Los Angeles Times
By Mark D. Wallace
July 6, 2011

Why not Iran?

Egypt and Tunisia have overthrown repressive regimes. Citizens in Syria, Yemen and other Middle East countries are demanding change. Yet in Iran, where a wave of 2009 demonstrations helped spark the movements we are now witnessing elsewhere in the Middle East, the populace is strangely silent.

What accounts for the relative quiet in Iran? The answer, at least in part, is that one of the great human rights tragedies of the modern era is underway in Iran.

From the moment the first protesters hit Tahrir Square in Cairo, Iran's leadership has cracked down hard, instituting a brutal campaign of terror against its own people. The most gruesome manifestation of this repression has been a wave of public executions.

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Commitments to liberty made by the living must be fulfilled.

By Nir Boms and Homayoun Mobasseri
The Washington Times
June 17, 2011

It was just two years ago when Neda Agha Soltan was shot to death in the streets of Tehran. Neda died with eyes wide open after the rigged 2009 presidential elections of Iran, where millions of people poured into the streets with a demand for change. Neda’s death shocked many who watched in disbelief from the comfort of their homes. A picture is worth a thousand words, it is said. But reality is often stronger than its captured moments.

Ironically, a few days short of the anniversary of Neda’s death, another senseless killing occurred. Haleh Sahabi, 54, an ardent humanitarian and democracy activist, died from wounds inflicted following her father’s funeral. Haleh, a member of Mothers for Peace and a campaigner for women’s rights, was arrested on Aug. 5, 2010, with numerous other activists. Her father, Ezatollah Sahabi, a former member of the Iranian parliament and prominent dissident who served sporadic jail terms throughout his life, was hospitalized because of a brain hemorrhage. Haleh was released from jail with a two-week pass to visit her ailing father. It was too late, and sadly, Mr Sahabi went into a deep coma and died.

Mr. Sahabi’s funeral was scheduled for the morning of June 1 at 8 a.m. However, security forces postponed it for a later time as a very large crowd gathered and tried to confiscate the corpse of the deceased. There was also an attempt to alter the direction of the funeral procession, much to the disapproval and protest of Mr. Sahabi’s daughter, Haleh. At this point, the infamous plainclothes security forces attacked the crowd. In an attempt to disburse them, police announced the funeral procession’s closure. Consequently, a scuffle with police occurred in which Haleh Sahabi was thrown to the ground. She was brutally kicked and eventually was beaten to death.

A large number of funeral attendees were arrested. Among them was the grandson of Ayatollah Hussein-Ali Montazeri – the heir to Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, who founded the Islamic Republic of Iran. Montazeri lost the leadership of the country because he opposed Khomeini for the killings of political prisoners in 1988. Khavaran is perhaps the most renowned site that marks these mass graves of the reported 30,000-plus murdered political prisoners of that era.

Needless to say, the Islamic Revolution of Iran has failed to deliver on its promises. Tragically, Iran’s leadership has proved to be one of the most repressive regimes of recent times. Rather than providing prosperity and progress, the Islamic republic ended up setting new records in other areas, such as executions per capita (including executions of children), the imprisonment and torture of journalists and bloggers, the number of prisoners of conscience and the arrest of human rights activists.

Saeed Pourheydar, a reformist-journalist and ex-political prisoner who recently fled Iran, has painted a very gruesome picture of the physical and psychological tortures that occur inside Iran’s prison walls. These include hanging a detainee from a ceiling in an upside-down position, dropping the detainee into icy water, lashing the detainee with cables, squeezing the testicles and holding mock executions. Rape and threats on the wife and daughters of the detainee are also a sadistic norm.

Followers of the Baha’i faith have been deprived of a higher education, and just a few weeks ago more than 30 were arrested for attending an online higher-learning institution.

At the Group of Eight (G-8) meeting in France, President Obama and other world leaders pointed out that the recent Middle East and North African uprisings – now known as the “Arab Spring” – actually began in Iran and that current events have not pushed the Iranian issue to the sidelines. “We deplore violence which has led to the loss of lives of Iranian civilians, and we deplore interference with media, unjustified detentions and arrest,” a G-8 statement said. It also called on Iranian officials to “respect their international commitments.”

But what will another statement – one of many – do to prevent the next brutal death? What will another round of negotiations do, aside from gaining time for the Islamic republic?

The West must bring the human rights issues to the forefront. Khomeini, the founder of Iran, promised a democratic nation with all the freedoms and liberties based on the International Declaration of Human Rights. Are we to deliver the same hollow promises? Or will our words actually have meaning?

Haleh Sahabi, may she rest in peace, is also watching us with her eyes open. If she could speak, she probably would ask when our words will turn to actions. Millions of Halehs in places like Iran and Syria are waiting for just that.

Nir Boms is co-founder of Cyberdissidents.org and a board member of Neda for a Free Iran. Homayoun Mobasseri is a founder of Neda for a Free Iran.

The Washington Times

Los Angeles Times
Oped: Benjamin Weinthal and Mark Dubowitz
May 28, 2011

On May 28, 1961, British lawyer Peter Benenson penned a passionate article in the London Observer, drawing attention to the plight of two Portuguese students who had delivered a toast calling for democratic reform in their country and were promptly carted off to prison for defying dictator Antonio de Oliveira Salazar. Benenson wrote in that article: "Open your newspaper any day of the week, and you will find a report from somewhere in the world of someone being imprisoned, tortured or executed because his opinions or religion are unacceptable to his government.... The newspaper reader feels a sickening sense of impotence. Yet if these feelings of disgust all over the world could be united into common action, something effective could be done." That summer, Benenson went on to co-found Amnesty International.

Today, across the Muslim world, the annual "prisoners of conscience" day — from a phrase in Benenson's article — finds scores of political dissidents languishing in jail, their only crimes being peaceful expressions of opposition to the undemocratic regimes under which they live.

Their situation is particularly dire in Iran, where on May 17 in the city of Isfahan — home also to one of the country's nuclear installations — jailers executed brothers Abdollah and Mohammad Fathi Shoorbariki, after subjecting Abdollah to beatings and threats of rape. Their parents were never shown the charges against their sons. According to the International Campaign for Human Rights in Iran, Bijan Fathi said, "I still don't know whether my sons' charge was moharebeh (enmity against God) or robbery. I don't believe they were at war with the regime or with God."

Last weekend Iran's semiofficial Fars News Agency reported that Iran had arrested 30 people whom the country accuses of spying for the United States. It's not yet clear whether the charges hold water, but even if they don't, like so many other Iranians who stand accused of crimes against the regime, the detained face the death penalty.

In Iran, 29-year-old Iranian Kurdish university student Habibollah Latifi also faces extrajudicial execution on charges of "enmity against God" — a claim Tehran frequently invokes to silence political dissent. Latifi awaits his fate on Iran's death row with at least 16 other known Iranian Kurds, as part of a massive wave of internal repression amid the demonstrations across the Middle East. The victims of Iran's judicial system have no recognized rights to defend, and their trials, when they exist, are show trials at best.

According to an Amnesty International investigation last month, there has been "a sharp rise in the rate of executions in public in Iran — which have included the first executions of juvenile offenders in the world this year. Since the start of 2011, up to 13 men have been hanged in public, compared to 14 such executions recorded by Amnesty International from official Iranian sources in the whole of 2010." Eight of those executions have taken place in the last month alone.

The plight of homosexuals, who face widespread state-sanctioned murder and violent repression, was the subject of last year's Human Rights Watch report, "We Are a Buried Generation: Discrimination and Violence Against Sexual Minorities in Iran." The investigatory report noted that trials based on moral charges in Iran are usually held in private. As a result, it is a herculean task to assess whether the defendants were killed for their sexual orientation.

As Iran continues its brutal crackdown on prisoners who seek the freedom to elect a government of their choosing, Western governments have swept its human rights violations under the rug, in hopes that dialogue and negotiations will somehow force its rulers to stop repressing their people.

President Obama, to his credit, has come to the realization that words alone will not change the Iranian leaders' behavior, and he has enacted a range of sanctions against the regime as recently as this week. "Hundreds of prisoners of conscience are in jail" in Iran, Obama said in his annual address to the Iranian population on the country's Nowruz holiday in March.

In a sharp break from his administration's previous posture, Obama attached names to the nebulous statistics of brave Iranians promoting democracy at the risk of their livelihoods.

"We have seen Nasrin Sotoudeh jailed for defending human rights; Jafar Panahi imprisoned and unable to make his films; Abdolreza Tajik thrown in jail for being a journalist. The Bahai community and Sufi Muslims punished for their faith; Mohammad Valian, a young student, sentenced to death for throwing three stones," Obama said.

Although the United States and the European Union have enacted human rights sanctions against Iran's leaders, they have done little to prevent the ongoing persecution of Iran's pro-democracy activists.

To inform the 50th anniversary of prisoners of conscience day with something more potent than symbolic speeches and commemoration events, the Obama administration must match words with actions. For starters, the president could help fast-track the one-two punch of human rights and economic sanctions legislation working its way through the House and Senate.

The new congressional measures contain a range of innovative penalties to crack down on Iranian officials responsible for human rights abuses, including targeting their assets and rejecting visas for their travel to the United States. The measures also punish foreign companies for their lucrative business deals with Iran's Revolutionary Guard, including the sale of products used to repress Iran's people, and the purchase of crude oil from Revolutionary Guard-controlled companies, which are the dominant force in Iran's petroleum trade.

In southern Europe, prisoners of conscience made enormous sacrifices to bring freedom and representative government to their countries. Portugal's fascist regime, for example, finally met its demise in 1974, as democracy began to take root. The Iranian people, who have suffered under their nation's theocratic dictatorship for far too long, deserve no less.

Benjamin Weinthal is a fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, where Mark Dubowitz is executive director and head of the Iran Human Rights Project.

This article was originally published here. 

By Azadeh Moaveni 
Time.com
April 19, 2011

For much of the past decade, the Iranian government has tolerated what it considers a particularly depraved and un-Islamic vice: the keeping of pet dogs.

During periodic crackdowns, police have confiscated dogs from their owners right off the street; and state media has lectured Iranians on the diseases spread by canines. The cleric Gholamreza Hassani, from the city of Urmia, has been satirized for his sermons railing against "short-legged" and "holdable" dogs. But as with the policing of many other practices (like imbibing alcoholic drinks) that are deemed impure by the mullahs but perfectly fine to many Iranians, the state has eventually relaxed and let dog lovers be.

Those days of tacit acceptance may soon be over, however. Lawmakers in Tehran have recently proposed a bill in parliament that would criminalize dog ownership, formally enshrining its punishment within the country's Islamic penal code. The bill warns that that in addition to posing public health hazards, the popularity of dog ownership "also poses a cultural problem, a blind imitation of the vulgar culture of the West." The proposed legislation for the first time outlines specific punishments for "the walking and keeping" of "impure and dangerous animals," a definition that could feasibly include cats but for the time being seems targeted at dogs. The law would see the offending animal confiscated, the leveling of a $100-to-$500 fine on the owner, but leaves the fate of confiscated dogs uncertain. "Considering the several thousand dogs [that are kept] in Tehran alone, the problem arises as to what is going to happen to these animals," Hooman Malekpour, a veterinarian in Tehran, said to the BBC's Persian service. If passed, the law would ultimately energize police and volunteer militias to enforce the ban systematically.

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