IN a second day of violence protesters in Iran yesterday defied heavy police presence setting fires and smashing store windows to challenge President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad' s re-election.
Anti-riot police lashed back and the regime blocked Internet sites used to rally the pro-reform campaign.
Scores of young people shouted "Death to the dictator!" and broke the windows of city buses on several streets in central Tehran. They burned banks, trash bins and piles of tires used as flaming barricades to block police.
Riot police beat some of the protesters with batons while dozens of others holding shields and motorcycles stood guard nearby. Shops, government offices and businesses closed early as tension mounted.
But Ahmadinejad said his re-election was "real and free" and cannot be questioned in comments yesterday during a press conference - his first since the government announced that he was re-elected to a second term in a landslide victory during Friday's vote.
He dismissed the unrest - the worst in a decade in Tehran - as "not important." He said Friday's vote was "real and free" and insisted the results showing his landslide victory were fair and legitimate.
Along Tehran's Vali Asr street - where activists supporting rival candidate Mir Hossein Mousavi held a huge pre-election rally last week - tens of thousands, according to the Associated Press (AP), marched in support of Ahmadinejad, waving Iranian flags and shouting his name.
Mousavi released his first statement since two days of violent protests began, calling on authorities to cancel the election. He said that is the only way to restore public trust. Mousavi, who has accused authorities of election fraud, urged his supporters to continue their "civil and lawful" opposition to the results and advised police to stop violence against protesters. He has claimed he was the true winner of the election.
The violence spilling from the disputed results has pushed Iran's Islamic establishment to respond with sweeping measures that include deploying anti-riot squads around the capital and cutting mobile phone messaging and Internet sites used by the Mousavi's campaign.
There's little chance that the youth-driven movement could immediately threaten the pillars of power in Iran - the ruling clerics and the vast network of military and intelligence forces at their command - but it raises the possibility that a sustained and growing backlash could complicate Iran's policies at a pivotal time.
United States (U.S.) President Barack Obama has offered to open dialogue after a nearly 30-year diplomatic freeze. Iran also is under growing pressure to make concessions on its nuclear program or face possible more international sanctions.
Vice President Joe Biden yesterday said he had doubts about whether the election was free and fair, as Ahmadinejad claimed. He said the U.S. and other countries need more time to analyse the results before making a better judgment about the vote.
In Paris, French Foreign Minister Bernard Kouchner said his country was "very worried" about the situation in Iran, criticising the Iranian authorities' "somewhat brutal reaction" to the election protests.
So far, Mousavi has issued mixed signals through his Web site before it was shut down. He urged for calm but also said he is the legitimate winner of Friday's election and called on supporters to reject a government of "lies and dictatorship. " He has not been seen in public since a news conference shortly after polls closed.
Iran's supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, closed the door for possible compromise. He could have used his near-limitless powers to intervene in the election dispute. But, in a message on state television over the weekend, he urged the nation to unite behind Ahmadinejad, calling the result a "divine assessment."
Israel, like the U.S., doesn't believe Tehran's claims that its nuclear program is designed to produce energy, not bombs. Netanyahu has said Israel would not tolerate a nuclear Iran and is thought to be mulling a military strike.
A poll for an Israeli think tank published yesterday showed that 59 per cent of the Jewish public would support a military strike should Israel determine that Tehran possesses nuclear weapons. But less than one-fifth said they would consider leaving Israel should Iran develop nuclear weapons, said the Institute for National Security Studies at Tel Aviv University.
The survey questioned 616 adult Jews and had a margin of error of three percentage points.
But while Benjamin Netanyahu sees Iran and its anti-Israel proxies in Lebanon and Gaza as the crux of the Middle East's problems, Obama thinks serious effort toward resolving the Israeli-Palestinian conflict could weaken Tehran.
The Israeli leader has been under intense pressure from Washington to enter into negotiations on Palestinian statehood and end all settlement expansion in the West Bank - positions he opposes and whose adoption would almost surely fracture his hawkish governing coalition.
Netanyahu had tried to parry that pressure by attempting to redirect attention away from peacemaking with the Palestinians and toward Iran's nuclear programme.
But the U.S. was not won over to that point of view, and in his June 4 address to the Moslem world, Obama forcefully called for a Palestinian state and a halt to the settlement construction that has proven to be a major impediment to peacemaking.
Any hopes by the Obama administration of gaining a result similar to Lebanon's recent election, won by a Western-backed moderate coalition, appeared to be in jeopardy.
"We are monitoring the situation as it unfolds in Iran, but we, like the rest of the world, are waiting and watching to see what the Iranian people decide," U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton said at a news conference with Canada's foreign affairs minister, Lawrence Cannon.
Minutes after Clinton spoke, the White House released a two-sentence statement praising "the vigorous debate and enthusiasm that this election generated, particularly among young Iranians," but expressing concern about "reports of irregularities. "
Despite the challenge from reformist Mousavi to incumbent Ahmadinejad, many officials and experts thought a Mousavi victory would result in only incremental shifts toward the U.S.
Because real power in Tehran is still wielded by religious leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, some say an Ahmadinejad re-election may make it easier to build an international consensus against Iran.
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