Iran: Top reformist leaders admit to plotting revolution

CAIRO, Egypt — Iranian leaders say they have obtained confessions from top reformist officials that they plotted to bring down the government with a "velvet" revolution.

Such confessions, almost always extracted under duress, are part of an effort to recast the civil unrest sparked by Iran's disputed June 12 presidential election as a conspiracy orchestrated by foreign nations, human-rights groups said.

Reports on Iranian Web sites associated with prominent conservatives said that leading reformers have confessed to taking velvet-revolution "training courses" outside the country. Atef, a Web site of a conservative member of parliament, referred to a video of Mohammad Ali Abtahi, who served as vice president in the reform government of former President Mohammed Khatami, as showing that he tearfully "welcomed being defrocked and has confessed to provoking people, causing tension and creating media chaos."

Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei's representative to the Revolutionary Guards, Mojtaba Zolnour, said Thursday that almost everyone now detained had confessed, raising the prospect that more confessions would be made public.

The Iranian government has made it a practice to publicize confessions from political prisoners held without charge or legal representation, often subject to pressure tactics such as sleep deprivation, solitary confinement and torture, according to human-rights groups and former political prisoners. Human-rights groups estimated hundreds of people have been detained.

Push to ban opposition

They said they fear the confessions are part of a concerted effort to lay the groundwork for banning existing reformist political parties and preventing any organized reform movement in the future.

"They hope with this scenario they can expunge them completely from the political process," said Hadi Ghaemi, coordinator of International Campaign for Human Rights in Iran, a New York-based research and advocacy group. "They don't want them to come back as part of a political party."

The confessions are used to convince a domestic audience that even cultural and academic outreach by some of the nation's top academics is really cover to usher in a velvet revolution, human-rights workers and former prisoners said.

"If they talk about the velvet revolution 24 hours a day, people don't care," said Omid Memarian, a former Iranian journalist who was arrested and forced to issue his own confession in 2004. "But if reformers and journalists say they are involved in it, it makes the point for them. Once my interrogators said, 'Whatever you say is worth 100 times more than having a conservative newspaper say the same thing.' "

The Fars news agency reported the confession of a Newsweek reporter, Mazaiar Bahari, that he had done the bidding of foreign governments, and a confession by the editor of a newspaper run by Mir Hossein Mousavi, the opposition leader.

Trials for Brit staffers?

At Friday prayers, high-ranking cleric Ayatollah Ahmad Jannati said the government planned to put on trial several Iranian employees of the British Embassy, a move that could provoke a tightening of European sanctions against Iran, including the withdrawal of ambassadors.

Jannati, head of the influential Guardian Council, told worshippers in Tehran that the embassy employees had "made confessions" and would be tried for their role in inciting protests following the presidential election.

In London, the Foreign Office said it was urgently seeking clarification from the Iranian government as to whether the cleric's remarks represented official policy.

"We are confident that our staff have not engaged in any improper or illegal behavior," Foreign Secretary David Miliband said. "We remain deeply concerned about the two members of our staff who remain in detention in Iran."

Of the nine staff members seized Sunday, five were released Monday after the first British and European protests. Iranian state media said Wednesday that three more had been freed, leaving one in custody. British officials, however, said two remained under arrest.

As local employees of the embassy, those arrested did not have diplomatic immunity. None are British citizens.

Although the Foreign Office has denied it had any role in stirring the ferment in Iran, officials in London have said the embassy in Tehran did not forbid local employees from participating in the protests as individuals. Iranian authorities say they have video of some embassy employees at the protests.

Hours after the threat of trials, the European Union seemed to hold back from a showdown, resolving to summon Iranian ambassadors in all 27 of the group's countries to send "a strong message of protest against the detention of British Embassy local staff and to demand their immediate release," said a European diplomat who spoke on condition of anonymity.

Other steps — such as a slowdown in issuing visas to Iranian officials seeking to visit Europe and a potential withdrawal of European ambassadors — would be considered, the diplomat said.