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Iran Courts Close Down Opposition
TEHRAN, March 18 (News Agencies) - Iran's conservative-run courts closed down the main opposition party on Sunday, less than three months before voters go to the polls for one of the most important elections in the nation's history.
They also banned four more publications close to the reform movement of embattled President Mohammad Khatami, whose silence over whether he will run for office has sparked widespread speculation about the June 8th vote.
Iran's revolutionary tribunal said the Iran Freedom Movement, which has been tolerated despite an official ban in place since 1988, was now in effect closed down because members wanted to overthrow the clerical regime.
"All activities of the so-called Iran freedom movement are forbidden and illegal," the court said in a statement cited by state radio Sunday, a week after around 20 people with links to the group were arrested.
It said other groups connected to the nationalist religious opposition were also outlawed, and that those jailed last Sunday could be charged with "collaborating with counter-revolutionary and terrorist groups."
The IFM, which played a key role in the 1979 revolution but was banned on direct orders of the Islamic republic's founder, the late Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, had still held press conferences and presented candidates in some elections.
The court said the IFM and other internal opposition groups had been "conspiring and sowing discord among the leadership of the regime," echoing a warning by Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Iran's supreme leader, on Friday.
"The enemy seeks to divide us and thus hurt our regime," Khamenei said, singling out the foreign media in particular for trying to divide Iran's leaders by favoring the pro-reform camp.
The reformists suffered another setback Sunday as the courts closed down four more pro-reform publications, including the daily Doran-e Emrouz, which just published its 100th issue the previous day.
The weeklies Mobine and Jameh-e Madani, as well as the monthly, Peyam-e Emrouz were also ordered to stop publication and the directors of all four will be charged in court, state radio reported.
The courts, in a crackdown that began last year after Khatami's reform movement ousted the conservative majority in parliament, had already closed down some 30 mostly pro-reform publications.
Khatami has increasingly gone public with his frustrations over his limited powers in office, and in October denounced the campaign against his liberalizing reforms as "sick."
Some presidential aides have suggested he might not have the stomach for another four-year term in office after encountering fierce opposition to his reform agenda.
But other supporters have said Khatami's movement has been victimized by the right, which controls key state institutions such as the courts, the police and the armed forces.
Parliamentary speaker Mehdi Karubi said last month that conservatives were "reducing" the president's allies to "silence," while another leading reformist charged the legislature was being "stripped of its power."
Khatami has also seen a number of close political allies jailed and the fate of at least one of them, dissident cleric Hassan Yussefi Eshkevari, remains unknown after his secret trial by a special clerical court.
Earlier Sunday some 400 people - many of them progressives and liberals with links to the IFM and other opposition groups, and including the IFM's head Ibrahim Yazdi - released a petition calling for Eshkevari's release.
The dissident is reportedly facing a number of serious charges, including apostasy, after he allegedly told a political conference in Germany last year that Muslim dress for women should be optional.
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