Iran's Dissidents,
Released but not Freed
BY ROBIN WRIGHT
“Jame’eh has two functions,” Mashallah Shamsolvaezin, its young editor, told me then. “We are trying to build up the level of democratic discourse, and we are a good test case to see how much freedom the government can tolerate.”
Not much, it turns out, even a generation later.
Released but not Freed
BY ROBIN WRIGHT
In 1998, I visited the offices of Jame’eh (“Society”), the first independent newspaper in revolutionary Iran. Its staff had just published a story about a Revolutionary Guard commander’s secret proposal to behead emerging reformers. In its first three months, Jame’eh also exposed the misadventures of the secretive Ansar-e Hezbollah, or Helpers of the Party of God, and interviewed a former official who was released after being imprisoned for fifteen years, on charges of being an American spy. The paper ran acerbic satires, daring political cartoons, and unconventional news stories. It came out twice a day (three times if there was big news), and kiosks had a hard time keeping it in stock.
“Jame’eh has two functions,” Mashallah Shamsolvaezin, its young editor, told me then. “We are trying to build up the level of democratic discourse, and we are a good test case to see how much freedom the government can tolerate.”
Not much, it turns out, even a generation later.
Jame’eh was shut down just months after its launch. Shamsolvaezin quickly opened three other papers, including Asr-e Azadegan (“Age of Free People”). The regime closed them just as quickly. Over the past sixteen years, Shamsolvaezin has been jailed three times, in the infamous Evin Prison, on vague charges of challenging national security and weakening the theocratic system. He was last released in 2010. For his daring, Shamsolvaezin was named the World Press Freedom Hero earlier this year by the International Press Institute.
Today, Shamsolvaezin makes his living as a pistachio farmer outside Tehran. His goatee is graying; his crows’ nests are rutted. “I dream of newspapers,” he told me this spring. Since the election of President Hassan Rouhani, last June, he has tried again to open a newspaper, but on the eve of its first issue it, too, was thwarted. He now carries a toothbrush in his briefcase. He showed it to me. “At least this time, I’m prepared,” he said. “The prison gives us a toothbrush, but it’s not good quality.”
Rouhani’s victory, an upset, spawned great expectations of change. A pragmatic centrist, he campaigned on the promise of “hope and prudence.” After the election, in a series of speeches and tweets, he pledged new freedoms and challenged past practices, including censorship. His quasi-official account tweeted, “Web filtering unable to produce results. Which important piece of news has #filtering been able to black out in recent years.” Rouhani was particularly tough on the country’s state-controlled television, Islamic Republic of Iran Broadcasting (I.R.I.B.):
Rouhani’s domestic agenda has generally suffered in his first year, while he concentrated on foreign policy—and, almost single-mindedly, on negotiating a nuclear deal with the world’s six major powers. (Talks will resume next week in Vienna.)
In the meantime, Iran maintains a bifurcated legal system that can charge people on vague grounds of un-Islamic behavior or unrevolutionary activities. Rouhani has been unwilling to take on either Iran’s deep state—a mix of security and intelligence agencies with their own political agendas—or the judiciary, over which he has no constitutional control. In addition to civil and criminal courts, Iran has Islamic revolutionary courts. Amnesty International warned last week that “despite President Rouhani’s popular mandate, Iran’s clerically-dominated politico-religious establishment, headed by Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, and hardliners within its security and judicial sectors, retain enormous power and influence and, to a large extent, continue to have the determining voice on the nature and pace of change in Iran.” As Shamsolvaezin put it, “The ruling system is the deep state.”
Rouhani’s shortcomings are now drawing the same condemnation once reserved for his hard-line predecessor, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. Two new Amnesty International reports detail “sustained brutality” against political prisoners in Evin Prison and the systematic repression of students and academics in Iran’s universities.
Internal tensions are reflected in the fate of two former Presidential candidates, Mir-Hossein Mousavi and Mehdi Karroubi, who have languished under house arrest since 2011 for their opposition to Ahmadinejad. Both are true insiders. Mousavi was the Prime Minister throughout the long war with Iraq in the nineteen-eighties; Karroubi was the speaker of parliament for eight years. Their claims of fraud in the 2009 election and their support for the subsequent Green Movement protests, in which millions poured into the streets, eventually led to their detention. Mousavi’s wife, a former university president, is also under house arrest. Three years later, none have been formally charged.
In a report to the United Nations this spring, Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon chastised Rouhani and called for their release. “The new Administration has not made any significant improvement in the promotion and protection of freedom of expression and opinion, despite pledges made by the President during his campaign and after his swearing in,” he said. He scolded Tehran for its “large number of political prisoners.” Tehran denies holding any, but the U.N. report counts almost nine hundred prisoners of conscience and political prisoners, including activists, religious minorities, women, online commentators, journalists, and students.
Over the past thirty-five years, Iran has taken tepid and token steps on human-rights abuses. In the nineteen-eighties, the revolutionary leader Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini warned the judiciary and the Revolutionary Guards against abusing individual rights. He issued an eight-point human-rights code to prevent excesses, and approved trying revolutionary prosecutors and judges who abused power. Before his death, in 1989, he also declared that the state was more important than Islam, stirring controversy among fellow-clerics. But revolutionaries tend to be paranoid, devouring their own as well as their opponents. A former President fled into exile; his foreign minister was executed by firing squad at Evin Prison, for plotting to overthrow the state. Cabinet officials and several members of parliament have been taken to court or jail. In 2009, a former vice-president was imprisoned for his political sins, until he recanted on national television.
For three years, Iran’s most famous political prisoner was a woman named Nasrin Sotoudeh. A petite human-rights lawyer, she tucks her short, feathered hair behind bright scarves, to comply with laws mandating modest Islamic dress. She has two young children. After Iran’s disputed 2009 election, she took on cases of Green Movement activists who had been detained en masse. Then she, too, was arrested, on charges of conspiring against state security and spreading propaganda. Sentenced to eleven years (later reduced to six), she was also disbarred and banned from leaving the country for twenty years.
Sotoudeh remained outspoken from prison. A letter she wrote to her husband, Reza Khandan, was published on Facebook:
Last September, a month after Rouhani took office and shortly before his début at the United Nations, Sotoudeh was released, abruptly, along with ten other prisoners. She is still disbarred, but she has resumed work on cases of minors facing death sentences.
“I was released, but I was not freed,” she told me when I visited her this spring. She works out of a dimly lit office off a narrow alley in north Tehran. A poster of Nelson Mandela was propped against the window. “When we were released, we thought this trend was going to continue, but it didn’t. For me, this sort of freedom is meaningless when my friends are still in prison.”
One of the prisoners who hasn’t been released is Mohsen Mirdamadi, the former head of parliament’s foreign-affairs committee and of Iran’s largest reform party. Mirdamadi was one of the original three ringleaders in the takeover of the U.S. Embassy, in 1979. (Two generations after the revolution, many early radicals have turned into reformers, and several have been jailed.)
Mirdamadi, a surprisingly small man, has been challenging the system for more than a decade. In 2002, he declared on the floor of parliament that it was time for Iran to repair relations with the United States. “Once enmity with America was in line with our interests,” he said. “Our interests today lie in détente with America.” He also dared to call the government authoritarian. “The goals of the revolution are being forgotten as this government becomes more of a dictatorship,” he told me in 2004. “People still want change.” That year, he was barred from running again for parliament. He then launched a newspaper, Nowruz (“New Year”), which advocated the rule of law. Ultimately, the authorities charged him with libel, subversion, “encouraging hooligans to undermine public order,” and propagating “moral decadence.” The paper was banned. In 2009, after the election protests, he was sentenced to six years at the conclusion of a mass, Stalin-esque trial.
Nasrin Sotoudeh told me that little is likely to change, given Iran’s unique legal system. She believes that the time has come to change, dissolve, or abolish the Islamic courts. “These courts were formed for emergencies after the revolution,” she said. “But thirty-five years have passed, so there is no reason to continue accusing people under urgent or emergency situations.”
A nuclear deal might help ease Iran’s human-rights crisis, she said. “If the country can resolve its international problem through dialogue and conversation, then it can solve its internal problems through dialogue as well.” But the Islamic Republic is still a long way from ending the pervasive climate of fear, even among the revolutionaries themselves.
Today, Shamsolvaezin makes his living as a pistachio farmer outside Tehran. His goatee is graying; his crows’ nests are rutted. “I dream of newspapers,” he told me this spring. Since the election of President Hassan Rouhani, last June, he has tried again to open a newspaper, but on the eve of its first issue it, too, was thwarted. He now carries a toothbrush in his briefcase. He showed it to me. “At least this time, I’m prepared,” he said. “The prison gives us a toothbrush, but it’s not good quality.”
Rouhani’s victory, an upset, spawned great expectations of change. A pragmatic centrist, he campaigned on the promise of “hope and prudence.” After the election, in a series of speeches and tweets, he pledged new freedoms and challenged past practices, including censorship. His quasi-official account tweeted, “Web filtering unable to produce results. Which important piece of news has #filtering been able to black out in recent years.” Rouhani was particularly tough on the country’s state-controlled television, Islamic Republic of Iran Broadcasting (I.R.I.B.):
#Rouhani: If day comes that #IRIB has more news coverage than foreign channels such as BBC, people will reconcile with it
— Hassan Rouhani (@HassanRouhani) July 3, 2013
#Rouhani: When #IRIB airs birth of panda in China but nothing abt unpaid workers protesting, obvious that ppl & youth will ignore it
— Hassan Rouhani (@HassanRouhani) July 3, 2013
Over the past year, though, Rouhani has conspicuously failed to uphold his promise. “We have freedom of expression in Iran,” Shamsolvaezin told me. “We just don’t have freedom after expression.” In accepting his press award, in April, Shamsolvaezin called for the release of forty-eight other jailed journalists.Rouhani’s domestic agenda has generally suffered in his first year, while he concentrated on foreign policy—and, almost single-mindedly, on negotiating a nuclear deal with the world’s six major powers. (Talks will resume next week in Vienna.)
In the meantime, Iran maintains a bifurcated legal system that can charge people on vague grounds of un-Islamic behavior or unrevolutionary activities. Rouhani has been unwilling to take on either Iran’s deep state—a mix of security and intelligence agencies with their own political agendas—or the judiciary, over which he has no constitutional control. In addition to civil and criminal courts, Iran has Islamic revolutionary courts. Amnesty International warned last week that “despite President Rouhani’s popular mandate, Iran’s clerically-dominated politico-religious establishment, headed by Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, and hardliners within its security and judicial sectors, retain enormous power and influence and, to a large extent, continue to have the determining voice on the nature and pace of change in Iran.” As Shamsolvaezin put it, “The ruling system is the deep state.”
Rouhani’s shortcomings are now drawing the same condemnation once reserved for his hard-line predecessor, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. Two new Amnesty International reports detail “sustained brutality” against political prisoners in Evin Prison and the systematic repression of students and academics in Iran’s universities.
Internal tensions are reflected in the fate of two former Presidential candidates, Mir-Hossein Mousavi and Mehdi Karroubi, who have languished under house arrest since 2011 for their opposition to Ahmadinejad. Both are true insiders. Mousavi was the Prime Minister throughout the long war with Iraq in the nineteen-eighties; Karroubi was the speaker of parliament for eight years. Their claims of fraud in the 2009 election and their support for the subsequent Green Movement protests, in which millions poured into the streets, eventually led to their detention. Mousavi’s wife, a former university president, is also under house arrest. Three years later, none have been formally charged.
In a report to the United Nations this spring, Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon chastised Rouhani and called for their release. “The new Administration has not made any significant improvement in the promotion and protection of freedom of expression and opinion, despite pledges made by the President during his campaign and after his swearing in,” he said. He scolded Tehran for its “large number of political prisoners.” Tehran denies holding any, but the U.N. report counts almost nine hundred prisoners of conscience and political prisoners, including activists, religious minorities, women, online commentators, journalists, and students.
Over the past thirty-five years, Iran has taken tepid and token steps on human-rights abuses. In the nineteen-eighties, the revolutionary leader Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini warned the judiciary and the Revolutionary Guards against abusing individual rights. He issued an eight-point human-rights code to prevent excesses, and approved trying revolutionary prosecutors and judges who abused power. Before his death, in 1989, he also declared that the state was more important than Islam, stirring controversy among fellow-clerics. But revolutionaries tend to be paranoid, devouring their own as well as their opponents. A former President fled into exile; his foreign minister was executed by firing squad at Evin Prison, for plotting to overthrow the state. Cabinet officials and several members of parliament have been taken to court or jail. In 2009, a former vice-president was imprisoned for his political sins, until he recanted on national television.
For three years, Iran’s most famous political prisoner was a woman named Nasrin Sotoudeh. A petite human-rights lawyer, she tucks her short, feathered hair behind bright scarves, to comply with laws mandating modest Islamic dress. She has two young children. After Iran’s disputed 2009 election, she took on cases of Green Movement activists who had been detained en masse. Then she, too, was arrested, on charges of conspiring against state security and spreading propaganda. Sentenced to eleven years (later reduced to six), she was also disbarred and banned from leaving the country for twenty years.
Sotoudeh remained outspoken from prison. A letter she wrote to her husband, Reza Khandan, was published on Facebook:
My dear Reza, everyone ponders about their freedom while in prison. Although my freedom is also important to me, it is not more important than the justice that has been ignored and denied…. Nothing is more important than those hundreds of years of sentences that were rendered to my clients and other freedom-seeking individuals, accused of crimes they had not committed. Though I had the privilege of representing only a few, I will continue to object to their unjust sentences regardless of whether or not I have a license to practice the law.She also went on repeated hunger strikes; the longest lasted forty-nine days. In 2011, President Obama filmed a video message to the Iranian people in which he called for her release. In 2012, the European Union awarded her the Sakharov Prize for Freedom of Thought.
Last September, a month after Rouhani took office and shortly before his début at the United Nations, Sotoudeh was released, abruptly, along with ten other prisoners. She is still disbarred, but she has resumed work on cases of minors facing death sentences.
“I was released, but I was not freed,” she told me when I visited her this spring. She works out of a dimly lit office off a narrow alley in north Tehran. A poster of Nelson Mandela was propped against the window. “When we were released, we thought this trend was going to continue, but it didn’t. For me, this sort of freedom is meaningless when my friends are still in prison.”
One of the prisoners who hasn’t been released is Mohsen Mirdamadi, the former head of parliament’s foreign-affairs committee and of Iran’s largest reform party. Mirdamadi was one of the original three ringleaders in the takeover of the U.S. Embassy, in 1979. (Two generations after the revolution, many early radicals have turned into reformers, and several have been jailed.)
Mirdamadi, a surprisingly small man, has been challenging the system for more than a decade. In 2002, he declared on the floor of parliament that it was time for Iran to repair relations with the United States. “Once enmity with America was in line with our interests,” he said. “Our interests today lie in détente with America.” He also dared to call the government authoritarian. “The goals of the revolution are being forgotten as this government becomes more of a dictatorship,” he told me in 2004. “People still want change.” That year, he was barred from running again for parliament. He then launched a newspaper, Nowruz (“New Year”), which advocated the rule of law. Ultimately, the authorities charged him with libel, subversion, “encouraging hooligans to undermine public order,” and propagating “moral decadence.” The paper was banned. In 2009, after the election protests, he was sentenced to six years at the conclusion of a mass, Stalin-esque trial.
Nasrin Sotoudeh told me that little is likely to change, given Iran’s unique legal system. She believes that the time has come to change, dissolve, or abolish the Islamic courts. “These courts were formed for emergencies after the revolution,” she said. “But thirty-five years have passed, so there is no reason to continue accusing people under urgent or emergency situations.”
A nuclear deal might help ease Iran’s human-rights crisis, she said. “If the country can resolve its international problem through dialogue and conversation, then it can solve its internal problems through dialogue as well.” But the Islamic Republic is still a long way from ending the pervasive climate of fear, even among the revolutionaries themselves.
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