Re: Azadegan
On Sep 12, 2006, at 12:03 PM, Yoshie Furuhashi
Total wants 10-15 pct of Iran’s Azadegan
Financial Times - September 12, 2006
Reformist Tehran newspaper banned for braying donkey cartoon By Gareth Smyth in Tehran
State authorities in Iran yesterday banned Shargh, a leading
reformist newspaper and one of the country’s most eloquent voices of
dissent.
Mohammad Atrianfar, the editor, said Shargh had “paid the price for
criticising the government of Mr Ahmadi-Nejad”.
The order was issued by the Press Supervisory Board, which a month
ago ordered the paper to change its managing director, Mehdi
Rahmanian. State television yesterday said the newspaper had failed
to appoint a replacement to “supervise published material”.
The board said it had acted after “repeated violations” by the paper
and “in particular the publication of an insulting cartoon”.
The cartoon, which appeared last Thursday, showed a chess board with
two knights, one of which was a braying donkey with a light around
its head.
Cartoons in Iran are often subtle. But some readers saw an allusion
to President Mahmoud Ahmadi-Nejad’s claim he had sensed “a light”
while addressing world leaders at the UN in New York last September.
ISNA, the semi-official news agency, said the press board’s action
was based partly on a clause in the press law outlawing the slander
of officials “even through a picture or cartoon”.
But Mr Atrianfar said such a view was based on a “particular
interpretation” of the cartoon. He questioned the legal basis of the
move.
“Even supposing we had openly insulted Mr Ahmadi-Nejad in words, the
legal punishment is not closure of the newspaper,” Mr Atrianfar said.
Such a sanction, he said, was reserved in Iranian law only for
insulting the supreme leader, a post held by Ayatollah Ali Khamenei,
or leading Shia Muslim authorities.
Shargh was closed for seven days during parliamentary elections in
2004 after it published parts of an open letter sent to Ayatollah
Khamenei by reformist deputies who had been banned from the election
and who implied the leader had played a partisan role.
Since the Ahmadi-Nejad government took office last year, Shargh has
run many articles criticising its domestic and foreign policies. Mr
Atrianfar was one of the first public figures to question the
government’s Iran’s nuclear programme tactics.
Some close to the president have shown little tolerance. Mehdi
Kalhor, Mr Ahmadi-Nejad’s media adviser, recently said parts of the
press were “playing the role of political parties”.
Many intellectuals have alleged there has been creeping restrictions
of books and newspapers. Academics resent a government decision
replacing the election of university presidents by professors with
appointment by the minister of higher education — a staunch
supporter of the president.
Mr Ahmadi-Nejad last week vowed to remove “secular” influence from
universities. “A student must yell against liberal thoughts and
against the liberal economy,” he said.
New York Times - September 12, 2006
Iran Shuts Top Reformist Paper, Citing Cartoon Seen as an Insult By NAZILA FATHI
TEHRAN, Sept. 11 — Iran’s conservative press watchdog shut down four
publications on Monday, including a major reformist newspaper.
The reformist daily, called Shargh, or East, was shut down
indefinitely because the newspaper had refused to replace its
director and because it published a cartoon in a recent edition that
was considered insulting to the government, state-run television
said, citing a statement from the press monitoring agency.
“Shargh was banned and referred to the court because of its frequent
violations and refusing to make amends in the past month, especially
an insulting cartoon in a recent edition,” the statement said.
The statement said that the press agency had issued 70 warnings to
the popular newspaper, which has a circulation of 100,000, and had
ordered it to replace its managing director, which it had not done.
The cartoon published Thursday showed two chess pieces, a white
knight facing an angry black donkey, a symbol of ignorance in Iran,
on a checkered board. Journalists working at the newspaper said the
cartoonist had tried to make the black donkey clearer on the
checkered board by making the area around it whiter.
The cartoon was believed to be a reference to Iran’s negotiations
over its nuclear program, The Associated Press said, and an insult to
President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.
He had been reported to have said that he felt in the spotlight with
world leaders focusing unblinkingly on him when he addressed the
United Nations General Assembly last year.
The political monthly Nameh, or Letter, was also shut down Monday,
the news agency ISNA reported, but no reason was announced. The
journal was published by religious nationalistic opposition groups.
The press agency also revoked permits for two other journals, Hafez
and Khatereh. Hafez was a literary and historical monthly that had
published articles about a former monarch of Iran.
“It seems that the government is limiting the freedom at home as the
international pressure is increasing on Iran over its nuclear
program,” said Mohsen Kadivar, a dissident cleric and an Islamic
philosopher in Tehran. “Now that the threat of sanctions looms, the
government does not want to hear any protest at home.”
The government shut down the daily newspaper Iran in May and jailed
two of its journalists after it published a cartoon that Iranian
ethnic Azeris said had mocked them.
More than a hundred newspapers and journals were shut down in
previous years by the conservative judiciary. But the press has come
under even stronger pressure since Mr. Ahmadinejad’s election a year
ago. Last month, a government spokesman, Gholamhossein Elham, was
reported to have sent a letter to the public prosecutor calling on
him to act against newspapers that publish accusations against the
government.
In addition to the crackdown on the press, two political prisoners
have died recently.
One prisoner, Valiollah Feyz Mahdavi, hanged himself last Wednesday,
the government said. He had been sentenced to death on charges that
he had ties to an armed opposition group in exile, the Mujahedeen
Khalq. Mr. Mahdavi’s death sentence had recently been upheld by a
supreme court.
Another political prisoner, Akbar Mohammadi, died in jail on July 30,
after a hunger strike protesting prison conditions.
Human Rights Watch warned last week that the health and safety of
Iranian political prisoners was in grave danger and called on the
government to appoint an independent commission of Iranian lawyers
and doctors to investigate the recent deaths.