a veteran — insisted on putting a token flag over the coffin. “I was ready to burn it,” Peg wrote later in a memoir.

She also started counting bodies. Seven other Iowa boys died in Vietnam the same week Michael did. When she contacted the families, she learned that most had also been told their sons’ deaths were, like Michael’s, classified as “nonbattle casualties.” This could mean a lot of things, including that a soldier died of battle wounds in the hospital, according to Bryan’s book, but most important to Peg, it meant that the death might not register in the military’s official casualty count, released weekly to the public. As the Mullens viewed it, the government was trying to play down the bloodshed. Meanwhile, Nixon, bolstered by the support of what he famously called a “great silent majority” of Americans, was quietly preparing to send troops into Cambodia.

A check in the amount of $1,844.40 arrived — Michael’s death-benefit pay — calculated by some faceless bureaucrat in Washington. Peg and Gene let it sit on the kitchen table for several weeks, a dormant slip of paper that made them ill. Peg finally called up a manager at The Des Moines Register with a question: how big an advertisement could a person buy with $1,844.40?

Their half-page ad was printed in the front section of the newspaper in Des Moines on Sunday, April 12, 1970. It was Peg and Gene Mullen’s message to the silent majority, addressed specifically to their fellow “fathers and mothers of Iowa.”

“We have been dying for nine long, miserable years in Vietnam in an undeclared war,” it read. “How many more lives do you wish to sacrifice because of your SILENCE?” The words were followed by a stark image: 714 small black crosses in neat rows, one cross for every soldier from Iowa who had died in Vietnam.

With this, Peg Mullen’s fury spooled outward into the world. Across Iowa, people clipped the ad out of the paper and hung it in windows and on bulletin boards. One woman wrote to the Mullens and said she was sending the ad to Nixon and to her congressmen. Another wrote and said, “It’s time the mothers unite.” In Chicago, the syndicated radio host Paul Harvey started talking about the power of the Mullens’ ad on the air. He did a television broadcast, using their message and black crosses as a backdrop.

Peg Mullen spent three, four hours a day at her typewriter, which she kept next to her sewing machine, answering the letters that poured in or reaching out to grieving families she read about in the newspaper. She corresponded with mothers whose sons had been killed, mothers of P.O.W.’s and mothers of sons who came home unrecognizable for their trauma. To a woman who was feeling guilty because her son evaded the draft, she wrote that she regretted not working harder herself to keep Michael out of the war. She urged the mothers to be public, to wear their anger alongside their sorrow. “I always reminded them that their son belonged to them,” she wrote, “not the military.”

Talking on the party line that the family shared with three neighboring farms, she did a call-in show on WBZ radio in Boston, broadcast up and down the East Coast. When someone phoned in and asked what women could do to stop the war in Vietnam, she replied, simply, “March.” A month later, partly inspired by Mullen, a delegation of mothers from around the country held a vigil in front of the White House to protest the war.

When in 1971 Richard Nixon visited Des Moines for a farm conference, Peg Mullen was there among several thousand others — a diminutive, gray-haired woman wearing a long coat and scarf wrapped over her head for warmth. She was holding up an improbably enormous poster, hand-lettered: “55,000 Dead, 300,000 Wounded — My Son, Just One.” Nixon emerged from the state Capitol building and was booed by the crowd, his car pelted with snowballs. Mullen found herself being clubbed with a nightstick as a police officer tried unsuccessfully to wrench the poster, her message, out of her hands.

“No power on earth,” she wrote later, “could take that sign from me.”

For years to come, Vietnam veterans turned up on the doorstep at Peg and Gene’s farm, knowing they were good country people who understood the impossibility of being both angry and silent. Peg fixed them coffee, served food. Other veterans called on the phone, sometimes at 2 or 3 in the morning. She listened to them all, sitting in her reclining chair, these men who were wounded, bewildered, drugged and sometimes half-dead inside their own grief and fury.

It was enough to keep her outraged for a lifetime, even after she became a grandmother, after she and Gene left the farm for a mobile home in Brownsville, Tex., and finally after she lost Gene to a weak heart in 1986. During the gulf war in 1991, Peg Mullen, then 74, could be found marching in protest every Saturday morning in front of the Brownsville Post Office. She was furious about the second invasion of Iraq and in 2005 followed the news of Cindy Sheehan, another mother-turned-activist, who sat waiting outside President George Bush’s ranch, demanding a face-to-face meeting and an end to the war. “I would give my right arm to be there,” Mullen, who was 88, said at the time, “I mean, somebody’s got to stop this thing.”