TEHRAN ( 2009-06-19 14:46:04 ) :Iran`s supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei appealed for calm in Iran on Friday after days of street protests against the results of a presidential election won by Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.
"Today the Iranian nation needs calm," Khamenei said in his first address to the nation since the protests broke out.
Khamenei has already approved the June 12 election results that gave hard-line Ahmadinejad a landslide victory, but he has not been able to ignore the powerful defiance of the opposition of his authority that has called the vote rigged.
Thousands of people, including Ahmadinejad, streamed into Tehran University on Friday to hear Khamenei speak. Some were draped in Iranian flags and carried pictures of Ahmadinejad. Others held sheets of paper with anti-Western slogans.
"Don't let the history of Iran be written with the pen of foreigners," Reuters quoted one flyer, which reflected official Iranian anger at international criticism of the post-election violence, as saying.
Khamenei's speech follows a sixth day of protests by Mousavi supporters. On Thursday, tens of thousands, wearing black and carrying candles, marched to mourn those killed in earlier mass rallies.
The largest and most widespread demonstrations since the 1979 Islamic revolution have rocked the world's fifth biggest oil exporter, which is also caught up in a dispute with the West over its nuclear program.
Iranian state media has reported seven or eight people have been killed in protests since the election results were published on June 13. Scores of reformists have been arrested and authorities have cracked down on both foreign and domestic media
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