DUBAI, United Arab Emirates (AP) — People in Iran’s capital shouted from their homes and rallied in the street Thursday night after a call by the country’s exiled crown prince for a mass demonstration, witnesses said, a new escalation in the protests that have spread nationwide across the Islamic Republic. Internet access and telephone lines in Iran cut out immediately after the protests began.
The protest represented the first test of whether the Iranian public could be swayed by Crown Prince Reza Pahlavi, whose fatally ill father fled Iran just before the country’s 1979 Islamic Revolution. Demonstrations have included cries in support of the shah, something that could bring a death sentence in the past but now underlines the anger fueling the protests that began over Iran’s ailing economy.
Thursday saw a continuation of the demonstrations that popped up in cities and rural towns across Iran on Wednesday. More markets and bazaars shut down in support of the protesters. So far, violence around the demonstrations has killed at least 41 people while more than 2,270 others have been detained, said the U.S.-based Human Rights Activists News Agency.
The growth of the protests increases the pressure on Iran’s civilian government and its Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. CloudFlare, an internet firm, and the advocacy group NetBlocks reported the internet outage, both attributing it to Iranian government interference. Attempts to dial landlines and mobile phones from Dubai to Iran could not be connected. Such outages have in the past been followed by intense government crackdowns.
Meanwhile, the protests themselves have remained broadly leaderless. It remains unclear how Pahlavi’s call will affect the demonstrations moving forward.
“The lack of a viable alternative has undermined past protests in Iran,” wrote Nate Swanson of the Washington-based Atlantic Council, who studies Iran.
“There may be a thousand Iranian dissident activists who, given a chance, could emerge as respected statesmen, as labor leader Lech Wałęsa did in Poland at the end of the Cold War. But so far, the Iranian security apparatus has arrested, persecuted and exiled all of the country’s potential transformational leaders.”
Iran is not Venezuela or Syria. The people have been suffering under this regime since 1979. They are angry and empowered. They will collectively trust the Shah, at least temporarily, if he means the end of the regime. Let Trump try to meddle like in Venezuela; Iranians will ultimately expel him. Iran is ready to be liberated.
If you think the Shah will be any better than the ayatollah then you are a fool. It always starts out temporary with these tyrants.
The positive thing in this mess seems to be: the crown prince has never ruled as a shah. His father ruled, did the crimes (suppressed opposition) and fled the revoltion with his family.
Outwardly, the crown prince appears to be a liberal democrat by persuasion. He is also not a fool (studied political science and definitely knows the basic stuff of public administration).
Game theoretically, he is currently in the "strongest challenger to the tyrant" role, and even those who don't want a kingdom, are likely OK with him for a little while.
About the general situation in Iran - it is now close to a revolution.
Since a revolution generally must grow exponentially to overcome established power, the next few days are critical to success or failure.
If a revolution won't succeed, a prolonged civil war may come as a result, and that's no good for anyone.
Reminds me a bit of how a prince inherited Spain from Franco. The prince in question dismantled the system and they created a democratic monarchy.
He also turned out to be corrupt and shitty, but at least he was not a ruler of the country, so I guess we can expect something good to happen, after all