TEHRAN, 23 June 2003 — Iranian student leaders said yesterday hundreds of students had been arrested following a wave of protests against the establishment, and warned the crackdown could make them adopt more radical and violent methods.
The student leaders, who came to Parliament to protest the arrests, said that since Thursday 87 students had been detained in Tehran, 250 in the northwestern city of Urumiyeh, 105 in the northeastern city of Sabzevar and 30 in Hamadan in western Iran.
“Even if they send us to prison and take us to solitary confinement there are others who have more daring slogans than us and they will confront the system with more violent methods,” Saeed Razavi Faqih, one of the student leaders, said. “Today we are sitting on a keg of gunpowder. Anyone who wants to play with this fire will be burned,” he said.
While venting most of their anger at the conservative opponents of moderate President Mohammad Khatami, demonstrators have also called on the president to resign for failing to deliver the promised reforms after six years in office.
Students and reformist lawmakers said the students had been arrested by plainclothes security officials carrying arrest warrants authorizing them to detain anyone under suspicion.
The whereabouts of many of the detained was unknown, they said.
“There has been a mass arrest order. They can arrest whoever they want,” one MP told Reuters on condition of anonymity.
Senior reformist parliamentarian Mohsen Armin said deputies had asked to meet the ministers of intelligence, interior and higher education, to learn the fate of those arrested.
“We are facing a new wave of arrests,” the official IRNA news agency quoted Armin as saying. “This shows Khatami was right when he talked about the existence of a government within a government.”
In Shuneh, Jordan, US Secretary of State Colin Powell said that the United States has a duty to encourage Iranian protests against the country’s regime but is not looking for a fight with the country.
