TEHRAN, 20 February 2004 — A hardline crackdown on Iran’s reform movement widened yesterday on the eve of a disputed parliamentary election when prosecutors sealed a campaign office of the main reformist party and blocked its news website.
It followed the closure of the two most outspoken reformist newspapers on Wednesday for daring to report an unprecedented scathing open letter to Ayatollah Ali Khamenei by dozens of reformist lawmakers banned from today’s elections.
“They are blocking our channels of communication with the people,” Ali Shakourirad, one of the deputies and a leading member of the Islamic Iran Participation Front, told reporters.
The party is boycotting the election, which it says was rigged when an unelected watchdog disqualified more than 2,500 mainly reformist candidates. Another 1,179 contenders have since withdrawn from the race, the Interior Ministry said.
Criticizing Khamenei is an offense, and the Supreme National Security Council had ordered newspapers not to report the six-page letter in which deputies accused Khamenei of presiding over a system that trampled on people’s rights.
The Yas-e No and Sharq dailies, and the Rouydad website were shut down when they disobeyed.
Without directly mentioning the latest crackdown, pro-reform President Muhammad Khatami warned of the risk of despotism.
In a speech to intellectuals and scientists yesterday, carried by the official IRNA news agency, Khatami said freedom meant people had the right to choose.
“Despotism and imposition of ideas will bring no result except corruption, but freedom and an open atmosphere, while it may do some harm, will cultivate virtue,” he said.
Issa Saharkhiz, a reformist journalist and former deputy culture minister, told reporters he expected hardliners to ban more newspapers and possibly outlaw the Participation Front, led by the president’s brother, Muhammad Reza Khatami, and another reformist group, the Mujahideen of the Islamic Revolution Party.
“This move is part of a plan to restrict the press. I even expect them to declare the parties illegal,” he said.
“What they are doing is a continuation of a non-military coup begun in Parliament, another dimension of the parliamentary coup d’etat in the press.”
Iran’s conservatives, who have successfully stifled most of Khatami’s efforts at political and social reform since his 1997 election win, appear set to recapture Parliament amid widespread public indifference.
Most analysts expect the election turnout, in which some 46 million Iranians aged 15 and over are entitled to vote, to be well below the 67 percent who voted in 2000 elections, when reformist allies of Khatami triumphed.
The conservative Resalat daily described Khatami, facing a tough last 16 months in office in the event of a conservative majority in Parliament, as “crushed between two rocks.”
“One is the elimination of some of his supporters and the other is his belief in the principles of this system,” it said.
