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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 -53-
in other ministries during his first term, the president has sacked five senior officers in the powerful ministry of intelligence. Their replacement with loyalists from the Revolutionary Guard, the ideologically zealous parallel to the regular army that also controls the baseej, has raised alarm even among conservatives of creeping militarisation. Some analysts speculate that the purge was prompted by resistance from within the ministry to efforts to tar all opposition as part of a foreign plot, with the ultimate aim of crushing the reformists for good. Copyright © 2009 The Economist Newspaper and The Economist Group. All rights reserved. -54-
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politicians still seem fixated by e
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Detecting habitable new worlds The
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Engels (whose name resembles the wo
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prose, having gone from Uighur to G
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she continued to lurk, roiling the
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