Iran's hardline clergy has begun arresting and interrogating journalists, students and political activists in a new attempt to intimidate opposition before next year's parliamentary elections.
In the most extensive wave of detentions in recent years, plainclothes security agents have detained hundreds of student activists as well as journalists and reformist commentators.
"This is not a new process," said Reza Yousefian, a member of parliament and member of the
reformist movement.
"But it has accelerated. They want to prepare themselves for the next round of parliamentary elections," Yousefian said.
"Newspapers and students are the two engines of reform and they have been damaged and disrupted in some way by these arrests," he said.
The most recent detentions include the arrest of Abolghasem Golbaf, the editor in chief of the political monthly Gozaresh.
Ever since the election of reformist President Mohammad Khatami as president six years ago, conservative militants acting through the judiciary and security services appear to have waged a campaign of repression to undermine the reformist movement.
A number of Khatami's allies have been imprisoned, a senior adviser was murdered three years ago and dozens of newspapers have been shut down.
Reformist activists say the pro-democracy demonstrations which erupted in June have provided a fresh opportunity for the conservative clergy to go after the most strident voices demanding reform of the country's theocracy.
Minister of Science, Research and Technology Mostafa Moin submitted his resignation last week amid speculation that he had objected to political interference at universities and had come under pressure to punish student activists after the June demonstrations.
Upon release, many students and other activists are less ready to speak their minds and some journalists choose to stay away from "sensitive" topics. After being freed on bail, dozens of journalists and activists operate under the cloud of a pending trial.
But despite the imprisonment of more than 20 journalists in recent months, the news media and dissident voices are growing increasingly defiant as they test the limits of the system.
Details of psychological torture are emerging and a flurry of open letters to supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, have castigated "authoritarian methods."
In a 32-page letter published last month, Abbas Abdi, a reformist held in solitary confinement, described how the authorities put inmates under extraordinary pressure to extract confessions.
A former student radical who helped to seize the US embassy in 1979, Abdi was imprisoned and accused of plotting with foreign powers after his firm published a poll last year showing more than 70 percent of Iranians favored restoring relations with the US.
The death in custody last month of a Canadian photojournalist of Iranian descent, Zahra Kazemi, shocked the country. Revelations that she died of a blow to the head and that authorities might have tried to hush up details of her case have underlined the reformists' long-held concerns that hardliners are operating parallel security services and unregistered detention centers outside legal authority.
Many voters, disappointed with the pace of reform, are expected to boycott elections next February, allowing the conservatives to win back control of parliament.
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