Latest Iran Video: The Attack on Karroubi's House (14 March)

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6P_X9cZ8NUA[/youtube]

The Latest from Iran (16 March): Fire and Politics

The Latest from Iran (15 March): Breaking Human Rights

2133 GMT: More Death Penalties or Old News? There's chatter tonight about a supposed announcement of "six death sentences" for protesters on Ashura (27 December), featured on The New York Times website.

We're being careful about this. Our perception is that the announcement is merely the restatement of death sentences which have already been announced by the Tehran Prosecutor General's office, rather than --- as the NYT piece indicates --- a new set of capital punishments.

2130 GMT: We've posted a separate entry on the developing story of the ban on the Islamic Iran Participation Front.

1945 GMT: Resisting the Empire of Lies. Responding to the Government's assertion that it has been banned (see 1650 GMT), the reformist party Islamic Iran Participation Front calls on all political and social activists to continue their social struggles and not to “give in to the empire of lies”. The IIPF claimed that the attempted ban reveals the “weakness of the government” and that civil institutions and activists will “grow and expand" their activities.

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The Latest from Iran (14 March): False Strategies, Real Conflicts

1940 GMT: Power, Money, and Oil. The engineering firm owned by the Islamic Revolution Guards Corps has been awarded an $850 million oil pipeline contract.


1935 GMT: Denying the Propaganda. The Center for Defense of Human Rights, connected with Nobel Prize laureate Shirin Ebadi, has rejected the allegation of Fars that it receives financial aid from the US Government. CDHR announced that it intends to sue the news agency for libel.

1930 GMT: Have a Happy Great Satan, Off-the-Streets Fire Festival. An activist reports that Islamic Republic of Iran Broadcasting is showing 11 movies on Tuesday, including District 9 andUP on Charshanbeh Suri. I'm sure this has nothing to do with a wish to keep people inside their homes and off the streets during the Fire Festival.


1650 GMT: Barring the Reformists? Deputy Interior Minister Solat Mortazavi says the Islamic Iran Participation Front, Iran's largest reformist party, has been stripped by the judiciary of its authorization to conduct political activity.

The judiciary has not confirmed the ban, and the IIPF said it was only barred from holding its annual meeting, scheduled for 11 March.

1545 GMT: Compromise Resolution? Iran's Parliament, after a skirmish with President Ahmadinejad, has given final approval to a $368 billion budget for the year to March 2011.

The Majlis originally passed a $347 billion plan, but Ahmadinejad wanted an extra $40 billion from anticipated subsidy reductions. The Parliament agreed to grant $20 billion but held out against the President's full request, despite an unusual appearance by Ahmadinejad to deliver a speech during voting.

1430 GMT: You asked for it, you've got it --- our readers have found the perfect photo for an Iran caption contest. Let the fun begin....

1245 GMT: Political Prisoner Watch. Prominent human rights lawyer Mohammad Oliyaifard has been released from detention.

1240 GMT: Showing Support. Mir Hossein Mousavi has met with members of the reformist Islamic Iran Participation Front.

1145 GMT: Ahmadinejad Embraces Non-Violence? Iran's latest get-tough pose loses something in translation. From Press TV:

Iran's President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has named the country's team tasked with minimizing the effects of damage on the country should it be attacked by foreign forces.

The occupant of the presidential palace in downtown Tehran on Monday appointed Chief-of-Staff of Iran's Joint Armed Forces Major General Hassan Firouzabadi as the head of the Permanent Passive Defense Committee.

A statement from the President's office also identified Davud Ahmadinejad as the President's special representative and the country's ministers of interior, defense and science as members of the committee.

0940 GMT: Gender and the Green Movement. Speaking to BBC Persian, Shadi Sadr has declared that the women's movement has managed to gather forces from different camps, from the religious (Azam Taleghani) to the secular (publisher Shahla Lahiji) to press its demands and influence politics at all levels. She complained that the women's movement has no political representative in the Green Movement. [A reader comments: Could Sadr fill that role?]

0930 GMT: Question of Day. Why was Tehran Prosecutor General Abbas Jafari Doulatabadi meeting marjas (senior clerics) in Qom?

0640 GMT: Political Prisoner Watch. Iran Gender Equality is maintaining two important lists: one on the status of women political prisoners and one on the status of detained journalists.

0615 GMT: The National Iranian American Council has published its summary of the US-Iran panel at last week's hearings in the US Senate. It's a fair reflection of a "realism" amongst American experts which is focused on nukes, nukes, nukes.

As NIAC notes, that issue was set within a call for a "broader strategic outlook" to deal with US-Iran tensions, bringing in discussion of Afghanistan, Iraq, the Middle East, and Iranian security. Questions of rights and justice in Iran, however, were barely mentioned by the panel, in contrast to the first session at the hearings.

0550 GMT: Ripples from the regime's latest strategy --- we've broken the journalists, now let's get the human rights activists --- continue. Among those named as agents for terrorist/US-backed cyber-war is Hossein Ronaghi Maleki, the man behind the Babak Khoramdin blog, who was arrested two months ago on accusations of spying for the CIA.

The attention to human rights campaigners does not mean that others have escaped attention. Among weekend arrests, that of Emad Bahavar of the Freedom Movement of Iran was notable. He was arrested and released recently but broke the condition of his freedom by continuing to publish incisive articles and protests against intrusions by Iranian security services.

Then there are claims that Basiji militia harassed Mehdi Karroubi's family on Sunday, surrounding and vandalising his house.

Understandably, in the face of the intense regime pressure, overt opposition moves are limited at the moment. Chatter continues about demonstrations tomorrow during the Chahrshanbeh Suri (Fire Festival) celebrations, but no substantial plans are being put forward.

Iran: The Opposition's Campaign in the US --- Sequel With Revelations and A Lesson

First, the update on the story of "a senior aide" to Mehdi Karroubi giving a press conference in Washington and the subsequent focus on his comments about a split between the Supreme Leader and President Ahmadinejad, rather than the Green Movement's strategy, objectives, and views of US policy on Iran.

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The Latest from Iran (14 March): False Strategies, Real Conflicts

Having been told that the aide was not Ataollah Mohajerani, the former Minister whose appearance in Washington last October brought tension rather than American support for the Greens, we put together the identity of the aide last night. Tehran Bureau, which to our knowledge has published the only significant report of the press conference, has now withdrawn the cloak of anonymity, so we can confirm that the speaker was Mojtaba Vahedi, "chief of staff" to Mehdi Karroubi since 1982 and editor-in-chief of reformist newspaper Aftab Yazd until January 2010.



The issue was not necessarily Vahedi's emphasis, as tangential as it might be, that "over the past nine months, we've seen Mr. Khamenei go from praise and support to silence to refusal to back the president". (An example of Vahedi's analysis can be found in an interview in Radio Zamaneh.) Rather it was the media's treatment of him as a spokesman for Karroubi.

A knowledgeable EA correspondent summarises:

The Khamenei-Ahmadinejad split is at best a rumor with no substantial elements to back it up. But then again, these people's claim to fame is the ability to produce "insider" information from within Iran and use their former proximity to ruling circles and people within Iran....I am sure Vahedi has proven links and solid contact with the people inside Iran, however he is not necessarily (and my gut feeling is that he isn't at all) a spokesperson or representative for Karroubi. In the same way that [Mohsen] Makhmalbaf doesn't necessarily represent Mir Hossein Mousavi.

The revised Tehran Bureau article backs up this point with the single line, "Vahedi asked that his comments not be attributed to Karroubi."

The problem actually stems from good intentions. Reporters in Washington want to get a picture of events inside Iran but face the challenges of getting around regime restrictions and gaps in communication. So they seize upon individuals --- who may have had significant inside Iran but are now outside the country --- as "spokesmen" when, in fact, they are expressing personal opinions.

In this case, the outcome was a fizzle. Vahedi offered little for "mainstream" journalists to grasp, so apart from Tehran Bureau, the effort disappeared. Yet, if his comments had been reported, they were likely to be misleading and counter-productive: the lead would have been his speculation over Khamenei and Ahmadinejad rather than any sense of the state of the opposition and its ambitions.

Put bluntly, this is a case where older visions of leaders handing down their insights through "senior aides" continue to overshadow the reality of a disparate Green Movement which, battling the regime's suppressions, can struggle to provide a focus for observers. Mir Hossein Mousavi's "We are the Media" still needs fulfilment.

The Latest from Iran (14 March): False Strategies, Real Conflicts

1910 GMT: More on the Universities Purge (see 1145 GMT). The Revolutionary Guards get in on the act, with Yahya Rahim-Safavi, the former commander and current advisor to the Supreme Leader, declaring, "The universities aren't in good shape today, missing from them are revolutionary forces and experts who are beholden to the Imam, the Supreme Leader, and the Constitution."

Rahim-Safavi, speaking at a conference organized for the "cultural experts" of the IRGC, said, "The goal of soft war is to change the culture, values and beliefs of the youth....Our weakness is in this very issue of culture, which our enemies have identified before we did. Therefore we must battle against and overcome the attacking culture with our soft and cultural power."

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1830 GMT: Let's Make Up a Cyber-War. More regime propaganda --- the Revolutionary Guard has briefed the Parliament on the nefarious cyber-plot of the opposition around Mir Hossein Mousavi and Mehdi Karroubi, bringing in names like the filmmaker Mohsen Makhmalbaf and human rights activist Ahmad Batebi. (There's a video as well.)

After the briefing, the head of Parliament's National Security Committee said Human Rights Activists in Iran had fabricated a list of killed protesters and passed it to Mir Hossein Mousavi.


1725 GMT: Political Prisoner Watch --- One Who Did Not Remain Silent. Emad Bahavar, head of the youth branch of the Freedom Movement of Iran, has been re-arrested.

Bahavar was arrested earlier this year and released after a short period. However, instead of refraining from criticism of the regime, he wrote a long, incisive analysis of "The Hardliners' Project".

On Wednesday, after Bahavar had appeared in court to defend his case, security forces raided his house without a warrant, threatened his family, and confiscated personal possessions. Bahavar was re-arrested when he went to court to protest the illegal behaviour.

1705 GMT: Political Prisoner Watch. The former Chief Executive Officer and founder of Persian Blog, Mehdi Boutorabi has been arrested.

1700 GMT: We've posted an update and an analysis of this weekend's "opposition campaign", which proved to be far less than a campaign, in the US.

1530 GMT: Political Prisoner Watch. Tehran Prosecutor General Abbas Jafari Doulatabadi has confirmed that Iranian-American academic Kian Tajbakhsh has been released for 15 days on $800,000 bail.

1525 GMT: Really, They Are All US-Sponsored "Cyber-Terrorists". Fars continues the propaganda overload attacking human rights activists with an "analysis" claiming that the Bush Administration and the CIA launched a $400 million campaign in 2006 for a cyber-battle against Iran.

This is a convenient pretext for Fars to lump together all the "bad guys" --- the Mujahedin-e-Khalq, monarchists, Baha'is, and human rights activists --- as traitors. Named groups includes Human Rights Activists in Iran, Nobel Prize winner Shirin Ebadi's Center for Defense of Human Rights, and the Human Rights Committee and the One Million Signatures campaign for women's equality.

1515 GMT: Stopping the Fire Festival. As our readers have noted, the Supreme Leader has turned on one of Iran's national ceremonies, Chaharshanbeh Souri, as an event “void of religious roots and cause of great harm and corruption".

Chaharshanbeh Souri, which takes place on the eve of Iranian New Year, is an ancient Iranian pagan festival with the building of bonfires and symbolic gestures and chants. These summon the fire to burn all sickness and lend its energy to a healthy new year.

1500 GMT: Back from a family break (Happy Mother's Day to all those celebrating in Britain) to go on Rafsanjani Watch.

Looks like the former President Hashemi Rafsanjani has continued his careful prodding of the Government, this time with attention to state media. He urged Islamic Republic of Iran Broadcasting (Seda va Sima) not to operate as “a gang”, warning that it would lose the trust of the public if it did so. He added that IRIB needs to assume a more “national” approach and pay more attention to people.

1145 GMT: Purge the Universities!

Press TV, from Islamic Republic News Agency, reports that up to 130 Iranian members of Parliament have written the Minister responsible for higher education, Kamran Daneshjoo, calling for strict action to be taken against proponents of secularism in universities throughout Iran.

The legislators warned Daneshjou of the activities that were carried out in universities by "certain individuals who are hostile toward the Islamic system". They insisted, "The cultural message of the [1979] Islamic Revolution is the most important topic that university professors and the elite must seek to promote....Activities of individuals, who feel enmity toward the Islamic establishment, are unacceptable. What is more, nowhere in the world are resources and opportunities generously handed out to those who seek to bring down the establishment and the principles that society is governed by."

Of course, the demand of the MPs for "serious and decisive" action against "the enemies of the Islamic establishment," "proponents of secularism," and "those who work to weaken the government" is a political set-up for the regime to get rid of unacceptable professors and limit scholarships and overseas education to only "proper" students. Last week Daneshjoo used a speech to denounce "deviant" academics.

0920 GMT:~Khomeini in the Cold. Looks like the regime is going to continue treating the family of the late Ayatollah Khomeini as too dangerous to acknowledge, given their criticisms of the Government. The memorial service for Khomeini's son Ahmad has been cancelled due to "mausoleum repairs". Most ceremonies at the Khomeini site since June 2009 have been postponed.

0915 GMT: Two Sunday Specials for You. We feature a defiant weblog from released detainee Foad Shams, "I Am Still Alive to Tell the Story", and Mr Verde has an analysis of 5 Signs of Regime Trouble.

0910 GMT: A Lament for the Election. Eshagh Jahangiri, the Minister of Industries and Mines in the Khatami Government, has declared that, after the Presidential vote on June 12, the chances of progress were lost for Iran.

OK, he would say that as he's a reformist, right? Yes, but the location of the criticism...the not-so-reformist Khabar Online.

0900 GMT: No More Satire --- Iran's Changing Flag. Remember a couple of months ago that we posted a comedy story about the apparent changing of the colours in Iran's flag, removing Green for Blue?

Well, look likes we might have to replace our satire warning for a label that this is Very Serious. From Khabar Online:

At the last session of Iran's Guardian Council in the current Iranian year (ends on March 20) held today, the speaker of the entity, Abbas Ali Kadkhodaei, answered the questions raised by the journalists.
He said that if a trustable evidence is provided on the national flag color change at the recent state ceremonies, the council will probe the issue."

"The rules are transparent on this case and must be abided by all executive bodies. If it's true, those organizations which have committed such act should be questioned," he maintained.

Recently at some ceremonies held by the government, the green stripe on the Iranian flag had changed to blue or black, including one attended by the President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad staged a in Tehran for the head of the state-funded Islamic Republic News Agency (IRNA). At the ceremony in a graphic design behind Ahmadinejad, the green stripe of the country's national flag had turned to blue.

0650 GMT: I thought at one point on Saturday that the main story might be an opposition initiative to sway American opinion, with a purported spokesman for Mehdi Karroubi holding forth to US journalists in a press conference and private talks.

That proved a fizzle, however, as the "former senior aide" primarily offered a distracting thesis of an Ahmadinejad-Khamenei split and got little coverage from a nuclear-focused (obsessed?) US media. The New York Times, for example, prefers a tangential thinkpiece by David Sanger, and The Washington Post is also off on a Tehran and the Bomb story.

Still there's an important lesson for the Green Movement here in the diversion and possibly damage of those claiming to be "spokesmen" for the opposition, when they are in fact expressing primarily personal opinions, and how they could built up as Green representatives by a media started of significant information from inside Iran. We'll have an update later today.

So what were the real stories? Well, there is what appears to be a regime strategy to break the opposition through the "revolving door" of releasing some detainees --- with the threat that they go back to prison if they step out of line --- and taking new prisoners with declarations of terrorists front groups and agents for the US.

On Saturday, a number of high-profile prisoners, notably journalists and the Iranian-American academic Kian Tajbakhsh, were reportedly freed. At the same time, the campaign to break human rights organisations was declared with the propaganda of media like Fars and Kayhan, with their announcements of dozens of arrests of campaigners linked to the "terrorist" Mujahedin-e-Khalq and Washington, and the attack on the websites of Human Rights Activists in Iran.

The latest statement from the Revolutionary Court declares that those arrested belong to a group called “Iran Proxy,” which is accused of
“downloading national databases, infiltrating and sabotaging internet sites, resisting government filtering efforts, creating secure spaces for users of internet networks, creating secure telephone lines and data for interviews with Radio Farda, Radio Zamaneh and television networks of Voice of America”. The Court alleges, in a reference to a campaign to distribute anti-filtering software so Iranians can access the Internet, “Members of Iran Proxy in Iran were in receipt of significant salaries in Iran in order to distribute over 70 thousand proxies through the internet.”

Then, however, there is the news of pressure on the Government, not through manufactured rings of secret US-backed agents but through members of Parliament. The  story of the battle between the Majlis and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad over the President's budget and subsidy reform plan seems to have attracted little notice. But, after the President appealed to the Supreme Leader and then gate-crashed the Parliament and still lost the vote on his proposal, it is a sign of Ahmadinejad's authority in jeopardy.

UPDATED Iran: The Opposition's New PR Campaign in the US

UPDATE 14 March: We've put the pieces and think we have the story of what happened at the press conference. More to come....

Iran: The Opposition’s Campaign in the US — Sequel With Revelations and A Lesson

UPDATE 2255 GMT: A journalist at the press conference writes to assure us that the "former Karroubi aide" was NOT Ataollah Mohajerani. The journalist also says that the theme of the Khamenei-Ahmadinejad rift, which was the Tehran Bureau headline (but which we think is tangential in the political situation) was the big pitch of the aide both during the formal conference and afterwards in conversations.

All of this indicates that the attempted PR effort of the opposition has been rather botched, with almost no coverage and a failure to bring out the points that would resonate in the US such as the position on sanctions and the declared aims of the Green Movement.

UPDATE 0915 GMT: Barbara Slavin, one of Washington's top journalists, adds, "A top aide to Mehdi Karroubi...said [President] Obama should send Nowruz [Iranian New Year] greetings this year. However, he argued that the message should focus on human rights and commemorate the scores of Iranians --- such as Neda Agha Soltan --- who have been killed since June by plainclothes thugs, prison torturers, and government executioners."

More than four months after their last public-relations effort in the US, Iranian opposition leaders have made another move to influence American political circles. "A senior aide to opposition cleric Mehdi Karroubi" met journalists at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace on Friday. The senior aide "worked with [Karroubi] for more than 25 years" but is now based outside Iran (while he is anonymous in the TB story, skilled Iran-watchers will identify him easily).

The headline claim in Tehran Bureau is that the aide revealed that "Iran's supreme leader has cooled his support for president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad". That, in fact, is not much of a story. The claim --- at least as reported in the article --- has no specific evidence but echoes a number of points (such as the incident over Ahmadinejad's close ally Esfandiar Rahim-Mashai) that we have noted since last summer.


What is far more significant is the strategy behind the assertion. Putting forth the vision of a Khamenei-Ahmadinejad rift tries to shift a US Government from an approach to Iran based solely on "engagement"; it may even accept that Washington can work with the Supreme Leader while boycotting the President.

Even more important, but tucked away in the TB story, is this assertion from the senior aide: "The end goal is to have transparent, free and fair elections....Once that happens, you can be certain the Iranian people will elect [a president] who will secure peaceful and friendly relations with the world."

Last October, when a close ally of Karroubi appeared at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, US journalists criticised the Green Movement's speaker for refusing to declare acceptance of Israel and renunciation of Iran's nuclear programme. In this article, no mention of the Israelis or the Bomb and thus no cause for a dismissal of the Greens.

Instead, the senior aide said that the Obama Administration's nuclear-first approach, at the expense of ignoring Iran's human rights violations, is "exactly what Ahmadinejad wants....If the U.S. reverses this approach and focuses on pressuring Iran for its human rights abuses...this is what the Iranian government fears most." he said.

And another point to notice:

Karroubi's aide recommended the use of "smart sanctions", targeted financial sanctions against members of the Revolutionary Guard. "For such sanctions to be truly 'smart', we need only to look at the multitude of companies set up in Dubai in the past 3-5 years," he said, hinting that much of import traffic to Iran from the UAE happened under the auspices of the Guards....

"As an Iranian, I'd hate to see our citizens suffer. But even if they are hurt in the short term, whatever shortens the life of this government is in the interests of the [Iranian] people."