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Copyright © 1999, by the Middle East Data Project, Inc. All rights reserved.
On August 14 Iran's Supreme National Security Council, which is chaired by President Khatami, issued its long-awaited report on the attack on student dormitories last July that sparked riots in Tehran and some 18 other cities across Iran.
The report called the police attack against the students a "blunder," but cleared the head of the Law Enforcement Forces, General Hedayat Lotfian, of any wrongdoing. During the disturbances, the students had called for Lotfian's dismissal. In a communiqué released in Tehran on August 28, the Elected Council of Students Sit-in, a leadership group that emerged from the strike, reiterated that demand, coupled with a new threat. "If the administration policies continue to resemble what they have been in the past, even these measures [the firing of Lotfian and the restructuring of the security organizations] will not substantially solve the problems."
The Supreme National Security Council report stressed that the attack "was not ordered by the highest police command" and absolved General Lotfian of any responsibility. Instead, the report singled out for blame the Tehran city police chief and six deputies, as well as anti-riot police and Islamic militants from the Ansar-e-Hezbollah group. The "incompetence" of the officers was responsible for the "blunder," the report said, adding that the students bore some of the blame for their "provocative attitude" during the "illegal demonstration." Seven top security officials and a group of hard-line vigilantes are to stand trial in Iran for their role in an attack, according to wire service reports and Iranian press accounts.
"The forces broke the law by entering the dormitory, beating up students and destroying the premises. Those who made this decision and took part in it are guilty," the report said. "The committee has introduced the guilty ones identified in the report to the judiciary."
Angry campuses this fall: Higher Education Minister Mostafa Moin said 2,000 people were beaten and hundreds wounded in the university attack alone, IRNA reported (8/15). Moin warned there would be new disturbances this fall if the government continued to hold students arrested during the disturbances for purely political reasons. "I want to stress that the student arrests, particularly if they were made for political or factional reasons or if their cases are not treated fairly, will lay the ground for more crises in the future," he said.
Moin added that disturbances in the provincial capital of Tabriz that happened at the same time had been "forgotten about," and said President Khatami has ordered an investigation into the incident.
Details of the Tabriz attack appeared for the first time in Hamshahri (8/11), which reported that LEF and Ansar-e Hezbollah plainclothesmen attacked female students at Tabriz University in mid-July "with a violence and brutality never seen before," undressing them in public and beating them with electric cables and hoses. The attackers "used hand guns, shooting at random at students, mostly the female ones," according to Mohammad Reza Milani, a member of Parliament from Tabriz quoted by Hamshahri. "They used machine guns and tear gas." As they forcefully undressed the female students, the attackers jeered at them: "You who support the civil society don't need to wear hejab" (the Islamic veil).
The report: The regime is trying to spin the attack on the student dormitory, as it previously tried to spin the assassination of dissidents Parvaneh and Darioush Forouhar, as "foreign plots" aimed at undermining the Islamic Revolution.
"The bitter event of the Tehran university dorm that had hurt the leader of the Islamic revolution, disheartened the President and deeply touched the noble people of Iran, once again awakened the people to the reality of the existence of the domestic and foreign enemies laying in wait to exploit the situation to their own benefits against the Islamic revolution and Islamic sovereign state," the report began. "However, political .....
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