Chants in support of jailed opposition leaders, and against Iran’s ruling cleric, rang out during a funeral procession for a dissident religious leader in the city of Isfahan on Tuesday, BBC News reported.
Video obtained by the BBC’s Persian-language service appeared to capture some of the chanting in support of Mir Hussein Moussavi and Mehdi Karroubi, two reformists who ran for president in 2009, and then contested the results, claiming that the vote count had been rigged in favor of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. The two opposition leaders remain under house arrest.
While restrictions on independent reporting inside Iran make it difficult to confirm the authenticity of the video, similar chants were heard in three other clips posted online on Tuesday, also said to have been recorded during the funeral of Ayatollah Jalaledin Taheri, who led Friday Prayers in Isfahan until he resigned in 2002 and accused the country’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei of betraying the promises of the Iranian revolution.
According to a translation from Golnaz Esfandiari, who blogs about Iran for the American-financed Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, mourners appeared to chant “Oh, Hussein, Mir Hussein!†and “Karroubi and Moussavi must be released!†in a brief clip of the procession along a broad avenue in Isfahan posted on YouTube by a Persian-speaking blogger.
While it is impossible to verify that the soundtrack to this clip has not been altered, visual clues from the video â€" including the appearance of the green-clad coffin held aloft by the mourners and a large, blue pedestrian overpass above the avenue â€" do seem to match exactly images of the funeral shot by Arshideh Shahangi, a photographer based in Isfahan, for the Web site of the Iranian Students’ News Agency.
Arshideh Shahangi/ISNA A screenshot from the Web site of the Iranian Students’ News Agency showing the coffin of Ayatollah Jalaledin Taheri, a dissident cleric who was buried in the city of Isfahan on Tuesday.
Arshideh Shahangi/ISNA A screenshot of a photograph posted on the Web site of the Iranian Students’ News Agency, showing the funeral of a dissident cleric in the city of Isfahan on Tuesday.As Ms. Esfandiari explained, the chants in another two video clips apparently recorded during the funeral and uploaded Tuesday to a YouTube account registered in the name Sohail Jannessari made reference to another dissident cleric, the Grand Ayatollah Hossein Ali Montazeri, whose funeral in late 2009 turned into a massive antigovernment protest.
In one of those clips, male mourners marching in the procession appeared to chant “Death to the dictator!†and “The real clerics: Montazeri, Taheri!â€
Since the mourners were recorded from behind, it is not possible to confirm that the voices heard on the video soundtrack are those of the men pictured, although this is a common tactic of opposition activists seeing to prevent the protesters they film from being identified through their footage.
The soundtrack for the second clip seems to capture a group of female mourners also chanting a slogan in favor of the dissidents ayatollahs.
More images of the funeral were posted on Facebook and Twitter by supporters of the campaign of Hassan Rouhani, a moderate cleric who is the only representative of the reformist wing of Iranian politics permitted to contest the presidential election this month. The Rouhani campaign slogan, “Hope. Prudence.†seems to indicate how much more restrained the reformists are in 2013 compared to 2009, when calls for change were voiced loudly.
As the bloggers at the Iranian-American site Tehran Bureau noted on Tuesday, at a recent campaign rally for Mr. Rouhani his supporters also chanted in honor of Mir Hussein Moussavi.
Robert Mackey also remixes the news on Twitter @robertmackey.
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