1968 all over again

Robert Worth has an article in The New York Times about the latest protests in Iran:

As thousands of protesters chanted in the streets outside, a former Iranian president, Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, assailed the government’s handling of the post-election unrest, saying it had lost the trust of many Iranians, and called for the release of hundreds of those arrested in recent weeks. Mr. Rafsanjani, speaking to a vast crowd at Tehran University’s prayer hall, advanced the cause of Iran’s beleaguered opposition, saying doubts about the disputed 12 June election “are now consuming us” and calling for a new spirit of compromise from the government. “A large group” of Iranians, he said, have doubts about the election. “We should work to address these doubts,” he said. His appearance emboldened opposition supporters, who asserted themselves more aggressively than they had in weeks. Tens of thousands of people converged around the prayer hall, witnesses said. Police officers beat back large crowds of chanting protesters with tear gas and truncheons. There were reports of at least fifteen arrests.
The speech was a turning point for Mr. Rafsanjani, a powerful government insider who previously had operated cautiously and mostly behind the scenes during the worst political unrest since the 1979 Islamic Revolution. It seemed another sign that the hard-line leadership’s repression had not yet extinguished smoldering opposition. In the audience were several prominent reformists, chief among them Mir Hussein Moussavi, the main opposition candidate, who has claimed that last month’s election was stolen from him. He had not been seen in public for weeks.
Mr. Rafsanjani, a bitter rival of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad who supported Mr. Moussavi’s campaign, did not directly question Mr. Ahmadinejad’s landslide victory, which has been sanctioned by Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. But he made clear that he believed that Ayatollah Khamenei, who has blamed foreign powers for the unrest and has called for an end to protests, should take a more conciliatory stance.
“Khamenei and Ahmadinejad tried to close the door for debate about the elections, but Rafsanjani reopened it in a very important setting,” said Karim Sadjadpour, an Iran expert at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. The hall has been the scene of many addresses by senior clerics.
Calling the election aftermath a “crisis”, Mr. Rafsanjani urged that restrictions on the press and on free speech be removed, in addition to seeking freedom for those detained since the election. Mr. Rafsanjani also criticized the Guardian Council, a powerful supervisory body that looked into possible election fraud, saying it “did not use wisely the time the supreme leader gave it to investigate.” He said he had discussed a possible solution with members of the Expediency Council and the Assembly of Experts, two powerful state institutions he leads. He said his proposal was based on two principles: that everything must be done within a legal framework; and that there must be a free and open debate.
While the details were unclear, Mr. Rafsanjani’s proposal was an implicit rebuke to Ayatollah Khamenei, who tried to close the door on the post-election turmoil in his own Friday prayer speech in the same hall four weeks ago. Ayatollah Khamenei has long presented himself as a neutral arbiter of Iran’s political disputes, but many Iranians say his embrace of Mr. Ahmadinejad and his stern dismissal of the protests has made the supreme leader seem a more partisan figure.
In that sense, Mr. Rafsanjani, a consummate pragmatist, appeared to be reclaiming a central role in Iran’s divided power structure. His speech is bound to anger some of Iran’s hard-line political figures, who had said they wanted him to come out strongly against the protesters. Just before Mr. Rafsanjani spoke, a government cleric cautioned him not to say anything that went beyond “the framework of what the leader has defined” for the speech.
Until Friday, the opposition had been mostly quiet for weeks, in part because of the brutal street crackdowns and in part, Mr. Sadjadpour noted, because its most articulate leaders were either in prison, under house arrest, or unable to communicate. “There remains tremendous popular outrage but no clear plan about how to channel it politically,” he said.
In fact, some opposition supporters were disappointed that Mr. Rafsanjani did not openly challenge the official election results. During the speech, some among the vast overflow crowd outside the hall at Tehran University chanted, “Rafsanjani, you are a traitor if you remain silent.”
Crowds began moving toward the prayer hall early Friday, and many were blocked by riot police officers. The crowds were mostly peaceful, but soon anti-government chants broke out, like “Death to the coup d’état". It was then, witnesses said, that the police began spraying tear gas, and the Basij militia began beating people with sticks. “There were so many people and so many security forces that the protests spread to streets several miles from the university,” one witness said. Among those arrested Friday was Shadi Sadr, a lawyer and women’s rights activist picked up by plainclothes police officers as she walked to Friday prayer, reformist blogs reported. Apart from Mr. Moussavi, a reformist former president, Mohammad Khatami, also attended, as did the other failed presidential candidates, Mehdi Karroubi and Mohsen Rezai.
Most of those who attended the speech appeared to be supporters of the opposition, witnesses said, with an unusual proportion of women and many people wearing wristbands or other accessories in bright green — the color of the Moussavi campaign. As the speech ended and traditional calls to chant Death to America came over the loudspeaker, many in the crowd instead chanted Death to Russia. Many opposition supporters are angry about Russia’s quick acceptance of Mr. Ahmadinejad’s election victory. Mr. Ahmadinejad, who was visiting the northeastern city of Mashad, did not attend the speech. He announced several changes to his new cabinet, including the promotion of members of his inner circle, that have led some to conclude the president is not heeding any call to compromise.
Some observers hailed Mr. Rafsanjani’s speech as a typically shrewd gesture, in which he undermined his political rivals while rooting his comments in the principles of the Islamic republic. “Everything in our Islamic republic is based on votes,” Mr. Rafsanjani said, in comments that were read by some as a quiet condemnation of the election results. “Without the people’s vote, things cannot go on.”