Iran reacts harshly to growing dissent

The government of Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is in the midst of a sweeping crackdown that both Iranian and U.S. analysts compare to a cultural revolution in its attempt to steer the oil-rich theocracy back to the rigid strictures of the 1979 revolution.

In the United States, attention has focused on the detention of four Iranian-American dual nationals, three of whom have been charged with endangering Iran's national security.

But according to human-rights activists and ordinary Iranians who described the events, the impact of the crackdown has been far more widespread at home, targeting groups as diverse as banks and labor unions, students and civic organizations.

The campaign includes arrests, interrogations, intimidation and harassment of thousands as well as purges of academics and new censorship codes for the media.

It has quashed or forced underground many independent groups, silenced protests over issues such as women's rights and pay rates, quelled academic debate and sparked fear about several aspects of daily life, sources said.

Escalation in April

The first extensive detentions came in April aimed at people wearing clothes deemed not to comply with Islamic strictures. Security forces swarmed streets in Tehran and grabbed people wearing skimpy head scarves, short overcoats or tight shirts. By the end of the month, about 150,000 had been stopped or detained, according to the national police chief. Most were held only briefly.

Since then, the campaign has widened. Student and union leaders have been arrested, and scholars have been harassed for refusing to sign statements attacking Israel, according to human-rights groups.

Private banks have come under attack for their interest rates.

The government moves have been met with resistance, but government officials have taken a tough line.

"Those who damage the system under any guise will be punished," Intelligence Minister Gholamhossein Mohseni-Ezhe'i declared in April. He accused women's and student groups of attempting to overthrow the government under the guise of civil-society movements.

Although the internal crackdown has been widespread, it has attracted relatively little attention outside Iran, in part because the government has harshly clamped down on the media.

Iranian news outlets have been issued a three-page letter from the Supreme National Security Council listing forbidden topics. Barred subjects include the enforcement of Islamic restrictions on dress, the effect of U.N. sanctions on everyday life, international sanctions on Iranian banks and travel bans on Iranian nuclear and military officials.

Also on the do-not-publish list were stories about tensions between Iran's Shiites and Sunnis, ethnic clashes in the provinces, and strained relations between Iran and other Muslim countries.

Western news organizations also felt intimidated. The bureau chief of one news organization likened present-day Iran to the former Soviet Union, where foreign journalists writing about human-rights abuses would have their visas revoked and local staffers regularly were summoned to interviews with intelligence officials.

"There are many things that I would like to write about, but can't," the journalist said, speaking on condition of anonymity. "They would shut down our office and kick us out."

Crackdown theories

Why the regime has cracked down now remains unclear, although analysts offered several overlapping theories.

The widespread purges and arrests are expected to have an impact on parliamentary elections next year and the presidential contest in 2009, either discouraging or preventing reformers from running against the hard-liners who dominate all branches of government, Iranian and U.S. analysts say. The elections are one of several motives behind the crackdowns, they add.

Public signs of discontent — such as students booing Ahmadinejad on a campus in December, teacher protests in March over low wages and workers demonstrating on May Day — are also behind the detentions, according to Iranian sources.

"The current crackdown is a way to instill fear in the population in order to discourage them from future political agitation as the economic situation begins to deteriorate," said Karim Sadjadpour, of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.

"You're going to think twice about taking to the streets to protest the hike in gasoline prices if you know the regime's paramilitary forces have been on a head-cracking spree the last few weeks."

Despite promises to use Iran's oil revenue to aid the poor, Ahmadinejad's economic policies have backfired, triggering 20 percent inflation over the past year, increased poverty and a 25 percent rise in the price of gas last month. More than 50 of the country's leading economists wrote an open letter to Ahmadinejad warning he is endangering the country's future.

Others see the repression as an attempt to establish firm control over the domestic situation as the country girds for possible war, international isolation or economic sanctions.

Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, the senior cleric who carries ultimate authority over political and security matters in Iran, urged Iranians in March to resist the West's "psychological warfare." Many people in Iran view his speech as having been the first sign of the campaign against dissenters.

"Currently, some factions in the government view all dissidents and critics as parts of America's secret plan for a nonviolent 'velvet revolution,' " Ahmad Zeidabadi, a leading Iranian dissident, wrote in a May 30 article in Roozonline, an Internet journal.

"Unfortunately, a significant part of the security and intelligence apparatus shares this view."

Congress appropriated $66.1 million this year to support Iranian opposition groups, and Bush administration officials have talked openly of seeking "regime change."

Iranian leaders say they believe the U.S. is trying to manipulate domestic groups to overthrow their rule the way Western-backed civil-society organizations helped unseat the Ukrainian government 2 ½ years ago. The U.S. government has refused to say what groups received its money.

Iran's government also might be particularly frightened lately. The U.S. has flooded the Persian Gulf with military hardware, including two aircraft-carrier groups and a third Marine expeditionary group. The U.S. also reportedly has embarked on covert efforts to stir unrest among Iran's large number of minority groups.

Kaveh Afrasiabi, a former Tehran University political-science professor who now lives in the U.S., described a "national security paranoia connected to the U.S. military buildup in Iran's vicinity, reports of White House's authorization of espionage activities inside Iran, and the various acts of terrorism by fringe minority groups ... reportedly supported by the CIA."

Universities have been hard hit by purges of faculty and student detentions, Iranian analysts and international human-rights groups say. Professors still on campus have been warned about developing relationships with their foreign counterparts, who may try to recruit them as spies.

"Ahmadinejad has repeatedly stated his goal of purging Iranian society of secular thought. This is taking shape as a cultural revolution, particularly on university campuses, where persecution and prosecution of students and faculty are intensifying with each passing day," said Hadi Ghaemi, the Iran analyst for Human Rights Watch.

In recent weeks, the government has also tried to dissolve student unions and replace them with allies from the Basij — a young, volunteer paramilitary body — rights groups say. Between April 30 and June 6, eight student leaders involved in the elections at Amirkabir University — where Ahmadinejad was reportedly jeered as students set pictures of him on fire — have been jailed.

The campus purges have been mirrored in virtually all organizations that receive government paychecks, as hard-liners have been slotted into positions in the civil service, security apparatus, financial institutions and public services in the two years since Ahmadinejad took office, replacing appointments by his more moderate predecessor, President Mohammad Khatami, Iranian analysts said.

The government's first move came in early April with mass collections of satellite dishes, which are illegal but had been widely tolerated. From there, the campaign quickly grew.

Militiamen posted checkpoints along many streets, including the popular downtown Seventh of Tir Square, where women shop for coats, and began arresting and questioning women. Barbers were fined for giving Western haircuts or trimming men's eyebrows.

In mid-April, an appeals court released six religious militiamen who allegedly had murdered a young couple deemed immoral. The release contributed to an atmosphere of impunity for security forces, said the New York-based Human Rights Watch.

On the streets, young men wearing tight T-shirts or clothes decorated with Western brand names were paraded around with toilet utensils strung around their necks.

"When we see people being beaten, hit, arrested — no one wants to go to prison," said one Tehran resident, an engineer, who asked that his name not be published for fear of retribution.

Footage of the campaign was broadcast on state television. In one scene a woman in an all-covering black chador, backed by two members of the security forces, approached a fashionably dressed woman and sternly reproached her for not dressing appropriately for an "Iranian woman."

But more violent footage, often taken by cellphone video cameras, surfaced on the Internet and on satellite channels beamed from abroad, including the U.S.-funded Voice of America.

Those videos are one sign of resistance to the crackdown. Others include melees that erupted in some Tehran neighborhoods as young people fought back against the morality enforcers.

In recent days, street-level harassment has begun to wane, and young people have begun to edge up the volume of pop music playing on their car stereos and allowing their head scarves to recede.

Despite media restrictions, newspapers have once again started criticizing Ahmadinejad for his most recent anti-Israel remarks and judiciary officials allowed the reopening of two previously shuttered dailies in recent weeks.

But even as the government has eased some restrictions, it has moved forcefully against new targets. In a warning to academics, Iran's Ministry of Intelligence issued a statement warning university professors to avoid being recruited by Western spying networks while attending "so-called scientific conferences" abroad.

And in late May, prosecutors charged three dual-nationals with espionage and endangering Iranian national security. The three are Haleh Esfandiari, director of the Middle East program at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in Washington, D.C.; Kian Tajbakhsh, with George Soros' Open Society Institute; and Parnaz Azima, a journalist with U.S.-funded Radio Farda who remains free on bail but is forbidden to leave the country. Relatives and colleagues deny the charges.

Held without charges

A fourth detainee, Ali Shakeri, a founding board member of the Center for Citizen Peacebuilding at the University of California, Irvine, has been jailed but not formally charged.

The government's actions appeared aimed at people critical of or a threat to Ahmadinejad and his circle. Among the most notable was Hossein Moussavian, an experienced Iranian diplomat close to Ayatollah Hashemi Rafsanjani, a rival to the president. Moussavian was arrested and charged with espionage after meeting with German diplomats.

Students at Amir Kabir University in Tehran were jailed on charges of lampooning Grand Ayatollah Khamenei in a campus newspaper. Trade unionists reported the arrests of labor leaders in the heavily Kurdish areas bordering Iraq and Turkey.

In a move that some people say is related to the crackdown, the country's burgeoning private banking sector also has come under attack.

In late May, Ahmadinejad ordered banks to cut interest rates on loans, a move consistent with his populist economic policies.

Many economists consider the interest-rate cuts inflationary and a potentially damaging blow to the banks, powerful and growing institutions that don't answer to the government.

The crackdown has had an extraordinary effect on the life of the country, especially in the capital.

"Overall, it's a very scary time," said a business consultant in Tehran.

Information in this article, originally published June 18, 2007, was corrected June 18, 2007. The first paragraph was written by Robin Wright of The Washington Post. The story, by Borzou Daragahi of the Los Angeles Times, included additional information from Wright's account. The byline indicated that the lead paragraph was Daragahi's.