More clashes seen and heard during Chaharshanbeh Soori celebrations.

Heavy Basij and Police forces were out to keep people from gathering and celebrating Chaharshanbeh Soori–a widely practiced and meaningful tradition for all Iranians that dates back to 1600-1700 B.C. of the early Zoroastrian era.

Police and anti-riot forces interrupting Chaharshanbeh Soori celebrations in Velenjak, Tehran.

WP: Security forces block year-end festivities

Tens of thousands of security forces took up positions at Tehran’s main squares and intersections Tuesday to block traditional celebrations marking the coming end of the Iranian year, which some officials said could reignite anti-government protests.

The move illustrates the government’s intensifying embrace of military tactics to quell unrest before it happens. Free Iran:  Unfortunately, this strategy has proved effective for the regime both on Feb. 11th and yesterday.  The regime will continue to repeat this formula – demonstrate overwhelming force to intimidate the people and prevent any demonstrations in the first place.  This way, the regime won’t actually have to use force and it’ll dampen people’s spirits.  I want the Green movement to succeed as much as anyone but unless the opposition comes up with a viable counter-strategy, the government may have the upper hand for now. Many observers here say the movement against the government has lost momentum in the face of the broad crackdowns. On Monday, the official Web site of opposition leader Mir Hossein Mousavi posted a statement online encouraging supporters to stay the course.

In a square in western Tehran on Tuesday afternoon, rows of black-helmeted security forces, some bearing the logo of the powerful Revolutionary Guard Corps, could be seen standing next to a truck carrying a water cannon as a police helicopter hovered overhead. When a man tried to hail a cab in the middle of the street instead of from the sidewalk, four police officers immediately apprehended him.

The government’s tactics pushed planned street festivities underground, with people lining up in back alleys and secluded gardens to purify themselves by jumping over fires. The ritual is part of Chaharshanbe Suri, a pre-Islamic fire festival celebrated ahead of the Iranian new year, which this year starts March 20.

NYT:  Iranians Defy a Ban in a Display of Dissent

Iranians defied a ban on events marking a traditional festival on Tuesday, turning an annual celebration into a show of antigovernment sentiment.

Also Tuesday, the opposition leader Mir Hussein Moussavi appeared to challenge the authority of the supreme religious leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, by assigning a name to the new Iranian year, a traditional prerogative of the ayatollah.

The celebration of the Feast of Fire, an ancient Iranian festival with Zoroastrian roots, has been banned every year since the 1979 Islamic Revolution, and every year Iranians have celebrated anyway, setting off firecrackers, dancing in the streets and leaping over bonfires.

But this year, the opposition decided to make a political statement and urged supporters to celebrate the day. In response, the government took extra measures to ban celebrations.

Ayatollah Khamenei issued a decree over the weekend saying that the feast “has no religious basis and is harmful and must be avoided,” his Web site and several government Web sites reported.

The authorities forced stores and shopping malls in Tehran to close in the afternoon and banned motorcycles in the city. Thousands of pro-government forces were stationed on major streets. Municipal garbage containers were collected to prevent their being used to make bonfires, a witness said, speaking on the condition of anonymity.

And neighborhood police officers went door to door warning residents that large celebrations were banned.

However, many neighborhoods “rocked” with bonfires and music later in the evening, witnesses said. The celebrations were scattered around Tehran but took place in almost all of the city’s neighborhoods. Firecrackers echoed across the city, witnesses said, despite police efforts over the past few weeks to confiscate them.

There were unconfirmed reports on opposition Web sites of sporadic clashes between pro-government forces and people in the streets.

LA Times:  Explosions and heavy security amid celebrations of ancient fire festival

Firecrackers and homemade explosives were heard throughout the Iranian capital on Tuesday night as Iranians took to the streets in celebration of Chaharshanbeh Souri,  an ancient Zoroastrian fire festival held ahead of the Persian New Year, amid a heavy police and security presence.

Opposition supporters had vowed to turn the event this year into a protest against the government of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. And security forces took no chances.

On the streets of Tehran, armed security forces were out in full force, especially in main squares where protests had taken place earlier. Droves of helmeted “special guards” on motorcycles rumbled past stunned pedestrians. Plainclothes security officials oversaw checkpoints, pulling over cars filled with young people. Police officers on sidewalks could be seen ordering kids to open up their rucksacks.

Although no major clashes were reported between celebrators and security troops, skirmishes between helmeted and uniformed security forces and revelers broke out on Gisha Street, in the capital’s central west.

Time:  In Iran, a Street Demonstration That Both Sides Stay Away From

The holiday is so sensitive that the opposition doesn’t want to be anywhere near accusations that it is fomenting unrest during its celebration. The so-called Green Movement leadership actually asked its followers not to target the day for protest, as has been done with Muslim holy days and the anniversaries of important dates in the Islamic revolution led by the late Ayatullah Khomeini. The blowback would be worse for opposition leaders like Mir-Hossein Mousavi and Mehdi Karoubi if they were seen as promoting demonstrations during a festival from the days before Iran converted to Islam. No one wants to be called un-Islamic.

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Yet the first day of Nowrooz has always been irresistible to Iranians, because it is tied not to Muslim piety but to Persian pride. Its roots are in Zoroastrianism, the world’s first monotheistic religion — the country’s national faith before Islam — one in which fire is revered as a symbol of purity. Apart from the theocracy, most Iranians in and outside the country, irrespective of their religion, celebrate the ancient rites. The Tuesday-night event itself is known as Chaharshanbe Suri (literally “Wednesday Party,” because dusk brings the new day in Iran) and was originally intended as a ritual to ward off evil spirits and negative energy collected in the previous year. That purification is done by leaping over a series of small bonfires.

Iranians marked a holiday that leads up to the Persian new year under the watchful eyes of police Tuesday night after the Islamic republic’s supreme leader tried to discourage the celebrations.

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Thousands of people turned out, some in groups as large as 400 people, to dance, listen to music and light bonfires in side streets around Tehran on the festival of Chaharshanbe Soori. But unlike other holidays in recent months, there was no immediate sign that the observance was becoming a platform for protests against the country’s leadership.

Parties continued into early Wednesday, including one in the northern neighborhood of Zafaranieh where about 150 people danced to music pouring out of cars in the neighborhood. Some revelers played cat-and-mouse games with police who roamed the streets, looking to break up ongoing celebrations.

Free Iran:  Maybe not today.  Maybe not tomorrow.  But the Iranian people’s victory is inevitable.  They will do away with this failed, miserable regime.  They will gain their freedom, and respect for their human rights.  The following are some posters and music videos – songs of hope, resistance and victory.  Long live the brave people of Iran.

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See More.

Chaharshanbeh Soori celebrations are interrupted by anti-riot Police attacking those gathered and ultimately propelling shouts of Death to the Dictator.

Khamenei’s picture set on fire at Vanak Square.

NYT:  So Let’s Say Iran Gets the Bomb…

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For a few months in the mid-1960s President Johnson and his aides secretly weighed bombing China’s nuclear sites — perhaps seeking Soviet help — rather than let Mao get the bomb. Then the costs of starting another war in Asia sank in and they decided to try containment — living with a threatening regime while deterring its most dangerous moves.

It worked. Nearly five decades later, more Americans wake up worried about our trillion-dollar debt to China than about China’s arsenal. China has evolved into a comparatively manageable military competitor, at least for now.

Today a version of the same debate about whether containment is the answer is breaking out again, this time about Iran. Prominent strategists like Zbigniew Brzezinski argue forcefully that what worked in the cold war will work with the mullahs. The cover of Foreign Affairs this month is an article titled “After Iran Gets the Bomb”; it draws scenarios for dealing with what many believe is inevitable. Meanwhile, the administration races to add antimissile systems and a naval presence in the Gulf — an effort to contain Iran’s power in the region, officials say, but it sure looks like the building blocks of a nuclear containment policy, a backup in case the next round of sanctions fails to do the trick.

The White House denies that nuclear containment is on the table. “The United States is determined to prevent Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons, period,” Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. said on his testy trip to Israel last week.

But to many in the early 1960s, a nuclear China was also unthinkable. More recently, George W. Bush would regularly repeat that America would never “tolerate” a nuclear North Korea. The reality was that during the last six years of his presidency, he tolerated it, then prepared the way for the current containment strategy of intercepting shipments from North Korea to customers for its nuclear know-how.

WP:  Pakistani scientist Khan describes Iranian efforts to buy nuclear bombs

The father of Pakistan’s nuclear weapons program has written an official account that details an Iranian attempt to buy atomic bombs from Pakistan at the end of the 1980s.

Bombmaker Abdul Qadeer Khan states in documents obtained by The Washington Post that in lieu of weapons, Pakistan gave Iran bomb-related drawings, parts for centrifuges to purify uranium and a secret worldwide list of suppliers. Iran’s centrifuges, which are viewed as building blocks for a nuclear arsenal, are largely based on models and designs obtained from Pakistan.

Khan’s narrative calls into question Iran’s long-standing stance that it has not sought nuclear arms. Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad said last month that “we won’t do that because we don’t believe in having them.”

The account also conflicts with the Pakistani government’s assertion that Khan proliferated nuclear know-how without government approval.

Pakistan has never disclosed Khan’s written account. A summary of interrogations of Khan and four others in 2004, conducted by Pakistan’s intelligence service and later provided to U.S. and allied intelligence officials, omitted mention of the attempt to buy a nuclear bomb. But Pakistan’s former top military official in 2006 publicly hinted at it.

AFP:  Khamenei tells Iranians to shun fire festival

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TEHRAN — Iran’s supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei on Sunday urged Iranians to shun next week’s Persian fire festival as an un-Islamic event which causes “a lot of harm.”

Seven people have already been reported killed in the runup to the festival, ISNA news agency said, quoting a police chief.

Charshanbe Soori, an ancient pagan festival, is held on the eve of the last Wednesday of the Persian calendar year. This year, the ritual falls on the night of March 16.

Khamenei, Iran’s all-powerful cleric, said on his website that Charshanbe Soori has “no basis in sharia (Islamic religious law) and creates a lot of harm and corruption, (which is why) it is appropriate to avoid it.”

The festival is a prelude to Nowrouz, the Persian New Year which starts on March 21 and marks the arrival of spring.

In the past few years, local municipalities have helped Iranians organise the festival but it is unclear whether they will do so this year in the wake of Khamenei’s remarks.

Iranians celebrate the fire festival by lighting bonfires in public places on the night before the last Wednesday and leaping over the flames shouting “Sorkhiye to az man, Zardiye man az to (Give me your redness and I will give you my paleness).”

Leaping over the flames symbolises the wish for happiness in the new year and an end to the sufferings of the past year.