WarSclerotic

Iran’s opposition said at least 79 people were arrested at protest rallies on Tuesday that the government denied had taken place at all.

Authorities have deployed large numbers of security forces to prevent any repeat of the massive unrest that followed hardline President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s 2009 re-election, and on Wednesday state media made no mention of Tuesday’s rallies.

	An Iranian protester demands the release of Iranian opposition leaders outside the United Nations office in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, March 2, 2011.
	Photo by: AP

Opposition websites said thousands of people demonstrated in Tehran and other cities to demand the release of “Green movement” leaders Mirhossein Mousavi and Mehdi Karoubi who they believe were taken from their homes last week and jailed.

Prosecutor-General Gholamhossein Mohseni-Ejei denied the arrests, saying both men were still in their homes but were being prevented from communicating with the outside world.

According to opposition website Sahamnews, at least 79 people were arrested on Tuesday. Sites said some 1,500 were arrested on February 14 during the Green movement’s first rally in more than a year, which was called to show support for pro-democracy uprisings in North Africa.

The police said “dozens” of people were arrested on February 14, and a parliamentary committee set up to investigate the events said only small groups of trouble-makers turned up.

Talking of events on Tuesday, Tehran prosecutor Abbas Jafari Dolatabadi told reporters: “A limited number of people, influenced by anti-revolutionary groups, were intending to do something.”

“No specific incident happened on Tuesday in Tehran,” he said, according to the semi-official Fars news agency. Dolatabadi declined to give the number of arrests.

Pretext

Despite the official line that there has been no significant resurgence of the Green movement, which the government considers to be a seditious plot guided by its Western foes, parliament has called for Mousavi and Karoubi to be tried and hanged.

Two people were shot dead on February 14, deaths that each side has blamed on the other.

The parliamentary report, issued on Wednesday, accused Mousavi and Karoubi of staging the February 14 rally at the encouragement of U.S., British and Israeli intelligence.

“Foreign intelligence services had contacts with the sedition leaders urging them to call for a rally in support of popular uprising in Egypt and Tunisia … as a pretext to create tension in the country,” said the report, according to the official IRNA news agency.

Opposition leaders deny such accusations.

Iranian government leaders have hailed uprisings in several Arab states as part of an “Islamic awakening” inspired by the 1979 revolution which ousted the Western-backed Shah.

Analysts outside Iran say the uprisings have been overwhelmingly secular, not religious, in nature.

The Iranian opposition took those pro-democracy protests as inspiration to stage its own first significant show of vitality since December 2009 street protests, which were crushed by the elite Revolutionary Guards.

Mousavi and Karoubi — reformists who lost to Ahmadinejad in the June 2009 election — were held in their homes, incommunicado, after they called for the rally. Authorities warned such “illegal” gatherings would not be tolerated.

Opposition website Kaleme said it believed Mousavi and Karoubi and their wives were secretly whisked from their homes last Thursday and taken to Heshmatiyeh prison in Tehran.

The authorities’ reluctance to confirm their whereabouts shows the sensitivity of taking aggressive action against men who remain rallying points for opposition to Ahmadinejad.

Muammar Gadhafi said on Wednesday that Libyans would die in thousands if the United States or other foreign powers enter Libya, and he was ready to discuss constitutional and legal changes without violence.

“Do they want us to become slaves once again like we were slaves to the Italians?” the Libyan leader said, referring to Libya’s former colonial power. “We will never accept it. We will enter a bloody war and thousands and thousands of Libyans will die if the United States enters or NATO enters.”

Gadhafi, who has lost swaths of his country to rebels, maintained in his speech that he would not resign.

“Muammar Gadhafi is not a president to resign, he does not even have a parliament to dissolve,” he said, adding that he held “no position from which to step down.”

Meanwhile, fighting between anti-government rebels and forces loyal to the Libyan leader have continued for weeks, with witnesses saying that everything from live ammunition to aerial bombing have been used to suppress the uprising.

	This video image taken from Libyan state television broadcast Wednesday March 2, 2011 shows Libyan leader Moammar Gadhafi addressing supporters and journalists in Tripoli, Libya
	Photo by: AP

On Wednesday, forces loyal to Gadhafi launched a major fightback in Libya’s east on Wednesday, sparking a rebel warning that foreign military help might be needed to “put the nail in his coffin” and end his long rule.

Government troops briefly captured Marsa El Brega, an oil export terminal, before being driven back by rebels who have controlled the town 800 km east of the capital Tripoli for about a week, rebel officers said.

At one point in the flip-flopping battle, anti-Gadhafi fighters cornered the attackers in a nearby seaside university campus in fierce fighting that killed at least five.

The assault appeared to be the most significant military operation by Gadhafi since the uprising began two weeks ago and set off a confrontation that Washington says could descend into a long civil war unless the veteran strongman steps down.

Yet in Gadhafi’s speech on Wednesday, the leader dismissed accounts of protests in Libya, blaming the unrest instead on al-Qaida. He also suggested that reports of deaths in the unrest were exaggerated, suggesting only 150 people had died.

Foreign estimates suggest 2,000 may have died.

“There were no protests at all in the east,” he said in a speech.

“Al Qaeda’s cells attacked security forces and took over their weapons,” he said, adding: “How did that all begin? Small, sleeper al Qaeda cells.”

Gadhafi said that Libya would open its doors to an international investigation and said the United Nations had taken decisions based on false reports.

On Tuesday, the UN General Assembly unanimously suspended Libya’s membership in the UN Human Rights Council because of violence by Libyan forces against protesters.

“How can the United Nations take decisions based on 100 percent false news?” Gadhafi said in Wednesday’s speech.

An Iranian diplomat who defected last month said on Tuesday that Iran’s leaders would rather “slaughter” their own people than surrender power to any popular revolt inspired by uprisings across the Arab world.

Ahmed Maleki, who was vice consul of Iran’s consulate in Milan before fleeing to Paris with his family last month, is the latest in a string of officials to defect from the Islamic state and join a year-old opposition group called the Green Wave.

	Members of Iran’s opposition protest outside the Iranian embassy in Ankara, Turkey on Feb. 11, 2011.
	Photo by: AP

He said in an interview that Iranians had been inspired by images of popular revolt in North Africa but faced a regime far more brutal than those of Egypt, Tunisia or even Libya.

“In the course of the past 32 years the sole objective of the regime has been to retain power,” he told Reuters at a prestigious hotel in Paris, speaking through an interpreter.

“They are willing to … resort to whatever measure, including slaughter and bloodshed to the extreme in order to retain power,” Maleki said.

Two people were killed and dozens arrested on Feb. 14 when thousands of opposition supporters in Tehran and other cities took to the streets in sympathy with uprisings that toppled the leaders of Egypt and Tunisia.

	Mir Hossein Mousavi
	Photo by: AP Photo / Ben Curtis

Iran’s Islamist leaders, seeking to avoid a revival of mass rallies that erupted after the 2009 elections, have warned that any illegal gatherings by the opposition would be confronted.

Maleki said many other Iranian diplomats and military officers shared his critical point of view on the Tehran government but were waiting for the right time to switch sides.

He said he had fought for his country for 77 months in the 1980-88 Iran-Iraq War.

Maleki joins a former Iranian consul to Norway, an air force officer and a general who have already defected to the Green Wave. It was founded in March 2010 by exiled Iranian businessman Amir Jahanchahi, who aims to disrupt Iran’s vital energy sector to put pressure on Iranian leaders.

An international human rights group said Sunday that the two main Iranian opposition leaders and their wives are in grave danger after security forces allegedly abducted them from their homes, where they were under house arrest.

According to the International Campaign for Human Rights in Iran, leaders Mir Hossein Mousavi’s and Mahdi Karroubi’s apparent abduction indicates a serious escalation in the Iranian government’s effort to silence the opposition movement that grew out of protests over the disputed presidential election in June 2009.

Mousavi ran for president in the 2009 election against the incumbent, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who was declared the winner despite widespread charges of irregularities. Karroubi is an ex-speaker of the Iranian parliament who also ran on a pro-reform platform in the election.