Worldwide protests against Iran
2009-07-25 22:26
Amsterdam - Demonstrators in cities around the globe joined protests on Saturday denouncing human rights abuses in Iran and showing support for opponents of hardline President Mahmoud Ahmandinejad.
Some of the biggest rallies took place in Amsterdam, London and Stockholm, with more than 4 000 alone taking to the streets of the Swedish capital.
Among the 1 000 people in Amsterdam was Iran's Nobel Peace laureate Shirin Ebadi who led the crowd in chanting: "We want to live in peace. Long live peace".
"We are here to show our solidarity with the people of Iran and to urge the Iranian government to respect human rights," said Tom van den Brand, a spokesperson for Amnesty International in Amsterdam.
Protest over disputed election
In London, where more than a thousand gathered outside the Iranian embassy, organisers also spoke of supporting Iranians protesting Ahmandinejad's disputed re-election.
"This is symbolic, it's a global day of solidarity," said Potkin Azarmehr, one of the organisers. "We need to make sure the government pays a price for the way they're treating the people in Iran."
Following charges of fraud in the June 12 presidential election, Tehran became the scene of mass street protests that shook the pillars of the Islamic republic.
Iranian official reports say at least 20 people died and more than 1 000 were arrested in demonstrations. Dozens of reformist leaders, journalists and human rights activists have also been jailed in the wake of the election that the opposition says was rigged.
In a park in Tokyo's buys Shibuya district, demonstrators carried a placard declaring: "Ahmadinejad is not Iran's president."
Many of Saturday's demonstrations included expatriates and those of Iranian descent.
'Electoral coup d'etat'
In Paris, a rally of some 600 people, mostly Iranians, denounced the "electoral coup d'etat" in Iran. Many wore green, the colour of the opposition led by moderate candidate Mir Hossein Mousavi who was Ahmandinejad's closest rival.
Others carried pictures of a young Iranian woman, Neda Agha-Soltan, who was shot dead during a demonstration and has become of symbol of the opposition's struggle.
"We want the United Nations to intervene, an inquiry into the systematic human rights violations in Iran," said the group United for Iran.
In Melbourne, one of the five Australian cities where protests took place, some 50 members of Iranian community waved their homeland's flag and banners reading "Stop Torture" and "Iran election was a fraud".
In London, Fariba Marzban, who was jailed in Tehran for eight years as a political prisoner following the 1979 revolution, said times were changing in Tehran.
"The people are now speaking - for 30 years, people were quiet, now they are talking," she said. "Our ambition is free speech, liberty."
Demonstrations also took place in Berlin, Copenhagen, Stockholm, Vienna and Geneva, where protesters gathered outside the United Nations' European headquarters.
Protest outside UN buildings
Some people outside the UN buildings wore masks because they said they did not want to be identified by any possible informers to the Tehran regime.
One Swiss delegation planned to bring a letter to the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, Navi Pillay, over the situation in Iran, said Hassan Bayat, a spokesman for the organisers.
On a smaller scale, but still symbolic of the extent of global reaction to the crackdown by Ahmadinejad's regime, about a dozen Turkish youths in Istanbul from the local Amnesty chapter staged a demonstration against the arrests of Iranian protesters.
And in Kyrgyzstan, a country not known for spontaneous demonstrations, a small group of some seven people were arrested for trying to protest outside the Iranian embassy in Bishkek, human rights activists there said.
- AFP