By Anne Penketh in Tehran
Saturday, 15 March 2008
While much of the world responded with scepticism and confusion to yesterday’s parliamentary elections in Iran, inside the country coverage has been crippled by the tightening of an already oppressive regime.
The limits on freedom of speech are not confined to the election period though, but part of a censorial onslaught being felt across Iran’s cultural landscape.
The closure of newspapers and the jailing of journalists has become commonplace. But for the first time, a prize-winning young novelist has been sentenced to jail for the behaviour of his fictional characters. Directives from the National Security Council containing the latest Islamic guidelines land on the desks of Iranian editors once or twice a week, and they are in no doubt that they must comply. They have been told in the past that any mention of Hizbollah, or of the Syrian President Bashar Assad, is strictly off-limits.
But a recent classified directive broke new ground by decreeing in minute detail how to report on every story. It was unprecedented even for the radical nationalist government of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. Iranian sources say it is part of an almost surreal trend of censorship.
Even the clergy has not been spared. Hadi Ghaemi, the New York-based co-ordinator of the International Campaign for Human Rights in Iran, calls it a “modern inquisition”. “The situation for literature is much worse,” said a source.
Yaghoub Yaadali, a 36-year-old television director, received a suspended jail sentence last summer on charges of “spreading lies, defamation and insulting a tribal minority”.
In his book, The Rules of Restlessness, a fictional character has an affair with a woman from an ethnic Bakhtiari village. It won Iran’s highest honour for literature, the Golshiri award, in 2004. As with any other work, it was only published after obtaining permission from the Ministry of Culture and Islamic Guidance.
When he was sentenced to three months in jail, suspended for nine months, last September it caused a sensation in Iranian intellectual circles. He had already spent 47 days in prison. The judge ordered him to write four articles on “cultural and artistic personalities, each at a minimum length of one page on size A4 paper, to be published every six months” at his own expense.
His supporters were dumbstruck when, on appeal last month, the court toughened the sentence to actual imprisonment. “It’s unheard of,” said one Iranian. The writer was ordered to begin his sentence before the Iranian new year, (21 March) but hopes that if he completes the articles the jail time will be suspended.
The censor’s verdict is even falling on new editions of published works. The Culture Ministry demands changes, and if the demand is not met, halts publication.
One author of a children’s book was told: “You wrote about a duck named ‘Brave’, but the duck isn’t brave, the frog is brave.” He responded that he couldn’t change the title because it was translated from another language, and in any case it was a children’s book. He also pointed out that it was the second edition.
A television presenter got into hot water for writing a poem which said “in my dreams I think of you in the middle of the night” because of perceived sexual innuendo. The verse was removed.
On 6 March, the general director of public libraries, Mansour Vaezi, warned a conference of library directors that their libraries would be purged of inappropriate works.
Academic freedom has also been severely restricted in the three years since President Ahmadinejad came to power. University faculty members deemed to be “problematic” are being forced into retirement, and even sacked.
A Tehran cleric, Hojatoleslam Hadi Ghabel, was ordered to be defrocked by a special court in the holy city of Qom, for criticising President Ahmadinejad and the spiritual leadership. He spent 47 days in jail awaiting trial and was given a three-year prison sentence.
“This is a modern inquisition by the Islamic authorities,” said Mr Ghaemi. “If they get away with it this time, there’s no saying where it will end.”
one must not forget that one aspect of “security” cases is the image that they carry for the groups that advance such issues. Therefore, before fake charges take to the news-media and become public, those who have had a hand in arresting the students must be weakened. Otherwise, after the severe charges are made public, repeated and are tied to the image of the actors, even the intervention of the head of the judiciary (as history demonstrates) cannot be of much help to the detainees.
How can we tell the judiciary officials of Iran that according to law juveniles can stay alive and continue to live with appropriate and suitable punishment? How must one make this request from the judiciary a public and wide-spread demand and point out that killing a juvenile who has not wholeheartedly committed an act does not solve any of the real problems facing the country?
it is easy to predict that the success of student activists in imposing their will and demands on government officials at academic institutions, such as the Teachers Training college and Zanjan University (where the students boldly took the initiative into their own hands), would result in a backlash by extreme right-wing officials who would plan an “instructive” counter-attack against the student movement.Hopefully such a reaction will not come. But from an analytic perspective, one must not negate it altogether.
This is the reason that the moment imprisoned students step out of prison, it becomes clear to every one why they were put behind bars: for simply criticizing the president. It becomes instantly clear why they were subjected to interrogations and what questions were asked of them. These are the events that portray the image of this country. Students, social activists and journalists are certainly not on the list of those that dent this image. The publication of the arrest of students because of their criticism of the president brings forth a caricature image of Mahmud Ahmadinejad which does not match the claims that he made at Columbia University or the image that the regime strives to present about its standing.
There are at least 70 young people on death row who at the time of their arrest were under the age of 16. In the past 12 months, Iranian organisations claim that 80 feminists have been arrested and 20 of them have been sentenced from three to five years in jail. A total of 54 journalists have ended up in prison, several were released without trial after serving jail time, while others remain behind bars. In the past 12 months, 34 newspapers and magazines, among them the feminist magazine Zanan, have been shut down.
