The Wall Street Journal - 26.11.2019

A16| Tuesday, November 26, 2019 THE WALL STREET JOURNAL.

WORLD NEWS

Thousands of Iranians
staged pro-establishment ral-
lies in Tehran and other cities
in a show of support after the
country’s leaders suppressed

nationwide protests that
erupted this month over a sud-
den increase in gasoline prices.
Monday’s marches followed
a week of violence against pro-
testers and an internet black-

ByAresu Eqbaliin

Tehran andSune Engel

Rasmussenin Beirut

out aimed at halting demon-

strations. Authorities began to

ease internet restrictions this

weekend as protests subsided.

At least 143 protesters were

killed in clashes with security

forces, according to Amnesty

International.

Iranian authorities blamed

the unrest on Iranian opposi-

tion groups based abroad and

foreign powers, including Israel

and the U.S., which has se-

verely damaged the country’s

economy with sanctions, and

called on Iranians to unite

against foreign pressure.

The commander of Iran’s

Revolutionary Guard warned

the U.S., Israel and other rivals

not to foment unrest.

“We have shown self-re-

straint, we compromised, but

be careful. Our patience has an

end. Respect the Iranian people

and behave,” Maj. Gen. Hossein

Salami told the crowd at Teh-

ran’s Revolution Square. He ac-

cused Iran’s enemies of using

the gas-price rise to stir un-

rest. “The enemy was waiting

for months but wasn’t able to

create an incident,” he said.

Participants, who also ral-

lied in the cities of Yazd, Boru-

jen, Minoudasht and Shadegan,

carried banners and chanted

slogans saying, “Death to

America,” and “death to the se-

ditionists”—a term used by au-

thorities for antiestablishment

protesters.

The U.S.-based nonprofit,

the Center for Human Rights in

Iran, said security forces have

arrested at least 2,755 people.

Iran’s judiciary has released a

number of the detainees after

“screening” them, it has said.

But authorities said they are

still investigating the unrest,

signaling more arrests.

Iranian authorities have la-

beled U.S. sanctions—imposed

after President Trump’s exit

last year from the 2015 nuclear

deal—as economic warfare.

The government said the fuel

price increase was intended to

fund cash subsidies for mil-

lions of Iranians suffering un-

der the economic downturn.

Although Monday’s rallies

were meant to show unity be-

hind the country’s leadership

in the face of hardship, they

also betrayed some discontent

with President Hassan Rou-

hani’s government and its in-

ability to alleviate problems

under a strained economy.

“The people’s protests

against livelihood problems

and inflation are completely

reasonable. But vandalism is an

invasion,” Farzad Akbari, a re-

tired teacher, said. He accused

some antigovernment protest-

ers of provoking violence at

the behest of foreigners.

been made that he was aware

while he was archbishop of

Buenos Aires, a post he held

until becoming pope in 2013.

The pope was later made

aware of the abuse at Provolo,

but victims and lawyers for the

children said he was slow to

start an investigation. Argen-

tine prosecutors said when the

Vatican sent representatives to

Lujan de Cuyo, they didn’t co-

operate with the investigations.

In 2017, the Vatican sent in-

vestigators to Argentina who

later recommended that the

pope defrock Father Corradi

and Father Corbacho. It is still

unknown, however, if any ac-

tion had been taken against the

two men. The Vatican didn’t re-

spond to requests to comment.

“We have to keep fighting

because the church continues

to not collaborate and provide

information,” Mr. Salinas said.

He said two nuns and several

other school employees will go

on trial in December for their

role in the scandal, which in-

volves at least 24 children.

The Argentine Catholic Bish-

ops Conference directed ques-

tions to the archbishop’s office

in Mendoza, which didn’t im-

mediately respond to requests

to comment. After Monday’s

verdicts, Mendoza’s arch-

bishop’s office said it expressed

solidarity with the Provolo vic-

tims and would work on pre-

venting similar crimes.

The Provolo Institute, on

the outskirts of the pictur-

esque city of Mendoza, was

once seen a model school

where poor, rural families sent

their hearing-impaired chil-

dren, hoping they would re-

ceive a good education.

Instead, children were sub-

jected to horrific abuse that

rights organizations said

amounted to torture. They

documented cases of students

being locked up in an attic for

days, where they were

chained, beaten and deprived

of food. The priests and school

employees targeted the most

vulnerable children, who were

sexually abused in bathrooms,

dorm rooms and in the

school’s chapel. The children’s

screams couldn’t be heard by

the other boys and girls.

Details of the abuse shocked

and angered Argentines. Fam-

ily members of victims and

their lawyers said there were

signs of abuse for years.

Cintia Martinez, whose son

studied at the school, said she

became alarmed in 2008 when

she found a drawing in her

son’s backpack of a man ap-

pearing to give another man

oral sex. She said her then-12-

year-old son, who previously

enjoyed school, stopped want-

ing to go to the institute and

had trouble sleeping in the

dark. Ms. Martinez said she

told school officials and au-

thorities of her concerns, but

nothing was done.

“No one ever helped me,”

said Ms. Martinez, who at-

tended Monday’s court session.

“If they would have done their

job, they could have avoided

the damage to all of these chil-

dren for so many years.”

Abuse victims at the

school’s branch in Italy pub-

licly denounced their abuse in

2009, leading the Vatican to

discipline several priests.

In 2014, the Italian victims

wrote to the Vatican and the

bishop of Verona about Father

Corradi and other Provolo

priests they said had abused

them. That was followed by

the Vatican investigators’ 2017

recommendation that the

priests be defrocked.

—Francis X. Rocca

contributed to this article.

An Argentine court found
two Catholic priests guilty of
sexually abusing children at a
school for the deaf, in a case
that horrified the country and
raised questions about how
Pope Francis, an Argentine na-
tive, responded to the crimes.
The two clerics—the Rev. Ni-
cola Corradi and the Rev. Hora-
cio Corbacho—and a third man,
a gardener, on Monday were
found to have sexually abused
11 boys and girls as young as 5
years of age at the Provolo In-
stitute in the town of Lujan de
Cuyo from 2005 to 2016.
Father Corradi, an 83-year-
old Italian citizen, was sen-
tenced to 42 years in prison,
while Father Corbacho, a 59-
year-old from Buenos Aires
province, received a 45-year-
sentence for abusing and, in
some cases, raping children.
The court gave an 18-year sen-
tence for sexual abuse to Ar-
mando Gomez, the gardener at
the school in the western
Mendoza province. Another
man who worked at the now-
closed Provolo Institute was
convicted of sexual abuse and
corruption of minors last year
and given a 10-year sentence.
“This is a one-of-a-kind
sentence, we’ve never received
one so high,” said Sergio Sali-
nas, a lawyer for the Argentine
human-rights group Xumek,
which represented Provolo
victims. “This will be a refer-
ence for so many other cases.”
The Vatican’s role in deal-
ing with the complaints of
parents and victims has been
questioned here and in Rome,
where the first public denunci-
ations were made in 2009
against a Provolo school in Ve-
rona, Italy. Father Corradi had
been reassigned to Argentina
in 1984 even though he had
been accused of abusing chil-
dren at the Verona school.
It is unclear when Pope
Francis—who has been dogged
by charges of insufficient zeal
in disciplining clerical abus-
ers—learned of the abuse,
though no public assertion has

BYRYANDUBE

Two Priests Are Convicted of Sex Abuse

Argentine court finds

clerics targeted deaf

students, in case that

puts pope in spotlight

Relatives, victims and support groups awaited Monday’s verdict at the Collegiate Criminal Court No. 2 in Mendoza, Argentina.

DIEGO PARES/EPA/SHUTTERSTOCK

Saudi authorities arrested

several high-profile people in

recent days, extending an effort

to sideline Crown Prince Mo-

hammed bin Salman’s per-

ceived opponents, despite a

push to repair the kingdom’s

international image to attract

investment.

At least nine people have

been arrested since Nov. 16, in-

cluding journalists, intellectuals

and businessmen.

The arrests come at a sensi-

tive time for the prince’s efforts

to reshape the Saudi economy.

Saudi officials are aggressively

pitching the multibillion-dollar

share sale of state oil giant

Aramco, testing investor appe-

tite that was dented by the

murder of dissident journalist

Jamal Khashoggi last year.

Despite the international

outrage triggered by the killing,

Prince Mohammed has largely

held on to political support

from key allies, including Presi-

dent Trump. That has embold-

ened Saudi authorities to arrest

more people they consider op-

ponents, rights groups say.

Since Prince Mohammed be-

came heir to the throne in

mid-2017, the Saudi govern-

ment has rounded up dozens of

activists, religious leaders and

business figures. That has

taken place alongside certain

social reforms such as granting

women the right to drive and

opening up the country to tour-

ism.

The recent arrests are un-

usual because the individuals

aren’t known widely for politi-

cal activity or strident criticism

of the government, indicating

how the effort has broadened

to even include people who

have supported the government

in the past.

A person familiar with the

matter said all of the people ar-

rested in recent days had been

identified by the government

for writing or speaking in sup-

port of the 2011 Arab Spring

uprisings that toppled a series

of Middle Eastern governments.

Those arrested include intel-

lectual Wa’ad al-Muhaya and

journalist Abdulmajeed al-Bu-

luwi, according to people famil-

iar with the situation and Lon-

don-based Saudi human-rights

organization Alqst. Both had

previously participated in

Prince Mohammed’s reform ini-

tiative. Another, prominent phi-

losopher Sulaiman al-Saikhan

al-Nasser, participated in gov-

ernment-sponsored cultural ini-

tiatives, according to rights ac-

tivists.

The Saudi government didn’t

respond to a request to com-

ment on the arrests.

Earlier this year, Saudi au-

thorities had arrested some 16

people, including a number of

cultural figures and intellectu-

als, according to Alqst.

“It’s all connected to the

same campaign of trying to

eliminate independent voices in

Saudi society, of going after

anyone who could be even

mildly critical or independent,”

said Adam Coogle, a researcher

at Human Rights Watch who

tracks events in Saudi Arabia.

Over the past year, Prince

Mohammed has attempted to

repair his international image,

which was shattered by the

Khashoggi killing, with mixed

results.

The crown prince continues

to face opposition from both

major parties in the U.S. Con-

gress, which has voted repeat-

edly to hold Saudi officials re-

sponsible for the murder and to

end U.S. support for the war in

Yemen.

ByJared Malsin

in Cairo and

Summer Saidin Dubai

Saudis

Arrest

Perceived

Opponents

LONDON—One recent eve-
ning, Holly Rigby stood in
front of a whiteboard with the
words “Anger Action Hope”
written on it, instructing vol-
unteers how to sell Labour
Party leader Jeremy Corbyn’s
socialist vision for Britain in
two minutes.
Ms. Rigby doesn’t work for
Labour or Mr. Corbyn. The 30-
year-old schoolteacher volun-
teers for Momentum, an activ-
ist group whose 40,
members have spent the past
four years pushing the coun-
try’s largest opposition party
to move sharply to the left and
reinvent itself as a socialist
movement that backs state in-
tervention on levels unseen in
the U.K. since the 1970s.
The election in December is
a litmus test for that vision.
While Boris Johnson’s ruling
Conservative Party wants the
U.K. to complete Brexit and
embrace global trade and free
markets, Mr. Corbyn is pitch-
ing a four-day workweek, na-
tionalizing the country’s
broadband infrastructure and
industries like water and rail,
as well as raising corporate tax
rates, steps that are enthusias-
tically backed by Momentum.
Labour trails the Conserva-
tives in the polls by around 12
points and its chance of winning
the election outright is as “close
to zero as one can safely say,”

said John Curtice, a polling ex-

pert. But Labour doesn’t need to

win to get into office after the

Dec. 12 poll. If Mr. Johnson fails

to get a majority, Mr. Corbyn

could still lead a group of

smaller parties into power.

Labour hopes to repeat what

happened in the 2017 election,

when Mr. Corbyn rallied from a

slow start to deprive the Con-

servatives of a majority in the

House of Commons. Labour

mobilized thousands of volun-

teers to canvass. The party’s

membership of around 500,

far outstrips that of the Con-

servative Party, which has

160,000 members. But histori-

cally, Labour supporters are

less likely to vote than Conser-

vatives, as many are younger.

Mr. Corbyn’s former cam-

paign manager, Jon Lansman,

formed Momentum in 2015 to

champion the party leader and

mobilize Labour’s base.

Momentum’s voice within

Labour has grown louder,

helping enlist passionate so-

cialist supporters while stok-

ing controversy by clashing

with trade unions and Labour

centrists as the group looks to

radicalize the party.

“They are a praetorian guard

for Jeremy Corbyn, not a van-

guard for a new politics,” said

Neal Lawson, chair of Compass,

a left-leaning think tank.

Momentum has tech-savvy

campaigners who can galvanize

voters in elections, said Tim

Bale, a politics professor at

Queen Mary University of Lon-

don. “They could make the dif-

ference between Labour losing

a marginal seat and keeping it.”

Bernie Sanders’s former

presidential-campaign adviser,

Becky Bond, recently met with

Momentum officials to fine-

tune scripts to be used while

canvassing and help with on-

line training for volunteers.

That playbook was used at a

campaign meeting on a recent

evening in north London.

Around 100 people were

taught how to canvass, to

channel voter anger over the

state of the country and out-

line Labour’s remedy.

A plan to bring in a four-

day week was cheered. Several

talked about Labour’s ambi-

tious environmental targets.

Brexit was barely mentioned.

Momentum’s tightening

grip around Labour has di-

vided the party. Ahead of the

election, several moderate

candidates have been replaced

with Momentum members.

Mr. Corbyn has also strug-

gled to capitalize on the Con-

servative Party tearing itself

apart over Brexit. His party’s

stance on the issue is unclear.

Despite pressure from Momen-

tum to back staying in the EU,

Mr. Corbyn refuses to say if he

would vote to leave the EU or

not. Labour is betting most of

its voters are more concerned

about other issues.

“It is all to play for,” Ms.

Rigby said. “There is a reason

why there is 250 people on

Tuesday night on door-knock-

ing training.”

BYMAXCOLCHESTER

Activists Work to Pull U.K. Labour Leftward

U.K. Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn attended a campaign event in northern England on Monday.

OLI SCARFF/AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE/GETTY IMAGES

Iranians Hold Pro-Establishment Rallies, Blame U.S. for Unrest

Victims and lawyers

said Pope Francis

wasslowtostartan

investigation.