Starting Points: scapegoats

Dec 29, 2009

Iran Lashes Out at West Over Protests

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BEIRUT, Lebanon — Iranian authorities continued arresting hundreds of opposition members and accused the United States and Britain on Tuesday of orchestrating the violent demonstrations that rocked the capital and other cities on Sunday.

The sister of Nobel peace laureate Shirin Ebadi was detained on Monday night, according to opposition Web sites quoted by news agencies.

A spokesman for Iran’s Foreign Ministry said countries including the United States and Britain had miscalculated in criticizing the government’s response to the demonstrations, which the government said left at least eight people dead in Tehran. The opposition counted five more deaths in other cities.

“Some Western countries are supporting this sort of activities,” said the spokesman, Ramin Mehmanparast, according to The Associated Press. “This is intervention in our internal affairs. We strongly condemn it.”

He said the British ambassador to Iran would be summoned for discussions.

The British government said its ambassador, Simon Gass, would respond “robustly” to any criticism and would reiterate calls for Iran to respect the rights of its citizens.

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The speaker of Iran’s Parliament, Ali Larijani, rebuked American and British officials for their “disgraceful comments” about the demonstrations, according to the state-run PressTV. The criticisms of Iran’s action were “disgustingly vivid that they clarify where this movement stands when it comes to destroying religious and revolutionary values,” he said.

Iranian authorities arrested at least a dozen opposition figures on Monday, including former Foreign Minister Ibrahim Yazdi, the human rights activist Emad Baghi and three top aides to the former presidential candidate Mir Hussein Moussavi, Iranian news sites reported.

All told, more than 1,500 people have been arrested nationwide since Sunday, including 1,110 in Tehran and 400 in the central Iranian city of Isfahan, the pro-opposition Jaras Web site reported.

In Hawaii, where he is on vacation, Mr. Obama condemned the violence against protesters and called for the release of those “unjustly detained.”

“For months, the Iranian people have sought nothing more than to exercise their universal rights,” Mr. Obama told reporters. “Each time they have done so, they have been met with the iron fist of brutality, even on solemn occasions and holy days.”

He added that the protests in Iran had nothing to do with the United States or other foreign countries. “It’s about the Iranian people, and their aspirations for justice, and a better life for themselves,” he said. “And the decision of Iran’s leaders to govern through fear and tyranny will not succeed in making those aspirations go away.”

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The streets of Tehran were largely quiet on Monday and early Tuesday, as citizens absorbed the shock of Sunday’s violence. Thirteen people were reported to have been killed and many more wounded in street battles in cities across the country between security forces and protesters, who fought back more fiercely than ever before. The government said Monday that eight people had been killed in Tehran, and opposition Web sites catalogued five deaths in other cities.

The government said that it was holding the bodies of five protesters, including a nephew of Mr. Moussavi, the state-run IRNA news agency reported, in what appeared to be an attempt to prevent funerals that could turn into more demonstrations. The bodies were being held pending autopsies.

The authorities’ use of deadly force on the Ashura holiday drew a fierce rebuke on Monday from the opposition cleric and reformist candidate Mehdi Karroubi, who noted that even the shah had honored the holiday’s ban on violence.

“What has happened to this religious system that it orders the killing of innocent people during the holy day of Ashura?” Mr. Karroubi said in a statement, according to the Jaras Web site.

Mr. Karroubi, a fierce critic of the government, was attacked Sunday by plainclothes security officers, and other attackers later smashed the front windshield of his car, the Sahamnews Web site reported.

Government supporters blamed opposition members for the violence and called for their prosecution. The Revolutionary Guards issued a statement calling violence by the protesters a “horrible insult to Ashura” and called for “firm punishment of those behind this obvious insult,” the semiofficial Fars news agency reported.

Large groups of police officers stood guard in several central Tehran squares on Monday morning, witnesses said. At least three subway stations were closed, apparently to prevent any further gatherings.

Still, there were reports of continuing scattered protests on Monday in Tehran’s Haft-e-Tir square and other areas, Jaras reported.

The police fired tear gas to disperse a group of mourners who gathered outside the Tehran hospital where the body of Mr. Moussavi’s nephew, Ali Moussavi, had been held, the Nowrooz Web site reported. A prominent opposition figure with ties to the Moussavi family said Ali Moussavi had been killed by assassins.

Family members said Mr. Moussavi’s body disappeared from the hospital overnight, and on Monday IRNA reported that his body and four others were being held while investigations were carried out.

A 27-year-old journalist who was reporting on the street clashes on Sunday was reported missing. The reporter, Redha al-Basha, who was working for Dubai TV, has not been heard from, according to a statement issued by Dubai TV. Mr. Basha was last seen surrounded by security forces in Tehran, witnesses said.

The group Human Rights Activists in Iran said that the 1,100 people arrested in Tehran were being held in Evin Prison, the Gooya Web site reported.

Among those arrested in Isfahan was the son of a senior cleric, Ayatollah Jalaleddin Taheri. Ayatollah Taheri is the former Isfahan representative of Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, and his son Muhammad is married to the granddaughter of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, the father of Iran’s 1979 revolution.

Ayatollah Taheri tried last week to lead a memorial service for the dissident cleric Grand Ayatollah Hossein Ali Montazeri, who died Dec. 20. The arrest of his son was viewed as an effort by the authorities to pressure the ayatollah.

Nazila Fathi contributed reporting from Toronto, and Peter Baker from Honolulu.

Aug 9, 2009

With Iran Blaming West, Dual Citizens Are Targets

By Tara Bahrampour
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, August 9, 2009

Among the more than 100 people on trial after Iran's disputed presidential election are two dual citizens: Kian Tajbakhsh, 47, an American Iranian urban planner, and Maziar Bahari, 42, a Canadian Iranian filmmaker and Newsweek reporter.

Bahari was arrested June 21 at his mother's Tehran apartment, where he was staying while reporting on the post-election turmoil. Tajbakhsh, who lives in Tehran with his wife and daughter, was arrested July 9 while leaving his home to attend a party.

Friends and family members say they do not know where the men are being held. They have not been allowed visitors or access to lawyers, though both have been allowed a few phone calls and appeared in a Tehran courtroom last week.

Their arrests, along with those of opposition politicians and other journalists, came after Iranians poured into the streets protesting what they said was the rigged reelection of the incumbent president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. Iranian officials have blamed the protests on foreign governments and news agencies, and friends of Tajbakhsh and Bahari worry that the two are being held because of their Western links.

"They are trying to make a case to their own constituents, and to international constituents, that what has taken place has a foreign element behind it, so dual nationals, people with ties to Western NGOs, are targets," said Karim Sadjadpour, an Iran analyst at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and a friend of Tajbakhsh. "I don't believe for a second that they genuinely perceive Kian to be a threat to national security."

Last month, Iranian news reports quoted Bahari as stating that "as a journalist and a member of this great Western capitalism machine," he had "either blindly or on purpose participated in projecting doubts and promoting a color revolution" similar to those in Georgia and Ukraine.

Last week, Bahari, whose partner is pregnant in London, apologized before Iranian reporters. Friends and colleagues say they think the statements were made under duress.

Both men looked haggard and tense in photos released last week by Iran's semiofficial Fars News Agency.

Their arrests follow a pattern during Ahmadinejad's tenure of high-profile detentions of dual citizens. Since he took office in 2005, at least seven have been detained, including Woodrow Wilson Center scholar Haleh Esfandiari in 2007 and freelance journalist Roxana Saberi, who was convicted of espionage this year and later pardoned.

Tajbakhsh, who has lived in Iran since 1999 and has done some projects for its government, was held for four months in 2007, during which authorities accused him of trying to foment a "color" revolution. He stayed in Iran afterward and had plans to teach at Columbia University this fall.

Friends said he had purposely avoided the election-related turmoil, even abstaining from voting. "He felt confident there was no rationale for him to be imprisoned," Sadjadpour said. Two days after the vote, Tajbakhsh wrote to him in an e-mail: "I'm keeping my head down. I have nothing journalistic to add to all the reports that are here."

Bahari had been filing reports for Newsweek and for television stations in Britain; the Iranian government has accused him of sending reports to foreign news media in exchange for payment, said Nisid Hajari, Newsweek's foreign editor.

"That's exactly what he's been doing for more than 10 years," Hajari said, adding that the Iranian government had renewed Bahari's press accreditation each year and had not complained about his work. "What they've accused him of doing is a job that they themselves had licensed and approved him to do."

Bahari's writing had not been particularly critical of the Iranian government, according to analysts. "Newsweek coverage has been quite favorable in the past, so I'm surprised that they would target him," said Ervand Abrahamian, a history professor at the City University of New York's Baruch College.

Esfandiari, the scholar who, like Tajbakhsh, spent four months in an Iranian prison in 2007, said the government may simply have looked for convenient targets to blame for the post-election unrest.

"I can guess that they were digging into the velvet revolution file, and they needed a credible voice to talk about this velvet revolution, and the only person who was there was Kian," she said. "I've heard they have rooms full of charts about universities, think tanks, NGOs and are then drawing parallels from Georgia, Ukraine and so on. And then they go after truly, truly innocent people like Kian."

Shiva Balaghi, an Iran scholar at Brown University, said the arrests are part of a historical pattern in the Islamic republic. "Whenever they feel they're losing their grip on power is when they do these things," she said.

In past weeks, as cracks have appeared in the top echelons of the Iranian government, it has been unclear who is in charge of detainees. When Tajbakhsh checked in with his Intelligence Ministry minder after the election, Sadjadpour said, he was told, " 'It's not us that's behind the imprisonment now; it's the Sepah, the Revolutionary Guard.' "

The U.S. and Canadian governments have called for release of the men, and writers, filmmakers and artists have signed petitions. Iran is also holding a French academic, who apologized in court Saturday, and three U.S. citizens who hiked over the border from Iraq last week.

Jacki Lyden, a National Public Radio reporter who has worked with Bahari inside and outside Iran, said his arrest signals an end to the reassurances journalists there used to count on.

"Every little thing you tell yourself about why they would not come after you, those little half-truths over the last 20 years, are gone," she said. "Anybody who subscribes to the idea that there's a doormat-sized civil society in the Islamic republic has found that doormat yanked out from under them."