High-school students gather to attend pro-government demonstration in Tabriz on February 11.
On the morning of February 11, the anniversary of the 1979 Islamic Revolution, some 200 students and their relatives from the Ferdowsi High School in Iran’s northwestern city of Tabriz, the capital of Eastern Azerbaijan Province, gathered in the schoolyard.
The same happened with other schools, universities, government agencies, factories, and banks. Mullahs preaching in mosques declared it a “religious duty” to participate in the event. Add to this thousands of Revolutionary Guards and Basijis and their family members whose participation is mandatory at this kind of government-organized rallies, even if they are not at work, dispersing, beating up, or even shooting at protesting demonstrators who dare to go out of the orchestrated demonstration routine.
A day before the anniversary, Tabriz’s chief prosecutor — yes, chief prosecutor Yahya Mirza-Mohammadi — had called on the citizens to show up en masse: “This year’s February 11 rally will silence all the plots [against the system].”
Still, on the day, according to three witnesses from different central areas of the city with a population of more than 2 million, Tabriz demonstrators numbered a total of not more than 50,000. “Very strange,” said one of the witnesses. “Even in Rasta Kuche, the central location where Khamenei’s representative, Mohammad Shabestari, held his speech, I couldn’t see more than a maximum of 20-30,000.
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