Iran Witness: Political Prisoner Arjang Davoudi From Evin on Human Rights (2008)

This morning we posted a feature by Loes Bijnen on the conditions inside Rajai Shahr Prison. One of the detainees she mentioned was Arjang Davoudi, an engineer, teacher, and poetwho has been detained since 2003.

Davoudi was given a sentence of 15 years in prison and 74 lashes for speaking to a Canadian reporter about the death of a Canadian-Iranian journalist Zahra Kazemi in detention in Iran. Davoudi is currently on a hunger strike of more than 50 days.

In this video from 2008, supposedly filmed secretly and smuggled out of Evin Prison, Davoudi talks about human rights and democracy:

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dl_oBaBI4W4[/youtube]

Iran Feature: Inside Rajai Shahr Prison (Bijnen)

UPDATED Iran Feature: Inside Rajai Shahr Prison (Bijnen)

UPDATE 1725 GMT: Human Rights and Democracy in Iran has posted the letter from Saeed Masouri on conditions inside Rajai Shahr.

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Loes Bijnen writes a guest feature for EA:

When I recently read that seven leaders of the Baha'i community in Iran were transferred from the Evin Prison in Tehran to the Rajaï Shahr Prison in Karaj, west of Tehran, my heart forgot to beat for a moment. Do these innocent people have to remain there for twenty years? Amid murderers and rapists? And finally die there?

In the summer of 2005 I wrote an article for Rooz Online about the fate of political prisoners in Rajaï Shahr . I did this at the request of an Iranian contact in the US who urgently wanted to draw attention to some of his friends who were detained in that infamous prison. They were in a bad state, and the circumstances under which these political prisoners, some of them older than 50, were held were said to be gruesome. My acquaintance in the US was in direct contact with one of them, Arjang Davoudi, and he sent me information that came directly from the Rajaï Shahr.

Iran Witness: Political Prisoner Arjang Davoudi From Evin on Human Rights (2008)

I wrote in 2005:

Rajai Shahr is the place where political prisoners who are seen as a nuisance, are stowed away. Going to Karaj is a severe punishment. Once in there one stops to be a human being. One is put out of sight, even of human rights activists and the press. In Rajaï Shahr, political prisoners have to share cells with dangerous criminals like murderers, rapists and drug addicts who don?t hesitate to attack their cell mates. They have nothing to lose: many of them are condemned to death anyway. Murders or unexplained deaths are a regular occurrence.

Two of the detainees I noted were Arjang Davoudi and Amir Saran. Davoudi, an engineer, teacher and poet, was abducted in 2003 and condemned in 2005 by a Revolutionary Court to 15 years in jail, exile to a harsh climate, five years suspension of his civil rights, and 70 lashes of the whip. He spent 100 days in solitary confinement in the Rajaï Shahr prison and was severely tortured. Later he was exiled to the Bandar Abbas prison in the hot south of Iran. [Editor's Note: Davoudi is again in Rajaï Shahr where he reportedly is in critical condition after a hunger strikie of more than 50 days. A new court case against him is being pursued.]

And Amir Saran? In March 2009, he died of a stroke in the gruesome conditions of Rajai Shahr.

Since my piece in 2005 the situation in Iran has worsened. Hundreds if not thousands of innocent Iranians spend their days in prisons in solitary confinement. They are being interrogated for long periods day and night until they are broken down and will sign any document.

However, this reality does not seem to reach the world media. A letter from a prisoner with a life sentence was recently smuggled out of Rajai Shahr:

I want to paint a picture of Rajai Shahr prison. Though large in the eyes of the citizens of Karaj, in reality it is a very small prison because of overcrowding. This is a different world, much like the Hell depicted in movies, full of fire and smoke. A world filled with burnt, black, dishevelled faces, naked bodies covered with sweat and red marks from the sting of lice. A world filled with torn trousers, scraps of which are used as belts; bare and filthy feet; clothes worn inside out and covered with lice; torn, mismatched slippers. A world in which you are exposed to polluted air, the extreme smell of putrid waste, overflowing sewage from toilets, the toxicity of dry vomit, infectious phlegm, and the body odour from bodies in close proximity, rarely given the opportunity to bathe --- all coming to a climax with the smell of urine by those who are unable to control themselves.

All this against the backdrop of the tremendous uproar and cries of prisoners who seem to spend their entire day in lines. Prisoners standing in lines holding plastic bottles that have turned black and serve as tea cups; standing in multiple, long, packed lines to use a bathroom, to take a shower.

It is in this prison that an internationally prominent journalist, Isa Saharkhiz, one of my own acquaintances, has to spend his days. Even more incomprehensible is that seven innocent, civilised and highly-educated Bahá'í leaders have been brought to Rajaï Shahr. They are the voice in Iran of the most peace-loving religion in the world.

How long will they survive there?

What can the world community do to rescue these political prisoners and hundreds of others from the dungeons in Evin in Tehran, Adel Abad in Shiraz, Vakil Abad in Mashhad, Karoun in Ahvaz, Dastgerd in Isfahan, and other, often secret, prisons? Speak out, of course. But first of all the international media has to be awakened. With a SCREAM.

I look at Le Monde, The Washington Post and The New York Times, at El Pais, The Zürcher and the Süddeutsche Zeitung, and at NRC Handelsblad. I look at Obama, at Angela Merkel and Nicolas Sarkozy. And also at [Dutch Foreign Minister] Maxime Verhagen. Help the Bahá'ís and all the other hundreds of innocent prisoners in Iranian prisons.

US Politics: How Can Obama Deal with a World after Iraq? (Cohen)

Roger Cohen writes for The New York Times:

Europe adjusted long ago, but not without pain, to its diminished place in world affairs. After Suez for the British, after Algeria for the French, even the most stubborn post-World War II illusions evaporated. The baton had passed to America. European nations set their minds to a war-banishing Union.

I don’t think the Iraq and Afghan wars constitute for the United States what Suez and the Algerian conflict were for Britain and France: points of irrevocable inflection. But, inconclusive and ill-managed, they have set new limits to U.S. power. President Obama is focused on reducing American expectations for “an age without surrender ceremonies.”

US Politics: When Delaware Matters — And How to Survive It (Haddigan)
Iraq: Obama and A Meaningless Date of Withdrawal (Packer)

That’s how he defined our epoch in an address winding up the seven-year U.S. war in Iraq. It was a quintessential Obama speech — intelligent but not stirring, firm and sober and rather solemn, altogether in the image of his refurbished Oval Office with its risk-averse muted neutral tones.

As with the office so with the speech: You can admire the clean lines but your heartbeat sure won’t quicken.

The main subject, it must be said, hardly lent itself to hurrahs. In Iraq, brief triumph subsided through criminal incompetence into fractured mayhem, leaving more than 100,000 Iraqi civilians dead and concluding in the fluid uncertainty of sporadic violence and democratic deadlock. No intellectual contortion — even with important stirrings of political give-and-take in Iraq — can ever inscribe Operation Iraqi Freedom in the annals of U.S. victories.

An age without surrender ceremonies is just that: an age without clear winners, an opaque time.

Obama put the situation this way: “One of the lessons of our effort in Iraq is that American influence around the world is not a function of military force alone. We must use all elements of our power — including our diplomacy, our economic strength, and the power of America’s example — to secure our interests and stand by our allies.”

Power, in this Obama doctrine, is not for winning the day, vanquishing the enemy. Its purpose is more modest: the pursuit of America’s interests or those of its friends.

Obama is a realist in the image of Britain’s 19th-century statesman Lord Palmerston, who once declared: “We have no eternal allies and we have no perpetual enemies. Our interests are eternal and perpetual, and those interests it is our duty to follow.”

What inhabits Obama is the conviction that the United States “is still the biggest power but not the decisive power,” said Jonathan Eyal, a British foreign policy analyst. “And Americans will only accept that with time and with bumping against buffers.”

This is not the stuff of heroic American narrative, of shining citadels or beacons to mankind. Obama, subtly but persistently, is talking down American exceptionalism in the name of mutual interests and mutual respect, two favorite phrases. He is downsizing American ambition — the eventual Afghan exit is now pre-scripted along neither-defeat-nor-victory Iraqi lines — in the name of American rebuilding.

Read full article....

Israel-Palestine Talks: So What is a Settlement? (Stone)

This weekend a friend suggested that, when her interest and that of others returned to the Middle East because of developments such as the launch of Israel-Palestine direct talks, it might be helpful to provide essential background information.

Her wish is our command. Andrea Stone, in AOL News, offers a handy guide to the key issue of Israeli settlements in the West Bank and East Jerusalem:

Israel-Palestine: An Interview with Hamas Leader Khaled Meshaal (Narwani)

Neighborhoods. Colonies. Facts on the ground. Suburbs. Unauthorized outposts. Jerusalem.

Whatever you call Jewish areas outside of Israel's 1967 border, the peace talks between Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas that opened at the White House will have to confront what to do with a half-million Israelis living in disputed territory that Palestinians want for their new state.

There are other intractable core issues, such as refugees and security, that must be worked out before a peace deal can be signed. But the question of settlements, which are seen by some Israelis as bargaining chips in a future land-for-peace agreement with the Palestinians, may be the most difficult to tackle. And they could end talks even before they seriously begin.

A 10-month moratorium on settlement construction, imposed in November under pressure from an Obama administration eager to set favorable conditions to restart peace negotiations, runs out Sept. 26. Netanyahu has said he won't extend the freeze even though Abbas has made clear he'll walk out if construction resumes.

Never mind that construction never really ended: Projects that had already been approved or started were grandfathered in. Schools, community centers and other public buildings were exempted from the moratorium, as was East Jerusalem. And when violations are added to the concrete mix, there has been no actual let-up in the pace of construction.

"Negotiating over the future of the West Bank while still building settlements is akin to two people talking about splitting a pizza pie while one of the parties is nibbling on the pie," said Ori Nir of the group Americans for Peace Now. "It is nibbling away at a future Palestinian state."

But Michael Oren, Israel's ambassador to the U.S., told AOL News this week that the Palestinians should not "demand our concession on a core issue as a precondition for negotiating," noting that "we believe that the settlement issue is part of the borders issue, which is a core issue to be discussed only in direct talks."

So, on the eve of direct negotiations between the two sides, here is a primer on this most vexing of issues:

What is a 'settlement'? Like most things in the Middle East, there is no simple answer.

Before the United Nations voted to partition Palestine in 1947, the word settlement, or yishuv in Hebrew, referred to Jewish communities established before the state of Israel came into being.

The word took on a different meaning after the Six Day War in 1967 when Israel captured the West Bank, Gaza, the Sinai Peninsula and the Golan Heights from neighboring Arab states. Jewish Israelis soon moved across the border, or Green Line, to build residential areas they called settlements but the Arabs called colonies.

Kfar Etzion, which had been a Jewish community before 1948 and was destroyed in Israel's war of independence, was the first settlement in late 1967. The next year a group of religious Zionists moved into a hotel in Hebron, the vanguard for a population that would come to include four settlers killed by Hamas this week.

Where are the settlements? Throughout the West Bank. They range from dense urban neighborhoods to isolated hilltop trailers to small villages to sprawling new cities.

Two of the three largest settlement blocs, Maale Adumim and Gush Etzion, lie close to Jerusalem and are viewed by many Israelis as suburbs they hope to keep in a land swap with the Palestinians. A third bloc, Ariel, sticks into the northern West Bank like a finger and is more controversial. Its new cultural center is the target of an actors' boycott.

Also close by the Green Line are several recently built ultra-Orthodox cities, including Modi'in Illit. They have attracted religious settlers in search of more affordable housing for families that typically can have 10 or more children.

Since the 1990s, about 100 illegal outposts have sprung up in isolated areas of the West Bank. Unlike other settlements, they have not been authorized by the Israeli government, although a 2004 report found officials often look the other way.

How many settlers are there? According to the group Peace Now, which keeps the most comprehensive database based on government information and its own research, there are about 290,000 settlers in 120 settlements in the West Bank. In addition, there are another 190,000 Israelis living beyond the Green Line in east Jerusalem.

Israel does not count Jerusalem residents as settlers because it annexed the eastern part of the city and some adjoining areas in 1967 and considers itself to have sovereignty there. The international community and the Palestinians, who want the eastern half of the city for their capital, don't recognize the annexations.

Read full article....

US Politics: When Delaware Matters --- And How to Survive It (Haddigan)

EA's US Politics correspondent Lee Haddigan writes:

After reading my daily in-tray of e-newsletters, I am somewhat bemused and enthused this morning. Delaware, the second-smallest state in the US (saved only by Rhode Island from the label of tiniest) and possibly the least-noticed, is now national news, and it will be until the state’s Republican primary for the US Senate is resolved on 14 September.

Establishment Republican favourite Mike Castle is running against Christine O’Donnell, a conservative backed by the Tea Party. And this is not just the latest round in Republican in-fighting before November's general elections. If Castle or O'Donnell defeats the Democrat candidate, he or she will take the seat in Congress immediately because this contest is for a long-term replacement for Joe Biden, who left the Senate to become Vice President. With both Republicans faring adequately --- Castle better than O’Donnell so far --- in the polls against Democrat nominee Chris Coons, plans by the administration to use the "lame-duck" Congressional session between November and January to pass controversial legislation could be significantly affected.

But more on the serious stuff shortly. The big news is that Delaware, for a short while, will be the focus of national politics. As an adopted Delawarean, I feel it is my duty to pass on a few warnings to the media types and interested observers who will try and dissect the politics of the state in the next few days.

(If you are still vainly searching for Delaware on a US map, look for the little outlined dot marked DE, just south of Pennsylvania and east of Maryland. A further note: the only tourist attractions in Delaware are the excellent beaches on the Atlantic coast.)

I claimed Delaware as my state after living there for six years, but I don’t believe Delaware was too happy with my decision. To be considered a proper Delawarean, you have to be a descendant of at least three generations of natives of the state. Joe Biden, who moved to Delaware after his first 10 years in Scranton, Pennsylvania, is not considered by some Delawareans, especially in southern Sussex County, to come from the state that he represented in Congress.

Commentators on this election will congregate in Wilmington, the largest city, and try to predict the outcome. They need to be wary. Wilmington is in the north of the state and viewed by the lower, "slower" half as the home of the credit card companies, and their liberal allies, who have helped ruin the United States. Political views held in Wilmington hold no relation whatsoever to opinions just down the road in Smyrna or Bridgeville.

The Mason-Dixon Line split between the North and South --- in practice, if not in geographical certainty --- occurs just south of the University of Delaware in Newark. It is the line of sharp differences in the state between a commercial/industrial/academic north and a rural south, with the differing political outlooks these generate. Northern Delawareans are prone to portray the south, where corn cribs are still a vital part of heritage, as the home of muskrat-eating, punkin-chunkin (the Punkin Chunkin, or pumpkin throwing, World Championships are staged in Sussex County) hicks. The corporate types who dominate Wilmington, at least in the daytime before they scuttle back to the suburbs, are especially keen to belittle the south as a backward part of the state.

The reality is for analysts trying to figure out this primary, and the Senate election following it, is that they will need to visit the southern half to have a chance of getting it right. So here are some tips for survival....

The first and most important warning is to never order the Scrapple for breakfast. It may be quaint idea to try a local favourite dish, and I did, but look it up on the internet before you attempt it. I never saw muskrat on a menu, but after trying Scrapple it sounds an appetising alternative.

More importantly, once you get past Wilmington, don’t bother talking politics with the locals or even the students in Newark. They don’t care to discuss such matters. Usually a taciturn lot, Delawares will consider you an alien species to be avoided if you break the taboo. Delawareans have opinions, and they vote upon them, but they don’t discuss it with strangers out of the natural civility the state is proud to claim. If in this election, you may catch a local unawares and solicit a terse comment, he or she will suffer from the withering stares from fellow Delawareans for years to come.

Part of the disregard of Delawareans for Wilmington and Newark comes from the opinion that the two places represent the invasion of the state by liberal northerners. However, it mostly stems from what they perceive as America’s mocking ignorance of "Dela-where" from enemies such as as Friends, The Simpsons, and the film Wayne’s World.

Delawareans are proud to point out that they are the First State of the Union, being the first state to ratify the Constitution. They will also remind you that the Stars and Stripes were first flown in battle at Cooch’s Bridge in 1777. Many Delawareans can trace the family history back to the Revolution (one subject, along with stock car racing, they will freely discuss)--- they consider an upstart like California a foreign country.

So, in your short visit there for the election, don’t make fun of Dela-where, at least outside of Wilmington and Newark. The locals are normally polite and civil, but you joke at your own peril.

Perhaps Delaware may surprise me with this nationally watched election and enter the political fray with more gusto than usual. The Tea Party Express, the instigators of the campaign that saw Joe Miller beat Lisa Murkowski in Alaska, have recently announced they will coordinate a similar strategy for O’Donnell to defeat King RINO (Republicans In Name Only) Castle. The aim is to raise $200,000 for her candidacy --- $21,000 has been given to date –-- and that's significant money in Delaware.

For the year that I have been tracking the Tea Party, I have kept an interested eye on the movement’s appeal in Delaware. Minimal, at best, sums up what I’ve seen so far. Unless the Tea Party Express can overcome Delawareans' traditional apathy for political controversy, then it may well see the derailing of O’Donnell’s campaign. Delaware won’t like those Tea Partiers telling them who to vote for, even if they don’t much care for Mike Castle.

Even the much desired endorsement of O’Donnell by Sarah Palin as part of the Palin Babes Revolution (O’Donnell has a telegenic appeal similar that of Palin and South Carolina's Nikki Haley) within the Republican Party will not help much, at least outside of Wilmington. Palin may be a poster girl for the anti-establishment Right nationally, but in this state she is just another of those pesky politicians.

Even before the Tea Party backed O’Donnell, this was turning into a bitter contest by Delaware’s recent standards. In March there were claims that O’Donnell was a hypocrite in calling for fiscal and social conservatism while her own finances and morals were in such disarray. On 21 March, The Wilmington News Journal asserted that O’Donnell owed back taxes, sold her house because it was foreclosed, and still had debts from her campaign against Joe Biden in 2008.

(This article and others are on the Know Christine O'Donnell website which only exists to make available these allegations; there is no commentary and no indication of who finances the site. These claims are duplicated on the realchristine.com website, paid for by the Castle Campaign Fund, which invites visitors to spread the word via Twitter: “How can we trust Christine O'Donnell with our money when she's been so reckless with her own?”)

If you visit O’Donnell’s website,  you will find documents that prove her innocence, at least to her supporters. Some have gone further. Liberty.com, a website founded by former members of the O’Donnell campaign and claiming to be new hub for Tea Party activities, was launched on 1 September with the slur that Castle was having a gay affair without his wife’s knowledge.

Perhaps in states where politics is a contact sport, such attacks may be the norm and may appear somewhat tame. But with citizens forced to be polite from fear of upsetting neighbours in a small face-to-face community, Delaware does not do nasty politics. O’Donnell is attracting criticism for not being immediate enough in her denunciations of the "out-of-state" claim. (On Friday, O’Donnell released a press statement stating: “I do not endorse that kind of mudslinging, and I’m asking all of my supporters not to go down that route.”)

Tongue-in-cheek generalisations aside, this election in Delaware is turning into a pivotal indicator of the future effectiveness of the conservative Right. O’Donnell’s statement denouncing the gay slur continued: “I am challenging Mike Castle to publicly denounce GOP State Chairman Tom Ross’ mudslinging and ask all of the Delaware State Republican Committee to stop the thug politics.” O’Donnell believes she is the victim of repeated attacks by the Republican establishment to wreck her campaign, and she is using that to portray herself as a martyr for the conservative cause. If she manages to upset the odds and beat Castle, it seems almost impossible that she will be able to work with the Delaware GOP party machinery to defeat Democrat candidate Coons in November.

Meanwhile, there are signs of splits within the conservative camp. The gay slur led Erick Erickson of redstate.com, possibly the most influential blogger on the conservative Right, to announce he is no longer actively supporting O’Donnell. He derided “amateur hour” politics --- even though he "would rather be slowly run over by a road roller while listening to Janeane Garofalo dialogue from The Truth About Cats and Dogs than see Mike Castle in the Senate”, he was “pulling the plug” on his interest in Delaware’s Senate race.

The numerous comments posted below Erickson’s article indicate that not all members of the  conservative resurgence are happy with his decision. If O’Donnell is defeated by Castle, expect mutterings in the movement about how O’Donnell was sold out.

I have said that the Tea Party will implode as the result of internal dissension. Could 14 September in Delaware be the date in history books when the first crumbling of the Tea Party coalition began?

Perhaps it is still a little too early for that to happen, but with the stakes so high, it looks like Dela-where has finally pushed aside The Simpsons and Wayne’s World.