WASHINGTON - Iran's judiciary has threatened
Internet journalists with torture and prison if they do
not renounce accusations that authorities abused members
of the electronic media and dissidents who were rounded
up months ago.
According to New York-based Human
Rights Watch (HRW), the chief prosecutor of Tehran,
Judge Saeed Mortazavi, threatened three recently
released detainees with severe punishment if they did
not cooperate with him in preparing a libel case against
Ali Mazroi, the president of the Association of Iranian
Journalists.
Charges or torture and coerced
confessions are not new in Iran, where conservatives
have been emboldened to act against their perceived foes
by their sweep of parliamentary elections last March and
the continuing conflict in neighboring Iraq, where
nearly 150,000 US troops remain bogged down 20 months
after they ousted Iran's arch-foe, Saddam Hussein, from
power.
Washington's repeated demands that Tehran
forgo its nuclear program, which US officials says is
aimed at acquiring a nuclear weapon within the next
several years, has also reportedly bolstered the
conservatives' position within Iran, despite perceptions
in the United States that the clerical regime remains
broadly unpopular.
Its unpopularity is
repeatedly cited by US hawks as evidence that the
country is ripe for "regime change". They have argued in
favor of openly or covertly supplying aid to exiled and
internal opposition groups as a way of mobilizing the
discontent. But such a move, according to a number of
Iran experts, could backfire by enabling the
conservatives to rally the country against foreign
intervention.
While Washington is particularly
concerned about Iran's nuclear program and its alleged
interference in Iraq, it has also spoken out on the
human-rights situation, particularly the recent
crackdown.
Conservatives, centered mainly in the
judiciary, have largely shut down most of Iran's
independent mass media, particularly reformist
newspapers and magazines, over the past year. As the
more traditional outlets for activism and free
expression disappeared, the Internet took on an
increasingly important role for reformists.
A
rare phenomenon four years ago, Internet usage has
skyrocketed recently. The number of regular Internet
users increased by an estimated 1,820% between 2000 and
2004, according to InternetWorldStats. Though the total
number of users as a percentage of the population is
still relatively small - just over 7% - Iran's
demographic profile indicates that Internet usage is set
to grow rapidly. More than half of the nation's
population of 69 million is under the age of 25.
The most recent crackdown has been aimed
particularly at Internet journalists.
In a
public letter to President Mohammed Khatami on December
10, Mazroi, who is a former reformist member of
parliament, implicated the judiciary in the torture and
secret detention of more than 20 Internet journalists
and civil-society activists during a crackdown that
began in early September. One of those detained was
Mazroi's son.
The following day, Mortazavi filed
charges against Mazroi and ordered that three Internet
journalists - Omid Memarian, Shahram Rafizadeh, and
Ruzbeh Ebrahimi - be detained as witnesses for the
prosecution, according to HRW.
The three
journalists and a fourth, Javed Ghlam Tamayomi, who had
been in detention since October 18, were brought to the
prosecutor's office. According to HRW's account,
Mortazavi threatened the four with lengthy prison terms
and torture if they did not publicly deny Mazroi's
charges, and they were subsequently interrogated for the
following three days.
On December 14, the four
were taken to a televised press conference to deny they
had been subject to solitary confinement, torture or any
ill-treatment during their earlier confinement. Tapes
from the conference were subsequently aired on
government-controlled television in what HRW charged was
a transparent effort to whitewash what had in fact taken
place.
One of the detainees said he had been
held in a 30-square-meter room with a color television,
while another said their jailer handled them as "gently
as flowers".
"If there are credible charges
against these journalists, the judiciary should hold
fair trials instead of forcing them to appear on
television and say their torturers treated them well,"
Joe Stork, HRW's Middle East director, said from
Washington.
In a report released two weeks ago,
the rights group charged that secret squads of
interrogators - primarily former intelligence officers
who were purged in the late 1990s by Khatami's reformist
administration but now employed by the judiciary -
forced detainees to write self-incriminatory
"confessionary letters" under "extreme pressure as a
condition for their release on bail".
The
confessions, said HRW, were designed to "destroy
individuals' reputations, sow discord among activists,
and ultimately shut down all independent voices and
organizations".
Consistent with Mortazavi's
actions in the pending libel case, these confessions
also included assertions that the prisoners had not been
mistreated during their detention.
But HRW said
it had obtained "detailed information" about the torture
and solitary confinement of the detainees at a secret
center near Tehran. Held in small cells for up to three
months, the detainees, it said, were subjected to
torture, including beatings with electrical cables, and
interrogations that lasted up to 11 hours at a stretch.
Throughout their ordeal, the prisoners were
denied access to lawyers and medical care, although
family visits were permitted in rare cases. They were
often threatened with the arrest of family members and
friends if they failed to cooperate, and a number of
them reportedly became suicidal, HRW said.
The
detainees were interrogated by the same person, an
operative who used the pseudonym "Keshavarz" who was, in
turn, backed up by a magistrate known as "Mehdipoor".
"Both the interrogator and magistrate repeatedly
delivered messages and threats to the detainees on
behalf of Judge Mortazavi," HRW said.
The
group's accounts have been backed up by Paris-based
Reporters Without Borders, which also denounced last
week's television confessions as "pathetic and
grotesque". "These testimonies," it said, "are
pointless, as there is abundant evidence of the mental
and physical harassment of journalists."
"These
detainees had been detained and tortured by secret
squads apparently taking orders from Judge Mortazavi
himself," said Stork in his statement. "Mortazavi
obviously has a lot at stake in covering up his role in
this affair."
