(YO) BUM RUSH THE SHOW

Iran's angry young adults erupt in political protest: For five nights in a row, students and families vent frustration with pace of reform. (Scott Peterson, 6/16/03, The Christian Science Monitor)

Unlike the student demonstrations four years ago, say analysts in Tehran, these protests are tapping into an unexpectedly fierce determination by thousands of ordinary Iranians - many of them young, and some families with children in tow - who are frustrated with the slow pace of political change in Iran.

In the past, unelected clerics led by Iran's conservative supreme leader, Ayatollah Sayed Ali Khamenei, were the target of protests. That's true again, with the first-ever public chants calling for the ayatollah's hanging. But now the reform-minded President Mohamed Khatami - whose widespread popularity during six years in office is ebbing, as reforms are systematically blocked - is also a target.

"It's scary talking to these people [the protesters]," says a seasoned political analyst reached by phone in Tehran, who asked not to be named. "There is such a determination in their eyes and their behavior. They are fearless; they are ready for combat. It's like [urban] warfare."

"They say: 'This is just the beginning, we have started it, and we are going all the way to the end,' " the analyst says. "But if you carry on the
conversation, they have no idea about what the end should look like.... It is very dangerous."

The Iranian Revolution can be considered to stand for two somewhat disturbing, but potentially useful propositions, that the Shi'a as a people can be united in opposition to even relatively mild forms of oppression rather easily but that they don't have a coherent positive program to erect in the place of that oppression. Both the mullahs and the "reformers" are toast--it's just a matter of time--but there's no telling what will rise in their place. Posted by Orrin Judd at June 17, 2003 12:18 AM