In the early morning of July 9, 1999, students at Tehran University were sleeping off a long day of demonstrating for reforms in Iran when they were awakened to brutal reality.
Plainclothes police and paramilitary volunteers stormed into dormitories, kicking in doors and beating students in their rooms. Some were thrown from windows and at least one student was killed, while hundreds were injured.
What had begun as relatively low-level demonstrations against the closure days earlier of a reformist newspaper would quickly spread from the capital to other major cities.
Over the course of a few days, at least five protesters would be left dead, hundreds injured, and thousands more detained in what would stand for a decade as the largest antiestablishment protests in Iran since the Islamic Revolution in 1979.
Looking back at the events 25 years later, a former student who unwittingly became the face of the demonstrations against the clerical establishment says the protesters truly believed they could help usher in societal and structural reforms promoted by the reformist political camp.
"We thought reforms represented a new paradigm, driven by individuals genuinely different and committed to change," Ahmad Batebi told RFE/RL's Radio Farda.
That the violent crackdown came during the presidency of the country's last reformist president, Mohammad Khatami -- who was elected in 1997 on promises of strengthening the rule of law and greater social freedoms -- no longer comes as a surprise.
"Time has shown that the reformists were not fundamentally different from those entrenched in power, [they were] just simply another facet of the Islamic republic," he said.
Batebi was one of thousands of reform-minded Iranian students who took to the streets after the dormitory raid in open defiance of the establishment.
When the cover of the British magazine The Economist showed him holding up the blood-stained shirt of a fellow protester who had been shot by security forces in Tehran, it awakened the outside world to the demonstrations.
This photo made Batebi the face of the 1999 student protests.
But the now-iconic photo also attracted the attention of the Iranian authorities. Batebi was arrested and sentenced to death for his alleged involvement in "street unrest."
Named a prisoner of conscience by rights groups, Batebi's sentence was eventually reduced to 15 years due to international pressure. He served nine years before fleeing to neighboring Iraq while on medical leave to treat the many ailments he suffered in prison and eventually moved to the United States.
Batebi said that the Islamic republic relied on violent repression from its beginning, pointing to the mass executions of political prisoners in the 1980s and deadly crackdowns against protests in the cities of Mashhad, Qazvin, and Eslamshahr in the 1990s.
"The Islamic republic habitually employed such methods of suppression, recognizing no other approach," Batebi said.
The harsh response to the student protests of 1999 was "not unusual," Batebi added, because "the government was accustomed to and prepared for such actions, and knew no other way to operate."
Those events simply foreshadowed the establishment's method of dealing with subsequent antiestablishment protests, including student demonstrations in 2003, mass demonstrations against the results of the disputed 2009 presidential election and the suppression of the Green Movement.
"This is the inherent nature of the Islamic republic and it will continue to operate in this manner," Batebi said.
He also addressed more recent protests, including the 2019-20 protests fueled by water shortages and economic woes, and the Women, Life, Freedom protests of 2022.
As many as 1,500 demonstrators were reportedly killed during the nationwide protests that broke out in 2019. More than 550 demonstrators were killed in the crackdown against the 2022 protests, which followed the death in police custody of Mahsa Amini and lasted for months.
Human rights watchdogs say the response was marked by a litany of atrocities carried out by the state, including extrajudicial killings, torture, and rape.
Batebi said the level of suppression to which the state will go has "surpassed what was experienced at the university dormitories" in 1999, which was by far eclipsed in scale and in violence by the 2009, 2019, and 2022 protests.
But so too has the involvement of the general population, he added.
"Initially, the student movement was at the forefront of social protests, making their suppression highly visible," Batebi said. "However, over the past decade, every segment of society, from teachers to workers and nurses, has been involved."
The former student protester said he saw a "significant maturity and sophistication among today's activists" in Iran. But he laments that the reforms the students of his era fought for, including greater political and social freedoms, are essentially dead.
"From the reform movement that once sought structural changes, only a name remains," he said. "The reforms we see today are vastly different from those initial aspirations and are, in fact, part of the government, deviating slightly from its authoritarian segment while attempting to realign with the long-standing governmental ideals."
The recent victory of Masud Pezeshkian -- who cast himself as a reformist during Iran's snap presidential election after ultraconservative Ebrahim Raisi died in a helicopter crash in May -- will make no real difference, according to Batebi.
Batebi expressed doubt over Pezeshkian's "reformist" credentials, but pondered for argument's sake what could happen if he deviated from his alignment with Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei or from Raisi's policies.
Even if he Pezeshkian was a "true democrat, genuinely modern, and eager to implement changes in Iran, how would he achieve this?" Batebi asked. "The tools for change are lacking in Iran. There are no institutions outside the supreme leader's control."
This includes the judiciary, media, security forces and military, the Intelligence Ministry, and all influential government bodies "that could obstruct presidential initiatives" in domestic and foreign policy.
"The situation is clear," Batebi concluded. "Regardless of an individual's democratic intentions or transformative aspirations, without the necessary instruments for change, substantial reform is unattainable. Therefore, in my view, the potential for change is virtually nonexistent."