Tehran’s Web of silence
Sunday, August 24th, 2008
AS TEHRAN’S nuclear crisis grabs headlines, an ominous development is taking place inside Iran: the escalation of state repression against Iranian dissidents online. The hard-liner administration of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has stepped up the arrest of political dissidents, who have used the Internet as an alternative medium to express their views against the Islamic Republic.
Coupled with their suspicion of the international community and continued attachment to a dogmatic vision of an Islamist society, the recent developments raise concern over the extent to which hard-liners are determined to muzzle dissent in cyberspace, thereby advancing their sphere of influence over Iranian civil society - especially over women’s rights and human rights groups that have suffered the most in the latest attacks.
Among the many dissidents detained by the regime are prominent students and women’s rights activists like Mohammad Hashemi and Bahareh Hedayat, whose websites were shut down in July for allegedly propagating “immoral activities” online and receiving support from organizations opposing the regime based outside of Iran. The two are accused of acting against “national security” and “insulting public sanctities.”
The July arrests came at the same time as the disturbing news that the hard-liner dominated Iranian parliament has plans to toughen some of the press laws to restrict blogging by dissenters. Bloggers who express anti-regime views would be vulnerable to being labeled as enemies of God on earth - a crime punishable by death. If passed by parliament, the measure would unleash the most repressive law adopted by the Islamic Republic.
Iran now employs the highest level of Internet filtering and surveillance in the world. Citizens are prohibited to access websites ranging from academic and social-networking sites to erotic poetry and computer technology - and especially websites that relate to anti-filtering programs. Politically dissenting sites are subject to regular blocks, while sites devoted to human rights and ethnic minorities are filtered for fear of undermining the existing religious ideology of the government.
In recent months, there has been talk of easing relations with the United States, and even the establishment of a US interests section in Tehran for the first time since 1979. Yet as that news spread, the supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, pursued activists through Kayhan, the newspaper he directly controls. Among the first targets of Kayhan’s infamous accusations were two Kurdish activists who were seeking support for the One Million Signature Campaign, a nonviolent initiative against laws that discriminate against women. The newspaper accused Ronak Safarzadeh and Hana Abdi of engaging in threats to national security and of taking up arms against the state on behalf of the Kurdish movement - a capital offense.
The charges were false. Both are young activists - in their early 20s - committed to a nonviolent grass-roots movement that has started two years ago by women’s rights activists first in Tehran and later active in 16 provinces around the country as well as among Iranian diasporas in Germany, the United States, Kuwait, and the United Arab Emirates. The simple act of gathering signatures has been defined by the Iranian authorities as “threat to national security.” Some of the activists are spotted and detained by Ahmadinejad’s newly appointed police guards, so-called social security guards in public places such as parks, buses, and in the streets.
The recent wave of arrests and accusations bring back the chilling memory of the massacre of political prisoners in 1988, when, a few months after then-Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khomeini himself was about to sign the UN Security Council resolution that ended the eight year war between Iran and Iraq, he ordered the massive killings of more than 3,000 political prisoners.
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