Jul. 27, 2003. 01:00 AM
Kazemi a martyr to democracy
REZA BARAHENI
SPECIAL TO THE STAR
The great Arab historian Ibn-Khaldun, in his classical book, The Introduction, addressing the psychology of tyrants, discloses their burning preoccupation: "How am I going to die?"
The question is asked of a tyrant's victim when the man is about to be beheaded. Whatever the victim says at the moment his head is being severed will be the fate of the tyrant.
We don't know what Zahra Kazemi, the Iranian-born Canadian photojournalist, told her killer before she lay comatose at his feet and finally died, but we know for sure how this tyrant and all other tyrants will die: The soft edge of democracy will show them to their graves.
Ahmad Miralaie, Ghaffar Hosseini, Mohammad Mokhtari and Mohammad Ja'far Pouyandeh were all murdered by the serial killers of the right-wing faction of the Islamic Republic of Iran. They were all my friends.
PEN and other human-rights organizations know of them.
Their killers were pardoned by Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Iran's Supreme Spiritual Leader. Hardly anyone in the media knows anything about the life and death of these outstanding writers and translators.
Most prominent Iranian journalists have been in and out of prison during the last 10 years.
The main question has been: "Who ordered the killing of Iranian intellectuals?"
The person who took his orders from the right-wing clergy and instructed the serial killers to murder these writers reportedly "committed suicide" by swallowing poisonous traditional hair remover. He was not a mullah.
Saeed Mortazavi, the public prosecutor in Tehran, is not a mullah, either. He took his orders from above and delivered them to the serial killers who murdered Zahra Kazemi.
Mortazavi, who had wanted to come to Canada to study law, may be on death row himself without knowing it. The destiny of another Saeed — Saeed Emami, the man who led my friends to their deaths but fell to those who later made him a scapegoat — should be before his eyes.
No one in Iran thinks of Mortazavi as a walking man.
To be Iranian and to get killed in Iran is not enough to wake up the world. The case of the serial killings of writers and intellectuals was simply swept under the carpet.
But the case of Zahra Kazemi will not die. Her name will go down in Iranian history as Iran's bridge to democracy. Her death has symbolic value.
She went to the horrendous Evin prison — the place that echoes with the death-rattle of thousands of Iranian youth from 1981-82 and 1988 — and saw the faces of those waiting to meet their loved ones behind the walls, and she took photos.
Those photos were destroyed, and yet her own smiling, painful face is everywhere in the world now, because her heroic death has made her the most eloquent symbol of the tyranny Iranians have been suffering for so many years.
To kill a Canadian photojournalist, to kill a Canadian woman in the most horrendous prison in all Iran, to announce that she was killed and not to deliver the body to the Canadian authorities, betrays the innocence with which people bragged about Canada-Iran relations.
Foreign Affairs Minister Bill Graham has taken the right action, and similar actions should follow.
As a photojournalist, Kazemi was a provider of testimony in her life. She is a democratic catalyst in her death.
Let us try to understand the version of democracy Iranians want.
Is it a Western democracy? If so, what phase of Western democracy? Which country's? Is it possible to have any of these democracies in Iran?
The Shah of Iran had wanted to take Iranians to the "gates of the great civilization." A few years before he was ousted in the 1979 revolution, he stood in Persepolis in a mock-heroic, clownish drama, addressing himself to the dead image of Cyrus, ancient king of Persia. "You sleep in peace, Cyrus," he said, proclaiming that he was leading the nation of Iran to the threshold of the great civilization.
Installed on his throne by the Allies in 1941, ousted by Iranians in 1953, re-installed on the throne by a CIA coup a few days later and armed to the teeth by Americans in the aftermath of the coup — all the way up to his scandalous fall a quarter of a century later, he ruled the country with an iron fist.
He built many prisons, the most horrendous of them being Evin, where Zahra Kazemi, blindfolded for sure, met her killers. The Shah led his people to the threshold of those prisons, and the larger prison of the Islamic Republic of Iran. He was called the Shadow of God.
Although the Iranian Ayatollah Ruhollah (Spirit of God) Khomeini came to power in 1979 on the shoulders of Iranian youth led by Iranian intellectuals for the cause of democracy, he actually wanted to take Iran back to the early days of Islam by declaring himself successor to the ulul amr, those who wielded power by the authority of God.
In a few months, he said: "Beshkanid in ghalamha ra!" (Break up these pens!")
But neither the backward movement toward Islamic roots nor the crackdown on the intellectuals, with millions forced into exile over the last 24 years, has been able to put into effect Khomeini's words.
Although his charisma holds sway in the Islamic world, and even in certain minor sections of the Iranian society, his attempts to Islamicize Iran failed miserably.
By Islamic standards, Iran is perhaps the most corrupted society in the world: Prostitution is in the open, addiction to drugs is a normal matter, financial corruption of those on the higher echelons of the state is 10 times worse than in the Shah's time and state terrorism is unprecedented in the history of the country.
Khomeini's successor, who was among the enlightened clergy before the revolution, has turned out to be more dictatorial than any ruler in Iran's recent history.
What Khamenei wants is more authority. He is leading Iran toward a bloody revolution.
What the people want is democracy. And a particular type of democracy.
The closure of the 1980-88 Iran-Iraq war when Khomeini was still alive, his death in the aftermath of the war and the fall of the Soviet Union, Iran's powerful and influential neighbour to the north, led to a new appraisal of the situation — first by the Writers Association of Iran and later by journalists on the other side of the table: young, semi-secular and semi-religious intellectuals who went on to become followers of President Mohammed Khatami before being disillusioned by the lethargy dominating his character and cabinet.
In the aftermath of the serial killings, some committed during the presidency of Hashemi Rafsanjani but most during Khatami's presidency — and with the suppression of newspapers in the business of exposing the mechanism that had led to the serial killings — university students joined the ranks of those struggling for democracy.
Minority groups, such as the Nationalist Frontists, the Freedom Movement, followers of philosopher Abdolkarim Soroush (a party to Khomeini's purge of university professors and students in the '80s who later turned against the divine authority of the clergy) and others are now trying their hands at opposing the rule of the clergy with some lukewarm advocacy of democracy.
But the major fighters against the system are the youth, the journalists, the writers, the women and the oppressed nationalities who insist that the destiny of Iranian democracy will be decided inside Iran.
They face an opposition led by Khamenei, who has at his disposal the plainclothes thugs, revolutionary guards, parts of the intelligence service, all the judiciary and all the un-elected, parasitical bodies of the regime.
The opposing sides agree on only one thing: Hands off Iran!
What I hear from the people inside Iran is this: It's our experience and we have to solve it ourselves. Any foreign intervention or aggression from any direction, whether from the mightiest military power in the world, the United States, or by neighbours who are even more fragile than the present Iran, will result in chaos, bloodshed and total anarchy.
This specific experience of democracy, a much-needed element in the historical development of Iran, is the burden, anguish and hope of Iranians in liberating themselves from the nightmares of their past and present.
Do whatever you can to secure the release of political prisoners. Try to get Zahra Kazemi exhumed and brought back to Canada.
Do whatever is in your power to expose violations of the rights of Iranian women, oppressed nationalities, intellectuals and journalists.
But beware. Iranians never forgave America for the 1953 coup. And today, both sides will fight side by side against any foreign aggressor.
*Writer Reza Baraheni is a former president of PEN Canada.
http://www.thestar.com/NASApp/cs/ContentServer?pagename=thestar/Layout/Article_Type1&c=Article&cid=1059257408082&call_pageid=968332188854&col=968350060724Is Iran a major threat?
Gulf News Research Centre | By Dr Marwan Asmar | 28-07-2003
Many people in the Middle East wonder about the fuss over Iran's nuclear programme, which is for peaceful purposes, when it is known Israel is a major nuclear power. As party to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, NPT, Iran signed in 1968 when the NPT came into existence, Iran has repeatedly stated said it is compelled to develop a nuclear programme for peaceful purposes only.
It is Israel that introduced nuclear weapons into the Middle East. As early as 1948, it began scientific research with the help of France to acquire a nuclear capability. With a suggested capability of between 200 and 400 thermonuclear and nuclear weapons, Israel today stands as one of the leading nuclear powers in terms of an offensive military arsenal.
Israel has always been highly secretive about its nuclear weapons. In fact, the first to blow the whistle on Israel's nuclear industry was Mordechi Vannu who was subsequently abducted from Rome by Mossad agents, illegally brought back to Israel and jailed in 1987 for 17 years for revealing pictures of the Dimona reactor in Israel, and remains there today.
However, Israel's nuclear weapons have always been an open secret. This ambiguity stands as the essence of Israel's nuclear policy. Israeli officials are bound not to reveal or acknowledge anything about its nuclear activity, even if they and the world know otherwise.
Indeed, a report by the eminent Federation of American Scientists suggested in 2001 that Israel had enough plutonium for 200 nuclear weapons. The report stated the number was based on new satellite photographs.
Israel's nuclear programme started in 1965 when the Dimona reactor became fully operational. While figures vary from one study to another, a detailed report by Warner D. Farr of the U.S. army, documents the history of Israel's nuclear bomb-making. He reports that by 1967, Israel had at least two bombs and certainly could have had more.
Avner Cohen, an Israeli writer and expert on the Israeli nuclear bomb who has written a book on the subject and now lives in the U.S., also suggests Israel had a "deliverable nuclear capability in the 1967 war". In an appendix at the end of his report, Farr provides a chronology of dates suggesting the upward swing of Israel's nuclear arsenal.
Based on documentary evidence, he says in 1976, Israel had between 10 and 20 nuclear weapons, increasing to 200 bombs in 1980. A lesser figure of 100 was suggested in 1985 and a number of 200 was put out in 1992. However, in 1997, it was suggested Israel had 400 deliverable thermonuclear and nuclear weapons.
Israeli policy-makers say the nuclear bomb was a matter of survival for Israel, being encircled by what it perceives as hostile Arab states. Such a view was held even in the era of the peace process in the 1990s and more so today.
However, many Arab states reject this and have repeatedly called for a check on the arms race in the Middle East as a way to prevent proliferation of weapons of mass destruction.
Israel appears to see any move on the nuclear front, even if it's for peaceful means such as generating electricity, as a threat to its security and had previously gone to great lengths to maintain itself as the sole power in the region with a nuclear capability. Its bombing of the Osiraq reactor in Iraq in 1981 suggested that it is ready to maintain a nuclear monopoly through the use of force.
And what is being played out today in international circles by Israeli politicians shows their offensive posture could be happen again against Iran if Tehran does not accept more on-the-spot inspections by the International Atomic Energy Agency.
This is a view demanded by the U.S., Europe and Israel which openly says Iran is using the NPT to develop its own nuclear weapons.
This is because, under NPT rules, nuclear material can be imported into the country for peaceful purposes like electricity generation. However, the U.S. is pressing Iran to sign an additional protocol or addendum to the NPT which will allow the IAEA to make unnannouced, on-the-spot inspections, which are deemed to be more searching than the regular inspections.
So far, Iran has refused, deeming the present agreement adequate, thus causing them additional pressure from the West and Israel.
http://www.gulf-news.com/Articles/Opinion.asp?ArticleID=93711