Iranian Alert -- DAY 34 -- LIVE THREAD PING LIST

The world media has all but ignored this week's dramatic events in Iran. The regime has masterfully handled the world media. As we reported yesterday, the regime appears to have a new ally in their efforts to silent the media, Cuba.

Several days ago we reported the jamming of LA based Iranian broadcasters, the key link of communication of the Iranian protest movement. The regime had been jamming the signals in the past within Iran using equipment purchased from France.

But days before the July 9th protests were to begin the broadcaster began reporting that their uplink signal was being jammed as well. This would require jamming equipment either in the US or nearby. We have been seeking confirmation of this story. We now have it.

Loral Skynet, hired a firm to investigate the source of the jamming. The result was that they have narrowed the probable source of the jamming to be in the vicinity of Havana Cuba.

This story has national security implications. We need to write the media and ensure they cover this breaking story. We need to contact our elected officials and demand they investigate this immediately.

These efforts by the regime, while successful in the short term, do not resolve the fundamental reasons why this regime is crumbling from within.

Iran is a country ready for a regime change. If you follow this thread you will witness, I believe, the transformation of a nation. This daily thread provides a central place where those interested in the events in Iran can find the best news and commentary.

Please continue to join us here, post your news stories and comments to this thread.

WORLD OPINION OUTRAGED AT THE DEATH OF PHOTOGRAPHER IN IRAN

TEHRAN 13 July (IPS) Iranian President Mohammad Khatami, reacting to the international anger and dismay on the death of the Canadian-Iranian photojournalist Zahra Kazemi, instructed on Sunday four ministers to look into the case and "determine the reasons for her sudden death and who is responsible for it".

Ms. Kazemi, 54, died in a Tehran hospital on Friday night, after, according to Iranian officials, she suffered headache while under interrogation at the Intelligence Ministry.

But her family and friends, as well as Canadian officials who saw her "at a distance" in the hospital while she was in coma said she presented bruises and head injuries.

The Canadian government, in a statement, said there are indications that the Iranian-born Canadian photographer presented multiple bruises and brain injury.

Ms. Kazemi had been arrested on 23 June while taking pictures near the Tehran’s notorious Evin Prison, an official from the Islamic Guidance Ministry told the official news agency IRNA, adding that after she presented prison guards with Iranian identity documents, "she had been treated as an Iranian citizen".

"Ms Kazemi was arrested while taking photo from Evin prison compound where families of those under arrest were staging demonstration on June 23", IRNA confirmed, adding that she suffered a stroke when she was subject to interrogation and died in hospital.

The Iranian clerical-ruled officials said although Ms. Kazemi, who was covering Iranian situation for a Canadian publication and the London-based "Camera Press" photo agency had been issued press pass, but she was not authorized to cover the demonstrations.

During the two weeks of students-led anti regime protests in June and early July, the authorities arrested at least 4.000 demonstrators, most of them taken in Evin prison.

Expressing his "deep grief" at sudden death of the Iranian photographer, the powerless president assigned Minister of Culture and Islamic Guidance Ahmad Masjed Jame’i, Minister of Information (Intelligence) Hojjatoleslam Ali Yunessi, Minister of the Interior Hojjatoleslam Abdolvahed Mousavi Lari and Minister of Justice Hojjatoleslam Isma’il Shoushtari to "clarify every aspect of the journalist’s death.

"You should determine the reasons for her sudden death and who is responsible for it", President Khatami said in his directive in reaction to a statement from Ms. Kazemi’s family that she may have died of physical torture.

President Khatami urged the four cabinet ministers to see whether there is a matter of culpability in the case, which led to the sudden death and report the outcome of their inquiry soon.

But analysts doubted the investigations would provide more information than that has been already offered by the authorities, that she had been arrested by prison guards while taking pictures in a high security zone and that she died in hospital from acute headache.

"And if the Canadian authorities insist more, the Iranians would not hesitate to charge her with espionage activities for foreign powers", one Iranian journalist told Iran Press Service, speaking on condition of anonymity.

The Canadian government and Mr. Stephen Hachemi, Ms. Kazemi’s son, insisted that her body to be returned to Canada for an autopsy, but not only the Iranian authorities refused the demand, they even did not allow a team of Canadian doctors to travel to Tehran and proceed to autopsy the victim’s body.

"I want to insist on the return of Zahra's body to Canada. That is all that is important at this point", the young Hachemi Hashemi told journalists at a press conference in Montreal.

He said once the body of my mother returned, he would urge the Canadian government to bring the murderers to international courts for trial and he would get help and assistance from international human rights groups to determine the conditions that led to her mother’s murder.

"We will help the family which has asked for the repatriation of the remains", the Canadian Foreign Affairs Ministry spokesman Reynald Doiron told the French news agency AFP. "The Canadian ambassador in Tehran has been instructed to meet with the Iranian foreign minister as soon as possible", he added.

A group of Iranian immigrants here, representing the Center for Thought, Dialogue and Human Rights in Iran, had written to Canada's minister of Foreign Affairs, Bill Graham, to demand, "the immediate return to Canada" of Kazemi's body.

"Due to the bad record of the Iranian regime on human rights abuses and in order for them to try to prevent the truth being found regarding the suspicious death of Ms. Kamezi, it is necessary that her body be flown back to Canada for an autopsy", the group said in its letter.

But according to well-informed sources, the authorities have already put pressures on Ms. Kazemi’s family, telling them that not only she should be buried in Iran, but also Islamic laws forbids the western practice of autopsy.

The Paris-based Reporters Without Borders expressed its "shock" at Kazemi's death and held the Iranian authorities responsible for her death after what it described as her "arbitrary arrest and lack of suitable medical attention".

The Association of Iranian Journalists Abroad (AIJA), in a fax to the leader of the Islamic Republic, Ayatollah Ali Khameneh'i, protested vigorously on Saturday to the death of Ms. Zahra Kazemi, an Iranian-born Canadian photo-journalist.

In another statement issued on Sunday and addressed to President Khatami, the Rome-based AIJA urged him to explain the circumstances of Ms. Kazemi’s arrest, who arrested her and on what charges?

"Did the journalist receive proper legal protection? Had she access to lawyer? Was she able to talk to her family? Was the family allowed to get medical assistance from their own doctors?", the Association asked the lamed President.

In its statement, AIJA also said it wanted to know why Ms. Kazemi had been transferred to a hospital that belongs to the Revolutionary Guards, not allowing any journalist to visit her and why the authorities refuses autopsy?

"The Association of Iranian Journalists Abroad, extremely concerned by the tragic fate of a respected colleague, not only urges the Iranian authorities to offer full information on the circumstances relating to the death of Ms. Kazemi, but also demands that an international independent team of lawyers and doctors that would include Dr. Karim Lahiji, an Iranian lawyer and deputy president of the Paris-based International Federation of Human Rights Leagues go to Tehran and investigate the case", AIJA said.

"In case the Iranian authorities refuse the admission of that team, the AIJAS reserves itself all the rights to take the matter to the attention of international courts for human rights", AIJA added. ENDS JOURNALIST DIES 13703

http://www.iran-press-service.com/

Iranian professor, whose death sentence provoked outcry, sentenced to 4 years on appeal

By ALI AKBAR DAREINI
The Associated Press
7/13/03 7:47 AM

TEHRAN, Iran (AP) -- A university professor whose death sentence was repealed after nationwide protests will serve just under four years in jail, his lawyer said Sunday.

Hashem Aghajari, a history professor at Tehran's Teachers Training University, is also barred from running for office or occupying a government post for five years, lawyer Saleh Nikbakht told The Associated Press.

Aghajari was convicted of insulting Islam and questioning clerical rule during a speech in western Iran last June. Last November, he was condemned to death, banned from teaching for 10 years, exiled for eight years to three remote cities and sentenced to receive 74 lashes.

Iran frequently issues multiple sentences in cases where it wants to make an example of the accused.

Aghajari's sentencing last November provoked the biggest student protests in Iran in three years and highlighted the power struggle between the country's liberals and hard-liners.

He initially said he would not appeal the death sentence, challenging the judiciary to carry it out. But his lawyer filed an appeal over his objections.

Iran's Supreme Court lifted the death sentence in February, saying the charges were inconsistent with Aghajari's speech, and returned the case to a lower court for review.

The new sentence puts him in jail for three years, 11 months and 29 days. The verdict also suspends the previous sentence of 74 lashes.

Nikbakht said the appeals court issued its verdict on April 26 and that he was notified on June 9. He said did not announce the verdict because it coincided with student-led protests against the ruling Islamic establishment.

"I would have been accused by the judiciary of inciting public opinion," he said.

Nikbakht criticized the verdict as "an insult to justice and the judiciary." He said the appeals court ruling made new charges against his client, including libel and spreading lies.

Nikbakht said he appealed the new sentence earlier this week. It was not immediately clear if this would be Aghajari's last appeal.

Both parliament and President Mohammad Khatami had denounced the death sentence. But hard-liners, who dominate government bodies such as the judiciary and police and accuse reformists of undermining the principles of the 1979 Islamic revolution, defended the sentence.

Also Sunday, the editor of the reformist daily Yas-e-Nou said two of the paper's journalists had been detained.

Vahid Pourostad and Hossein Bastani were detained Saturday evening, Mohammad Naimipour said.

Naimipour, a prominent lawmaker, gave no further details. but relatives said the two were arrested on charges of threatening national security.

Prominent student leader Saeed Razavi Faqih was arrested Thursday on similar charges, relatives said. Faqih had organized student protests to condemn Aghajari's death sentence.

http://www.nj.com/newsflash/international/index.ssf?/cgi-free/getstory_ssf.cgi?a0429_BC_Iran-Professor

Amnesty International slams student arrests in Iran

Sunday, July 13, 2003 - ©2003 IranMania.com

NICOSIA, July 12 (AFP) - Human rights group Amnesty International on Saturday expressed concern over the arrest of three student activists in Iran earlier this week.

In a statement received here by AFP, London-based Amnesty denounced the detention of the trio on Wednesday just minutes after they had held a press conference condemning the Islamic republic for banning events to mark the fourth anniversary of bloody student clashes with security forces.

Reza Ameri Nassab, Ali Moghtaderi and Arash Hashemi of the Office to Consolidate Unity (OCU), a pro-reform student umbrella group, "may have been targeted solely for the peaceful expression of their political views", Amnesty said.

"During the press conference they criticized restrictions on freedom of expression and association in Iran. They were said to have been forced to the ground and thrown into three separate vehicles and taken to an unknown destination. Ali Moghtaderi was reportedly released the same evening," the rights group added.

Amnesty claims that up to 4,000 demonstrators have been arrested in Iran since June 11 in the latest wave of student protests, and that some 2,000 may remain in detention without charge or trial.

"Many of these detainees appear to have been targeted for demonstrating peacefully," the statement said.

"Amnesty International considers them prisoners of conscience and calls for their immediate and unconditional release. Amnesty International also calls for anyone charged with a recognisable criminal offence to be given prompt fair trial.

"The authorities should take immediate measures to ensure that student activists and peaceful demonstrators are treated in accordance with international human rights standards," the statement added.

http://www.iranmania.com/News/ArticleView/Default.asp?NewsCode=16919&NewsKind=Current%20Affairs

People watching

Abbas Kiarostami's stage debut sees the acclaimed Iranian film-maker tackle the gulf between the west and Islam. Lee Marshall reports from Rome

Monday July 14, 2003
The Guardian

Abbas Kiarostami, Iran's most celebrated cultural export, is clearly ruffled. The 63-year-old Iranian film-maker is in Rome to direct a play - his first. That, however, is not the trouble. Up to now, Kiarostami has avoided making overt political comments, preferring to let films like Ten or Taste of Cherry tell their own, sometimes opaque stories of truth and lies in present-day Iran. But now, exasperated by the reversal of the reform process, and spurred on by the recent demonstrations by Iranian students, Kiarostami has decided to speak out.

"The student protests," he says, carefully, "are a natural reaction, after six years of Khatami's presidency. It's clear that he has not maintained the promises he made when he was elected." Like the students, he strongly disagrees with a government proposal to privatise Iranian universities. "I come from a large family; if university had not been free in my day, I wouldn't have been able to go. Our revolution was in favour of the disinherited, the poor. So my request is that the government should remain faithful to its initial intentions."

His politics are expressed more characteristically and obliquely in the play he has chosen to direct in Rome, the Ta'ziyeh (or Ta'ziyé, or Ta'ziyah). Best thought of as a Shi'ite passion play, the Ta'ziyeh has over 200 separate texts in the current repertoire, but all focus on one event: the murder of Hussein, son of Ali, and grandson of the prophet Mohammed, in 680AD. Even in Shi'ite Iran, however, the authorities do not always look on the cult of Hussein with favour. "Hussein," says Kiarostami, pointing out the connection with the recent unrest, "is the spiritual leader of the dispossessed."

The Ta'ziyeh is one of the few surviving forms of popular, traditional theatre generated by the Islamic world, and seems an unusual choice for a director whose films are often infused with a certain cinematic self-consciousness. But Kiarostami's production, in the atmospheric Teatro India, a former soap factory in the crumbling industrial wastelands that line the Tiber south of Ponte Testaccio, is hardly straight. Because Kiarostami doesn't just present the play, but an Iranian audience as well.

His open-air, hexagonal wooden theatre has a central stage surrounded by shallow tiers of seats. Above are six screens, on which we see the faces of Iranian spectators watching a previous performance of the same version of the Ta'ziyeh. The effect is a curious one: we watch the play, and a version of ourselves. This, says Kiarostami, is the idea: "Ta'ziyeh is strictly linked to its audience - the event is actually created by the rapport between actors and spectators."

The Ta'ziyeh is occasionally performed in Europe and the US, but it tends to be seen as a melodramatic vaudeville. In Iran, however, village-square performances of the martyrdom of Hussein culminate in the first 10 days of Muharram (the first month in the Muslim calendar) and are part of a huge, collective display of grief, contrition and eventual consolation - ta'ziyeh in Persian. Storytellers keep the gruesome details in people's minds all year long, and as Ashura (the day of Hussein's death) approaches, the mood of frenzied grief spills over into displays of self-mutilation and self-flagellation, which are frowned on by religious authorities.

With his version of the Ta'ziyeh, Kiarostami says he has attempted to transform "an empty stage show" into "a living ritual". His films of audiences were recorded at the height of the last Ta'ziyeh season, in rural villages around the town of Khansar, south of Tehran, where the Ta'ziyeh tradition is strongest. So involved are most of the men, women and children in what is happening on stage that they are generally oblivious to the camera, or, says Kiarostami, "they would brush it away because it was blocking their view".

The faces have been edited so that their reactions correspond to the drama we see unfolding on stage. In the play's highly static introductory phases, women whisper gossip to each other, a young boy tells what looks like a hilarious story to a man who might be his grandfather, and a row of men sip mint tea from saucers. But as the tragic denouement approaches, the waverers are transfixed and eyes begin to fill with tears. One woman sobs uncontrollably into her chador; men rock, head in hands, or beat their breasts in grief.

And yet, to western eyes, the performance on stage has more in common with pantomime or circus. For instance, as Hussein prepares for his martyrdom by refusing an offer of water in the desert, a man in a lion suit lollops on to the stage. Western audiences see a cuddly stage lion and have to stifle the instinct to laugh; but Iranian spectators see the incarnation of Hussein's followers and supporters, and burst into tears.

In fact, Kiarostami's Ta'ziyeh is about more than the death of Hussein. It is about how the west views Islam, and vice versa. When I tell Kiarostami that the Iranian audience's extreme emotional reactions left me with a feeling of inadequacy, even envy, he becomes animated. "That is central to the experience I had in mind," he says. "It comes down to innocence: the innocence of the Iranian spectator, of his reaction to the Ta'ziyeh; and the innocence of western audiences, who feel inadequate when confronted with that type of reaction to the very same show that they are watching. It's important to me that audiences in Rome have understood the innocence of the faces they are watching on the screen - I wasn't sure that they would".

Just as Kiarostami often confronts viewers with the material reality of film-making in his films, so the Ta'ziyeh makes little attempt to disguise the theatrical illusion. He came to the Ta'ziyeh as a young boy, "a long time before I saw my first film", and especially remembers an episode in which one of the baddies (dressed in red) was fighting one of the goodies (dressed in green). "At a certain point the tin sword of one of the two bent backwards. The other one took it, picked up a pebble from the edge of a nearby stream, and hammered the sword back into shape. Then they carried on fighting."

Kiarostami admits to having directed his actors very little. Cuts were made to bring the length of the performance down from four hours to a nicely filmic 90 minutes, but otherwise, the performers - who form one of several touring Ta'ziyeh troupes - were left pretty much to their own devices. All are men - some playing women's roles - and all have other occupations, which they abandon for the two months of the Ta'ziyeh season. The head of the troupe is an air-conditioning technician. Five are students; one is a lawyer, another a journalist. "Oh, and the Archangel Gabriel is a film editor", adds the director. Knowing Kiarostami, there's a rich subtext in that. If only we could tease it out.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/arts/features/story/0,11710,997557,00.html

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