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Simpson on Sunday: In which I am manhandled by Iranian fanatics By John Simpson

THE night was hot, and full of the noise of car horns. Val-i-Asr Avenue, one of the chief thoroughfares of the city, was choked. Everyone was out, looking for something to happen yet not quite wanting to start it themselves.

That afternoon it had become clear that Mohammed Khatami, Iran's would-be reformist president, had won a second term with 78 per cent of the vote: greater, even, than his landslide of 1997. So now it was Sunday evening, a public holiday, and half the population of Teheran seemed to be looking for a way to celebrate.

There was a certain irony here. Twenty-two years after the revolution, Iranians finally had a government they liked and could identify with and yet they were scared of showing it. As my television team, three of us altogether, finally inched through the traffic and reached the large public park close to the television station, we could see why. Red lights flashed everywhere. Most of the police force of greater Teheran seemed to be here, together with some nastier elements.

The park in Val-i-Asr Avenue is large and pleasant. Now it was crammed with young people. In the little woods and bushes fully armed detachments of riot police were crouching, waiting to be summoned; you could see the glinting of the streetlights on their helmets.

And among the circling, laughing, excited young, mostly dressed expensively and obviously coming from the wealthy suburbs of northern Teheran, there were groups of men who seemed to be from a different nation altogether: older, darker, bearded, with deep-set eyes and the look of religious fanaticism about them. Some filmed the crowds with video cameras held high above their heads.

The people around us called them "Hizbollahis". They call themselves The Soldiers of the Party of God: the shock troops, that is, of a revolution which has long since run its course. No one has told the Hizbollahis, though. Still employed to enforce rules from nastier, more oppressive days, they support the nation's religious leader, Ayatollah Khamenei, in his continuing arm-wrestling match with President Khatami to stop the further erosion of the strict Islamic state. These are the thugs who break up demonstrations, raid private houses and slash women's faces with razors if they are wrongly dressed.

Yet the extent of their failure was plain. Everywhere in the park there were girls wearing lipstick, and the skimpiest of headscarves, and shortish skirts or jeans which showed their ankles, and shirts which revealed their arms. Worse, some were arm-in-arm with their boyfriends. On a night of celebration over the re-election of a president who has dedicated himself to restoring personal liberty, the law was being comprehensively, joyfully broken. The Hizbollahis didn't like it at all.

The riot police were summoned. They marched grimly towards the crowd, clashing their sticks on their shields. The crowd broke up, thinned out, regrouped. Iranians have many superb qualities, but as a nation they are not much given to challenging authority. This crowd wasn't looking for a fight.

The Hizbollahis were. Spotting our television camera, a group of eight or 10 surrounded us and started screaming. Close up, they didn't smell very good. Nor were they used to being resisted. When the cameraman refused to hand over his gear and the producer and I waded in and stopped them seizing it, they became violent, punching and kicking and pulling us down to the street. It didn't matter to them that we had full permission to be here.

At this point something important happened. An Iranian friend who had seen what was happening went quietly over to the police commander and told him we were from the BBC. The commander was, as it happened, a regular viewer of BBC World. "Oh God," he said, "I shall be in trouble now." He gave orders that the police should take charge of us, not the Hizbollahis. The police are much more under the control of the constitutional government than the Hizbollahis.

The Hizbollahis resisted, and as the police pushed the three of us into the back of a car they tried to attack us. One of them, a particularly violent character who seemed to me to be drugged, stabbed his finger into the corner of my eye, apparently trying to put it out. I turned my head instinctively, and his fingernail dug into the eyeball: painful, but not serious. Soon afterwards I had the exquisite pleasure of catching his fingers in the window by winding it up unexpectedly.

Soon, though, the police formed a cordon round the car to stop the Hizbollahis getting at us. After three hours or more hanging around at the local police station, an apologetic senior government official came from his bed and released us. It was 3.30am. "Thank God you weren't being held by the Hizbollahis," he said. "That would have been much harder."

John Simpson is the BBC's World Affairs editor

-- Anonymous, June 16, 2001