Iranian Prosecutors Seek to Shut 2 Reform Parties: Via NYTimes.com .

Iran’s prosecutors moved Tuesday to shut down the nation’s two largest reform parties during a mass trial of former officials, journalists and academics all arrested and charged with conspiring to orchestrate a so-called velvet revolution in Iran.

In the nationally televised hearing, the government of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad sought to repudiate not only individuals charged with crimes but also the entire record of the reform movement. Prosecutors called on the judge to ban the two reform parties, the Islamic Iran Participation Front and the Islamic Revolution Mujahedeen Organization.

The accusations portrayed senior members of the reform movement, as well as journalists and academics, as counterrevolutionary secularists who were leading astray “young people who were experiencing politics for the first time,” according to Iranian news services.

Tuesday’s proceedings were the fourth of what human rights groups and reform leaders have described as Soviet-style show trials, complete with defendants issuing apologies to the state and scripted confessions. The trial was yet another sign that Mr. Ahmadinejad and his hard-line allies had already neutralized the reform movement as an organized force and were moving to consolidate power.

“What Ahmadinejad wants to do is expel them from under the umbrella of the regime, to eliminate them,” said Mustafa El-Labbad, an expert in Iranian affairs and director of the East Center for Regional and Strategic Studies in Cairo. “But this is a shortsighted goal because this will deepen their opposition to the regime — and he will create a problem for the political system in Iran in the long run.”

The proceedings served as a marker for the Islamic republic, with the transformation of so many figures who had early roles in the Islamic Revolution into enemies of the state. Chief among those were Saeed Hajjarian, one of the students who took over the United States Embassy in 1979 and who went on to be one of the architects of the reform movement and a deputy intelligence minister.

Authorities had asked another prisoner, Saeed Shariati, to read what they said was Mr. Hajjarian’s confession. Mr. Hajjarian could not read it himself because he was left disabled and had trouble speaking after being shot in the head in an assassination attempt in 2000, after he became a critic of Iran’s leadership.

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