TIMES ONLINE: More than 2,000 Iranians have been arrested and hundreds more have disappeared since the regime decided to crush dissent after the disputed presidential election, a leading human rights organisation said yesterday.
“A climate of terror and of fear reigns in Iran today,” the International Federation for Human Rights, an umbrella body for 155 human rights organisations, said as it released the startling figures.
Last night 3,000 protesters tried to gather outside a mosque in Tehran where they believed that Mir Hossein Mousavi, the defeated presidential candidate, was going to speak. The police rapidly dispersed them and Mr Mousavi never appeared.
Having largely suppressed such protests, the security forces are engaged in a purge of dissidents in an apparent effort to decapitate Mr Mousavi’s so-called green movement.
Prominent Iranian actors, actresses, writers and singers are believed to have been seized at the weekend for supporting the demonstrators. Several opposition bloggers have fallen silent, probably because they have been detained. Almost anyone who dares to challenge President Ahmadinejad’s re-election is now considered an enemy of the state.
At least one senior Mousavi aide and other unidentified Iranians have appeared on state television to “confess” that the demonstrations were part of a foreign conspiracy against the Islamic Republic.
Human Rights Watch says that the Basiji — volunteer Islamic militiamen — are raiding houses, beating civilians and destroying their cars and other property in an effort to silence the nightly rooftop chanting that has become the opposition’s last means of peaceful protest. “The Basiji entered our neighbourhood and started firing live rounds into the air, in the direction of the buildings from which they believe the shouting of ‘Allahu akbar’ [God is greatest] is coming from,” a middle-aged Tehran resident said. >>> Martin Fletcher | Monday, June 29, 2009
