Rooyesh

THE head of Iran’s judiciary is a confident man. Despite foreign attempts at slander, Ayatollah Mahmud Hashemi Shahrudi recently declared, his country has presented a fine image to the world of Islamic law at work.

If news were limited to such mercies as the recent release, on bail, of Haleh Esfandiari, a 67-year-old Iranian-American academic, after six months in jail on charges of espionage, or the amnesty granted to 4,000 other prisoners on the occasion of the birthday on August 20th of Imam Hussein, a revered Shia martyr, Mr Shahrudi’s confidence might be justified. But these welcome developments come against a darkening backdrop, as the administration of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad intensifies a campaign to reimpose the moral fervour, and xenophobic zeal, of the 1979 Islamic revolution’s early years.

The rest of the world may be more concerned about Iran’s nuclear ambitions. But for many Iranians, the issue that has begun to outweigh other troubles, such as poverty, unemployment and the danger of war with America, is human rights.

This is not surprising. Recent months have seen the largest crackdown on civil liberties since the 1980s. Purges of suspected liberals have decimated university faculties, and repeated closures have all but silenced the once-vociferous opposition press. Ms Esfandiari was the best-known of four Iranian-American scholars incarcerated earlier this year for alleged ties to American intelligence. Her colleagues remain in prison. But since the spring a wave of arrests has targeted everyone from women’s-rights advocates to student leaders, trade unionists and critical journalists, packing the country’s prisons so tight that police are commandeering other buildings as makeshift lock-ups.

Political activists are not the only ones at risk. Security officials boast that their campaign against “bad hijab”, which includes the warning, booking or detaining of women deemed insufficiently clad, but extends also to youths sporting “Western-style” haircuts, rock-music fans, shopkeepers selling indecent garments, and unmarried couples, has alone netted more than 500,000 offenders since April. And unlike previous dress-code enforcements, which tended to relax after a few weeks, this one appears to be growing stricter. Signs have appeared outside public hospitals declaring that only women wearing the head-to-floor chador, and not merely the headscarf, will be helped.

As much as the scale of the crackdown, its severity is raising eyebrows. Much of the police action has been accompanied by complaints of brutality, and in many cases by documentary evidence such as graphic footage of beatings, posted on dissident websites. Despite prison crowding, punitive use of solitary confinement appears to have grown more common. The number of executions nearly doubled last year, to 177, bringing Iran the unsavoury distinction of being the world’s heaviest user of capital punishment per head of population. This year has seen not only a further jump in the number of judicial killings but a return of mass public hangings, which are sometimes broadcast on state television.

Such harsher treatment, say rights activists, is partly a product of the paranoid atmosphere generated by a government that has deliberately associated any form of civil disobedience with alleged foreign plots. Recent remarks by the country’s chief of police made this link explicit. Once they had dealt with “propagators of moral decay”, he said, his forces would turn their attention to those who “theorise on corruption”, such as critics whom he tied to foreign conspiracies aimed at a “soft overthrow” of the Islamic Republic.

The dissent within

But foreign spies and decadent liberals are not the regime’s only critics. Mr Shahrudi, the chief judge, has himself voiced dismay over the government’s policies. In July he condemned the stoning to death of a man accused of adultery, and sponsored this month’s mass amnesty in what was seen as a sign of discomfort with police excess. He has also joined a broad range of former officials, economists, oil executives and businessmen in attacking Mr Ahmadinejad’s erratically autocratic economic policies, which have included forcing banks to slash interest rates, splurging on costly infrastructure projects and replacing respected technocrats with cronies.

Many establishment figures agree that, rather than American bluster, it is these policies that endanger the country. To paraphrase Mr Shahrudi in a recent interview, if Iran wishes its revolution to be a model, a good start would be to get its economy in order. Another way might be to treat its people better.

Source: Economist

On many early mornings in Tehran, my uncle Ali would bang on our door to deliver large heaps of mammoth mushrooms from the mountain of Shemiran. Every summer and early autumn when I saw thunderstorms gathering in the sky, I knew we would have giant bunches of wild, tasty mushrooms the following day. My uncle believed that the storms pushed the mushrooms up from beneath the mountain’s numerous stones. Mushroom hunters like Ali would wake up early the next morning to go after those fresh, juicy mushrooms and cut off their heads.

Skip to next paragraph Enlarge This Image Jordan Awan As a journalist and writer in Iran, I have often compared myself, and many of my colleagues and friends at other Iranian newspapers, to those mushrooms. In 1992, when I started working in Tehran, I was very careful about what I would report. That is, until right after the election of Mohammad Khatami, the reformist president, in 1997. Then I, like so many other journalists, quickly went to work for the country’s leading reformist papers. Moderate clerics began using those newspapers as conduits for challenging religion-based laws, like the restrictive dress code and death by stoning. President Khatami brought reform to the political system and exposed the involvement of Iranian intelligence agents in the murder of a number of intellectuals. Every day, Iranian journalists, with the encouragement of the Iranian people, disclosed news or challenged the system. We trusted that the changes that had come about would remain and that we would be protected by the government we had elected.

The last newspaper I worked for in Iran — Zan — was closed by the judiciary in the spring of 1999. I was in the United States at that time, and as soon as I returned to Tehran, I was arrested. The government held me in solitary confinement for three months, and during that time I confessed to crimes I never committed and did whatever a human being could do to save his or her life. I now wonder if all the opportunities we had seen for reform were really illusions created to trick us. Did the Iranian government encourage a fleeting era of reform in order to identify its opponents so as to come after them? Was President Khatami’s election the thunderstorm that ultimately allowed the government to hunt us down? This storm drowned not only us but also those expatriate Iranian intellectuals and scholars who had begun to visit Iran again after President Khatami traveled abroad with his famous message of “Iran for all Iranians.” Many academics started to travel back and forth to Iran after this historic announcement. But recently some of them have been arrested too.

Ramin Jahanbegloo, who is an Iranian-Canadian scholar, spent four months in an Iranian prison last year. He “confessed” on Iran’s national public media that at conferences outside Iran he “got acquainted with” many Americans and Israelis, some of whom were “intelligence figures.” Zahra Kazemi, an Iranian-Canadian photographer, died under interrogation while in detention in Tehran. And, of course, Haleh Esfandiari, an Iranian-American academic who directs the Middle East program at the Wilson International Center for Scholars, in Washington, spent more than 100 days in Evin Prison before being released on bail on Tuesday. She, too, made a statement on television, which Iranian officials cast as an admission that she was associated with a “velvet revolution” against the regime in Tehran. The situation in which Dr. Esfandiari finds herself today is the same one that has repeatedly been endured by Iranian citizens who have dared to think differently and who have sought to progressively influence the country’s youth. The message being sent to Iranian scholars abroad is the same one being given to intellectuals at home: “You are not welcome here anymore.”

Those who have had a taste of Iran’s jails and interrogation — including scholars and writers of my generation who work for reformist media in Iran, and the British sailors who were recently detained by the government — know what I am talking about. They, too, have endured psychological torture and false charges. In prison, all you have left is to pray for your freedom so that you can leave the country for good and never return. This is what the regime really wants: for any writers, scholars or academics who could have some sort of intellectual influence over the Iranian people to leave Iran for good and be too afraid to return. It is still not clear whether Ms. Esfandiari will be allowed to leave Iran soon. I would not be surprised if she is now promising herself to never visit her mother or her homeland again, and to advise other Iranians to do the same.

Source: New York Times

Camelia Entekhabifard is the author of “Camelia: Save Yourself by Telling the Truth — a Memoir of Iran.”

William D. Hartung of the Nation writes under the guise of promoting a “security dialogue” in the Persian Gulf, the Bush Administration has proposed $63 billion in arms transfers to the Middle East over the next ten years. As is so often the case, team Bush seems to prefer to let the weapons do the talking, even when it claims to be engaging in diplomacy. The foundation of the deal is a pledge to sell $20 billion worth of high-tech arms to Saudi Arabia and the other oil-producing states in the Gulf.

Items in the package reportedly include upgrades to Riyadh’s US-supplied fighter planes, satellite-guided bombs and combat ships. To ease any concerns about the Gulf buildup, the plan calls for increasing military aid to Israel and Egypt to $3 billion and $1.3 billion per year, respectively. That’s $43 billion in US taxpayer support over the next decade.

Why pour more weapons into the region now? The principal rationale appears to be to send a message to Iran that it must bend to US pressure to end its nuclear program, stop the flow of Iranian weapons to Iraqi insurgents and cease its support for Hamas and Hezbollah. Otherwise, the argument goes, not only will Tehran face the prospect of US military action but it will also be surrounded by neighbors armed with top-of-the-line US weaponry. The arms package will be seen as even more provocative by Iran in light of the latest move in the Bush Administration’s campaign to turn up the pressure on the regime: the recent decision to label its Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps a terrorist organization.

Threatening Iran with military strikes and arms sales to potential adversaries is more likely to spur Tehran to add to its own arsenal while being less open to talks on its nuclear program. If the Bush Administration is looking for a new designated enemy to stand in for the late Saddam Hussein, this approach will work just fine. But if it wants to solve the security problems of the region, it would be hard to come up with a more counterproductive policy.

Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and Secretary of Defense Robert Gates have tried to paper over the real intent of the deal by arguing that it will promote “stability” by bolstering moderate regimes. This is a strange assertion, especially as regards Saudi Arabia. Not only are funds from Saudi sources supporting insurgents in Iraq, but they are financing Islamic extremism around the world. The Saudis also operate one of the most repressive regimes on the planet, in direct contradiction of the Administration’s continuing claims to be promoting democracy. The State Department’s latest human rights report on Saudi Arabia contains this upbeat passage: “Religious police harassed, abused and detained citizens and foreigners of both sexes.” The most recent Human Rights Watch Saudi report points out that “the government undertook no major human rights reforms in 2006, and there were signs of backsliding in issues of human rights defenders, freedom of association, and freedom of expression.” Sending more weapons will not reverse these trends, which does not bode well for long-term stability in the Saudi kingdom.

In Egypt, decades of US aid have had no positive impact on human rights or democracy. Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak runs a quasi-Stalinist regime that won 88 percent of the vote in the last national elections while jailing numerous democracy advocates. As the State Department has acknowledged, torture is still widely practiced in Egyptian prisons, while Cairo’s overall human rights record is described as “poor.” Rewarding the Egyptian government with an increase in US military aid is tantamount to condoning these repressive practices–practices that are producing a popular backlash that could eventually lead to the end of the regime. If that happens, whatever government comes to power next will inherit huge stockpiles of US-supplied weaponry.

As for Israel, more military aid is the last thing it needs. In recent times Tel Aviv has used its military in ways that have undermined its own security as well as that of its neighbors. From the ongoing attacks on Gaza to last summer’s invasion of Lebanon, the Israeli government has unintentionally offered aid and comfort to hard-line forces, both among the Palestinians and in Lebanon. Israel has plenty of weapons; what it needs is a return to genuine diplomacy, ideally prodded by its closest ally, Washington.

Sixty years of arms racing has repeatedly undermined prospects for Middle East peace. Why should this latest round be any different? The only clear beneficiaries of this mega-deal will be US arms makers. Already gorging on expenditures for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, companies like Boeing, General Electric and General Dynamics can anticipate ten years of lucrative foreign sales if the deal goes forward. The arms lobby can be expected to vigorously support the deal if it is challenged on Capitol Hill.

Thankfully, there has been early opposition in Congress. Representative Anthony Weiner has pulled together a group of 114 House members opposed to the deal. Now the foreign affairs committee chairs in the House and Senate, Representative Tom Lantos and Senator Joe Biden, need to move from skepticism to opposition. They should hold hearings as soon as Congress comes back in September. And Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama need to join their rival John Edwards in roundly denouncing the deal. If there is a significant public debate about its likely impacts, it won’t withstand even minimal scrutiny.

Mideast stability can’t be promoted with arms, any more than democracy can be imposed through the barrel of a gun. Stopping or scaling back the Bush Administration’s Mideast arms package would be a step toward learning this lesson.

Police in Tehran have closed two dozen barbers and hairdressers in a fortnight in the latest phase of a “morals” crackdown aimed at enforcing Islamic dress codes among young Iranians. The businesses were shut after being identified as purveyors of decadent “western” culture. Eleven women’s hairstylists were told to stop trading for offering tattoos. Tattooed eyebrows - in which the hair is shaved and replaced with elaborate patterns - are popular with many young Iranian women.

One women’s salon was shut when authorities discovered one of its employees was a man. It is against Iran’s Islamic law for men to work in women’s salons. A further 13 barbers were closed for giving customers excessively eye-catching haircuts and plucking men’s eyebrows. Many young Iranian men wear their hair in a gelled-up bouffant that would look outlandish even in some western countries. The closures were imposed by Amaken-e Omoomi, a police body for regulating businesses such as shops, restaurants and hotels, after it inspected more than 730 hairdressers in Tehran. They follow a concerted summer campaign to stamp out widespread flouting of Iran’s Islamic dress code by younger people. Since last May, thousands of women have been arrested or warned for wearing hijab - or headscarves - that reveal too much hair.

Women have also been detained for wearing overcoats deemed too figure-hugging and for short trousers that reveal too much skin. Police officers have been deployed in Tehran and other cities to identify transgressors. The arrested men have been forced to identify their barbers and get fresh haircuts. They have then had to return to police stations for officers to decide whether their hairstyles are acceptable. Mohammad Ali Najafi, head of Amaken-e Omoomi, told Fars news agency that police officers would accompany trade inspectors in future visits to barbers and hairdressers. Those breaking the law would be closed immediately, he said. The morals clampdown has come amid a broader law-and-order offensive which the government says is aimed at increasing “social security”. Large numbers of “thugs” and “hooligans” have been arrested in police raids.

The campaign has coincided with a crackdown on political dissent that has seen the arrests of academics, students and women’s rights activists. Officials have accused those arrested of fomenting a “soft revolution” against the Islamic regime. In the past five weeks, more than 30 offenders have been hanged - some publicly - for crimes including murder, rape, armed robbery and drug trafficking.

Source: Guardian

Somalia, 1993: During the darkest days of the American military intervention, when US troops were taking casualties from drug-addled gunmen wearing flip-flops, US officials pointed to a familiar nemesis. It was Iran, warned Madeleine Albright, then-US envoy to the United Nations,

 that had forged a “tactical alliance” with a Somali warlord and “terrorists” in Sudan. Intelligence sources for the first time spoke of smuggled Iranian weapons. In Mogadishu, journalists were told that Iranian agents were training Somalis to make car bombs. But no proof was ever presented.

US charges against Iran’s role in Iraq are mounting. But analysts say that a history of unsubstantiated US claims against Iran should serve as a cautionary tale. The lesson to be drawn is not that Iran is guiltless in Iraq, they say, but one of restraint as a familiar drumbeat sounds.

The latest step in the Bush administration’s intensifying campaign to depict Iran as a disruptive force in Iraq is a decision to designate Iran’s Revolutionary Guard force a “terrorist” group. That label, and a push for more UN sanctions against Iran over its nuclear program, and continued charges of training, funding, and supplying anti-US militants in Iraq, experts say, could harm Iraq security talks between US and Iranian diplomats in Baghdad.

“The Americans are blaming Iran for everything that goes wrong, even if it’s not Iran’s fault, and Iran does the same with the US,” says Trita Parsi, the Washington-based author of the forthcoming “Treacherous Alliance: Secret Dealings of Israel, Iran and the US.”

“Decisionmakers in Washington are by-the-minute limiting their own maneuverability in how to deal with Iran, [thereby] making it more difficult to put the relationship on a positive track,” he says.

The US case against Iran

This week, the US commander of central Iraq claimed that 50 officers of the Revolutionary Guard’s elite Qods Force were in Iraq, training militants.

Top US officers also charged this month that lethal roadside bombs called explosively formed penetrators (EFPs) from Iran were used in 99 attacks in July and caused one-third of US combat deaths, an “all-time high,” Lt. Gen. Raymond Odierno, deputy US commander in Iraq, told The New York Times.

General Odierno claimed the “Iranians are surging support” to Iranian-trained cells to influence US decisions about the Baghdad troop surge. “Over the past three to four months, [Iran's support] has picked up in terms of equipment, training and dollars,” Odierno told the Times.

Some US charges appear to stick. US forces earlier this month captured homemade video of preparations for two Shiite militant attacks on a US base southeast of Baghdad on July 11 and Aug. 5. The footage showed 50 fresh-from-the-box 107-mm rockets being lined up on metal stands in daylight, to fire upon the base.

Intelligence officers told Fox News that there was “no doubt” the rockets – still with some packing grease and English lettering for export, the year 2006, and color-coded – were made in Iran. How they got to Iraq, and carried by whom, they could not say. Fourteen of those rockets were fired at the base, killing one soldier; 36 others were found primed, but their timers failed. Three more larger rockets were fired Aug. 5.

Still, other charges have not stuck and some have been retracted. US intelligence sources claimed in Baghdad in February, for example, that the sophisticated manufacture of EFP parts led them to believe that they could only have been made in Iran and that Iran’s supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei would almost certainly have been aware of it.

Shortly afterwards the chairman of the Joint Chiefs, Gen. Peter Pace, said that he could not confirm that Iran’s government “clearly knows or is complicit.” US forces have also raided numerous EFP workshops inside Iraq and found such explosives ; they are often used in the oil industry.

Likewise, initial speculation by US officials pointed to “Iranian-trained operatives” in a January attack in Karbala, in which militants dressed as US soldiers and speaking English drove into a US base, kidnapped US troops, and killed five. Months later, the top US general in Iraq denied finding any tie to Iran.

Still, headlines linking Iran to the Karbala killings emerged again in early July, after a US general said that two captured operatives, a Lebanese Hizbullah member, and an Iraqi group leader, said that Iran’s Qods Force “knew of and supported planning” for the attack. But in late July, Time magazine reported – based on an internal US Army investigation and interviews with US and Iraqi witnesses – that details “suggest” an inside job by the Iraqi police.

The result of this buildup of US allegations of Iranian involvement in Iraq could also prove to be a prelude to war: “If you can make the case that Iranians are actually killing Americans, that makes it extremely difficult for those opponents of military action to depict the administration as warmongering,” adds Parsi, also the head of the National Iranian American Council.

Iranian officials deny undermining US efforts in Iraq, though senior officers note that US forces throughout the Gulf and in Iraq and Afghanistan are often within Iranian missile range. Revolutionary Guard commander Gen. Yahya Rahim Safavi vowed this week that “America will receive a heavier punch from the guards in the future.”

Some hard-liners in Iran, who today exert strong influence over every power center in the Islamic Republic, welcome the steady drumbeat from Washington as proof of US ill intent, says Hadi Semati, a political scientist in Tehran.

“I haven’t seen this level before [of] a systematic [US] propaganda campaign, partly disinformation, partly probably true, but exaggerating it … to blame Iran for everything,” says Mr. Semati, who recently spent three years at think tanks in Washington. “It reinforces the idea that people have in this town [Tehran] that any discussions on Iraq are purely tactical, and that the Americans are not serious.”

The Iraq effort “is already a failure,” says Semati. “Blaming Iran serves a purpose of partially, or even mostly, from the perspective of hard-liners in Washington, making the situation look better.”

The Halabja example

Such episodes echo past hostile US-Iran allegations, as in Somalia, since the 1979 Islamic Revolution. Few examples are as clear-cut as that of Halabja, the Kurdish town in northern Iraq gassed by Saddam Hussein’s troops in 1988 in a strike that left up to 5,000 civilians dead.

Iraq increasingly received the backing of the US and the West in its 1980s war against Iran. So US officials, to cast doubt that Iraq was solely responsible for such a war crime, began suggesting that Iran was also to blame.

“There is a rush to judgment [against Iran today], and this should be questioned, given the past and the outright dissembling that occurred [in 1988] when it was convenient to accuse the Iranians because the American ally Iraq was doing something totally embarrassing to the Reagan administration,” says Joost Hiltermann, author of the recently published “A Poisonous Affair: America, Iraq, and the Gassing of Halabja.”

“These people have learned the lesson that this kind of lying works and will do it again,” says Mr. Hiltermann, the Istanbul-based Middle East director for the International Crisis Group.

The charge against Iran took root so effectively in the media – this newspaper also published notable, unattributed examples of “good intelligence” that cited Iran’s role – that until recently, references to the “Iraqi” gassing of Halabja yielded letters of complaint from readers, pointing out the Iranian role, and offering US government documents as proof.

The Halabja case suggests “an exceptional attempt at naked deception,” says Hiltermann in his study, noting that 18 tons of Iraqi secret police and intelligence documents seized in northern Iraq in 1991 make frequent reference to Iraqi use of chemical weapons, but none about any chemical use by Iran.

Growing antipathy toward Iran

If anything, the level of antipathy toward Iran is higher today than two decades ago.

“We are confronting Iranian behavior across a variety of different fronts on a number of ‘battlefields,’ if you will,” US State Department spokesman Sean McCormack said last week. “We confront them on the ground in Iraq. Our military is doing that. We are confronting Iran diplomatically … with respect to their nuclear program.”

“This administration has a track record of doing what it thinks is right, and doing it regardless [of the facts]…. The debate is far less about ‘Can it be true?’ or ‘Can it not be true?’ ” says Parsi. The bigger picture, he says, is a regional power struggle between a strengthening Iran and an America weakened by debacle in Iraq.

Source: The Christian Science Monitor