Not Ready For Prime Time

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Like most Iranian political activists arrested in recent months, student leader Ali Afshari has been held in solitary confinement, denied access to a lawyer and allowed just one visit from his immediate family. Since his arrest five months ago for a speech criticizing Iran's Supreme Leader, Afshari has been sentenced to six years in prison for participating in a conference the judiciary said was aimed at overthrowing the regime. But Iranians last week watched a televized interview with Afshari on state TV without the benefit of any of this information. Afshari appeared dressed in a checkered shirt, not looking as though he had been summoned from his cell only moments earlier. With dark circles under his eyes, he rambled through a confession in which he admitted planning to overthrow the Islamic Republic. The subversive method "is political overthrow," Afshari nodded. "But by peaceful means."

These classic hallmarks of a show trial have prompted concern for the fate of 16 other dissident intellectuals arrested since January. But as Iranian reformists see it, the country's powerful, hardline judiciary has something else on its agenda besides unmasking alleged subversives. "The goal of this interview, coinciding with the announcement of candidates for the presidential election, is intended to discourage voter participation and reduce [reform-minded] President Khatami's vote," says publisher Hamid-reza Jalaipour, whose daily newspaper Nosazi (Modernization) was banned on May 9 after only five issues.

When 42 religious-nationalists were first arrested two months ago, it looked like a scheme to discourage the then still undecided Khatami from running for re-election on June 8. Now, according to the prisoners' family members, the judiciary is pressuring the activists to confess to plotting to overthrow the Republic. The judiciary is using the methods of psychological intimidation to turn the regime's critics into criminals, they claim. But these Islamic nationalists, who are outside the reform movement, are hardly wide-eyed radicals; they accept the tenets of the Islamic Republic, advocate tolerance, and mostly keep their quiet criticisms within the limits proscribed by the regime.

In the course of the 45-minute, edited interview that Afshari claimed took place at his own behest, the student leader said that foreign governments and media had used the activities of the Office to Consolidate Unity, Iran's main student group, to undermine the regime. He linked the reform movement to the overthrow plot, and said the ultimate goal was to topple the Supreme Leader and turn Iran into a secular state. Reformists were appalled by the crudity of the confession. "What we heard from Afshari's lips invokes the contents of a revolutionary court press release," says Ali Tajernia, a parliamentary MP. The head of Tehran's Revolutionary Court, Hojjatoleslam Mobsheri, refused to allow other media access to Afshari, but maintained that "he gave this interview in complete health and well-being, without any pressure." Afshari's family, in a letter to the Revolutionary Court cited by a student news agency, said the conditions Afshari had been kept in "amounted to torture."

In meetings with family, some activists said they have been told to sign confessions under threat of execution and been pressured to do interviews like Afshari's. Their lawyers don't even know which articles of the criminal code they are charged with breaking. "After prolonged sensory deprivation, people become suggestable," says Maryam Rassoulian, a psychiatrist whose husband, writer Mahmoud Omrani, is among those detained. "These conditions break a person." Rassoulian and other wives and daughters gather weekly to write letters and exchange information.

Reform leaders hope that after the election the activists will be released. The Tehran headquarters of the Office to Consolidate Unity, a decaying old house adorned with posters of Ayatollah Khomenei, is empty. The arrest of their leader — and their own disunity — have convinced them that for now a central meeting place isn't worth the cost of the electricity. Fatimeh Haghighatzoo, a reformist MP, said the Afshari interview was aimed at "destroying the student movement." With their leader on television saying that distributing leaflets is part of a scheme to overthrow the regime, Iran's students can only hope that the dim light of reform doesn't sputter out altogether.