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Source: Reuters -
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Huge crowds of Iranians have chanted anti-government slogans
during the funeral of leading dissident cleric Grand Ayatollah
Hossein Ali Montazeri in the holy Shi'ite city of Qom, websites are
reporting.
Montazeri, who died late on Saturday aged 87, was viewed as the
spiritual patron of an opposition movement that blossomed after a
disputed presidential election in June and has proved resilient
despite repeated efforts to suppress it.
Violence flared when security forces around Montazeri's house
clashed with stone-throwing protesters, the reformist website
Norooz said. There was no immediate official comment.
The report could not be verified independently since foreign media
were banned from reporting directly on protests and were told not
to travel to Qom for Montazeri's funeral.
The reformist website Jaras said hundreds of thousands of people
joined a procession for Montazeri, an architect of Iran's 1979
Islamic revolution that toppled the US-backed shah. He later became
a fierce critic of its present hardline leadership.
"Innocent Montazeri, your path will be continued even if the
dictator should rain bullets on our heads," they chanted.
Iran's internal unrest, highlighted by Montazeri's arguments that
the leadership had lost its legitimacy, has complicated a
long-running dispute over Iran's nuclear programme, which the West
believes may have military ends, not just civilian purposes.
The cleric's death from a heart attack occurred at a tense moment
when the government was seeking to choke off any attempt to use the
run-up to the Shi'ite religious occasion of Ashura next Sunday to
stage large-scale protest rallies.
Shouts of "Oh Hossein, Mirhossein" also rose from mourners near
Iran's second holiest shrine, many wearing green wristbands to mark
support for opposition leader Mirhossein Mousavi.
Their cries echoed traditional Ashura laments for Hossein, a
grandson of the Prophet Mohammad, killed in a 7th-century battle
that sealed the schism between Sunni and Shi'ite Muslims.
Ashura, a key occasion in the Islamic Republic's calendar, will
coincide with the seventh day of mourning for Montazeri, making it
harder for authorities to keep people off the streets.
Riot police were out in force in Qom, 125 km south of Tehran, ahead
of the funeral of the senior Shi'ite cleric who had been a thorn in
the establishment's side.
Pro-government Basij militiamen shouted: "Shame on you hypocrites,
leave the city of Qom," said the Ayande website, seen as close to
conservative politician Mohsen Rezaie. Mourners chanted back: "What
happened to the oil money? It went to the Basijis."
The reformist Kaleme website said crowds had shouted: "Today is the
day of mourning and the green Iranian nation is the owner of this
mourning," referring to the opposition colour.
Mourners carried pictures of Montazeri and of another Qom-based
dissident cleric, Grand Ayatollah Yusuf Sanei.
Mourning for Montazeri
Opposition figures declared a national day of mourning for
Montazeri, who was named in the 1980s to succeed revolutionary
leader Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini but was shunted aside after he
criticised mass executions of prisoners.
Khamenei, who succeeded Khomeini after he died in 1989, expressed
his condolences, but said he asked God to forgive Montazeri over a
"difficult and critical test" that he faced towards the end of
Khomeini's life, ISNA news agency said. Khamenei made it clear he
believed Montazeri failed the test.
Iranian newspapers published no pictures of Montazeri on their
front pages, in line with what reformist websites said were
instructions from the Ministry of Culture and Islamic
Guidance.
Khomeini's grandson, Hassan Khomeini, a cleric, paid tribute in his
condolence message to a man he said had "spent many years of his
honourable life on the path of advancing the high goals of Islam
and the Islamic revolution", ILNA news agency reported.
Human rights activist and Nobel Prize laureate Shirin Ebadi called
Montazeri "the father of human rights in Iran".
President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's reelection in a June vote that
losing candidates Mousavi and Mehdi Karoubi said was rigged kindled
the worst unrest in the Islamic Republic's 30-year history and
split the political and clerical establishment.
In August, Montazeri said the authorities' handling of the unrest
"could lead to the fall of the regime" and he denounced the
clerical leadership as a dictatorship.
The authorities deny charges of electoral fraud and have portrayed
the protests, quelled by Revolutionary Guards and Islamic
militiamen, as a foreign-backed plot to undermine them.
"Montazeri was one of the chief spiritual and religious voices of
the reformist movement," said Alireza Nader, Iran analyst at the
RAND Corporation in Washington.
Nader said the cleric's status as a Shi'ite religious authority and
his revolutionary credentials provided a cover of legitimacy for
the reformists' political and social demands.
"His death leaves an important vacuum, but there are other senior
clerics who are also outspoken against the Ahmadinejad
administration and who demand political reform. His absence will
not necessarily lead to a weakening of the opposition."
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