Iranian Dissident Cleric Dies /Funeral for Iranian Cleric Turns Into a Vast Protest

Iranian Dissident Cleric Dies
Copyright By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Published: December 20, 2009
Filed at 3:59 p.m. ET
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/2009/12/20/world/AP-ML-Iran-Obit-Montazeri.html?_r=1&scp=3&sq=Iran's%20opposition%20cleric%20dies&st=cse


TEHRAN, Iran (AP) -- The spiritual father of Iran's reform movement died Sunday at the age of 87, prompting thousands of his followers to immediately head to the holy city where the dissident cleric is to be buried.

A huge display of mourning for Grand Ayatollah Hossein Ali Montazeri could transform his funeral Monday into another display of power by the opposition, whose activists have for months defied a brutal crackdown, a mass trial and abuses in detention to denounce the country's hard-line clerical rulers. Opposition leaders called for people to turn out for a day of mourning.

Police reinforcements were also called out into the streets of Qom, the religious center south of the capital where Monday's commemorations will take place, an opposition Web site reported, and a prominent government critic who was one of Montazeri's students was arrested on his way to the city, a human rights group said.

Authorities also banned foreign journalists from traveling there to cover the events.

Montazeri was a key figure in the 1979 Islamic Revolution who later accused his fellow clerical leaders of imposing dictatorship in the name of Islam. His criticism persisted after June's disputed presidential election ignited a new wave of anti-government protest.

In particular, he opened the door to direct condemnation of the ruling clerics, a bold step that energized Iran's young activists. In August, he decried the ''despotic treatment'' of protesters at the hands of the ruling theocracy. A month later, he accused the regime of committing ''crimes ... in name of Islam.''

Despite his stature, Montazeri's death is not likely to have a profound impact on the opposition movement, which has moved past allegations of vote rigging to assert that the entire ruling system has been corrupted, said Abdulkhaleq Abdulla, a professor of political science at the United Arab Emirates University.

''I think the current opposition movement has gone way beyond and above what Montazeri was standing for,'' Abdulla said.

But his strong denunciations against Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei helped break the taboos against such criticism and pushed the protesters into bolder acts of defiance. In demonstrations earlier this month, students shouted ''Death to the dictator!'' and burned pictures of Khamenei.

Khamenei issued a statement of condolence Sunday that contained a mixed message.

He praised Montazeri as an outstanding jurist, but added that he hoped God would forgive him for what he called Montazeri's ''crucial test,'' a reference to his falling out two decades ago with the Islamic Republic's founder, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini. The split between those two men led to a long government campaign to marginalize Montazeri that included five years of house arrest in which security agents were posted just outside his front door.

Montazeri's grandson, Nasser Montazeri, said he died in his sleep overnight. The Web site of Iranian state television quoted doctors as saying Montazeri had suffered from asthma and arteriosclerosis, a disease that thickens and hardens arteries.

Police increased their presence in the city of Qom, where he is to be buried, according to the pro-reform Web site Rah-e Sabz.

Authorities there faced a difficult choice over whether to try to prevent an outpouring at the funeral that could turn into another opposition street protest. Doing so risks serious backlash from an influential group of clerics based in Qom who are among the current leadership's critics.

The International Campaign for Human Rights in Iran said one of Montazeri's followers and a government critic, Ahmad Ghabel, was arrested while driving to Qom with his family to attend the funeral. The New York-based group called on the government not to interfere in the commemorations.

Another prominent critic, filmmaker Mohammad Nourizad, was arrested on a charge of insulting officials, the state news agency IRNA reported Sunday. Nourizad, once a conservative government supporter, wrote a letter of protest to Khamenei in September urging him to apologize to the nation for the postelection crackdown.

The opposition's leader, Mir Hossein Mousavi, called Montazeri's death ''a great loss,'' but said he is hopeful other clerics will fill the gap left behind and answer the needs of Iran's younger generation.

Mousavi's claims that fraud deprived him of the presidency in the June 12 election set off weeks of street protests.

He and another defeated pro-reform candidate, Mahdi Karroubi, called for a day of mourning and urged people to join Monday's funeral of ''the legend of jurisprudence and spirituality.''

Montazeri had once been designated to succeed Ayatollah Khomeini, the late founder of Iran's 1979 Islamic Revolution, as the supreme leader. But the two men clashed a few months before Khomeini died of cancer in 1989.

Montazeri was one of the leaders of the revolution and he helped draft the nation's new constitution, which was based on a concept called velayat-e faqih, or rule by Islamic jurists. That concept enshrined a political role for Islamic clerics in the new system.

But a deep ideological rift soon developed with Khomeini. Montazeri envisioned the Islamic experts as advisers to the government who should not have outright control to rule themselves. He was also among those clerics who believed the power of the supreme leader comes from the people, not from God.

Taking an opposing view, Khomeini and his circle of clerics consolidated absolute power.

The two men also diverged over Khomeini's fatwa, or religious decree, calling for Salman Rushdie to be killed for writing ''The Satanic Verses.'' And Montazeri sharply criticized a wave of executions of political prisoners in the late 1980s.

During that period, Montazeri was gradually stripped of his official duties and became the focus of a high-level campaign to undermine his credentials as a leader and theologian.

In 1997, Montazeri was placed under house arrest in Qom, 80 miles (130 kilometers) south of Tehran, after saying Khamenei wasn't qualified to rule.

The penalty was lifted in 2003, but Montazeri remained defiant, saying the freedom that was supposed to follow the 1979 revolution never happened.


Keyser reported from Cairo. Associated Press Writers Nasser Karimi in Tehran and Brian Murphy in Dubai, United Arab Emirates, contributed to this report.












Funeral for Iranian Cleric Turns Into a Vast Protest
By ROBERT F. WORTH
Copyright by The New York Times
Published: December 21, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/12/22/world/middleeast/22cleric.html?th&emc=th


BEIRUT, Lebanon — The funeral of a founding father of Iran’s Islamic revolution now embraced as the spiritual leader of the reform movement became a vast opposition protest on Monday, as mourners flooded the holy city of Qum and faced off with Iranian security forces and the volunteer Basij militia.

Iran’s most senior dissident cleric, Ayatollah Hossein Ali Montazeri, in Qom, Iran. He died Sunday.

The cleric, Grand Ayatollah Hossein Ali Montazeri, 87, was once designated to succeed Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini as Iran’s supreme leader, but he stepped away from the country’s hard-line path in the 1980s and eventually embraced the reform movement. He died in his sleep on Sunday.

Photographs from Iran and witnesses reached by phone and e-mail indicated that the mourners numbered at least in the tens of thousands: one Iranian Web site, Jaras, said that hundreds of thousands of people had gone to Qum. The reports could not be independently confirmed because foreign journalists have been barred from traveling to the holy city of Qum.

Iranian opposition Web sites said there had been clashes outside Mr. Montazeri’s home in Qum , according to The Associated Press. Another report said members of the Basij militia had torn down funeral banners at Mr. Montazeri’s home.

Within hours of the ayatollah’s death on Sunday, senior political opposition figures, including the former presidential candidates Mir Hussein Moussavi and Mehdi Karroubi, began urging supporters to travel to Qum for his funeral. Mr. Moussavi attended the ceremony, which began at 9 a.m. local time, according to the Iranian Labor News Agency.

The Iranian authorities had deployed riot police near the funeral site and had been planning to close major highways into Qum in order to prevent a mass outpouring. But they allowed the mourners through, apparently deciding that the funeral of an esteemed figure was too sensitive a venue for a confrontation with the opposition.

In Tehran, hundreds of protesters marched Sunday at Tehran University and the University of Science and Industry, chanting, “Montazeri is alive!”

An opposition Web site, Peykeiran, reported that demonstrators had set fire to two buses in the ayatollah’s hometown, Najafabad, and had clashed with riot police officers.

Large opposition protests are planned next Sunday on the religious holiday of Ashura. That will coincide with the seventh day after Ayatollah Montazeri’s death, an important marker in Shiite mourning rituals and one that could amplify the day’s potential for confrontation.

In the months since Iran’s disputed June presidential elections, Ayatollah Montazeri issued stinging denunciations of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s government, saying that the Islamic republic was neither Islamic nor a republic, and that Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Iran’s supreme leader, had lost his legitimacy.

Two weeks ago, he said that the Basij militia — which has brutally suppressed opposition street rallies — was forsaking the “path of God” for the “path of Satan.”

Although the ayatollah’s death is a loss for the opposition movement, it is not a serious reversal, analysts said. He was isolated in his later years and had little direct contact with the movement’s supporters, who tend to be disaffected from the clergy. Still, his example of defiance and courage is likely to be an important legacy in the coming week, as protesters try to use the annual mourning ritual of Ashura to re-energize their defiance of the authorities.

“He died at exactly the right time,” said Rasool Nafisi, an Iran expert at Strayer University in Virginia. “He will be revered for his courage, and his example is likely to restore some of the clergy’s prestige.”

Ayatollah Montazeri was widely regarded as the most knowledgeable religious scholar in Iran, and that gave his criticisms special potency, analysts say. His religious credentials also prevented the authorities from silencing or jailing him. Last month, he stunned many in Iran and abroad by apologizing for his role in the 1979 takeover of the American Embassy in Tehran, which he called a mistake. Iran’s leaders celebrate the takeover every year as a foundational event of the Islamic revolution.

Ayatollah Montazeri, who long advocated greater civil liberties and women’s rights in Iran, was angered by the bloody crackdown that followed the June election and issued a series of remarkable broadsides against the authorities. “A political system based on force, oppression, changing people’s votes, killing, closure, arresting and using Stalinist and medieval torture, creating repression, censorship of newspapers, interruption of the means of mass communications, jailing the enlightened and the elite of society for false reasons, and forcing them to make false confessions in jail, is condemned and illegitimate,” he wrote.

Ayatollah Montazeri was born in 1922 in Najafabad to a peasant family. He studied under Ayatollah Khomeini in Qum and became involved in networks opposed to Shah Mohammed Reza Pahlavi, which resulted in a four-year prison term in 1974. After the revolution in 1979, he played a central role in creating Iran’s new Constitution, in part because of his authorship on the doctrine of rule by clerics. But he argued that clerics should play an advisory role and not rule directly.

In the years after the revolution, Ayatollah Montazeri served as the Friday Prayer leader in Qum and as a deputy to Ayatollah Khomeini, who designated him as his successor in 1985. Although he lacked a large popular following, the senior ayatollah viewed him as a loyal supporter of the concept of clerical rule.

But Ayatollah Montazeri gradually began to move away from his mentor’s policies. In 1989, after a mass execution of political prisoners, he published an article condemning the decision and calling for a “political and ideological reconstruction.” He also mocked Ayatollah Khomeini’s fatwa calling for the killing of the novelist Salman Rushdie, saying, “People in the world are getting the idea that our business in Iran is just murdering people.”

Ayatollah Khomeini quickly denounced Ayatollah Montazeri, who was stripped of his post. The state news media no longer called him a grand ayatollah and instead began to refer to him dismissively as a “simple-minded” cleric. In 1997, he was placed under house arrest after criticizing Ayatollah Khomeini’s successor as supreme leader, Ayatollah Khamenei. The restriction ended in 2003 after Iranian legislators called on Iran’s president then, the reformist cleric Mohammad Khatami, to release him.

Ayatollah Montazeri continued to teach and to write, championing the reformist cause and calling for greater democracy. “Independence is being free of foreign intervention, and freedom is giving people the freedom to express their opinions,” he wrote recently. “Not being put in prison for every protest one utters.”