IRAN: Hundreds of Iranian hardliners clashed with pro-reform students at a demonstration in Tehran yesterday in the first serious outbreak of violence in 10 days of university protests against a dissident's death sentence.
The student rallies and strikes in support of history lecturer Hashem Aghajari, condemned to hang for blasphemy, have raised political tension at a crucial stage in the power struggle between Iran's reformists and hardliners.
The violent clashes come after Ayatollah Ali Khamenei on Sunday ordered a review of Aghajari's case in an apparent effort to defuse the political row.
Analysts said Ayatollah Khamenei's intervention revealed how concerned the leadership had been about the student protests.
Student leaders responded to the Ayatollah's move by ordering an end to the protests, but it was not clear if student rank-and-file would heed the call.
Witnesses said fighting broke out when a group of about 300 Islamic vigilantes entered a hall at Tehran University, the centre of a demonstration by some 3,000 reformist students.
The clashes came after riot police sealed the area and parked buses around the campus to obscure the view from outside. The students later emerged, some with blood on their faces, triumphantly punching their fists into the air and chanting "referendum, referendum" in a call for a nationwide vote on the political future of the Islamic Republic.
Police stood back letting the students disperse, but riot police clad in body armour mounted on motorbikes waited on stand-by in side streets.
The almost daily meetings at universities in the capital and across the country have been the biggest pro-reform protests seen in Iran since police and hardline vigilantes put down violent Tehran student unrest in the summer of 1999.
Ayatollah Khamenei's intervention was an apparent setback for the hardline judiciary's four-year legal onslaught against leading reformers, liberal intellectuals and the pro-reform press.
The reformists, allied to President Mohammad Khatami, enjoy popular support and dominate parliament, but have run into stiff resistance from conservatives opposed to changing Iran's Islamic system who control the judiciary and other key state bodies.
Reformists accuse hardliners of trying to spark violent clashes with the students as a pretext for a big crackdown in which dozens of top reformers could face arrest.
A conservative newspaper, seen as close to the Ayatollah, said the review would probably lead to Aghajari's sentence of 74 lashes, eight years jail and execution being overturned, but his guilty verdict for questioning clerical rule may still stand and some form of punishment can be expected.- (Reuters)