As Iran moves toward a diplomatic agreement with Britain, France, and Germany to freeze parts of its nuclear program, its right-wing security forces are cracking down hard against the country’s besieged reformist movement, according to human rights groups here.
About half a dozen prominent activists who use the Internet and Weblogs to communicate with other reformists have been detained over the last two months in what New York-based Human Rights Watch (HRW) called part of an effort to stamp out the “last remaining outlet for freedom of expression in the country.”
“The Internet has been a gateway for outreach and information sharing with the Iranian public,” said Joe Stork, Washington director of HRW’s Middle East and North Africa Division. “With so many NGO [non-governmental organization] activists arrested or under surveillance, the remaining members of civil society fear for their safety.”
At the same time, the arrest Nov. 1 of women’s rights and NGO leader Mahboubeh Abbasgholizadeh drew a strong protest from Human Rights First (HRF), formerly known as the Lawyers Committee for Human Rights.
She has long been a leader in the campaign to achieve equal rights for women in matters such as child custody, inheritance, domestic violence, and divorce, areas in which the reigning clerics had permitted activists to organize relatively freely, at least until now.
“By targeting leaders like Dr. Abbasgholizadeh,” said Neil Hicks, HRF’s director of international programs, “the authorities are erasing divisions between secular and religious Iranian reform activists and demonstrating that they will not permit any dissent.”
“This can only have destructive consequences for Iranian society and for human rights conditions in the country.”
The crackdown against activists follows the defeat of reformist parties in elections to the Majlis, or Iranian parliament, last February. More-conservative parties loyal to Iran’s supreme clerical leader, the Ayatollah Khameini, won a large majority in the Majlis and are now poised to take over the presidency when the reformist incumbent, Mohammed Khatami, serves out his term in mid-2005.
After the parliamentary elections, conservatives moved closed down most of Iran’s reformist newspapers and magazines and now appear to be moving against civil society groups that have carried on the reformist agenda.
The Bush administration, which has charged Iran with attempting to destabilize neighboring Iraq, is reportedly mulling over a number of policy options – from joining its European allies in an agreement with Teheran that would even lift various bilateral sanctions against the Islamic Republic in exchange for a permanent freeze of its nuclear program, to launching military strikes against its nuclear facilities and backing opposition forces to achieve “regime change.”
Most experts on Iran believe that the U.S. invasion of Iraq has actually strengthened the conservatives’ hold on the country and that many students and other reformists who were demonstrating against the regime in the streets just two years ago have become more apolitical.
That has left civil society groups and Internet activists as the main dissident force in Iran at the moment, and the current crackdown is causing growing concern among rights groups here and elsewhere in the West.
HRW said it was particularly disturbing that the government is now, for the first time, attacking mid-level activists in the NGO community.
In the case of the Internet-related arrests, the authorities, according to HRW, are detaining contributing journalists and technicians rather than higher-profile political leaders under whose names their Web sites operate.
“We’re talking about rank-and-file activists working on social and cultural issues,” said Stork. “Their basic freedoms are being sacrificed as conservative leaders try to purge critics from society.”
HRW said that to date none of the detainees have been charged with a crime, and that judicial authorities have given different reasons for their arrests.
Last month, for example, the spokesman for Iran’s judiciary, Jamal Karimi Rad, said that detainees were accused of “propaganda against the regime, endangering national security, inciting public unrest, and insulting sacred belief.” Two weeks later, the head of the judiciary, Ayatollah Shahrudi, told an interviewer on state-run television that detainees would be charged with “moral crimes.”
Meanwhile, Nemat Ahmadi, an attorney who represents some of the detainees, has been barred from meeting with them and has been told they are being held in solitary confinement.
“The only criminal behavior here appears to be that of Iran’s judiciary officials,” Stork said. “They seem to be ready to defy the country’s own laws, as well as its international human rights obligations in solidifying their hold on power.”
Abbasgholizadeh, who, in addition to NGO work, serves as editor of Farzaneh, a quarterly devoted to women’s studies and research, was arrested at her home and has been held without formal charges.
HRF said her detention, as well as that of other activists, suggests that the clerical oligarchy “is positioning itself to extinguish the final traces of a broad-based movement for political reform.”
As other avenues for activism and free expression have been closed down by the authorities, according to the group, large numbers of young people, including many women, became involved in officially recognized NGOs active in various fields, particularly women’s rights.
Their activities have been focused on educating women about their rights and the difference between traditional cultural values that repress women and reinforce patriarchal values and more progressive interpretations of Islam’s teachings. The latter, according to HRF, are seen as a challenge to the regime’s authority and legitimacy.
One Iranian women’s rights activist, Mehrengiz Kar, was honored just last month at HRF’s annual Human Rights Award dinner in Manhattan.
(One World)
