Posted on 06/11/2004 12:24:27 PM PDT by F14 Pilot
Reporters Without Borders called today for the immediate release of Abbas Kakavand, who was imprisoned on 7 June for allegedly disseminating "false news" in articles he wrote for the website gooya.com since February after leaving the conservative newspaper Ressalat. His articles criticised corruption and the political payments received by many conservative leaders.
The organisation described the jailing of Kakavand as "flagrant evidence of the systematic violation of press freedom in Iran," and pointed out that "it came just a few days before talks on human rights are scheduled to get under way between the Islamic Republic and the European Union".
"The EU has apparently not yet realised that the situation of free expression has got much worse since this so-called "constructive dialogue" with Iran began more than three years ago", Reporters Without Borders said.
"No journalist is protected from repression, not even those who have worked for one of the most pro-government newspapers. Farsi-language websites, which play a major role in disseminating news, are being monitored more and more closely. The Islamic Republic continues to claim that it adheres to international human rights standards, in which case it should therefore immediately release the 13 journalists currently imprisoned in Iran," Reporters Without Borders said.
Charges were brought against Kakavand at a hearing of the Tehran criminal court on 7 June. The court ordered his immediate imprisonment when he was unable to pay bail of 100 million rials (about 11,600 euros). His articles criticising political corruption had appeared in both reformist dailies and on gooya.com, a very popular site which the authorities blocked along with other reformist sites for several days before the February legislative elections.
He was first summoned by the judicial authorities on 3 April. On the day of his 7 June court hearing, gooya.com published an interview in which he accused most of the conservative political leaders and members of the overwhelmingly conservative parliament of "stealing from the tills of the Imam Khomeini foundation" to finance their electoral campaigns. Hadad Adel, the currently parliamentary speaker, was named.
The Iranian regime censors thousands of websites considered to be "un-Islamic." It also harasses and jails online journalists. But the Internet is flourishing in Iran, online political debates are impassioned and weblogs are spreading fast.
On 22 June, Reporters Without Borders will bring out a report on the "The Internet under Surveillance" which will detail the methods used by the Iranian authorities to control online content. The full report will be available on the Reporters Without Borders website, www.internet.rsf.org.
Now with a total of 13 journalists detained, Iran is the biggest prison for the press in the Middle East
From an e-mail that came my way... I do not know (of) Mr. Alex Agahi
-----Original Message-----
From: Alex Agahi [mailto:alex@agahi.net]
Sent: Monday, June 07, 2004 4:44 PM
To: Alex Agahi
Cc: ted.turner@turner.com; Christiane.Amanpour@turner.com; asieh.namdar@turner.com; lklshow.ideas@cnn.com; tom.hannon@cnn.com; wolf@cnn.com; rudi.bakhtiar@turner.com; cnnfutures@cnn.com; sundays@cbsnews.com; uttm@cbs.com; sat@cbsnews.com; 2020@abc.com; thisweek@abc.com; nightline@abc.com; tony.snow@foxnews.com; fns@foxnews.com; oreilly@foxnews.com; brit.hume@foxnews.com; hannity@foxnews.com; colmes@foxnews.com; fnc.wash@foxnews.com; cavuto@foxnews.com
Subject: story from prison
First story:
Twice they took me to the courtyard in ????, where the executions are carried out. They tied my feet. They took off my blindfold. One man was saying: "Tell me why you lied. Tell me what you did." They hung me from my feet, and they put a bag over my head. For what I think was 30 minutes, they were kicking me and hitting me. They hit my chin, and the skin broke. Blood began to fill the bag that was tied over my head. Blood began to drip on the floor, and this is when they stopped.
The second time they took me in there, they hung me from my hands. They used a baton to beat my torso. They broke my hand, and I fell unconscious. When I regained consciousness, they said, "If you say you lied, we will stop." I could not speak. It is not because I am brave that I did not confess, it is because I couldn't talk.
Second Story:
In the first few hours, it is very hard. You have never been this close to walls in your life. You don't want to sit, because it is chalk, and you are not used to sitting on chalk. You stand. You pace. You start to get dizzy. After you get dizzy, you lean on a wall. After three or four hours, your legs get tired, and you sit. And then you scream and no one hears you.
And you feel like they are holding you, like they are physically holding on to you. Your hair and nails grow faster. A lot of prisoners say that solitary is like being like "the dead in their coffins" because we had heard that the dead's nails grow in their coffins. Even if they had given me something to read, they had taken my glasses. Even if I had had my glasses, there wasn't enough light.
To our wealthy, successful working only for what it pays journalists;
These are real stories but they are not from Al-Ghrib Prison in Iraq, they are new but they are facts and they are the way of life in Iran, it does happen every day but nobody has ever heard about them.
I am sure that Ted Coppell, Peter Jennings, Mike Wallace, Tom Brokaw, Dan Rather, even our own Christiana Amanpour and many more news salesmen can not even call themselves journalist since they are only a salespersons who are trying to sell their products and at this time this is not the product that has a big market.
Human dignity is not a product, all we ask of you is to be human and to report the same way that you report other products.
If you would please go to http://www.hrw.org/english/docs/2004/06/07/iran8774.htm
{{{ Iran: Torture Used to Suppress Dissent (Brussels, June 7, 2004) -- The Iranian government has intensified its campaign of torture, arbitrary arrests, and detentions against political critics, Human Rights Watch said in a report released today. Iran's outgoing reformist parliament in May passed legislation to prohibit torture, but without effective implementation, the law remains an empty gesture.....}}}
Its time to give back, be a Journalist, be human.
Alex Agahi
Thanks for the ping!
Where are all the peaceniks on this one? Why are they not protesting against the treatment of people in Iran?
They've been asked that. One group said, they were probably put in jail because they were imperialists. Is that sick enough for you?
Bump!
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