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Tehran Prosecutor General told to quit over Canadian's death

World News
Jul 20, 2003

TEHRAN - Iranian reformist lawmakers on Sunday called for a top hardline judiciary official to resign or be sacked over the death in custody of a Canadian journalist this month.

In a series of blunt verbal attacks MPs accused Tehran Prosecutor General Saeed Mortazavi's interrogators of beating Montreal-based Zahra Kazemi to death and said the former judge was waging an implacable campaign against journalists in Iran.

Officials at Mortazavi's office and the judiciary declined to respond to Reuters' requests for comment on the accusations.

Kazemi, 54, a Canadian of Iranian descent, died of a brain haemorrhage caused by head injuries more than two weeks after she was arrested for taking photographs outside Tehran's Evin prison, where many political dissidents are held.

Kazemi's death has tested previously harmonious relations between Iran and Canada and shed a spotlight on Iran's shadowy security services and treatment of the media.

Reformist deputy Mohsen Armin, in a speech to parliament broadcast live on state radio, said Kazemi told police she had been beaten, particularly on the head, during initial interrogations by officials from Mortazavi's office.

"Mortazavi, instead of respecting the dignity of journalists and the country's prestige...by punishing those who beat her," ordered her to stay in detention, Armin said.

Three days after her arrest, complaining of feeling unwell, Kazemi was transferred to a hospital run by the hardline Revolutionary Guards where she slipped into a coma and died.

RUMOURS CAMPAIGN

Following Kazemi's death, Armin said Mortazavi had told officials to announce she had died of a stroke and ordered her body to be buried.

Kazemi's burial was halted when President Mohammad Khatami ordered a thorough investigation of her death. The results of the probe were to be announced by Monday, officials said.

"I announce that Mortazavi and his supporters should be dismissed and a court should review their cases," Armin said.

Conservatives said Mortazavi, who in his previous position as head of a Tehran court ordered the closure of scores of liberal newspapers, was the victim of a rumours campaign.

"Evidence shows the reformists' propaganda machine has begun its project aimed at removing Mortazavi," said Amir Mohebian, an editor of the hardline Resalat newspaper.

"If they succeed, they will use it to remove all the people they want, one by one," he told the ISNA students news agency.

The reformists accused Mortazavi and his allies in the judiciary -- a key bastion of conservative opposition to Khatami's pro-reform agenda since his 1997 election -- of being behind a wave of detentions of journalists. More than a dozen journalists and editors have been arrested since mid-June.

Many newspapers were now too afraid to publish stories without first checking with Mortazavi, the MPs said.

"Today the judiciary's behaviour shows that a lot of the activities of this organisation are under question and need to be seriously reviewed," MP Mohammad Kianoushrad told ISNA.

"Maybe the least the judiciary could do would be to accept the prosecutor's resignation," he added.

Some reformists have said Kazemi's case highlights the operation of a shadowy parallel intelligence service in Iran which is beyond the control of the government.

"This case is an opportunity reformists have been looking for to expose the operation of these parallel entities," said a political analyst, who declined to be named. "It may shed some light on this dark corner and help them get rid of some elements who have plagued them for the last six years."

http://www.daneshjoo.org/generalnews/article/publish/article_1274.shtml

CNN refusing to tell the truth about Iran
IranVaJahan 7/20/03 Gary Metz
http://www.iranvajahan.net/cgi-bin/news_en.pl?l=en&y=2003&m=07&d=20&a=5

Posted on 07/20/2003 10:11 PM CDT by freedom44

Repeating their Iraqi mistakes in Iran.

It appears CNN is once again in the business of burying news stories when their reports might embarrass their host country. If it were not for a student from Iran I might not have heard of this report. Fortunately the world of the Internet makes it increasingly difficult for stories to remain hidden from the public. The story I am referring to was published on gooya.com and while written in Persian it is available on the net. I contacted CNN for a response but they chose not to.

Gooya.com is reporting that an Iranian student, Hamid, provided CNN with video of the attack on the student dormitories by the regime. The student was arrested by the regime and taken to the same prison, Evin where the Canadian/Iranian photojournalist Zahra Kazemi was tortured. Kazemi eventually died allegedly under the hands of the regime official Saeed Mortezavi, Tehran's Chief Prosecutor. The story of her murder has been international news for the past week.

But unlike Kazemi whose photos of the Evin prison remain in the hands of the regime, Hamid was successful in getting his footage to CNN. According to this report CNN is refusing to air the student's footage, claiming it would endanger his life. But since they refused to air the footage the story has not received international attention and his life is now in grave danger.

It was reported that as the regime's enforcers arrived to arrest Hamid, he ate additional footage to keep it from the regime. They report that this young man was then taken to Evin prison where the same official responsible for the death of Kazemi ordered immediate surgery in the prison to retrieve the footage in his stomach. Since that time, due to infections caused by the surgery they were forced to move him to a hospital where it is reported he has four different infections.

Apparently CNN has not yet learned it lesson about protecting tortuous regimes. Just a few months ago CNN admitted that it sat on a variety of news stories in Iraq that would have exposed the nature of the Iraqi regime (New York Times, Editorial | The News We Kept To Ourselves, by CNN producer Eason Jordan).

In both cases they use the same excuse that they are protecting the lives of their sources of information.

In reality, the only thing keeping the regime from killing this brave Iranian is international awareness of his situation. The regime needs to maintain the illusion of respect for human rights to provide the Europeans and Japan with an excuse for further economic ties. If CNN were to broadcast this report and attribute it to him it would provide him with the notoriety needed to keep him from being one more unnamed student executed by the regime. It is time for CNN to stop protecting this regime in order to maintain its office in Tehran. When journalists sell out their ethics for rating it destroys the value of a free press to protect the innocent from corrupt governments.

I hope CNN will reconsider its position on this story. It may save a life and perhaps redeem the soul of that network.

http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/949628/posts

More death sentences carried in Iran

SMCCDI (Information Service)
Jul 21, 2003

Several more death sentences were carried in Iran, on Saturday and on Sunday, against freedom lovers and opponents to the regime arrested following the bloody crackdown on last June's protests.

3 of the executions were carried in the central prison of Esfahan and the 3 others in the Capital. All arrested were young Iranians who preferred to stand against the ruling theocracy rather than living on knees.

The name of one of the executed has been reported as "Gholam Hossein Mohammadi" (known as Siavash) who was arrested during the bloody clashes of Nasim Shahr, a district of the the poor suburb of Tehran known as Eslam-Shahr.

Hundreds of other arrested demonstrators of all ages and genders are languishing in prisons and several of them will be executed in the next days according to the regime's decision to increase its policies of Terror and Fear adopted in order to undermine the popular will for its overthrown. 5 of these future executions, decided to be carried "publicly" are to take place in Esfahan this week.

The threats made against the families of arrested and murdered demonstrators seem to work as many refuse to comment on their relatives fates.

http://www.daneshjoo.org/generalnews/article/publish/article_1292.shtml

"If you want on or off this Iran ping list, Freepmail me”

This is a statement from students of Amir Kabir Technical University, Tehran.

We Will Become Liberated Without Violence

Today, while writing this declaration, we are ashamed of not being in prison and we are disgraced not being under your torture. We are suffering to see that our friends, who together were practicing day and night lessons of passive resistance and nonviolence, are in solitary confinement in your prisons under the most savage physical and mental torture.

Until yesterday Mehdi Habibi, Abdollah Momeni, Amin Zadeh, Ameri Nasab, Hojjat Sharifi, Arash Hashemi, Bagher Oskooi, and others were one with us in peaceful protest. Now their days and nights are spent in the dark prison cells that have borrowed darkness from your conscience. We will continue the path that we started together with them and in honor of them. We will never forget the promise we made to each other, that one has only to tolerate—not instigate—the violence in order to achieve peace. We tell you, as they do, that your sickle is rusted!

As you uselessly try to muffle my song,
I will sing stronger than ever.

We tell you that we will counter your readiness and eagerness to inflict pain with our strength for tolerance of pain. We will balance your power of imprisonment, torture, harm and hurt with our moral strength and we will without an ounce of hatred. However, we will never let you proudly attack and lash us, and smile victoriously at the sight of our bloodied bodies.

We are talking to YOU!
Imprison us, torture us, and extract confessions from us. Expel, imprison, exile and even execute our professors. Destroy and set fire to our houses. Make us bloody and drag us in our own blood to your torture chambers. Beat us and leave our bloodied bodies alone. We will endure and will never hate you! We will never slap your face. When you stab our side, we will never swear at you. When you throw us out from the third floor, we will answer your violence with tolerance. We will continue to tolerate pain and torture until your acts of cruelty, past and present, returns to haunt you! This is our campaign. We see freedom in nonviolence and you see power in violence. We swear that we will stand with no violence against your power, even in the face of your torture, stabs and lashes.

In pursuing freedom, we will never take arms, we will never assassinate, we will never torture. We know well that violence is bad, assassination is ugly, and torture is painful. We have learned patience and tolerance in our doctrine. There will be an ease after every hardship.
We will campaign with our honesty, our clean conscience and our minds. Our campaign is the tolerance of your torture. We will wait and tolerate the pain so long that we make your conscience, darkened for the last few decades, wake up from ignorance.

We will tolerate pain but not complain, suffer torture but not shout. We will continue until the world testifies to our innocence, and until your black conscience testifies to your cruelty. Then your nights will be filled with nightmares of your own torture cells, nightmares of the lashes you inflicted on our tired bodies, and you will not rest any more. Be certain that tomorrow, even if you are still in power, you will not be able to spend your nights without nightmares reflecting on the muffled cries and open wounds of the youth of this land.

We will tolerate pain until your conscience arises from its poisoned slumber and until you are obliged to yield to the people to relieve your guilty consciences. Tomorrow, at the time of the people’s victory and when you have fallen from the pedestal of power to the dark well of disgrace, we will be there to welcome you and show you again that we abhor violence, we do not even hate you, our torturers, and we will forgive you without any reward. Although we will never hate you, we can not forget you because the wounds you have inflicted will never heal.

We will continue to campaign without violence in order to prove to the world that violence should not be responded by violence, and cruelty is not the proper answer against cruelty. We would like to show that violence, in any shape or form and under any cover up - torturer or tortured, oppressor or oppressed - is condemned. We will become liberated without violence!

Islamic Society of Students of Amir Kabir Technical University (Tehran/Iran)
July 2003

http://akunews.org/News/view.asp?ID=2707

Ignoring Iran's Abuses

July 21, 2003
The Washington Times
Editorial/Op-Ed

While American news outlets fixate on the 16 words spoken by President Bush about Iraqi efforts to acquire uranium during the State of the Union address (three months after Congress voted to authorize the use of force), they have largely ignored a far more important story from that region of the world: the efforts of the people of Iran to overthrow an oppressive dictatorship, and the regime's brutal efforts to hang on to power, which now may include the murder of a Canadian journalist by Iranian security forces.

The situation in Iran has major geopolitical implications for the United States. With the demise of Saddam Hussein, Tehran is indisputably the world's leading supporter of international terrorism and a determined foe of U.S. efforts to bring peace to the Middle East. The regime has chemical and biological weapons, and could produce nuclear weapons in the next few years. With more than 150,000 U.S. troops stationed in neighboring Iraq and Afghanistan, few developments would be more beneficial to American foreign policy interests than the replacement of the current government with a democratic one that is pro-Western in orientation.

In June, during 10 nights of mass protests throughout the country, police arrested 4,000 people — virtually all of whom remain behind bars. Vigilantes supported by the regime played a critical role in suppressing the demonstrations; some members of these groups reportedly invaded campus dormitories in order to beat student protesters in their beds. On July 9, hundreds of police officers and vigilantes surrounded Tehran University, where they arrested three student leaders after they had cancelled plans to hold a sit-in to protest against the repressive Islamic dictatorship in Tehran.

The paranoia and brutality of Iranian security forces had horrific consequences for Canadian photo journalist Zahra Kazemi. Kazemi, 54, was arrested June 23 while taking pictures outside Evin prison near Tehran, where many of those arrested are believed to be held. Iranian officials initially claimed she suffered a stroke during her interrogation; now, Foreign Minister Kamal Kharrazi says she may have died of a fractured skull after having fallen "accidentally." But the French newspaper Liberation reported last week that Kazemi (a Quebec resident with joint Canadian and Iranian citizenship) suffered the skull fracture after being beaten in the head with a shoe by an interrogator — an Iranian security official. The news of Kazemi's death could seriously damage relations between Tehran and the government of Prime Minister Jean Chretien, which has sought warmer ties with the current Iranian regime. Ottawa has warned that relations between the two countries could be jeopardized if Iran fails to return Kazemi's body and explain the circumstances of her death.

What's remarkable thus far is how little attention the democracy protests and the abysmal human rights situation in Iran have received from the three major networks: From the beginning of June through Thursday night, ABC, NBC and CBS evening news programs devoted less than nine minutes of air time to the human rights situation in Iran — a mere 11 seconds a night. Given the huge geopolitical implications for the United States, it surely deserves more serious, comprehensive coverage. For more information on the Iranian pro-democracy protests, see the Web site: http://www.daneshjoo.org.

http://washingtontimes.com/op-ed/20030720-103228-8013r.htm