Azerbaijan , Baku, March 2 /Trend Т .Konyayeva/
The opposition in Iran has shown the government the situation in the country is countrary to the state of affairs it tries to present. Moreover, country's leaders will fail to get the situation back on track, the analyst of the Institute of European Security Research (EUISS) Rouzbeha Parsi said.
"What the opposition is managed to do is to show that they can bring up people regardless if opposed leaders Karroubi and Mousavi are under arrest or not," Parsi told Trend via telephone. "Basically, they showed the government that everything is not normal and everything will not go back to be normal."
Rallies to support Egyptian and Tunisian people began in Tehran on February 14. Protests were also reportedly held in other cities across Iran, including Esfahan, Shiraz and Kermanshah. The opposition website Kaleme.com reported that more than thousands demonstrators went on the streets in the cities of Shiraz and Isfahan. The Iranian police used tear gas to disperse the participants of rallies ongoing in Tehran.
Access to mobile communications has been closed in many Iranian cities, particularly in Tehran.
Several protesters were injured and at least one was killed during the clashes between protesters and police in the Iranian capital and several cities of the country. More than 100 participants were arrested.
According to Parsi, the government in its turn seems to be intended once and for all to break the back of the opposition and they are doing this at several levels - at the level of the ruling elite and at the level of ordinary people.
"They are applying pressure on Ali Akbar Hashemi-Rafsanjani," he told. "In the upcoming elections we will see if he manages to retain his post as the Head of the Institution that formerly at least elect the Supreme Leader. And, of course, they are repressing people in the streets and they have put their leaders under some kind of arrest, we don't know exactly what kind."
Opposition leaders Mehdi Karroubi and Mir-Houssein Mousavi were arrested due to the fact on Feb.7 they sent a letter to the Interior Ministry with a request to give them and their supporters a permission to hold a rally in support of the peoples of Egypt and Tunisia on the Imam Hussein and Liberty squares on Feb. 14.
Ex-Iranian President Mohammad Khatami, as well as former Interior Minister Abdullah Nuri, has been put under house arrest.
Among other arrested Iranian activists were Ali Baghiri, who was acting as chief of the police during former president Mohammad Khatami's ruling.
One February 20, Iran arrested the daughter of former president Hashemi-Rafsanjani Faize for taking part in a banned opposition rally. After being detained briefly, she was released on the same day.