Mass Trial for Protesters Begins in Iran

The New York Times

BEIRUT, Lebanon — The Iranian authorities opened an extraordinary mass trial against more than 100 opposition figures on Saturday, accusing them of conspiring with foreign powers to stage a revolution through terrorism, subversion, and a media campaign to discredit last month’s presidential election.

The trial, coming just days before President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is to be sworn in for a second term, signaled an intensified government attack on the opposition movement, which maintains that the June 12 election was rigged and continues to muster widespread street protests.

The charges read out in the courtroom were a broadside against virtually every major figure associated with reform in Iran, including some who are not in detention. State television broadcast images of the defendants, who included a former vice president and a Newsweek reporter, as well as some of the reform movement’s best-known spokesmen, clad in prison uniforms and listening as prosecutors outlined their accusations in a large marble-floored courtroom. Some were shackled.

Although no formal charges were brought against the leading opposition candidate, Mir Hussein Moussavi, prosecutors said that his campaign and the post-election protest movement that supports him has drawn crucial support from enemies of the state in Iran and abroad.

Opposition leaders angrily disputed the accusations on Saturday and protested that the defendants have had no access to lawyers or to details of the charges against them.

Mr. Moussavi issued a call on his Web site, Ghalam News, for Iranians to resume their nightly protest chants of “God is great” more intensely than ever. Those protests have infuriated the country’s ruling ayatollahs, and Basij militiamen roam the streets in force in an effort to snuff out the chanting wherever it crops up.

Although the trial was expected, its scale took many Iranians by surprise, coming days after the government said that there would be just 20 defendants.

As the trial started, just after 9 a.m., prosecutors accused a group of prominent critics of the government, like the Nobel laureate Shirin Ebadi and the historian Abbas Milani, both of whom are out of the country, and echoed the Iranian government’s longstanding claims that its internal critics are pawns of an international plot to undermine the Islamic republic through human rights groups and even terrorists.

The only media organization allowed to cover the trial was the semiofficial Fars news agency, which has links to the country’s Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps. That, in combination with recent revelations about the Guards’ central role in holding detained protesters, bolstered a widespread view that the Guards were aggressively leading the effort to put down the opposition movement.

Last week, shortly after Iran’s intelligence minister, Gholam-Hussein Mohseni-Ejei, said he was against the broadcasting of confessions by detainees, he was fired by Mr. Ahmadinejad, a former Guardsman.

On Saturday, prosecutors highlighted what they called a confession by Muhammad Ali Abtahi, a cleric who served as vice president under the reformist government of Mohammad Khatami. Mr. Abtahi, one of Iran’s most widely read bloggers, was arrested shortly after the election, and word later emerged that he had appeared in a tearful videotaped confession. Such confessions have been frequently used before, and are almost always obtained under duress, according to human rights groups and the defendants themselves.

“I believe the reformist had prepared for two or three years for this election, in order to limit the powers of the supreme leader,” Mr. Abtahi said, according to a Fars transcript. Fars carried news of the trial under the headline, “The accused know election fraud to be a lie.”

In his confession, Mr. Abtahi began by praising the high election turnout, a standard feature of the government’s approach to the issue. Later, he described hearing Mr. Moussavi describe allegations of electoral manipulation that did not, according to one of the opposition figures present, amount to proof of any large-scale fraud. But the three leading opposition figures — Mr. Moussavi, Mr. Khatami and former President Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani — “promised to always back each other up,” the confession said.

Mr. Rafsanjani, a powerful insider who has shown support for the opposition, harshly criticized the trial on Saturday, saying that “the obtaining of confessions from those who have recently been imprisoned,” which formed the basis of the indictment, had thrown the basis of the country’s entire government into question, according to a statement posted on the semi-official Mehr news agency.

In photographs, Mr. Abtahi could be seen sitting in a gray prison uniform in the front row at the trial clutching a white piece of paper, his cleric’s turban gone and his face a grim mask. Seated near him was Muhammad Atrianfar, a prominent journalist who served as deputy interior minister.

There were other former high-ranking officials in the dock as well, including a former deputy parliament speaker, Behzad Nabavi, and a former deputy economy minister, Mohsen Safai-Farahani.

The deputy prosecutor in Tehran, Abdolreza Mohebati, also referred to what he called incriminating remarks by Maziar Bahari, a journalist who works for Newsweek, suggesting that there was a “policy of the Western media” to say the electionwas rigged before it even took place.

Some senior government officials touted Mr. Abtahi’s confession as proof of the opposition’s malign intent. But the confession, which was disjointed and at times almost incoherent, seemed to be a kind of compromise with what his interrogators wanted him to say. At one point, Mr. Abtahi is quoted as saying, “I think there was the capacity for what the deputy prosecutor called a ‘velvet revolution,’ but I don’t know if the intention was there or not.”

Mr. Bahari, the Newsweek reporter, was brought out to speak to journalists on the sidelines of the trial, where he delivered a chilling mini-lecture on the media’s alleged role in fomenting a “velvet revolution.” He then asked forgiveness from the Iranian people and the supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.

Omid Memarian, an Iran consultant at Human Rights Watch who was jailed on accusations of jeopardizing national security in 2004, said the government now wants to justify its use of violence in putting down the demonstrations.

“It is part of their effort to say the results were not rigged,” Mr. Memarian said. “But it will backlash against them like other efforts.”