- TEHRAN (Reuters) - Students
who have staged Iran's biggest pro-reform protests for three years claimed
a victory for freedom of speech Sunday as Iran's supreme leader ordered
a review of the death sentence against a dissident academic.
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- The week-long student rallies and strikes in support
of history lecturer Hashem Aghajari, condemned to hang for blasphemy, had
raised political tension at a crucial stage in the power battle between
Iran's reformists and hard-liners.
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- 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.
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- The hard-line Jomhuri-ye Eslami newspaper Sunday reported
Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Iran's most powerful figure, had ordered the judiciary
to review the case against Aghajari who angered hard-liners by questioning
their dearly-held belief in a marriage between religion and state.
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- "Based on the request of hundreds of university
professors, the leader ordered the judiciary to carefully review this case,"
the newspaper quoted an informed source as saying. "An appeals court
has been authorized to carefully review Aghajari's case."
-
- The newspaper, seen as being close to Khamenei, said
the death sentence would most likely be overturned on appeal.
-
- Students greeted the news as a victory and said they
would consider ending mass protests at campuses across the country.
-
- "There's no need for the students to protest now.
They presented and reached their goal which was the cancellation of the
verdict," said one student leader, who declined to be named.
-
- "It's a big victory for students in defense of freedom
of expression," he told Reuters by telephone.
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- JUDICIARY EMERGES WEAKER
-
- Analysts said Khamenei's intervention, which followed
widespread criticism of the Aghajari verdict by reformists and even some
prominent conservatives, revealed how concerned the leadership had been
about the protests.
-
- "The fact that Khamenei intervened showed that this
was an important and sensitive issue," said analyst Saeed Leylaz.
-
- The judiciary, which has been a major thorn in the side
of Khatami's reform efforts, closing scores of liberal newspapers and jailing
pro-reform intellectuals and journalists, emerges weaker from the case,
analysts said.
-
- "The judiciary will have to be more careful in future...
This was a setback for them," said Hamid Reza Jalaipour, lecturer
in political science at Tehran University.
-
- Parliament Speaker Mehdi Karroubi thanked Khamenei for
intervening. "I would particularly like to thank the leader for taking
into account the importance of blood and human life in Islam," he
was quoted as saying by the state IRNA news agency.
-
- Frustrated by five years of almost constant battle with
hard-liners, Khatami has presented two bills to parliament in a last-ditch
attempt to curb the power of the judiciary and the veto-wielding Guardian
Council.
-
- Khatami's allies have called on the mid-ranking cleric
to make good on his threat to resign if, as expected, the Guardian Council
blocks the bills.
-
- Analysts said the apparent climbdown over Aghajari would
encourage a rejuvenated student movement which had been virtually dormant
since student rallies were suppressed in 1999.
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- "Now they (the students) are aware of their power,"
said Leylaz.
-
- At the Shahid Beheshti University in north Tehran Sunday
several hundred students gathered for a rally arranged before news of the
Aghajari case review.
-
- Majid Hajbabaee, one of the organizers, said the students
had other, unfulfilled demands. "We want the release of all political
prisoners and that nobody be jailed for expressing their opinion."
-
- While rallies and class boycotts would be called off,
the students would continue the momentum of their protests by issuing regular
statements, he said.
-
- -- with additional reporting by Parinoosh Arami.
-
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