Protester into prisoner
The Economist
November 13, 1999 , U.S. Edition
Tehran - LAST summer, Tehran was rocked by students demonstrating for
reform and democracy. The Economist, writing about these events, carried
a photograph on its cover of a demonstrator holding up a bloodied T-shirt,
which looked (though there is no proof of this) as if it might have belonged
to a fellow-protester beaten by the police or vigilantes. Other newspapers,
including Iranian ones, used the same dramatic photograph. The publicity
did the student, Ahmad Batebi, no good. Last month, he was punished by
a revolutionary court which sentenced him to ten years in prison.
The court sentenced six students, whom it accused of being the demonstration's
ringleaders, to various prison terms. Manouchehr Mohammadi, charged with
inciting the protests and co-operating with western intelligence, received
the harshest prison sentence: 13 years. The other four were sent down for
two to three years. The fate of another group of four, reported to have
been tried in secret and given the death penalty, is still unknown. None
of the Islamist vigilantes whose dawn raid on a student dormitory sparked
the protest appears so far to have been arrested.
The protesters' crime was to cross a red line: they moved from calling
for the reform of the theocratic system to challenging the system itself.
Yet this is exactly what Abdollah Nouri, a former interior minister and
leading reformist, is doing before a Special Court for Clergy. Mr Nouri,
who is charged with undermining the principles of the Islamic revolution
in his newspaper Khordad, has turned the court into a forum for the most
sensitive of issues. He has challenged the legitimacy of the court, set
up by the late Ayatollah Khomeini. He has questioned the absolute authority
of Khomeini's successor, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. And he has charged the
clerical establishment with being behind last year's murder of secular
intellectuals.
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