THE NEW YORK TIMES: Hundreds of riot police officers in Iran beat protesters and fired tear gas Monday to contain the most significant street protests since the end of the 2009 uprising there, as security forces around the region moved — sometimes brutally — to prevent new unrest in sympathy with the opposition victory in Egypt.On Tuesday, thousands of mourners in Bahrain braved tear gas to take part in a funeral procession for a man killed in protests on Monday when the police fired rubber bullets and tear gas into crowds of peaceful protesters from the Shiite majority population. So much tear gas was fired that the officers themselves vomited.
Riot police initially sought to block the funeral but then permitted it to proceed. In the clashes, however, a second protester died. The crowd learned of the death from text messages on their phones from witnesses.
Yemen, too, witnesses a fourth straight day of protests on Monday when hundreds of student protesters clashed with pro-government forces.
In Tehran, a spokesman for Mir Hussein Moussavi, a leading opponent of the government, said Monday’s protests had shown that the so-called Green Movement, formed to challenge the disputed election in 2009, had scored a “great victory” and was “alive and well” despite a huge government crackdown when the government quashed dissent through the shooting of demonstrators, mass trials, torture, lengthy jail sentences and even executions of some of those taking part.
Breaking an official silence on the demonstrations, the Fars news agency, a semiofficial service linked to the powerful Revolutionary Guard Corps, said the demonstrations had been conducted by “hypocrites, monarchists, hooligans and seditionists” whose leaders were puppets of Britain and the United States. It ridiculed them for not chanting slogans about Egypt, the nominal reason for the protests, and said an unspecified number of people had been arrested. >>> NEIL MacFARQUHAR and ALAN COWELL | Tuesday, February 15, 2011
