In the early morning of July 9, 1999, students at the University of Tehran were sleeping through a long day of demonstrations for reforms in Iran when they woke up to a brutal reality.
Plainclothes police and paramilitary volunteers stormed the hostels, kicked in doors and beat students in their rooms. Some were thrown from windows and at least one student was killed while hundreds were injured.
What began as a relatively low-level demonstration against the closing days of reformist newspapers would become spread rapidly from the capital to other big cities.
Within days, at least five protesters would be left dead, hundreds injured and thousands more detained, in what would be the biggest anti-establishment protests in Iran for a decade since the 1979 Islamic Revolution.
Looking back on the events 25 years later, a former student who unwittingly became the face of the anti-clerical establishment protests says the protesters genuinely believed they could help usher in the social and structural reforms pushed by the reformist political camp.
“We thought the reforms represented a new paradigm, driven by individuals truly different and committed to change,” Ahmad Batebi told RFE/RL’s Radio Farda.
That the crackdown came during the presidency of the country’s last reformist president, Mohammad Khatami — who was elected in 1997 on promises to strengthen the rule of law and greater social freedoms — is no longer a surprise.
“Time has shown that the reformists were not fundamentally different from those in power, (they were) just another side of the Islamic Republic,” he said.
Batebi was one of thousands of reform-minded Iranian students who took to the streets in open defiance of the establishment after the raid on the dormitories.
When the cover of the British magazine The Economist showed him holding the bloodied shirt of a fellow protester who had been shot dead by security forces in Tehran, it woke the outside world to the demonstrations.
But now the iconic photo has also attracted the attention of the Iranian authorities. Batebi was arrested and sentenced to death for his alleged involvement in “street riots”.
Labeled a prisoner of conscience by legal groups, Batebi’s sentence was eventually reduced to 15 years due to international pressure. He served for nine years before fleeing to a neighboring one Iraq while on medical leave to treat the many illnesses he suffered in prison and eventually moved to the United States.
Batebi said the Islamic Republic has relied on violent repression since its inception, pointing to mass executions of political prisoners in the 1980s and deadly crackdowns on protests in the cities of Mashhad, Kazvin and Eslamshahr in the 1990s.
“The Islamic Republic usually used such suppression methods and did not recognize any other approach,” Batebi said.
The harsh response to student protests in 1999 was not “unusual”, Batebi added, because “the government was used to and prepared for such actions and did not know any other way to act”.
These events simply foreshadowed the establishment’s way of dealing with subsequent anti-establishment protests, including student demonstrations in 2003, mass demonstrations against the results of a disputed presidential election in 2009, and the suppression of the Green Movement.
“This is the natural nature of the Islamic Republic and it will continue to operate in this way,” Batebi said.
He also covered recent protests, including the 2019–20 protests sparked by water shortages and economic hardship, and the 2022 Women, Life, Freedom protests.
Up to 1,500 people demonstrated supposedly killed during nationwide protests that erupted in 2019. More than 550 protesters were killed in the 2022 crackdown on protests that followed the death of Mahsa Amini in police custody and lasted for months.
Rights watchdogs say the response has been marked by a litany of state atrocities, including extrajudicial executions, torture and rape.
Batebi said the level of repression the state would go to “exceeded what was experienced in university dormitories” in 1999, which was far eclipsed in scale and violence by protests in 2009, 2019 and 2022.
But so is the involvement of the general population, he added.
“Initially, the student movement was at the forefront of social protests, so their suppression was very visible,” Batebi said. “But over the past decade, every part of society has gotten involved, from teachers to workers to nurses.”
A former student protester said he sees “considerable maturity and sophistication among today’s activists” in Iran. But he laments that the reforms that the students of his era fought for, including greater political and social freedoms, are essentially dead.
“Only a name remains of the reform movement that once sought structural change,” he said. “The reforms we see today are very different from those original aspirations and are actually part of a government that is slightly deviating from its authoritarian segment while trying to align itself with the government’s long-term ideals.”
The recent victory of Masud Pezeshkian – who branded himself a reformist during Iran’s snap presidential election after the ultra-conservative Ebrahim Raisi died in a helicopter crash in May – will make no real difference, according to Batebi.
Batebi expressed doubts about Pezeshkian’s “reformist” credentials, but for argument’s sake wondered what might happen if he deviated from his association with Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei or from Raisi’s policies.
Even if Pezeshkian was “a real democrat, really modern and eager to bring about change in Iran, how would he go about it?” Batebi asked. “The tools for change in Iran are lacking. There are no institutions beyond the control of the Supreme Leader.”
This includes the judiciary, the media, the security forces and the military, the Department of Intelligence, and any influential government bodies “that could impede the president’s initiatives” in domestic and foreign policy.
“The situation is clear,” Batebi concluded. “Regardless of the democratic intentions or transformational aspirations of the individual, without the necessary tools for change, fundamental reform is unattainable. Therefore, in my opinion, the potential for change is practically non-existent.”
