Iran’s prosecutors moved Tuesday to shut down the nation’s two largest reform parties during a mass trial of former officials, journalists and academics all arrested and charged with conspiring to orchestrate a so-called velvet revolution in Iran.
A mass trial on Tuesday in Tehran for those arrested and charged with conspiring to orchestrate a so-called velvet revolution.
In the nationally televised hearing, the government of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad sought to repudiate not only individuals charged with crimes but also the entire record of the reform movement. Prosecutors called on the judge to ban the two reform parties, the Islamic Iran Participation Front and the Islamic Revolution Mujahedeen Organization.
The accusations portrayed senior members of the reform movement, as well as journalists and academics, as counterrevolutionary secularists who were leading astray “young people who were experiencing politics for the first time,” according to Iranian news services.
