QOM, Iran, 8 April 2003 — About 3,000 Iranian clerics and theological students burned US and British flags yesterday in the holy city of Qom to protest the presence of Western forces close to Shiite religious sites in southern Iraq.
Another group of around 70 clerics and students also protested outside the British Embassy in Tehran, which has become the focal point for anti-war protests in Iran.
The protests were peaceful, unlike one outside the British Embassy 10 days ago when several windows in a building inside the compound were smashed by stones hurled by protesters. The embassy, struck last Monday by a truck laden with extra fuel, was surrounded by heavy security, including riot police.
In Qom, the center of Shiite learning in Iran about 125 km south of Tehran, protesters chanted “Death to America”, “Death to warmongers” and burned a coffin covered by US and British flags. Iran has given repeated warnings to US and British forces not to damage sites in the southern Iraqi cities of Karbala and Najaf which are home to some of the most sacred shrines for their branch of Islam.
“The occupation of those cities by infidels is condemned and is an attack against Shiites in the world,” Ahmad Khatami, a mid-ranking conservative religious leader, said in a speech in Qom. “America and Britain, by ignoring all the international rules, are acting like Hitler,” the ISNA students news agency quoted Khatami as saying.
All Iran’s religious schools halted classes yesterday to stage protests against the war in neighboring Iraq, the official IRNA news agency said. Radical religious students and clerics have called on Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei to allow them to go to Iraq to protect its Shiite holy sites.
But Iran, eager to avoid US allegations of interfering in the war, has sealed its borders and prevented Iranians and Iraqi opposition members living in the country to cross into Iraq to join the fighting. Despite the protests, anti-war sentiment remains relatively subdued in Iran which fought a bitter eight-year war with Iraq in the 1980s during which chemical weapons were used against Iranian troops.
In Tehran, young seminarists gathered in Marvi theology school and marched on the British Embassy, interspersing their cries of “Death to US, death to Great Britain”, with chants of “Death to Saddam”, said an AFP journalist at the scene. The demonstrators also chanted slogans calling for the “closure of the British Embassy” and “the expulsion of British diplomats”.
Iranian reformists have also criticized the alleged pro-Iraqi news coverage by the state-run television network IRIB, press reported yesterday. The IRIB news coverage of the war in Iraq contradicted the country’s official neutral stance, the daily Yasse No quoted reformist MP Elaheh Kulaie as saying. She stressed that the IRIB coverage should be in accordance with national interests and any pro-Iraqi coverage could have negative impacts for Iran on an international scale.
