Crackdown Drains Iranian Dissidents
The Iranian government has seized and detained several hundred activists, journalists and students across the nation, in one of the most extensive crackdowns on key dissidents since the 1979 Islamic Revolution.
Even as unprecedented protests broke out on the streets after the June 12 disputed presidential election, the most stinging backlash from authorities has come away from the crowds through roundups and targeted arrests, according to witnesses and human rights organizations. They say plainclothes security agents have also put dozens of the country's most experienced pro-reform leaders behind bars.
The Iranian government says only that unspecified figures responsible for fomenting unrest have been taken into custody.
The arrests have drained the pool of potential leaders of a protest movement that claims President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad stole the election by fraud. They also point to the potential for high-profile trials - and serious sentences - before a special judicial forum created to handle cases from the unrest.
With the main reformist candidate Mir Hossein Mousavi under constant police surveillance, protests demanding a new vote have withered. Many of those rounded up during demonstrations have been released within days.
But most of those detained in raids against potential opposition remain in custody. That has spread fear among Mousavi supporters and left the opposition movement reeling.
"We heard some news about people who are arrested at night and we are worried if it could happen to us," a Tehran resident active in the protests wrote in an e-mail Friday, asking for anonymity for fear of government retaliation.
The targeted arrests appear to have begun the day after the election. Several of Iran's best-known reformist politicians were taken into custody, including the brother and several close allies of former President Mohammad Khatami.
Since then, at least 230 more students, professors, journalists and reformists have been arrested, according to the International Campaign for Human Rights in Iran. At least 29 are known to have been released, the New York-based organization said in a list released Wednesday, although it acknowledged that the numbers were constantly changing.
The crackdown appears to have grown bolder as the government escalated its use of force on the streets.
Security agents arrested nearly the entire staff of Mousavi's newspaper, The Green Word, Monday night, seizing 25 people in a raid on its offices, according to a statement on Mousavi's Web site. Four or five who were out of the office during the raid remain free, according to the paper.
On Thursday, authorities arrested 70 reformist university professors after they met with Mousavi, his Web site said. At least 66 were later freed, said Hadi Ghaemi, spokesman for the International Campaign for Human Rights in Iran.
Among the most prominent reformists detained was Ebrahim Yazdi, 78, who was a key aide of the Islamic Republic's founder, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, and served as foreign minister after the 1979 revolution. Yazdi was hospitalized with a bladder problem when agents walked into his room on June 17, had his intravenous tubes disconnected and took him to Tehran's notorious Evin Prison.
"They did not show any judicial or legal papers, nothing," Yazdi told The Associated Press by telephone from Tehran. "Even in prison they didn't interrogate me. Nobody came to tell me why they were arresting me."
Yazdi said he was treated respectfully and released the next day. But many other members of his Freedom Movement of Iran remain in prison along with leaders of other reformist parties, some of whom served in Khatami's government.
They include Abdollah Ramezanzadeh, a former government spokesman under Khatami; Saeed Hajjarian, an adviser to Khatami who was paralyzed in an assassination attempt in 2000; and human rights lawyer Abdolfattah Soltani, who was arrested in his office by security forces posing as clients, according to the International Campaign for Human Rights in Iran.
Officials even briefly arrested the daughter and four other relatives of one of Iran's most powerful men, Ayatollah Hashemi Rafsanjani. The detentions were seen as an official warning to Rafsanjani, a former conservative president who many believe now favors the opposition.
Observers say the crackdown is the largest since Khatami's 1997 election and the birth of the modern Iranian reform movement.
"The people that they have arrested represent a wide spectrum of the political orientation," Yazdi said. "It is much broader than in the past."
State television has begun broadcasting purported confessions of street protesters who say they acted on behalf of Britain and other Western nations in a bid to destabilize the government.
"These kinds of arrests usually are undertaken in order to produce some kind of a show trial," said Ahmad Sadri, a sociology professor at Lake Forest College in Illinois who writes a column for the reformist Iranian daily Etemad-e-Melli, or National Confidence.
The editor-in-chief of Etemad-e-Melli, which is owned by reformist presidential candidate Mahdi Karroubi, was taken into custody last week, according to the Committee to Protect Journalists, which says roughly 40 journalists have been arrested. Among them was Newsweek correspondent Maziar Bahari, a dual Iranian-Canadian citizen, and Iason Athanasiadis, a Greek national reporting for The Washington Times.
Arrests of foreign reporters without family ties to Iran have been rare in recent years. The Greek government said Athanasiadis, who lived in Iran from 2004-2007, was taken into custody last week on an alleged visa violation. Iran has said little about the case.
Athanasiadis' parents have appealed for his release, calling him a reporter, photographer and filmmaker with "a particular love of Iran, and a deep respect for its cultural and religious traditions."
Arrests have taken place not only in Tehran but in smaller cities like Hamedan, Zanjan and Shiraz, rights groups said. The numbers of detentions outside Tehran could not be verified independently.
"It causes mass paranoia that nowhere's safe; you can't be in your home, you can't be in the hospital," said Afshon Ostovar, who is writing a doctoral dissertation on Iran's security forces at the University of Michigan.
The targeted roundups allow authorities to suppress dissent while avoiding the flood of amateur videos and photographs that have documented police or militia confrontations with demonstrators. The most famous showed music student Neda Agha Soltan bleeding to death from a gunshot wound on a Tehran street.
"It's much easier to arrest people at night than crack heads in the daylight," Ostvar said. "There's no camera, there's no proof, there's no pictures."
Iranian officials appear to have identified some protest leaders by monitoring cell phones, e-mail accounts and Internet activity. The fear of official surveillance has forced some opposition supporters into self-censorship.
"In any demonstrations we turn off our cell phones and remove its battery because we heard they can search people by the phones even when it's off," the Tehran protester who insisted on anonymity wrote in his e-mail.
Many fear the government can track down opponents by tracing their computers if they visit certain Web sites.
Sadri, the professor in Illinois who regularly visits Iran, said he has begun couching his criticism of the government in his newspapers, taking an indirect approach to avoid angering the government.
"It is much more writing in allegory and symbols," he said.
By Associated Press Writer Michael Weissenstein
© 2009 The Associated Press. All Rights Reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed. Even as unprecedented protests broke out on the streets after the June 12 disputed presidential election, the most stinging backlash from authorities has come away from the crowds through roundups and targeted arrests, according to witnesses and human rights organizations. They say plainclothes security agents have also put dozens of the country's most experienced pro-reform leaders behind bars.
The Iranian government says only that unspecified figures responsible for fomenting unrest have been taken into custody.
The arrests have drained the pool of potential leaders of a protest movement that claims President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad stole the election by fraud. They also point to the potential for high-profile trials - and serious sentences - before a special judicial forum created to handle cases from the unrest.
With the main reformist candidate Mir Hossein Mousavi under constant police surveillance, protests demanding a new vote have withered. Many of those rounded up during demonstrations have been released within days.
But most of those detained in raids against potential opposition remain in custody. That has spread fear among Mousavi supporters and left the opposition movement reeling.
"We heard some news about people who are arrested at night and we are worried if it could happen to us," a Tehran resident active in the protests wrote in an e-mail Friday, asking for anonymity for fear of government retaliation.
The targeted arrests appear to have begun the day after the election. Several of Iran's best-known reformist politicians were taken into custody, including the brother and several close allies of former President Mohammad Khatami.
Since then, at least 230 more students, professors, journalists and reformists have been arrested, according to the International Campaign for Human Rights in Iran. At least 29 are known to have been released, the New York-based organization said in a list released Wednesday, although it acknowledged that the numbers were constantly changing.
The crackdown appears to have grown bolder as the government escalated its use of force on the streets.
Security agents arrested nearly the entire staff of Mousavi's newspaper, The Green Word, Monday night, seizing 25 people in a raid on its offices, according to a statement on Mousavi's Web site. Four or five who were out of the office during the raid remain free, according to the paper.
On Thursday, authorities arrested 70 reformist university professors after they met with Mousavi, his Web site said. At least 66 were later freed, said Hadi Ghaemi, spokesman for the International Campaign for Human Rights in Iran.
Among the most prominent reformists detained was Ebrahim Yazdi, 78, who was a key aide of the Islamic Republic's founder, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, and served as foreign minister after the 1979 revolution. Yazdi was hospitalized with a bladder problem when agents walked into his room on June 17, had his intravenous tubes disconnected and took him to Tehran's notorious Evin Prison.
"They did not show any judicial or legal papers, nothing," Yazdi told The Associated Press by telephone from Tehran. "Even in prison they didn't interrogate me. Nobody came to tell me why they were arresting me."
Yazdi said he was treated respectfully and released the next day. But many other members of his Freedom Movement of Iran remain in prison along with leaders of other reformist parties, some of whom served in Khatami's government.
They include Abdollah Ramezanzadeh, a former government spokesman under Khatami; Saeed Hajjarian, an adviser to Khatami who was paralyzed in an assassination attempt in 2000; and human rights lawyer Abdolfattah Soltani, who was arrested in his office by security forces posing as clients, according to the International Campaign for Human Rights in Iran.
Officials even briefly arrested the daughter and four other relatives of one of Iran's most powerful men, Ayatollah Hashemi Rafsanjani. The detentions were seen as an official warning to Rafsanjani, a former conservative president who many believe now favors the opposition.
Observers say the crackdown is the largest since Khatami's 1997 election and the birth of the modern Iranian reform movement.
"The people that they have arrested represent a wide spectrum of the political orientation," Yazdi said. "It is much broader than in the past."
State television has begun broadcasting purported confessions of street protesters who say they acted on behalf of Britain and other Western nations in a bid to destabilize the government.
"These kinds of arrests usually are undertaken in order to produce some kind of a show trial," said Ahmad Sadri, a sociology professor at Lake Forest College in Illinois who writes a column for the reformist Iranian daily Etemad-e-Melli, or National Confidence.
The editor-in-chief of Etemad-e-Melli, which is owned by reformist presidential candidate Mahdi Karroubi, was taken into custody last week, according to the Committee to Protect Journalists, which says roughly 40 journalists have been arrested. Among them was Newsweek correspondent Maziar Bahari, a dual Iranian-Canadian citizen, and Iason Athanasiadis, a Greek national reporting for The Washington Times.
Arrests of foreign reporters without family ties to Iran have been rare in recent years. The Greek government said Athanasiadis, who lived in Iran from 2004-2007, was taken into custody last week on an alleged visa violation. Iran has said little about the case.
Athanasiadis' parents have appealed for his release, calling him a reporter, photographer and filmmaker with "a particular love of Iran, and a deep respect for its cultural and religious traditions."
Arrests have taken place not only in Tehran but in smaller cities like Hamedan, Zanjan and Shiraz, rights groups said. The numbers of detentions outside Tehran could not be verified independently.
"It causes mass paranoia that nowhere's safe; you can't be in your home, you can't be in the hospital," said Afshon Ostovar, who is writing a doctoral dissertation on Iran's security forces at the University of Michigan.
The targeted roundups allow authorities to suppress dissent while avoiding the flood of amateur videos and photographs that have documented police or militia confrontations with demonstrators. The most famous showed music student Neda Agha Soltan bleeding to death from a gunshot wound on a Tehran street.
"It's much easier to arrest people at night than crack heads in the daylight," Ostvar said. "There's no camera, there's no proof, there's no pictures."
Iranian officials appear to have identified some protest leaders by monitoring cell phones, e-mail accounts and Internet activity. The fear of official surveillance has forced some opposition supporters into self-censorship.
"In any demonstrations we turn off our cell phones and remove its battery because we heard they can search people by the phones even when it's off," the Tehran protester who insisted on anonymity wrote in his e-mail.
Many fear the government can track down opponents by tracing their computers if they visit certain Web sites.
Sadri, the professor in Illinois who regularly visits Iran, said he has begun couching his criticism of the government in his newspapers, taking an indirect approach to avoid angering the government.
"It is much more writing in allegory and symbols," he said.
By Associated Press Writer Michael Weissenstein
Popular on CBSNews.com
- 2 men from diverted Pakistani flight into U.K. arrested
- Toronto mayor: I don't smoke crack cocaine
- Graphic video: Man dead in "truly shocking" London attack Play Video
- Photos of the week 22 Photos
- Bangladesh slum life 13 Photos
- Muslim hard-liners ID suspect in London attack
- Former sex slaves: Osaka mayor should quit
- Tokyo's rockabilly scene 16 Photos
And if you refused to believe what THEY WANTED, you could be imprisoned FOREVER, refused any rights AT ALL, tortured REPEATEDLY, and seen your family humiliated or imprisoned with you!!!
It would have been the Spanish Inquisition and the Holocaust all over again!!! Only it would be happening HERE!!!!!!
AND IT STILL COULD BE!!!!!!!!!!!
HAIL OBAMA???????
No wonder Ahmadinejad claims the Holocaust never happened. He intends to perpetrate it upon the people of his own country which want basic freedoms. To able to speak out against the government.
If ever there was a 2nd Hitler, this excuse of a human being is it.
And the far left is in power and denial.
THIS is why you don't elect people like Obama into power.
He is an inexperienced idealist. Sure he has ideas, but just like Jimmy Carter, we'll find they were naive when history judges him.
Strip him of his power in the very next election. Show him that Pelosi and Reid are NOT doing what is necessary. Punish his party for ever putting this ill-equiped person up for such an important position.
It is a shame that the first man of color could not have had a magnificent presidency. It would have gone a long way towards diversity and intercultural respect.
RELIGIOUS DOGMA, DELUSIONS OF POWER, DOMINATION AND CONQUEST
=
THE CURRENT, RELIGIOUSLY FANATICAL, ISLAMOFASCIST IRANIAN REGIME
The entire world must take thorough, decisive action - militarily and all other ways - to ensure that the current, Iranian Islamofascist regime does NOT produce or possess any nuclear weaponry.
The hour is late to stop the Iranian nuclear weapons program, therefore immediate military pre-emption with regard to Iran's nuclear program MUST BE initiated.
Iran is not working in the interests of the world's nations or people.
The sooner the world removes the Iranian nuclear threat, the better!
These are the same Clerics and Fanatics that Jimmy Carter allowed to come to power through inaction. Carter condemned the Shah for trying to keep exactly these guys from taking over, lmao. Oh those poor Mullahs locked up in the evil Shah's prisons.....Jimmy bought it hook line and sinker....now its those Mullahs who are locking people up and executing them in far greater numbers than the Shah ever did. Meanwhile Obama "WATCHES".
Or anyone for that matter...
Short of military intervention?
Oh, OK, this make it better - lol.
So sad, and so obvious that the government of Iran could not withstand even the slightest negative opinions or views and must completely supress them. This will not last forever, no matter what the current outcome. Achma-whats his face, should quit talking - he was doing better when he was quiet. It's only a matter of time before the clerics will be displaced by Iran's more openminded youth.
two leaders of a country who actually did and
are presently doing what we Say that
Ahmadinejed only MIGHT do?,,,
What country has Iran invaded lately?,,,Causing
tens if not hundreds of thousands of another
countries' citizens,,,,,,
,,,easy to forget isn't it?
If we're trying to denegrate Obama then try his
criminal stomping through Afghanistan.
But that's the repubs' catch 22,,,
,,got them in a bind,,,
Repubs NEVER judge Obama one way or another for
going into Afghanistan,,,,they cant,,,
They'd love to hit Obama for going into Ahfghanistan
but to do so would be smacking their hero for doing
the same thing in Iraq,,,,And to praise Obama
for doing the same thing in Afghanistan that
Bush did in Iraq,,,,would after all be,,,,
gulp!,,,"praising" Obama,,,,
So you'll never hear a word, good or bad from
repubs about Obama going into Afghanistan,,,
,,,wont happen,
Here's how repubs should handle it:,
Honest dems, certain that going into Iraq was
a war crime and seeing that their man Obama is doing
near the criminal same thing say that they're both
criminals,,,
So conversely, repubs, only believing that the
invasion was mandated by God or what ever
the reason for their belief, should nonetheless
say that both Obama and Bush did and are now
doing the right thing.
How about you address the points made, he makes some good points.
"you idiot"
lmao