Price protests turn political in Iran as rallies spread

DUBAI (Reuters) – Demonstrators chanted anti-government slogans in several cities across Iran on Friday, Iranian news agencies and social media reports said, as price protests turned into the largest wave of demonstrations since nationwide pro-reform unrest in 2009.

Police dispersed anti-government demonstrators in the western city of Kermanshah as protests spread to Tehran and several other cities a day after rallies in the northeast, the semi-official news agency Fars said.

The outbreak of unrest reflects growing discontent over rising prices and alleged corruption, as well as concern about the Islamic Republic’s costly involvement in regional conflicts such as those in Syria and Iraq.

An official said a few protesters had been arrested in Tehran, and footage posted on social media showed a heavy police presence in the capital and some other cities.

About 300 demonstrators gathered in Kermanshah after what Fars said was a “call by the anti-revolution”. They shouted: “Political prisoners should be freed” and “Freedom or death”, and some public property was destroyed. Fars did not name any opposition groups.

The protests in Kermanshah, the main city in a region where an earthquake killed over 600 people in November, took place a day after hundreds rallied in Iran’s second largest city Mashhad to protest at high prices and shout anti-government slogans.

Videos posted on social media showed demonstrators yelling, “The people are begging, the clerics act like God”.

Fars said there were protests in the cities of Sari and Rasht in the north, Qazvin west of Tehran and Qom south of the capital, and also in Hamadan in western Iran. It said many marchers who wanted to raise economic demands left the rallies after demonstrators shouted political slogans.

PRO-GOVERNMENT RALLIES PLANNED

State television said annual nationwide rallies and events were scheduled for Saturday to commemorate pro-government demonstrations held in 2009 to counter protests by reformists.

The Revolutionary Guards, which along with its Basij militia spearheaded a crackdown against the protesters in 2009, said in a statement carried by state media that there were efforts to repeat that year’s unrest but added: “The Iranian nation … will not allow the country to be hurt.”

Mohsen Nasj Hamadani, deputy security chief in Tehran province, said about 50 people had rallied in a square but most had left after being asked to by police, while a few who refused were “temporarily detained”, the ILNA news agency reported.

In the central city of Isfahan, a resident said protesters had joined a rally held by factory workers demanding back-pay.

“The slogans quickly changed from the economy to those against (President Hassan) Rouhani and the Supreme Leader (Ayatollah Ali Khamenei),” the resident said by telephone.

In Qom, a stronghold of the Shi‘ite clergy, footage posted on social media showed protesters attacking Ayatollah Khamenei by name. “Seyyed Ali should be ashamed and leave the country alone,” they chanted.

Protests were held also in the town of Quchan near the Turkmen border, and in Ahvaz, capital of oil-rich Khuzestan province, social media and Iranian news websites reported.

Police arrested 52 people in Thursday’s protests, Fars quoted a judicial official as saying in Mashhad, one of the holiest places in Shi‘ite Islam.

In social media footage, which could not be authenticated, riot police were seen using water cannon and tear gas to disperse crowds.

Openly political protests are rare in Iran, where security services are omnipresent.

The last unrest of national significance occurred in 2009 when Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s re-election as president ignited eight months of street protests. Pro-reform rivals said the vote was rigged.

However, demonstrations are often held by workers over lay-offs or non-payment of salaries and by people who hold deposits in non-regulated, bankrupt financial institutions.

Prominent conservative cleric Ayatollah Ahmad Alamolhoda called earlier for tough action against the protests.

“If the security and law enforcement agencies leave the rioters to themselves, enemies will publish films and pictures in their media and say that the Islamic Republic system has lost its revolutionary base in Mashhad,” the state news agency IRNA quoted Alamolhoda as saying.

“DEATH TO DICTATOR”

Some social media videos showed demonstrators chanting “Death to Rouhani” and “Death to the dictator”. Protests were also held in at least two other northeastern cities.

Alamolhoda, the representative of Ayatollah Khamenei in Mashhad, said a few people had taken advantage of Thursday’s protests against rising prices to chant slogans against Iran’s role in regional conflicts.

Tehran backs Syrian President Bashar al-Assad in his country’s civil war, Shi‘ite militias in Iraq, Houthi rebels in Yemen and Lebanon’s powerful Hezbollah group.

“Some people had come to express their demands, but suddenly, in a crowd of hundreds, a small group that did not exceed 50 shouted deviant and horrendous slogans such as ‘Let go of Palestine’, ‘Not Gaza, not Lebanon, I’d give my life (only) for Iran’,” Alamolhoda said.

Social media videos also showed demonstrators chanting ”Leave Syria, think about us”, criticizing Iran’s military and financial support for Assad.

Vice-President Eshaq Jahangiri, a close Rouhani ally, suggested that hardline conservative opponents of the pragmatist president might have triggered the protests but lost control of them. “Those who are behind such events will burn their own fingers,” IRNA quoted Jahangiri as saying.

Rouhani’s leading achievement, a 2015 deal with world powers that curbed Iran’s disputed nuclear program in return for a lifting of most international sanctions, has yet to bring the broad economic benefits the government says are coming.

Unemployment stood at 12.4 percent in this fiscal year, according to the Statistical Centre of Iran, up 1.4 percent from the previous year. About 3.2 million Iranians are jobless, out of a total population of 80 million.

Reporting by Dubai newsroom; Editing by Mark Heinrich and Gareth Jones

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It’s Cold Outside. Cue the Trump Global Warming Tweet.

One 2009 study found that the United States saw roughly as many record highs as record lows in the 1950s, but b y the 2000s there were twice as many record highs as record lows. Severe cold snaps were still happening, but they were becoming less common.

“Of course it sometimes gets very cold,” said Todd D. Stern, the United States climate change envoy under President Barack Obama. “Five minutes’ worth of education would tell you that what matters are global averages, and those are going implacably up.”

Politicians have tried to use cold snaps to prove a point before. Mr. Trump’s line of reasoning recalled a February day in 2015 when Senator James Inhofe, Republican of Oklahoma, brought a snowball to the Senate floor as evidence that the Earth was not warming.

The president’s tweet also took an implicit swipe at the Paris climate accord, which Mr. Trump has vowed to abandon. In announcing that the United States would withdraw from the agreement among almost 200 nations to collectively rein in greenhouse-gas emissions, Mr. Trump lobbed a similar charge that the deal put a burden only on America.

The United States under Mr. Obama pledged $3 billion over four years to the Green Climate Fund, aimed at helping countries build resilience to extreme weather and develop clean energy. Japan has paid about $1.5 billion into the fund, Britain $1.2 billion and France and Germany about $1 billion each. Developing countries like Mexico, Chile and Indonesia also have contributed.

Mr. Trump, who once called climate change a hoax perpetuated by the Chinese, has recognized its threats where some of his properties are involved. Last week a council in Ireland gave a golf resort owned by the president approval to build two sea walls. An early application for the construction cited the threat of global warming.

Mr. Trump has made a habit of airing his climate skepticism on Twitter, posting comments on “climate change” or “global warming” more than 100 times since 2011. Thursday’s tweet appeared to be the first time he addressed the issue head-on since becoming president, however. The last time he fired off a tweet on global warming was more than two years ago, when he declared:

It’s really cold outside, they are calling it a major freeze, weeks ahead of normal. Man, we could use a big fat dose of global warming!

—
Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump)
Oct. 19, 2015

The climate may be changing, but some jokes stay the same.

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