TEHRAN — Iran's supreme leader vowed Wednesday that he would neither reconsider vote results nor bow to public pressure over the disputed reelection of his ally, President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, as state-controlled broadcast outlets intensified a media blitz against the West.
Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Iran's ultimate political and military authority, decried "lawlessness" after demonstrators took to the streets to dispute Ahmadinejad's reelection in a June 12 vote that they and many independent analysts say was suspiciously out of sync with previous voting patterns and Iran's demographics.
"Once lawlessness becomes a norm, things will be complicated and the interests of people will be undermined," Khamenei said after a meeting with lawmakers, according to state television.
"Everyone should respect the law," he said. "Even in the case of the recent incidents, I have been, still am and will continue to be insisting on the implementation of the law. . . . Certainly, neither the system nor the people will yield to pressure under any circumstances."
Using batons, tear gas and large contingents of uniformed and plainclothes security forces, Iranian authorities for now appear to have beaten back their greatest domestic challenge in 30 years as a dispute over the election sharply divided both society and the political establishment into two camps: supporters of Ahmadinejad and those backing his main election challenger, Mir-Hossein Mousavi.
Pro-government Basiji militiamen have put down a series of large-scale demonstrations over the last week. On Wednesday afternoon, riot police and militiamen used clubs and tear gas near parliament at Baharestan Square to disperse protesters who numbered either several hundred or more than a thousand, according to different witnesses. Security officials fired into the air to frighten the crowd, witnesses said.
Police officers continued to guard key intersections as plainclothes militiamen on motorcycles patrolled streets. Mousavi's wife, scholar Zahra Rahnavard, who broke with tradition in Iran's male-dominated political society to campaign for her husband, likened the situation in the country to "martial law" on one of his websites.
