Obama Raises Doubts About Dialogue With Iran

TEHRAN — Despite new criticism from President Obama, the Iranian authorities showed no sign Friday of bending to domestic or foreign pressure, saying that the disputed presidential vote on June 12 was the “healthiest” in three decades.

The uncompromising words emerged as the Group of Eight countries, including the United States, fired a fresh broadside Friday, saying they “deplored” the post-election violence and demanding that the “the will of the Iranian people is reflected in the electoral process.”

In Washington, President Obama accused Tehran of violating “universal norms, international norms,” and saying that the bravery of the Iranian people is “a testament to their enduring pursuit of justice.”

“The violence perpetrated against them is outrageous,” the president said, with German Chancellor Angela Merkel by his side. “And despite the government’s efforts to keep the world from bearing witness to that violence, we see it, and we condemn it.”

The president also conceded that the crackdown would complicate his plans to have a dialogue with Tehran, saying: “There is no doubt that any direct dialogue or diplomacy with Iran is going to be affected by the events of the last several weeks.”

Chancellor Merkel, too, was harshly critical of the Iranian leadership, declaring in German that Iranians should be able to demonstrate peacefully and to have their votes count. “The rights of human beings, of individuals, of citizens are indivisible the world over and also apply, therefore, to the Iranian people,” she said.

But there seemed little likelihood that the Iranian authorities would be swayed by the harsh words, as a senior cleric called for demonstrators to be punished “ruthlessly and savagely.”

At Friday prayers at Tehran University, a senior cleric, Ayatollah Ahmad Khatami, referred to the demonstrators as rioters and declared, “I want the judiciary to punish leading rioters firmly and without showing any mercy to teach everyone a lesson.”

Reuters quoted him as saying that demonstrators should be tried for waging war against God. The punishment for such offenses under Islamic law is death, Reuters said.

The cleric’s remarks represented a significant hardening of official rhetoric as the authorities confronted the biggest political challenge since the Islamic Revolution in 1979. Yet. because Ayatollah Khatami is not regarded as a high-profile figure, it was not clear how much weight his words carried.

However, he is a member of the influential Assembly of Experts and his threats seemed likely to further intimidate protesters whose presence on the streets has dwindled in the face of large numbers of police officers and Basij militias.

A week ago, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Iran’s supreme leader, used the platform of Friday prayers to dismiss charges of electoral fraud and warned of harsh measures against the protesters if they continued to flood the streets.

After the elections, the losing candidates, led by a former prime minister, Mir Hussein Moussavi, lodged bitter complaints that the vote was rigged in favor of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who was proclaimed the victor in official results that gave him almost two-thirds of the ballots.

The authorities have repeatedly dismissed the opposition complaints. In remarks quoted on the official IRNA news agency on Friday, Abbas-Ali Kadkhodaei, a spokesman for the 12-member Guardian Council charged with vetting elections, said the panel had “almost finished reviewing defeated candidates’ election complaints,” which the council said earlier numbered in excess of 600.

“The reviews showed that the election was the healthiest since the revolution,” Mr. Kadkhodaei said. “There were no major violations in the election.”

The statement fell short of formal certification. But it offered further evidence that despite mass demonstrations and violent confrontations with those who call the election a fraud, the authorities are intent on enforcing their writ and denying their adversaries a voice.

Initially, three losing candidates registered complaints of electoral irregularities, but one of them, Mohsen Rezai, a former commander of the Revolutionary Guards, withdrew his objections on Wednesday. Mr. Moussavi said Thursday he had come under pressure to drop his complaint.

Internationally, European countries were the first to criticize the authorities’ handling of the protests but President Obama, initially cautious, has issued ever more critical comments, drawing a taunt from Mr. Ahmadinejad on Thursday that he sounded like former President George W. Bush and should apologize.

At the news conference on Friday, President Obama dismissed Mr. Ahmadinejad’s gibe. “I don’t take Mr. Ahmadinejad’s statements seriously about apologies, particularly given the fact that the United States has gone out of its way not to interfere with the election process in Iran,” he said. “And I’m really not concerned about Mr. Ahmadinejad apologizing to me.”

Rather, Mr. Obama said, the Iranian president should “think carefully about the obligations he owes to his own people. And he might want to consider looking at the families of those who’ve been beaten or shot or detained.”

At a meeting in Trieste, Italy on Friday, the foreign ministers from the Group of Eight issued a joint statement saying they “deplored post-electoral violence which led to the loss of lives of Iranian civilians” and urged Iran to respect human rights, including freedom of expression. Along with the United States and Italy, the group includes Japan, Russia, Canada, France, Germany and Britain.

The statement called on Iran to “guarantee that the will of the Iranian people is reflected in the electoral process,” but it said the door must remain open to dialogue with Tehran on its contentious nuclear program, news reports said.

The joint statement was a compromise between some European countries seeking a harder line, and Russia, whose foreign minister, Sergey V. Lavrov, said at a news conference in Trieste that while Moscow wanted to express its “most serious concern” over use of force in Iran, “we will not interfere in Iran’s internal affairs.”

“Our position is that all issues that have emerged in the context of the elections will be sorted out in line with democratic procedures,” The Associated Press quoted him as saying. Unlike other G-8 members, Russia has recognized the election result and played host to Mr. Ahmadinejad.

Mr. Moussavi has maintained a defiant posture but has few options other than to express his outrage, and he is growing increasingly isolated.

He does not have a political organization to rally, and during the height of the unrest he attracted a large following more because of whom he opposed — Mr. Ahmadinejad — than because of what he stood for, political analysts said. And on Friday, his personal Web site was shut down by what his associates described as hackers. Mr. Moussavi also seemed to be sending mixed messages. After vowing on Thursday not to “back down even for a second” to the “election criminals,” he later said he would ask for permission to hold future rallies, noting that Mr. Ahmadinejad had been granted two permits in the last week. With most demonstrations suppressed or canceled, a few dozen people arrived Friday at the Behest-e Zahra cemetery to mourn Neda Agha-Soltan, a 26-year-old woman shot dead last Saturday whose image went round the world as an instant emblem of the protests.

According to Tehran residents, members of the government’s Basij militia, ordered to prevent any gatherings, have beaten even small groups of passers-by so the mourners arrived in groups of two or three, muttered brief prayers and left, The A.P. reported, quoting unidentified witnesses. Opponents of the election result said they planned to release thousands of green and black balloons bearing a message in Ms. Agha-Soltan’s memory.

There were other signs of continued resistance. A few conservatives have expressed revulsion at the sight of unarmed protesters being beaten, even shot, by government forces. Only 105 out of the 290 members of Parliament took part in a victory celebration for Mr. Ahmadinejad on Tuesday, newspapers reported Thursday. The absence of so many lawmakers, including the speaker, Ali Larijani, a powerful conservative, was striking.

There was still no word from a former president, Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, a Moussavi supporter who is considered one of the nation’s most effective political operatives and coalition builders. His absence raised the prospect of behind-the-scenes maneuvering that might challenge the status quo, political analysts said.

Some people have begun to identify and embarrass plainclothes agents by circulating photographs of those who infiltrated protests and beat demonstrators. In another indication of the depth of divisions that remain, a senior cleric, Grand Ayatollah Nasser Makarem-Shirazi, called for “national conciliation.”

“Definitively, something must be done to ensure that there are no embers burning under the ashes, and that hostilities, antagonism and rivalries are transformed into amity and cooperation among all parties,” he said in comments posted on the state-run Press TV Web site.

By NAZILA FATHI and ALAN COWELL, nytimes.com
Nazila Fathi reported from Tehran, and Alan Cowell from Paris. Michael Slackman and Mona el-Naggar contributed reporting from Cairo, and Sharon Otterman from New York.