IRAN: Student leaders protest police detentions

BY DOUG LORIMER

Student leaders held sit-ins on June 22 in front of the Iranian parliament (Majlis) and inside Tehran University to protest the detention of classmates following violent attacks on student protests the previous week by pro-clerical thugs.

Police chief Mahmoud Japalaqi said that 520 people, including 18 women, were arrested "during the clashes and riots" in Tehran beginning June 10 and handed over to judicial authorities. "Only 10 of them are students and the rest of [the] rioters are ruffians", Japalaqi told the government-run daily Iran.

But student leaders claimed most of the detainees were classmates. "We believe more than half of those detained are students. I know about three dozen who were either arrested or disappeared", student leader Hasan Shoaei told the Associated Press.

According to a June 25 Reuters report, the son of at least one reformist MP has also been detained. Several MPs complained they had received death threats since releasing a letter that called for an end to clerical control over Iranian politics.

Shoaei and about 30 other student leaders and families of detainees gathered outside the Majlis to protest the arrests. Inside Tehran University, about 50 people held a similar sit-in demanding information on the detainees.

Inside the Majlis, 166 of the parliament's 290 members signed a statement denouncing the "savage and ruthless attacks" by the reactionary pro-clerical vigilantes against the students, and expressed support for the sit-ins.

In his first comment on the student protests and the police crackdown, pro-reform President Mohammad Khatami told reporters on June 25: "In this country criticism should be free, the right of protest should be free. But everything should be in the framework of the law."

Reuters reported that "MPs said Khatami, whose popularity has slumped in recent years due to the slow pace of reform in Iran, had a duty to live up to his 1997 and 2001 election pledges to bring greater democracy, justice and social freedoms."

Meanwhile, a Washington Post-ABC News poll of 1024 Americans published on June 24 found that 56% said they would support the use of force to block Iran's alleged amibitions to develop nuclear weapons. As with Iraq, US officials claim that Iran has a secret "weapons of mass destruction" program.

From Green Left Weekly, July 2, 2003.

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From GLW issue 544