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.”
What we have said here is only a brief listing of academic violations and denial of right to education in Iranian universities today. Students are determined to continue their legal and rightful struggle to promote independence of universities and uphold academic freedoms, although many are sacrificed down this path.
Iran is a state party to both the International Convention on Civil and Political Rights (without reservation) and the Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC), both of which prohibit the execution of persons under the age of 18 at the time of their offense. In ratifying the CRC, Iran declared an extremely broad reservation, “not to apply any provisions or articles of the Convention that are incompatible with Islamic Laws.”
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?
Thousands of university students in an Iranian city have held a protest against the attempted sexual harassment of a female colleague by a top university official, the press reported on Monday. About 3,000 students at the university in the northwestern city of Zanjan staged the sit-in protest over the weekend at a sports hall on campus, the reports said.
