Iranian President Hassan Rouhani, a relative moderate who was re-elected a year ago, has expressed sympathy for peaceful protesters anxious about how to make ends meet amid high unemployment and 10-percent inflation. “The people have little food, big inflation and no human rights. The US is watching!” he wrote.
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Trump and other administration officials, including US Ambassador to the UN Nikki Haley, have voiced support for peaceful protestors demonstrating against the Iranian government, reported the Hill.
Iran’s foreign ministry said Trump was “wasting his time sending useless and insulting tweets” and would be better off focusing on “homeless and hungry people” in his own country.
The citizens are reportedly highly discontent with the Khamenei and Rouhani’s regime, leading to the biggest anti-government demonstrations after the Iran Green Movement in 2009.
In what seemed a veiled criticism of the Obama administration’s response to those demonstrations, Haley said Tuesday that “the worldwide community made the mistake of failing” to support Iranian protesters in 2009.
In this regard, US President Donald Trump praised on Tuesday the protesters and said they were acting against Iran’s “brutal and corrupt” regime.
“The bold and growing resistance of the Iranian people today gives hope and faith to all who struggle for freedom and against tyranny”, Pence continued. “This person whose whole being is against the nation of Iran has no right to feel pity for the people of Iran”. Social media was apparently also used by the organizers to call for more protests in dozens of towns and cities across the country.
Meanwhile, a spokesman for Iran’s foreign ministry has hit back at the United States president, saying that Trump should focus on his own country rather than tweet about civil unrest overseas. In his first statements since the beginning of the crisis, the supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, accused on Tuesday the “enemies of Iran” of meddling in the affairs of the country.
Since then, they have spread to some 50 cities and towns, including the capital Tehran, and seen tens of thousands of people take to the streets to vent their anger at the entire establishment.
Many note that the protests have not been centered in Tehran but scattered around the country, often in small cities. At least 36 people were killed, according to an official toll, while the opposition says 72 died. Rouhani claimed that “This is nothing” compared to other outbreaks of unrest, but authorities responded with mass arrests and restrictied the use of the social media apps Instagram and Telegram, used to organize the rallies.
Worldwide calls for the protests to remain peaceful, for human rights to be respected, and for the government to take a restrained approach in its response seem appropriate.
An image grab taken from a handout video released by Iran’s Mehr News agency reportedly shows a group of men pushing traffic barriers in a street in Tehran on December 30, 2017.
In Tehran alone, 450 protesters have been arrested in the last three days, the semi-official ILNA news agency reported on Tuesday.
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Russian Federation jumped to Iran’s defence, with deputy foreign minister Sergei Ryabkov telling state agency TASS: “Despite the many attempts to distort what is really going on (in Iran), I am sure that our neighbour, our friend, will overcome its current difficulties”.
