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Iran and human rights
The crackdown
Aug 13th 2009 | CAIRO
From The Economist print edition
Allegations of torture against opponents of the president
WHEN residents of Iran’s capital seek escape from its choking smog, they
often head for the hills, or rather the barren mountains that soar above
Tehran’s northern suburbs. But the anxious little crowd gathered at the
foot of one of these slopes on a recent morning was not in search of fresh
air. Clustered around lists of names pasted on a high concrete wall topped
with concertina wire, they were hoping for a clue that some missing loved
one might be immured inside, in the hillside complex of cell blocks and
interrogation rooms that make up Iran’s most notorious prison.
AP
Built in the 1970s to house the shah’s political enemies, Evin prison has
been much expanded since the 1979 Islamic Revolution. During the
revolution’s grim first decade, thousands of dissidents were summarily shot
in its yards. Iran remains second only to China as a dispenser of capital
punishment, a practice that has surged under the administration of
President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. But the victims are, with a few ugly
exceptions, mostly convicted criminals rather than political opponents of
the regime.
Yet Evin, as well as several of Tehran’s lesser detention centres, has been
busier than ever in the past two months. By the government’s own tally, at
How to make opponents see
reason
least 4,000 citizens have suffered arrest and imprisonment in the fierce crackdown that followed the
bitterly contested presidential election on June 12th. The sweeping campaign of arrests has muted, but
not silenced, opposition to the polls; millions of Iranians still believe that these were rigged to ensure a
return for Mr Ahmadinejad.
According to a spokesman for the judiciary, all but 300 of the detainees were freed within a week of their
arrest. One conservative MP, part of a parliamentary committee that visited Evin to investigate conditions,
declared that its prisoners received the same excellent food as the minister himself. This would be
comforting, except that damning evidence, including testimony from released detainees and admissions
from some officials, suggests that many endured appalling crowding in custody, ritual humiliation,
starvation, sleep deprivation, vicious beatings and worse. A rival presidential candidate to Mr
Ahmadinejad, Mehdi Karroubi, claims that both male and female prisoners suffered brutal and repeated
sexual assaults.
The abuse at one jail in the south of the city, Kahrizak, was so bad that Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah
Ali Khamenei, ordered it closed last month, after the revelation that the son of a top aide to a prominent
conservative politician was among at least three prisoners who had died there. Though officials claim that
the deaths were due to a mysterious virus, the prison director is now himself under arrest, charged with
negligence.
By the government’s count, the number of those killed during the unrest is fewer than 30, including
members of the regime’s own baseej militia. Claims by some that hundreds may have died appear
exaggerated, but opposition politicians, demanding a more thorough parliamentary investigation, have
submitted a list of 69 people alleged to have been killed.
Those remaining in jail include scores of former officials, academics, journalists and others, the alleged
ringleaders of what prosecutors describe as a vast conspiracy to cast doubt on the vote, and so foment a
“velvet” secularist overthrow of the Islamic state. Several hundred are being tried as alleged plotters, in
partially televised sessions that have been widely condemned as parodies of justice.
Yet Mr Ahmadinejad’s henchmen appear to see enemies even closer to his office. Extending a tactic used
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