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Following a recent thread about persecution of gays in Iran, you might like to read this article :


http://observer.guardian.co.uk/magazine/story/0,,2178056,00.html

Baiting Bush, denying the Holocaust... Iran's hardline president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, has also been busy dealing with simmering unrest within his own borders. Now, Iran's leaders have launched a ferocious crackdown after accusing their opponents of conspiring to topple the Islamic system in a velvet revolution. Robert Tait reports from inside Iran

Sunday September 30, 2007
The Observer

One afternoon early in May this year, a Kafkaesque drama unfolded in the normally placid east Tehran suburb of Seyed Khandan Bridge. Four burly men in plain clothes entered a block of flats, telling residents that they were police officers pursuing an armed robber. They went to the first-floor flat of Shamsolmoluk Tajik and banged on the door, forcing their way in by violently barging her aside when she answered. They were looking for her nephew Ehsan Mansouri, who often stayed with her. They ransacked the house and scoured the cellars, but Mansouri was not there. So the men left with Tajik, who was by this time screaming hysterically to attract her neighbours' attention.

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They pushed the terrified woman into a waiting car and drove away, but stopped when they spotted their quarry, Mansouri, walking along the street. Seeing the men jumping from the car, Mansouri tried to make a run for it. A gunshot rang out, prompting the fleeing man to look back and see one of his pursuers training his gun on him. Fearing he was going to be shot, Mansouri decided to surrender and lay on the ground. Seconds later, the chasing pack pounced and started beating him mercilessly around the head and neck with rubber batons.

Releasing Tajik, the gang handcuffed Mansouri, bundled him into the back of the car and continued assaulting him. They took him to Evin prison, a sprawling and intimidating facility in northwest Tehran. When they arrived, Mansouri was bleeding so profusely that prison authorities refused to admit him. They eventually relented only on the condition that Mansouri would be examined by a doctor, who would then submit a document listing his injuries to those who had delivered him for their signatures.

The incident showed how ruthless Iran's security forces could be in pursuit of a wanted man. But Mansouri was no armed robber. He was a 22-year-old mathematics student at Amirkabir University, one of Iran's most prestigious seats of higher learning. What had he done to be hunted down so brutally and subjected to such a fearful battering?

The arrest of Mansouri, a prominent student activist, was precipitated by the circulation of four campus publications containing blasphemous references and insulting commentaries on Iran's Islamic system. These included the incendiary statement that neither the Prophet Mohammad nor Imam Ali, the prophet's cousin and son-in-law who is the most revered figure in the Shi'ite branch of Islam practised by Iran, were 'innocent'. It also argued that no figure in today's Iran - including its supreme leader, a figure normally regarded as above public criticism - should be considered 'sacred'. One publication asserted that the highest number of prostitutes in Iran could be found in Qom, an emblematic shrine city on the edge of the central Kavir Desert that is home to the country's religious establishment.

In the cloying religious atmosphere of Iran's ruling theocracy, making such statements can be almost suicidal. Mansouri was one of eight students arrested over the affair. Five were subsequently released. He remains in custody along with two of the others arrested, Majid Tavakoli and Ahmad Ghasaban. Relatives of the three say they have been tortured while in detention in an effort to extract confessions.

A close associate of the men told me they had undergone marathon interrogation sessions lasting up to 48 hours and frequently involving severe beatings. Interrogation teams of up to eight men have subjected the students to physical assaults interspersed with insults and psychological abuse. The students have been made to lie on the floor while interrogators stood on their backs. They are also said to have been beaten with electric cables. When they fainted from stress, the interrogators revived them by throwing cold water over them. Parents of the students have detailed the allegations in a letter to Iran's judiciary chief, Mahmoud Hashemi Shahroudi.

The men's families and friends insist that the publications were forgeries produced as a pretext for arresting them as prominent members of Amirkabir's Islamic Students Committee, which plays a leading role among Iran's student activist movement. 'The government wanted to confront the Islamic Students Committee in such a way that other student bodies around the country would be intimidated,' one activist says. 'As they couldn't find any other excuse they produced these publications with the help of the student Basij [a pro-regime volunteer militia]. As soon as we got wind of the publications, we told everyone that they were fakes. They even found four scanned copies of the publications' logos inside the briefcase of a Basij student.'

It is not an isolated case. Dozens of Amirkabir activists have been expelled, suspended or put forward for compulsory military service in what students say is a concerted government campaign.

It has been instigated, they believe, by Iran's conservative president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, in revenge for a humiliating episode at the university last December, when pro-democracy students staged an audacious and unprecedented challenge to his authority.

The event coincided with one of Ahmadinejad's most bitterly controversial initiatives, a 'scientific' conference questioning the Holocaust staged at the foreign ministry's political and international studies institute in north Tehran. Rather than attend the birth of his own brainchild, however, the president chose that day to visit the Amirkabir campus near the city centre.

It was, in its own way, as provocative a move as holding the Holocaust conference.

The university, commonly known as the polytechnic, has been historically renowned as a hotbed of pro-democratic protest. The secular convictions of its student activists are far removed from Ahmadinejad's messianic religious beliefs. Many of them were already angry over a series of government-sponsored restrictions, including a stringent disciplinary code, limitations on inter-gender mingling and the demolition of student representative buildings. The president's visit appeared to show he had neutralised his critics.

The plan began to backfire as he addressed a gathering of Basij students in the sports hall. Dozens of anti-government activists forced their way in and drowned out his speech by chanting 'Death to the Dictator'. In a characteristically Iranian put-down, they held Ahmadinejad portraits upside down and set them alight. One student displayed a banner reading: 'Fascist president, the polytechnic is not for you.'

The interruption provoked a furious melee in which punches were thrown and a shoe was hurled at the bemused president. Ahmadinejad was forced to cut his speech short and as he hurriedly left the campus, a member of his security detail fired a stun grenade to disperse angry activists attempting to follow him.

It was a stunning reversal for a politician accustomed to basking in mass audience acclaim during the nationwide roadshows that had become his political trademark. Eye-witnesses described him as looking bewildered and close to tears as the upheaval unfolded. Yet amidst it all, he issued one riposte of lasting resonance. 'Everyone knows the real dictator is America and its servants,' he shouted in response to the 'dictator' chants. Those present recall him accusing his hecklers of being paid agents of America and warning that they would be confronted.

That response may come to be regarded as one of the most telling moments of Ahmadinejad's presidency. In the months since, a preoccupation with alleged US plots to topple the Islamic regime has been at the forefront of the government's agenda. It has also provided the rationale for an intensifying atmosphere of social and political repression, which had been relatively mild in the first 18 months after Ahmadinejad's election in June 2005.

Less than three weeks after the Amirkabir episode, masked men armed with knives hijacked the car carrying Haleh Esfandiari to Tehran's Mehrabad airport and stole her bags, along with her US and Iranian passports. The event marked the beginning of a long ordeal for Esfandiari, 67, an Iranian-born scholar at the Woodrow Wilson Center, a Washington-based think tank, who had returned to Tehran to visit her ailing 93-year-old mother. Esfandiari was placed under virtual house arrest and repeatedly interrogated until May, when she was formally arrested and detained in Evin prison. She was subsequently charged with espionage and endangering national security. This month she returned to the US after being released on bail following three and a half months in solitary confinement.

Esfandiari's treatment mirrors that of two other US-Iranian academics. Kian Tajbakhsh, an urban planner with the New York-based Soros Open Society Institute, faced identical charges after being arrested in May, though he too was released this month on bail. Also in jail is Ali Shakeri, a founding board member of the Center for Citizen Peacebuilding at the University of California at Irvine, who is still being investigated.

Government officials justified the arrests by referring to the Bush administration's openly stated desire for regime change in Iran and pointed to $75m of annual US state department funding for pro-democracy projects in the country. Most of the money is allocated for American-backed Farsi language broadcasts, in the form of Voice of America satellite news channel and Radio Farda, which both broadcast into Iran. But the US has not disclosed where the rest goes.

Iran claims it is being used to construct a 'civil society' network - consisting of students, women's activists, trade unionists and so on - that will press for fundamental change to the political system. Officials believe academics are playing a pivotal role in these alleged networks. The final goal, the Iranians claim, is to overthrow the regime in western-backed 'soft' or 'velvet' revolutions like those witnessed in former Soviet states like Ukraine and Georgia. To ram home the point, state television in July screened 'confessions' from Esfandiari and Tajbakhsh in a two-part programme, In The Name of Democracy, in which their testimony was interspersed with extensive footage from such revolutions.

The 'soft' revolution allegation is distinctive for being the only external security threat given credibility in Tehran. While speculation about a US or Israeli strike on Iranian nuclear installations and other facilities has reached fever pitch in the west over recent weeks, in Iran the possibility is publicly dismissed. Senior figures, including Ahmadinejad, confidently assert that American forces are too bogged down in Iraq for the White House to contemplate attacking Iran. Having given up the idea of toppling the regime through military action, the official narrative goes, the US is trying to destabilise it by stealth. It is unclear if this sanguine assessment of American military capabilities is a bluff intended to maintain domestic calm.

Virtually all Iranian activists deny receiving US money. 'I can tell you that we have not received any of the $75m. We don't hope for it and we're not looking for it,' Abdollah Momeni, spokesman for the anti-regime students' alumni association, told me earlier this summer. 'Allocating such a budget can only give the government a pretext to crack down on opposition groups even harder.'

Days after our conversation, Momeni was arrested during a police raid on his office. His family say he was beaten during detention.

Official intolerance has extended to women's rights groups, already confronting a panoply of discrimination. In July, a revolutionary court sentenced Delaram Ali, 24, to 10 lashes and three years and three months in prison. Ali was among the organisers of a protest rally in Tehran's Haft-e Tir Square in June of last year that was violently broken up by police. She is also a leader of the One Million Signature campaign, a mass petition demanding an end to a wide range of inequalities against women, including laws depriving them of child custody rights after divorce and entitling them to only half the inheritance and compensation rights due to men. Ali, who has appealed, was so stunned by her sentence that she initially thought it was a mistake. 'When I read the verdict, I started searching for the word "suspended",' she says. 'It was only later, when I saw others getting similar punishments, that I realised it wasn't just me.'

Those unfortunates who are arrested after attracting the authorities' suspicion are taken to Evin prison's Section 209, reserved for political detainees and supervised exclusively by the intelligence ministry.

Descriptions of the block echo the opening scene of Alexander Solzhenitsyn's novel, The First Circle, when it describes how the central character is subjected to disorientating techniques in a KGB interrogation centre. Former inmates describe being guided blindfold through a labyrinthine network of corridors, and repeatedly ordered to turn left and right and to duck their heads to pass through low doorways. 'They try to lead you through long corridors so you lose all idea of the dimensions of the building,' Mohammad Hashemi, 25, secretary of Tahkim-e Vahdat, a student group, tells me. 'But you never know if they are leading you in a circle or if the turns are genuine. I tried to memorise the route and when I was led through again, I remembered at one point thinking, this is the spot where I should lower my head. But the guide never said anything the second time and we just passed through.'

Suspects are allowed to remove their blindfolds only inside their tiny cells, which are typically six square metres, although some are smaller. The cells have no beds or mattresses and the light is switched on constantly, making sleep difficult. The only reading material permitted is the Koran. All inmates are held in solitary confinement. Many describe it as a crushing ordeal that makes them question their self-worth and previous actions. 'Solitary confinement in itself is a torture,' says Hashemi, who underwent 27 days of it after participating in a protest outside Amirkabir University.

The authorities are usually unapologetic about such techniques. But the allegations of abuses committed against Mansouri, Tavakoli and Ghasaban - the three students accused of distributing the insulting publications - have caused disquiet. Publicly, Iranian officials deny practising torture. The parents' letter to Shahroudi, the judiciary chief, prompted him to order an investigation. Shahroudi is a moderate figure who has openly criticised the current government. But when the parents met last month with Tehran's chief prosecutor, Saeed Mortazavi, he rebuked them and flatly denied that their sons had been tortured. 'It is for me to say whether they have been tortured and I say we have not yet tortured to know the meaning of torture,' the parents recalled him saying. He said they would only be released after they had written letters of repentance.

For some perspective, I went to see Shirin Ebadi, whose tireless campaign to improve human rights in Iran earned her the Nobel peace prize in 2003. Ebadi has been representing Esfandiari and the three Amirkabir students, but has been denied access to them. Among the books in the waiting room of her modest basement office in central Tehran's Yousef Abad neighbourhood is a volume of speeches by Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, spiritual leader of the 1979 Islamic revolution and the main architect of Iran's theocratic system.

But this does not amount to an endorsement. 'I personally believe that politics should be divided from religion so that people's religious beliefs are not abused,' she says. 'But if you have an Islamic system, it doesn't mean you can abuse people's rights under the excuse of Islam. Under a proper interpretation of Islam, we can be Muslims and still respect human rights and democracy.'

Ebadi has just written to Louise Arbour, the UN human rights high commissioner, complaining about the systematic discrimination against women in Iran. Before the revolution, Ebadi had been Iran's first female judge. Afterwards she was reduced to the status of a clerk when the new authorities decreed that women could not be judges under Sharia law, which Ebadi says is used as a pretext to justify myriad abuses.

Ebadi, who is 60, looks weary as a result of working 17-hour days to cope with the growing number of cases coming before her. She has never worked harder, she says. While Iran's human rights situation has deteriorated to its worst point in years, her Nobel laureate status encourages victims to seek help when before they might have stayed quiet. But there may be an additional reason for her strained appearance. Her international fame has given her a certain protection against state harassment, but not total immunity. 'I have received many threatening letters and the rightist newspapers, especially Kayhan [which is close to the leadership] are always accusing me of trying to launch a velvet revolution,' she says. 'Three times, Tehran's chief prosecutor has tried to establish a dossier against me so he can summon me to court as a defendant.'

Ebadi is not interested in the government's reasoning. 'I'm not inside their minds to give you a reason,' she says. 'All I can tell you is that everything they do is illegal. It not only contravenes all international laws, but also the laws they have passed themselves. As for what is called a soft or velvet revolution, we have no crime by that name on our legal code. What has happened in countries such as Georgia is simply the victory of one political party over another. When a political party is active, it tries to achieve power and Iran has always claimed that it gives power to political parties to act. So why should they be so sensitive over this question of a velvet revolution?'

Ahmadinejad's election ended eight years of relatively benign governance under Mohammad Khatami, a mild-mannered cleric who believed in reform and liberalisation. Khatami's election in a landslide in 1997 ushered in an atmosphere of social and political relaxation never before seen in the Islamic Republic. Iranian women, long fettered by the restrictions of Islamic dress, felt confident enough to wear more fashionable clothes and colourful hijabs, or headscarves, which they often pushed back daringly to reveal glamorous hairdos. As free speech flourished, dozens of newspapers and magazines appeared, almost all of them demanding greater liberties. The chorus was joined by an emboldened new generation of student activists, too young to remember or identify with the fervour that had produced the revolution which swept away the monarchical rein of the shah, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi. In this intoxicating 'Tehran spring', many Western commentators were seduced into believing that Iran stood on the threshold of a new era of freedom.

But it was a false dawn. Long before Khatami had finished his first term, his project had withered under a sustained assault from conservatives and religious hardliners. Reformist newspapers were closed down one after another, initially using pre-revolutionary laws and then under fresh updated legislation. Student activists were brutally suppressed, most notably during a protest at Tehran university halls of residence in July 1999. Khatami was powerless to intervene. His re-election in 2001 was perfunctory rather than triumphant. Conditions were not ripe for his vision. In hindsight, it was too exclusively the preserve of social and intellectual elites.

Yet he had given the population a taste of freedom. The public's appetite had been whetted and it might one day ask for more.

This prospect alarmed conservatives and radicals proclaiming loyalty to the revolution's puritanical Islamist spirit. It inspired what has been described as a silent takeover by the most ideological factions of the revolutionary guards, the elite force created by Khomeini to safeguard the revolution. The public face of the takeover was manifested in the election of Ahmadinejad, a former guard commander whose ideology was driven by a zealous adherence to the Shia belief that Mehdi, the hidden or 12th imam - who disappeared more than 1,100 years ago - would one day return to earth and herald a new age of justice. The guards' tightening grip has been reflected in their increasingly dominant role in the economy. The force's commercial interests extend into lucrative areas such as oil and natural gas, hotels and civil aviation.

According to Ebrahim Yazdi, leader of the Freedom Movement of Iran, a pro-democratic opposition group, the power seizure was a 'velvet coup d'etat' which is now being reinforced by applying a 'victory through terrorisation' philosophy. 'The philosophy is that you terrorise people in order to succeed. Ahmadinejad represents this line,' Yazdi tells me. 'To survive you have to continuously create episodes that justify the political repression.'

The development has had the blessing of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the supreme leader and the most powerful figure in Iran. Under the Islamic Republic's system of velayat-e faqih - a concept of rule by religious jurisprudence devised by Khomeini - Khamenei's role as supreme jurist gives him the final say over all state matters and command of the armed forces, including the revolutionary guards. But his power has not gone unchallenged. Khamenei, who was appointed after Khomeini's death in 1989, knew that certain leading figures in the establishment believed his role to be outmoded and in need of revision.

Chief among them was Hashemi Rafsanjani, a veteran cleric and pillar of the revolution, whose colourful political career has included spells as president and parliamentary speaker. Much of his enduring influence stems from having been one of Khomeini's closest confidants during the Eighties, when Iran fought a bloody eight-year war with Iraq. Rafsanjani, I was told, had concluded that the Islamic system in its present form is unworkable. In private, he has reportedly suggested that the supreme leader's post should be reduced to a ceremonial position akin to a constitutional monarch. Together with his known desire for rapprochement with the US, these sentiments put him on a collision course with Khamenei. According to one version, the two clashed angrily months before the 2005 presidential election, with Khamenei telling Rafsanjani that his conduct risked putting the country 'in the hands of the Americans'. Apocryphal or not, Khamenei backed Ahmadinejad over Rafsanjani in the election and mobilised state resources to help him win. But Rafsanjani's influence is far from spent. This month he was elected chairman of the experts' assembly, a clerical body with constitutional powers to supervise and even dismiss the supreme leader. Rafsanjani has indicated that he plans to use the powers.

It is against this background that Ahmadinejad's government has rolled back the remnants of the freedoms introduced by Khatami. In recent months, heavy deployments of 'morals' police officers have led to thousands of women being warned or arrested for 'bad' hijab or other forms of insufficiently Islamic dress. Similar measures have been taken against young men sporting outlandishly spiked or quaffed hairstyles, a surprisingly common sight in Iran. Police have arrested hundreds of 'hooligans' and 'thugs' in raids on working-class areas purportedly designed to root out violent criminals. Several reformist newspapers and websites have been closed for publishing 'lies'. At least 64 executions have been carried out since mid-July, more than 20 of them in public, in what seems to be a thinly disguised attempt to create a climate of fear.

The government says its purpose is to increase 'social security'. But after a period of relative freedom, do such repressive policies risk provoking a public backlash?

No, says Amir Mohebian, political commentator of the pro-government Resalat newspaper. Most Iranians, he argues, understand that the government's actions are a response to US sabre-rattling. 'When you have a big enemy such as America that has called you the axis of evil, attacked two of your neighbours and says the next target is you, then, of course, the situation isn't normal,' says Mohebian, who holds a PhD in western philosophy. 'In normal circumstances, the government's actions aren't reasonable or rational, but the reaction of the people will not be so hard. The government and the people understand each other.'

The hopes of American neoconservatives for a popular uprising that would unseat the regime are sheer fantasy, Mohebian says. 'Every nation that gathers the energy to stage a revolution doesn't have the strength for another one for at least 50 years. Iranians used all their energy for the Islamic revolution. Ask ordinary people and they will tell you they don't want another revolution - one was enough.'

One obvious flaw in this theory may lie in the economy. Contrary to his populist pre-election promises to alleviate poverty and redistribute Iran's oil wealth, Ahmadinejad has presided over rising inflation, soaring housing costs and high unemployment. His government has dismantled long-established structures hitherto used to run the overwhelmingly state-dominated economy. Last autumn, Ahmadinejad ordered the break-up of the Management and Planning Organisation, which set budgetary priorities. After ordering interest rates last May to be cut to 12 per cent (compared with an inflation rate unofficially estimated at between 20 and 30 per cent), he dissolved the Money and Credit Association, which had the power over important monetary decisions, and ousted the central bank governor, Ebrahim Sheibani, who had disagreed with the reduction. Independent ministers in charge of the industry and oil ministries have also been sacked, as have the heads of several state-owned banks. Ahmadinejad has justified the decisions as essential to overcoming bureaucratic resistance to his social justice agenda. But analysts say they have had the effect of handing greater control over the economy to his backers in the revolutionary guards. The short-term effect has been to plunge economic management and decision-making into chaos.

As the world's fourth-largest oil producer, Iran has a source of wealth that ostensibly provides the government with a degree of protection against outside economic pressures. Yet years of US sanctions have starved its oil industry of investment and left its infrastructure dilapidated. One consequence is a lack of capacity to refine crude into petrol. That has forced the state to import up to 50 per cent of its domestic petrol supply, which was then sold to consumers at heavily subsidised prices.

Worried about the long-term budgetary consequences and its potential for leaving the Iranian economy vulnerable to a US blockade, the government in June imposed rationing. From being used to considering cheap and unlimited petrol as a birthright, motorists suddenly found themselves restricted to 600 litres over the following six months. The response was an outbreak of nationwide unrest in which dozens of filling stations and some state supermarkets and banks were destroyed and looted. It seemed to indicate that Iran's social peace was more fragile and conditional than its leaders believed.

'They are playing very badly with the economy,' says Ebrahim Yazdi. 'Governments can play with politics, which is the domain of the intellectuals, but the economy is the everyday life of all citizens. Play around with it and you will have the kickback.'

Yazdi is one of the revolution's lost leaders. During the Shah's reign he was exiled in Texas, where he worked as a molecular geneticist while serving as Khomeini's adviser on US affairs. He resigned as foreign minister in the first post-revolutionary government in November 1979 after radicals took over the American embassy in Tehran and has since acquired dissident elder-statesman status. Ten years ago he was arrested and briefly detained by the authorities, but he was released after an outcry. Still vigorous at 76, his former revolutionary zeal has been replaced by a belief in the inevitability of evolutionary change.

But heading in which direction? Towards democracy, Yazdi insists when I visit him at his spacious house in a quiet lane off Valiasr Street, Tehran's throbbing main thoroughfare. 'This is the [present system's] last bus. What its precise destination is, I don't know,' he says. 'But my prediction is that it will end similarly to the old Soviet system. That didn't end through a revolution - red, orange or velvet - or through an outside military attack. More than anything, it ended because the collective Russian leadership came to the historical conclusion that the continuation of that system was impossible. It will not be a revolution. It will be gradual. But ultimately, it will be democratic.'