Iranian Leaders Vow to Crush March

“These elements are fully aware of the illegal nature of the request,” Mehdi Alikhani Sadr, an Interior Ministry official, said of the permit request for the march in comments published Sunday by the semiofficial Fars news agency. “They know they will not be granted permission for riots.”

The Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps was blunt.

“The conspirators are nothing but corpses,” Hossein Hamadani, a top commander of the corps, said Wednesday in comments published by the official IRNA news agency. “Any incitement will be dealt with severely.”

But opposition supporters, hoping the democratic uprisings sweeping the region will rejuvenate their own movement, insisted the march would go forward. “There are no plans to cancel it,” Ardeshir Amir Arjomand, senior political adviser to the opposition leader Mir Hussein Moussavi, said in a statement published Sunday on opposition Web sites.

The opposition also hopes to capitalize on the contradiction between Iran’s embrace of democracy movements abroad — Foreign Minister Ali Akbar Salehi referred Friday to “the brave and justice-seeking movement in Egypt” — and its crackdown on a kindred movement at home.

“If they are not going to allow their own people to protest, it goes against everything they are saying, and all they are doing to welcome the protests in Egypt is fake,” another opposition leader, Mehdi Karroubi, said in an interview last week.

The United States has also seized on the apparent hypocrisy, issuing a statement on Sunday that seemed intended to encourage a revival of the protests in Iran. “By announcing that they will not allow opposition protests, the Iranian government has declared illegal for Iranians what it claimed was noble for Egyptians,” the statement, from the White House, said. “We call on the government of Iran to allow the Iranian people the universal right to peacefully assemble, demonstrate and communicate that’s being exercised in Cairo.”

Even as President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad of Iran was welcoming the emergence of what he called a “new Middle East” on Friday, his government had already taken steps to quash the protest planned here.

In the week since opposition leaders filed the request for the march, the government has imposed restrictions on the communications and movements of Mr. Karroubi and detained at least 30 journalists, student activists and family members of figures close to the opposition leadership, according to opposition Web sites. There was also a vigilante attack on a senior reformist figure.

While the pro-democracy movement here professes similar political goals to those elsewhere, the differences are critical. The so-called Green movement here is, as the government points out, inherently counterrevolutionary; while democracy movements toppled secular dictatorships in Tunisia and Egypt, Iran’s Islamic Revolution did that here in 1979. The Iranian leaders praising the revolts of recent weeks claim them as their political progeny.

The democracy movement here has also been shaped, and battered, by recent experience. After the disputed election of June 2009, hundreds of thousands of Iranians took to the streets in protest, deploying their own social networks in what was then called “the Twitter revolution.” By the end of the year, a government crackdown characterized by killings and mass arrests had largely curtailed the movement’s public actions.

With those memories still fresh, opposition supporters are caught between fear and hopelessness on one hand, and the urge to seize what feels like a historic opportunity on the other.

“Things are far more complicated in Iran than Egypt,” said an online activist using the pseudonym Zahra Meysami. “People need to believe that things are possible. We desperately need hope. People need to see, not just believe, that the movement is alive.”

In the background has been a steady drumbeat of executions. International rights groups say 66 prisoners have been hanged this year, at least three of them arrested during the 2009 protests.

Mr. Moussavi and Mr. Karroubi have condemned the executions for creating an atmosphere of “terror in society.” Some activists have called them a deliberate ploy to neutralize dissent.

Still, opposition Web sites have announced protest routes for more than 30 cities.

“The victory of the freedom-seeking movement in Egypt and Tunisia can open the way for Iran,” read a statement from an association of Tehran University student political groups. “Without a doubt, the starting point of these protests was the peaceful freedom-seeking movement of Iran in 2009.”

But some of the movement’s foot soldiers learned other lessons from 2009.

“Many people suffered in the 2009 unrest,” Leyla, 27, said. “They don’t want one martyr to become two.

“This is my souvenir from the protests,” she said, pushing aside her hair to reveal a scar in the center of her forehead, etched by a police baton two summers ago.

“My parents will be locking me in the house tomorrow.”