2305 GMT: Back on the Road Again. Off for flight to UK and work in Liverpool so will be quiet for a while. Thanks to everyone for backing up EA on an eventful day.
2300 GMT: Political Prisoner Watch. Reports that student activist and weblog writer Fouad Shams has been released from prison after 96 days. Saeed Nourmohammadi, a member of the youth branch of the Islamic Iran Participation Front has been freed after 4 1/2 months in detention.
2255 GMT: Maintaining Control. Radio Zamaneh headlines, “Iran’s Supreme Leader May Approve Changes to Electoral Policies”, but the more you read, the more this is an assertion of Khamenei’s authority rather than reform.
Meeting members of the Assembly of Experts, the Supreme Leader said that he will approve the changes in “general policies of the elections” under discussion in the Expediency Council, headed by Hashemi Rafsanjani.
However, Khamenei added that the opinion of the Expediency Council regarding election policies is “debatable”, and once he is informed of their decision, he will enforce what he deems necessary. Hardly a ringing endorsement of the Council’s moves for change…..
1615 GMT: The Iraqi electoral commission is reporting that voter turnout is well above 50 percent in all but one of 11 provinces declared so far.
Strikingly, the turnout in Diyala, a former centre of Sunni insurgency, was more than 90 percent. That’s a sharp contrast from the 2005 national elections, which were boycotted by the main Sunni parties.
1600 GMT: Iraqi security forces have announced a 10 p.m. (1900 GMT) curfew in Baghdad to allow safe transport of ballot boxes to election commission headquarters.
2230 GMT: Sneaking Out the News. It appears that the official statement of the Assembly of Experts meeting has been quietly placed on its website. We are reviewing and will have an analysis in the morning.
First impression is that while the statement is effusive about the “leadership and guidance” of the Supreme Leader to get Iran through the post-election crisis, it is not as severe in condemning the “sedition” of the opposition as the alleged statement released by Fars News in mid-week.
2115 GMT: Larijani Watch. Speaker of Parliament Ali Larijani, continuing his Japan tour with a visit to the Peace Memorial Museum in Nagasaki, declared both Tehran’s commitment to nuclear non-proliferation and the perfidy of the West:
Iran will host an international conference on nuclear disarmament within the next two months….After the bombardment of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the US made no change in its policies. Two nuclear bombs of the United States have now increased to tens of thousands.
2110 GMT: Khamenei v. Khomeini. Radio Zamaneh has more on the criticism of Ayatollah Khomeini’s grandson, Seyed Hasan Khomeini, by the Supreme Leader’s representative in the Revolutionary Guards, Ali Saidi.
The conflict was sparked when the head of the Institute of Ayatollah Khomeini’s Publications, Mohammad Ali Ansari, wrote to Saidi to remind him of the Khomeini’s insistence on no military intervention in politics, Ali Saidi then criticized Hassan Khomeini’s decision not to attend the August inauguration of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. He alleged that the Ayatollah’s grandson was standing against “the system and the Leader”.
2100 GMT: Political Prisoner Watch. Mehrdad Bal Afkan, a senior member of the Mojahedin of Islamic Revolution party and Mir Hossein Mousavi’s campaign, was arrested in Isfahan on Thursday.
2300 GMT: Urgent Correction on the Labour Front. Earlier today (1600 GMT) Tehran Bureau reported that the Tehran Bus Workers had called for civil disobedience over the case of jailed activist Mansur Osanloo. Tonight Iran Labour Report has issued an effective retraction of the story:
On February 12, a statement appeared on various Iranian websites, including Balatarin which is one of the largest Persian-speaking community websites in the world, in the form of a poster. The poster called for solidarity with the imprisoned leader of Tehran’s bus drivers union, Mansoor Osanloo, through acts of civil disobedience beginning on March 4 around Tehran’s Valiasr square. The statement purported to be an offcial statement of the union (formally known as the Syndicate of Vahed Company Workers of Tehran and Environs). Subsequently, in an article for the popular web journal Tehran Bureau, a staff member at Iran Labor Report wrote an analysis of the union statement as it had appeared on the various websites.
It now appears that the poster-statement was not authentic and that the union’s leadership had not issued the statement. Moreover, the provenance of the statement is still not clear. The union had apparently not published an official disclaimer earlier on due to the recent disuptions with internet use in Iran. Subsequent to this, the union requested that the inauthenticity of the statement be made public and that henceforth no reference would be made of it.
2145 GMT: Labour Rights. The joint statement of three Iranian unions — the Syndicate of Tehran Bus Workers, the Syndicate of Haft Tapeh Sugar Cane Company, and The Free Union of Workers in Iran — to the United Nations Human Rights Council has been posted:
[Workers'] most urgent and most basic demands at the present time are:
It has been eerie to watch the first few days of Operation Moshtarak, the US-Afghanistan-ISAF (International Security Assistance Force) military offensive against the Taliban in Helmand Province. It is not just the observation of the battle from thousands of miles away; it is that this encounter has been scripted.
The offensive was signalled weeks ago in declaration from US military and political headquarters, reporters were suitably embedded, and the ritual proclamations were issued. BBC radio even turned over several minutes of prime-time programming to the speech, in full, of a British commander to his troops on the eve of battle. (Ever since William Shakespeare put words in the mouth of Henry V at Agincourt in 1415 — “We few, we happy few, we band of brothers” — this has been required in presentation of English/British wars.) Yet all the scripting could not set down the final-act resolution of this question:
This morning an Afghan official is declaring that 12 Taliban were killed on Sunday. That makes it a score draw with number of dead civilians, as 12 perished in an American rocket strike. In total, about 40 Taliban are reported dead since the start of the offensive. That’s 40 bad guys in what was supposed to be a showdown battle for the Taliban “stronghold” of Marja and in what The Washington Post, voicing the words of a US Lieutenant-Colonel, is calling “last-ditch efforts” by the enemy.
1950 GMT: Criticising Khomeini. That’s right — days before the celebration of the anniversary of the 1979 Revolution, 180 members of Parliament have signed a statement denouncing the Imam’s grandson, Seyed Hassan Khomeini. The dispute arose when Khomeini wrote the head of Islamic Republic of Iran Broadcasting, Ezzatollah Zarghamai, complaining about “censorship” of his grandfather’s speeches.
1930 GMT: Conservative Mischief. Ayande Newsstirs the pot with a story claiming that Ahmadinejad Chief of Staff Esfandiar Rahim-Mashai went to Switzerland recently, not only to promote a “uranium swap” on Iran’s Kish Island but also to pursue secret meetings on other issues, presumably with US officials. The paper, quoting French and Swiss newspapers, ponders what covert messages Rahim-Mashai brought.
No prizes here to guess the propaganda: the “conservative opposition” wants to stick Ahmadinejad, through his right-hand man, with the label of appeaser of Washington.
1925 GMT: After all our frustration with the media coverage of the Ahmadinejad nuclear moves this week, full marks to Borzou Daragahi and Julian Barnes of the Los Angeles Times for nailing the story: “In a possible move to deflect attention from Iran’s political woes, President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad on Sunday ordered the nation’s atomic energy agency to begin enriching uranium from 3.5% to 20% purity to serve as fuel for a Tehran medical reactor.”
2150 GMT: A Final Note. We’ll know more tomorrow, after Iranian state media kicks into high gear, but the Ahmadinejad statement on the nuclear talks — which had effectively gone into the freezer — could be big. All of a sudden, the move of Iran’s uranium stock outside the country is A-OK: “If we allow them to take it, there is no problem. We sign a contract to give 3.5 percent enriched uranium and receive 20 percent enriched one after four or five months.”
But — and watch this, because it will probably be missed by Western media more concerned with the West-Iran dynamic — Ahmadinejad may have re-opened a fight with Iran’s “conservatives” over his nuclear strategy. As the Associated Press notes, “He dismissed concerns by what he called ‘colleagues’ that the West would not return the uranium.”
2135 GMT: Hamlet and 22 Bahman. Let’s close tonight on a high literary note.
Rah-e-Sabz, unsurprisingly, is jabbing away at the Government. For example, it is claiming that the Revolutionary Court has stepped back in its latest bulletin by not connecting the two executions last week to the post-election demonstrations. However, its cheekiest story is a summary of Seyed Hassan Khomeini’s supposed comments as he cold-shouldered President Ahmadinejad yesterday: “To be or not to be a protester, that is the question.” Read the rest of this entry »
2305 GMT: Back on the Road Again. Off for flight to UK and work in Liverpool so will be quiet for a while. Thanks to everyone for backing up EA on an eventful day.
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