Rooyesh

He has provoked the west’s fury with his calls for Israel’s elimination, dismissal of the Holocaust as a “myth” and strident advocacy of Iran’s nuclear rights. Now Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the Iranian president, has ordered his fiery polemics to be saved for posterity in preparation for commercial publication.

He has appointed a 15-member advisory council of his closest aides to study his “works and opinions” and choose the most important. Selected items are likely to be issued as books, CDs and pamphlets. Mr Ahmadinejad’s readiness to air his radical views has earned him a reputation as a rousing speaker. Besides infamously calling for Israel to be “wiped off the map”, he also struck a chord among Iran’s poor by pledging to redistribute oil wealth “to people’s tables”. The president has already shown a desire to communicate his thoughts to a wider audience by launching his own blog in English, French, Farsi and Arabic. However, the idea of compiling them as a commercial package has drawn a cynical response from critics. Some have pointed out that none of Mr Ahmadinejad’s predecessors published their thoughts and speeches while in office. The move appears to have been prompted by the precedent of the late Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, father of Iran’s 1979 Islamic revolution, whose numerous writings and speeches are published by an institution founded by his son. However, Rooz Online, an opposition website, suggested Mr Ahmadinejad’s advisers would have a much thinner body of work to choose from. The only known publication credited to the president - who has a PhD in traffic management - was a treatise about cold asphalt, it said. The project got off to a false start yesterday when it emerged that two of the advisers selected had declined to participate because they had not been consulted in advance. Maryam Behrouz - head of the Zeinab Society, a fundamentalist women’s group - said the remaining members could best serve Mr Ahmadinejad by advising him against publication. “Fundamentalists have long urged Mr Ahmadinejad to choose experts and strong advisers so that his actions and comments are better conceived on a more rational and thoughtful basis. We hope this council gives him advice, rather than publishing,” she told Aftab website. Ali Akbar Javanfekr, the president’s press secretary, said the council’s establishment was “necessary”. “It has been established with Mr Ahmadinejad’s approval and he has a positive view towards it,” he said. Source: Guardian

As Tehran presses for the release of five Iranians held by the U.S. military in Iraq, Iran’s top judiciary spokesman announced Tuesday that three detained Iranian-Americans will be formally indicted by the end of the week, according to Iranian media reports. “The initial stages of investigation pertaining to the cases of Haleh Esfandiari, Kian Tajbakhsh and Ali Shakeri have been completed and indictments will be issued in the next two to three days,” spokesman Ali Reza Jamshidi said, according to the Iranian Labor News Agency.

So far, the two issues have remained separate although questions have arisen as to whether the Tehran regime’s recent clamp-down on Iranians with dual American citizenship is an attempt to broker the release of the five men that Tehran says are Iranian diplomats. The U.S. military has accused the men of having ties to Iran’s Revolutionary Guard-Quds Force, which the United States says is providing weapons and funding to Shiite insurgent groups in Iraq. Speaking to reporters in Tehran, Iran’s Ambassador to Iraq Hassan Kazemi-Qomi held out the possibility of talks between the United States and Iran on the issue of the five detainees. In an interview with CNN last month, former U.S. military spokesman Maj. Gen. William Caldwell said the detained Iranians will be dealt with “just like anybody else who has broken the law.” Speaking at a news conference on Tuesday, Iranian Foreign Minister Manouchehr Mottaki said Tehran “will make the Americans sorry for this ugly and illegal act,” Iran’s state-run IRNA news agency reported. Mottaki pledged to send a letter to U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon in the coming days, criticizing the U.N. Security Council for its indifference and “indefensible” inaction in dealing with the five Iranians, who were detained January 11 in Irbil, an Iraqi Kurdish city near the Iranian border. Iran complained to the United Nations that the raid was carried out in “clear violation of international conventions” because it took place at an Iranian consulate. The United States maintains its forces raided an Iranian liaison office that does not have the same diplomatic status as a consulate. Meanwhile, the United States continues to call on Iran to release the three detained Iranian-Americans and a fourth who has had her passport revoked. “The Iranians are holding people and trying people who have done nothing except try and make Iran a more open and better place, in some cases just went to visit their families,” U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said Monday. In addition, Robert Levinson, an American and retired FBI agent, has been missing since March 8, when he was last seen on Iran’s Kish Island. Washington’s attempts to obtain information have been hampered by the lack of diplomatic ties between the two countries.

 Source: CNN

BBC reports fifty-seven Iranian economists have launched a scathing attack on President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. They have accused his government of ignoring the basics of economics. The university professors say mismanagement is inflicting a huge cost on the economy, the brunt of which will be borne by people with modest means.

This comes as the price of housing has almost doubled in the last year and food is getting more expensive by the week in Iran. In an open letter to the media, the economists warned that the government of Mr Ahmadinejad had been making hasty and unscientific decisions, and that if this continued Iran would be pushed into a complex economic crisis. They say instead of analysing the situation, the government just argues official statistics are wrong, and presents its own questionable figures to say the economy is prospering. The letter says there is been an unprecedented injection of liquidity into the economy, some $80bn (£40.5bn) of oil money in the last two years. But it says pumping cash into the economy just delays the problems and makes them worse in the end. Although the government says it has created two million jobs, the economists say all it did was give loans to start small business and that too, done by diverting funds from other areas, resulted in job losses. Inflation is said to be at unprecedented levels and that is visible in the shops where many housewives can no longer afford meat or fruit. Mr Ahmadinejad’s frequent trips to the provinces are criticised too - for promoting questionable projects not based on scientific, social or economic principles. And the economists add that Iran’s worsening international relations are imposing a huge cost on its economy which the next generation will pay for. They say the new officials in government need to understand that economics has rules. At no point does the letter mention international sanctions or foreign banking restrictions as responsible for Iran’s economic woes. Instead the authors pin the blame squarely on domestic mismanagement.