Iranian Justice, They Murder Journalists
July 31, 2003
The Economist
The Economist Print Edition
The plan backfired. Iran's hardline judiciary chief tried to get the better of his opponents by asking Saeed Mortezavi, the Tehran prosecutor who ordered the arrest of Zahra Kazemi, a Canadian-Iranian journalist, to investigate her subsequent death in custody.
But after pressure from President Muhammad Khatami, Ms Kazemi's death is being probed by one of the judiciary's less flagrantly politicised branches. And Mr Mortezavi, the leader of the campaign to gag Iran's reformist press and jail its stars, has been weakened, with conservatives re-examining his usefulness.
It is now undisputed that Ms Kazemi died as a result of violence done to her during her detention, from June 23rd to 26th. Two questions remain. First, which of the agencies that questioned her—the prosecutor's office, the intelligence ministry, or the intelligence branch of the police—landed the fatal blows? Javad Ismaili, the criminal-court judge in charge of the investigation, is spreading his net wide: members of all three agencies are said to have been among the five people whose detention was announced on July 26th.
Second, to what extent should Mr Mortezavi, who has boasted in private of having secured Ms Kazemi's “confession”, carry the can? He has already been named, by a team appointed by Mr Khatami, as one of her interrogators, and a reformist deputy has accused people from his office of beating the journalist. But the most damaging missile was fired by Muhammad-Hossein Khoshvaght, the head of the culture ministry's foreign media department.
On July 23rd Mr Mortezavi blamed Mr Khoshvaght for sowing confusion over the cause of Ms Kazemi's death. The following day, newspapers printed a letter in which Mr Khoshvaght accused the chief prosecutor of pressuring him into announcing that Ms Kazemi had died of a stroke, and of threatening him with prosecution for abetting Ms Kazemi's “espionage”. Mr Khoshvaght also indirectly accused Mr Mortezavi of lying to the public about the case. Unless the prosecutor is conspicuously exonerated, it will be hard for judicial hardliners to repose much faith in him again.
Having banned some 80 publications, and jailed more than a dozen journalists, the youthful Mr Mortezavi may have grown too big for his boots. His alleged enthusiasm for threatening the families of suspects as a means of forcing confessions has become an embarrassment. The most famous of the reformist confessors, Abbas Abdi, recently claimed from his prison cell that it was such pressure that had persuaded him to recant.
Ms Kazemi's death has spoiled Iran's innocuously good relations with Canada. In private, the Canadians talk about sponsoring a UN resolution to condemn Iran's human-rights record, something that Iranians, of all stripes, are keen to prevent.
Nobody expects to see Mr Mortezavi in the defendant's stand. In 1998, in an even grislier tussle between Mr Khatami and the hardliners, a presidential team of investigators forced the intelligence ministry to own up to four gruesome assassinations. In return, the president did not insist that justice be done—the senior conservatives who ordered the killings remain free—only that political murder be abandoned as a tool of domestic policy.
This time, there is unlikely to be a great or sudden improvement in the appalling treatment of journalists, which has earned Iran the distinction, conferred by Reporters Without Borders, of being “the biggest prison for journalists in the Middle East”. But the furore may at least make it harder for journalists to be beaten to death while in custody. That would be another of the barely perceptible advances that have become Mr Khatami's trademark.
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