Since 06-25-07
“Cultural revolution”: Iran cracks down on dissent, cracks heads
of dissenters
Since 06-25-07
June 24, 2007
By NEIL MacFARQUHAR
Editors' Note Appended
Iran is in the throes of one of its most
ferocious crackdowns on dissent in years, with the government focusing on labor
leaders, universities, the press, women’s rights advocates, a former nuclear
negotiator and Iranian-Americans, three of whom have been in prison for more
than six weeks.
The shift is occurring against
the backdrop of an economy so stressed that although Iran is the world’s
second-largest oil exporter, it is on the verge of rationing gasoline. At the
same time, the nuclear standoff with the West threatens to bring new sanctions.
The hard-line administration of
President
Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, analysts say, faces
rising pressure for failing to deliver on promises of greater prosperity from
soaring oil revenue. It has been using American support for a change in
government as well as a possible military attack as a pretext to hound his
opposition and its sympathizers.
Some analysts describe it as a
“cultural revolution,” an attempt to roll back the clock to the time of the 1979
revolution, when the newly formed Islamic Republic combined religious zeal and
anti-imperialist rhetoric to try to assert itself as a regional leader.
Equally noteworthy is how little has been permitted to be discussed in the Iranian news media. Instead, attention has been strategically focused on Mr. Ahmadinejad’s political enemies, like the former president, Mohammad Khatami, and the controversy over whether he violated Islamic morals by deliberately shaking hands with an unfamiliar woman after he gave a speech in Rome.
Mr. Khatami, the lost hope of
Iran’s reform movement, felt compelled to rebut the accusation because such a
handshake is religiously suspect, but contended that the crowd seeking to
congratulate him for his speech was so tumultuous that he could not distinguish
between the hands of men and women. Naturally a video clip emerged, showing the
cleric in his typical gregarious style bounding over to the first woman who
addressed him on the orderly sidewalk, shaking her hand and chatting amicably.
The dispute over the handshake occurred during a particularly fierce round of the factional fighting that has hamstrung the country since the 1979 revolution. Far more harsh examples abound.
The country’s police chief
boasted that 150,000 people — a number far larger than usual — were detained in
the annual spring sweep against any clothing considered not Islamic. More than
30 women’s rights advocates were arrested in one day in March, according to
Human Rights Watch, five of whom have
since been sentenced to prison terms of up to four years. They were charged with
endangering national security for organizing an Internet campaign to collect
more than a million signatures supporting the removal of all laws that
discriminate against women.
Eight student leaders at Tehran’s
Amir Kabir University, the site of one of the few public protests against Mr.
Ahmadinejad, disappeared into Evin Prison starting in early May. Student
newspapers had published articles suggesting that no humans were infallible,
including the Prophet Muhammad and Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah
Ali Khamenei.
The
National Security Council sent a stern
three-page warning to all the country’s newspaper editors detailing banned
topics, including the rise in gasoline prices or other economic woes like
possible new international sanctions, negotiations with the United States over
the future of Iraq, civil society movements and the Iranian-American arrests.
The entire campaign is “a strong
message by Ahmadinejad’s government, security and intelligence forces that they
are in control of the domestic situation,” said Hadi Ghaemi, an Iran analyst for
Human Rights Watch. “But it’s really a sign of weakness and insecurity.”
At least three prominent
nongovernment organizations that pushed for broader legal rights or civil
society have been shuttered outright, while hundreds more have been forced
underground. A recent article on the Baztab Web site said that about 8,000
nongovernment organizations were in jeopardy, forced to prove their innocence,
basically because the government suspects all of them of being potential
conduits for some $75 million the United States has earmarked to promote a
change in government.
Professors have been warned
against attending overseas conferences or having any contact with foreign
governments, lest they be recruited as spies. The Iranian-Americans are all
being detained basically on the grounds that they were either recruiting or
somehow abetting an American attempt to achieve a “velvet revolution” in Iran.
Analysts trace the broadening
crackdown to a March speech by Ayatollah Khamenei, whose pronouncements carry
the weight of law. He warned that no one should damage national unity when the
West was waging psychological war on Iran. The country has been under fire,
particularly from the United States, which accuses it of trying to develop
nuclear weapons and fomenting violence in Iraq.
President Ahmadinejad and other
senior officials have dismissed all the criticism as carping. The president
blames the previous administration for inflation or calls it media exaggeration,
while Tehran’s chief prosecutor, Said Mortazavi, said Iranians who oppose the
Islamic Republic look for an excuse to criticize it.
After a meeting of senior police and judiciary officials in Tehran on June 19 to review what was described as “the public security drive,” the Iranian Labor News Agency quoted Mr. Mortazavi as saying that if the state did not protect public security, then “louts” and criminals “would be safe in society.
The three Iranian-Americans are
being held in the notorious Section 209 of Evin Prison, the wing controlled by
the Intelligence Ministry, and have been denied visits by their lawyers or
relatives. Iran recognizes only their Iranian nationality and has dismissed any
diplomatic efforts to intervene. A rally to demand their release is set for
Wednesday outside the
United Nations.
The three are Haleh Esfandiari,
the director of the Middle East program at the Woodrow Wilson International
Center for Scholars; Kian Tajbakhsh, an urban planning consultant with the Open
Society Institute; and Ali Shakeri, of the Center for Citizen Peacebuilding at
the
University of California, Irvine. A
fourth, Parnaz Azima, a journalist who works for Radio Farda, an
American-financed station based in Europe, has been barred from leaving the
country.
“People don’t want to come to conferences, they don’t even want to talk on the phone,” said Abbas Milani, the director of the Iranian studies program at Stanford University. “The regime has created an atmosphere of absolute terror.”
To the political crackdown, Mr.
Ahmadinejad adds a messianic fervor, Mr. Milani noted, telling students in Qom
this month that the Muslim savior would soon return.
The appeal of such a message may
be limited, however. Iran’s sophisticated middle class wants to be connected to
the world, and grumbles that the country’s only friends are Syria, Belarus,
Venezuela and Cuba. But it might play well with Mr. Ahmadinejad’s main
constituency.
“They are the poor, the rural,”
said Vali Nasr of the
Council on Foreign Relations. “They don’t
travel abroad, they don’t go to conferences. He is trying to undermine the
social and political position of his rivals in order to consolidate his own
people.”
Most ascribe Mr. Ahmadinejad’s
motives to blocking what could become a formidable alliance between the camps of
Mr. Khatami and Hashemi Rafsanjani, both former presidents. Parliamentary
elections are scheduled for early next year, and the next presidential vote in
2009.
“Having to face a single pragmatic conservative and reform block is extremely threatening,” Mr. Nasr said, hence the intimidation of all possible supporters.
Not that everyone has been
intimidated. More than 50 leading economists published a harshly worded, open
letter to the president saying his policies were bringing economic ruin. High
unemployment persists, there has been little foreign investment and inflation is
galloping, with gasoline alone jumping 25 percent this spring.
Gasoline rationing is expected within a month, with consumers so anxious about it, reported the Web site Ruz, financed by the Dutch government, that skirmishes broke out in long lines at some pumps on June 17.
Iran can prove a difficult
country to separate into black and white. Amid all the recent oppression, for
example, last week the public stoning of a couple — the punishment for adultery
— was called off. Women’s rights advocates had been agitating against it.
Also, two recent movies touched
off controversy as too racy. One depicted an extramarital affair, and the hero
of the second was an
abortion doctor who drank and gambled, and
yet was so beloved of the patients he had seduced that they sent him bouquets on
his wedding night.
In an attempt to deflect
criticism that its standards had grown loose, the Ministry of Islamic Guidance,
which vets all books, movies and gallery exhibits, issued a statement noting
that both scripts had been approved under the former administration of Mr.
Khatami.
Editors' Note: June 25, 2007
A front-page article yesterday
described a crackdown in Iran that has included the jailing of three
Iranian-Americans, repression or intimidation of nongovernment organizations
pressing for broader legal rights, warnings to newspaper editors against
articles on banned topics, arrests of advocates for women’s rights and of
student leaders, and the detention of 150,000 people for wearing clothing
considered not Islamic.
The headline over the article
said that Iran was cracking down on dissent and “parading examples” in the
streets, and one paragraph in the article also said that young men detained for
wearing tight T-shirts or western-style haircuts had been “paraded bleeding
through Tehran’s streets by uniformed police officers.” The Times caption on an
official Iranian news agency photograph that ran with the article said that it
showed a police officer punishing a young man in public for wearing un-Islamic
clothing by forcing him to suck on a plastic container normally used for
intimate hygiene, a punishment the article also asserted was for that offense.
But the man in the photograph,
according to widespread Iranian news reports, was one of more than 100 people
arrested recently on charges of being part of a gang that had committed rapes,
robberies, forgeries and other crimes. The caption published on the Web site of
the news agency, Fars, had said only that the man was being punished as part of
a roundup of “thugs” in a Tehran neighborhood.
The current repression has made
reporting in Iran difficult. In this case, The Times relied on an interview with
a researcher for a nongovernment agency that no longer operates within Iran who
said the photograph was evidence of a more visible police role in public
crackdowns on what the authorities consider immoral behavior. The reporter then
wrongly interpreted what the researcher said as applying to a crackdown on
dress, and incorporated the erroneous interpretation into the body of the
article, without giving any indication of the source for it.
These errors could have been avoided with more rigorous editing. The article should not have said that young men had been paraded through the streets for wearing un-Islamic dress, and the headline over it should not have said that dissenters were being paraded as part of the crackdown.