Three years after heavy clashes between students and security forces in Iran, the government is clamping down hard on dissenters and potential "troublemakers". All marches commemorating the storming of a Tehran student dormitory by right-wing vigilantes on 8 July 1999 have been banned.

Dozens of students were reported to have been killed in the attack, carried out by riot police and the hard-line Ansar Hizbollah faction, and it was swiftly condemned from all sides of the Iranian political spectrum. But street fighting and unrest across Iran over the following days quickly dissipated the sympathy the reform movement initially received from the general population, prompting some to suggest that the riots had in fact been instigated by infiltrators bent on undermining the reform movement.

This year, students aim to forestall such right-wing tactics by complying with the government ban, instead pouring their energy into publicising their cause and reviving a number of progressive newspapers shut down over the past years. They are also pressing for an investigation into the fate of Ahmad Batebi, who became the face of the student movement after he was condemned to 15 years in prison for holding up a bloodied shirt during a protest. Batabi claims to have been tortured by secret police and forced to sign false confessions accepting responsibility for the riots in 1999.

Iranian students, who were instrumental in bringing the party of pro-reform cleric Mohammed Khatami to government in 1997, are regarded as the largest radical movement in the country and the main force fo change. Conservatives view the student movement as the greatest threat to their grip on power, and have repeatedly tried to brand them as foreign-sponsored troublemakers - a label that carries strong stigmata among the generally nationalist Iranian population.

Further links on the situation in Iran: Release of more footage by the Iran Tribunal | MayDay in Tehran