Dozens arrested, wounded in Iran clashes over reform
student meeting
TEHRAN, Aug 27 (AFP) - Dozens of people were injured in violent clashes
between reform supporters of President Mohammad Khatami and Islamic hardliners
in the Iranian city of Khoramabad, press reports said on Sunday. See photo
The unrest followed days of protests after two prominent progressives
were blocked last week from addressing a conference of a leading pro-reform
student group holding its annual meeting in the city.
Rioters smashed up banks and police cars, started fires and attacked
government buildings on Saturday in a violent protest put down with the
help of the volunteer Islamic militia, the conservative Kayhan paper said.
Twenty demonstrators and 20 policemen were injured in the disturbances,
some badly enough to be hospitalised, and 20 people were arrested, the
paper said.
The pro-reform Hayate-No newspaper reported that the violence began
on Thursday when Mohsen Kadivar and Abdol Karim Soroush, often vocal critics
of the clerical regime, ran into trouble on arrival in Khoramabad.
Kadivar, who recently finished an 18-month prison term, told the paper
that angry protesters blocked them from entering cars at the airport to
take them to the conference of the Office to Consolidate Unity (OCU).
He said angry militants wielding clubs and chains smashed windows at
Khoramabad airport and eventually scaled the gates and ran onto the runway,
while others called for the deaths of the two men, the paper reported.
The pair were prevented from addressing the conference and ended up
being held several hours at the airport for their own security before being
sent back to Tehran by car.
Hayate-No meanwhile said that several other people were also injured
in Saturday's unrest when vigilantes attacked a tour bus carrying student
sightseers.
One of the students was unconscious for several hours after the attack,
the paper said.
Kadivar has openly questioned the constitutional principle of Veliyat-e
Faqih, under which final say on all matters of state rests in the hands
of the nation's supreme religious leader -- currently Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.
Souroush is well known for his writings calling for a more liberal Islamic
society.
The largest pro-Khatami party -- the Islamic Iran Participation Front
(IIPF), headed by the president's brother Mohammad-Reza -- appealed for
calm in a statement carried by the official IRNA news agency.
"The recent incidents in Khoramabad reveal that the government
does not possess sufficient means to carry out its duties, including ensuring
security," it said.
It accused hardline vigilantes of inciting unrest in order to "create
an atmosphere of pessimism and hopelessness regarding reform and the supremacy
of law in society."
Tehran MP Ali Shakuri-Rad, an IIPF member who sits on parliament's governing
commitee, condemned the interruption to the student meeting in the city.
He accused "wayward groups" of staging the unrest to forward
"their own political agenda (and) bamboozle others into taking such
actions," IRNA reported.
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