===================================== Iran's Mousavi defies crackdown Iran protest leader Mir Hossein Mousavi says he holds those behind alleged "rigged" elections responsible for bloodshed during recent protests. In a defiant statement on his website, he called for future protests to be in a way which would not "create tension." He complained of "complete" restrictions on his access to people and a crackdown on his media group. A BBC correspondent in Tehran says the statement is a direct challenge to Iran Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khamenei. In another development on Thursday, Iranian state media said that eight members of the pro-government Basij militia had been killed and dozens more wounded in the protests. The eight deaths were in addition to 17 other people whose deaths have already been reported. The figures cannot be verified due to severe reporting restrictions inside Iran. "I won't refrain from securing the rights of the Iranian people... because of personal interests and the fear of threats," Mr Mousavi said on the website of his newspaper, Kalameh. Those who violated the election process "stood beside the main instigators of the recent riots and shed people's blood on the ground", Mr Mousavi said, pledging to show how they were involved. Mr Mousavi, a former prime minister, spoke of the "recent pressures on me" that are "aimed at making me change my position regarding the annulment of the election". He described the clampdowns he and his staff were facing. "My access to people is completely restricted. Our two websites have many problems and Kalameh Sabz newspaper has been closed down and its editorial members have been arrested," said Mr Mousavi, who has not been seen in public for days. "These by no means contribute to improving the national atmosphere and will lead us towards a more violent atmosphere," he added. Day of mourning Opposition leaders had called for a day of mourning on Thursday, but some reports say it has been cancelled. Separately, nearly two thirds of MPs appear to have stayed away from President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's election victory party. All 290 MPs were invited to attend the party, Iran's press reports, but only 105 turned up. An earlier BBC report wrongly reported that 105 did not attend. One of those who reportedly failed to turn up was Parliament Speaker Ali Larijani, a high-profile figure who shares some of Mr Ahmadinejad's hardline views but has been critical of some aspects of the government's handling of the protests. About 50 MPs are reformist and would not have been expected to attend the victory party. But the high number of MPs who stayed away is another indication that the disputed election has split the nation, says the BBC's Jeremy Bowen in Tehran. President Ahmadinejad on Thursday criticised US President Barack Obama for his condemnation earlier this week of the violence in Iran. "Our question is why he fell into this trap and said things that previously [former US President George W] Bush used to say," he was quoted by the semi-official Fars news agency as saying. The Guardian Council, which supervises elections, has already said it will not re-run the election. Ayatollah Khamenei reiterated on Wednesday that he would "not yield" over the election result. Arrests Hundreds of opposition protesters and activists are believed to have been taken into custody and at least 17 protesters have died in the unrest since the election. The Iranian government has set up special courts to deal with those arrested and has threatened harsh sentences. Mr Mousavi's website reported on Thursday that 70 academics who visited the opposition leader on Wednesday had been arrested. It was not clear where they had been taken. Wednesday's street protest was smaller than on previous days, as an increasingly heavy security presence took effect. But there were reports of riot police firing tear gas, shooting in the air and beating demonstrators with batons. Severe reporting restrictions imposed on foreign media in Iran mean the BBC cannot verify the reports. Tehran has blamed foreign governments for inspiring the protests, but some Western countries are continuing to criticise its handling of the crisis. "We stand beside you," said German Chancellor Angela Merkel, referring to "all in Iran who seek to demonstrate peacefully". UK Foreign Secretary David Miliband told the BBC there is a "crisis of credibility between the Iranian government and their own people". The Italian government said it hoped Thursday's meeting of Group of Eight foreign ministers would send a "tough" message to Tehran. ================================================ 70 Iranian Professors Reportedly Detained According To Mousavi's Web Site, Professors Taken By Regime Forces After Meeting Opposition Candidate Seventy university professors were detained in Iran in a widening government crackdown on protesters, according to a Web site affiliated with Iran's key opposition figure, Mir Hossein Mousavi, who says he was robbed of victory in a rigged presidential election. The professors were detained on Wednesday, immediately after meeting with Mousavi, said the Kalemeh site, which is affiliated with the opposition leader. The report said it is not clear where the detainees were taken. EDITOR'S NOTE: Iranian authorities have barred journalists for international news organizations from reporting on the streets and ordered them to stay in their offices. This report is based on the accounts of witnesses reached in Iran and official statements carried on Iranian media. Hundreds protesters and activists are believed to have been taken into custody since the June 12 vote, in which Iran's ruling clerics declared hard-line President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad the winner by a landslide. The government has also set up a special court to deal with the cases of people arrested in more than a week of unrest and threatened harsh sentences. IranWatch: Track the latest on the Iran election upheaval. Widespread protests erupted after the election, amid allegations of massive fraud. Since then, at least 17 people have been killed as authorities gradually intensified their crackdown. The state-owned newspaper, Iran, reported Thursday that in addition to the 17, seven members of the pro-government Basij militia were killed in post-election clashes, and dozens more injured by weapons and knives. The report could not be independently verified. The professors detained Wednesday were believed to be among a group that has been pushing for a more liberal form of government. The detentions signal that the authorities are increasingly targeting members of Iran's elite. A flood of security forces using tear gas and clubs quickly overwhelmed a small group of rock-throwing protesters near Iran's parliament Wednesday, and the country's supreme leader said the outcome of the disputed presidential election would stand - signs of the government's growing confidence in quelling unrest on the streets. As the election showdown has shifted, demonstrators are finding themselves increasingly scattered and struggling under a blanket crackdown. In Wednesday's clashes, thousands of police crushed hundreds of Mousavi's supporters. With no western television cameras left in Iran, shaky cell phone video provides the only images of the protest. And although the pictures show confrontations and casualties, it's impossible to verify when and where they were filmed, reported CBS News correspondent Elizabeth Palmer. The regime seems determined to head off further violence before it starts by flooding areas favored by the protestors with riot police and paramilitaries. Mousavi hasn't been heard from in almost a week, Palmer reported. But Wednesday, his wife - who rocketed to stardom during the election campaign - posted a message online reminding protestors they have a legal right to demonstrate and blasting the government for acting as if it had imposed martial law, reports Palmer. ================================= Where's The U.N. On Iran? Claudia Rosett, 06.25.09, 12:01 AM ET People are being killed in Iran. Where is the U.N.? What institution could be better positioned to relieve President Obama of his worries about America standing up unilaterally for freedom in Iran? The U.N. is the self-styled overlord of the international community, committed in its charter to promote peace, freedom and "reaffirm faith in fundamental human rights." Iran's regime is already in gross violation of a series of U.N. sanctions over a nuclear program the U.N. Security Council deems a threat to international peace. The same regime has now loosed its security apparatus of trained thugs and snipers on Iranians who have been, in huge numbers, demanding their basic rights. Surely top U.N. officials such as Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon should be leading the charge for liberty and justice, with the strongest possible criticism and measures against the Iranian regime. But that's not happening. While Iranian protesters have been risking their necks to try to rid their country of a malignant despotism, the U.N. has hardly even qualified as voting "present." During the upheaval following the disputed results of Iran's June 12 presidential election, Ban confined himself to a grand total of three public utterances on the matter. In the first, on June 15, with pictures of bloodied Iranian protesters already flooding the Internet, Ban told reporters in New York that he was "closely following the situation." In words so ritually obtuse that they could have been scripted for him by Iran's supreme tyrant, Ali Khamenei, Ban added that he had "taken note of the instruction by the religious leaders that there should be an investigation into this issue." The next day, June 16, when asked again about Iran, Ban came up with pretty much the same anodyne answer: "taken note ... very closely following ... just seeing how the situation will develop." Other than that, for the next six days, Ban had lots to say--but not about Iran. He sent a message to a meeting in Yekaterinburg, Russia, of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, which Iran's President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was attending as an observer, having briefly decamped from the upheaval that his own Ayatollah-blessed, irregularity-fraught "re-election" had sparked in Iran. To this gathering in Russia, where Ahmadinejad posed for the cameras among a lineup of heads of state, Ban dispatched a message full of buzzwords about poverty, climate change and "combined commitment to a peaceful and prosperous common future." He made no mention of the "situation" in Iran. Ban also found time for such activities as addressing a seminar on "cyber-hate." He paid tribute to Gabon's late President Omar Bongo Ondimba. He fretted about the effects of desertification on migration patterns by the year 2050. This past weekend, as the world played and replayed the footage of Iranian protester Neda Agha-Soltan bleeding to death on a street in Tehran, Ban was in Birmingham, England, apparently absorbed in accepting an award at a Rotary International Convention. Not until June 22 did Ban finally return to the subject of Iran. And even then, Ban did not step forth before the cameras himself. At the regular noon press briefing, Ban's spokeswoman, Michele Montas, delivered a long list of announcements, replete with notices of assorted public service awards, and of the demise of a man who served from 1976 to 1981 as the spokesman for former U.N. Secretary General Kurt Waldheim. There was nothing on Iran. When the announcements finally ended, the first question she got was about the Secretary General's reaction to the latest news on election oddities and murdered protesters in Iran. She replied only that a statement from Ban was in the works, which she hoped would be ready "in a few minutes." To a second question on Iran, she said that time was up, and the briefing was over. Hours later, Ban's office finally issued the promised response on Iran: a one-paragraph statement, "attributable to the Secretary General." It turned out that while Iran's security forces had been spending day after day beating, shooting and arresting demonstrators, Ban had progressed from keeping an eye on Iran to following the situation with "growing concern," and had become "dismayed" by the violence. As U.N. diplomat lingo goes, this is phrasing so tepid it could double as old dishwater. Compare it, for instance, to Ban's statement the next day about the rape of some 20 women at Goma's central prison in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. This was a horrible event, but was it more horrible, or of greater import, than Iran's government assaulting and slaughtering its own people? In the Congo case--keep your eye on the nuances--Ban was not merely "dismayed." He was "deeply distressed." Or contrast Ban's lukewarm angle on Iran with his "around-the-clock efforts with world leaders"--as his spokeswoman described it--to produce an immediate ceasefire when Israeli forces went into terrorist-run Gaza last December to try to stop Iranian-backed Hamas from launching rockets into Israel. In that case, Ban declared himself "deeply dismayed," "deeply alarmed," and having demanded, urged and condemned, he finally traveled to Gaza. There, Ban did not wait for any considered inquiry and analysis to unfold. He let fly, condemning Israel for "excessive" use of force, and pronouncing himself incensed that U.N. buildings had been hit--never mind why. He rolled out for the press such phrases as "outrageous, shocking and alarming," demanded a full investigation and pronounced himself too "appalled" to be able to describe his full feelings. No such vocabulary or demand has been emanating from Ban's office over the carnage that Iran's government, in order to maintain its monstrously repressive grip, has been inflicting on its own people. To be fair to Ban, in his statement Monday on Iran, he did spell out that his dismay extends particularly to "the use of force against civilians." But he didn't mention anything about this force being "excessive." Perhaps by U.N. lights, the Iranian Basij and rooftop snipers have hit on some eminently proportionate use of force--dismaying to Ban, lethal to an untold number of Iranians, but not worth a denouncement as "outrageous, shocking and alarming." Ban, in the second half of his one-paragraph statement on Iran, went on to urge "a stop to the arrests, threats and use of force," calling on "the government and the opposition to resolve peacefully their differences through dialogue and legal means." That might be a reasonable notion, were Iran a free society operating with a genuinely democratic system and set of laws. But Iran under the mullahs is a place where they jail women who take off their veils, and hang homosexuals. Whether disingenuous or simply clueless, Ban, with his morally neutral U.N. mantra, is ignoring the problem that Iran's regime, since its inception 30 years ago, has been grounded not in democratic rule of law, but in rule by diktat and terror. The arrests, threats and force are part of the government's "dialogue." Beyond Ban, where is the rest of the U.N. on the showdown and brutal crackdown in Iran? Well, last Friday, the U.N. high commissioner for human rights, Navi Pillay, according to the U.N. News Service, "expressed concern" (though apparently not deep concern). With fastidious attention to the small print, Pillay noted that "the legal basis of the arrests that have been taking place, especially those of human rights defenders and political activists, is not clear." She may be right; the details right now are not clear. But the big picture certainly is. What of the 15-member Security Council, which over the past three years has imposed sanctions on Iran, meant to stop its "proliferation-sensitive nuclear activities." You might suppose that with Iran's government brazenly violating these sanctions, the Security Council would take an interest in the recent tumult within the Islamic Republic. Perhaps the U.S. would be pushing the issue? Nope. According to a Western diplomat connected with the Security Council, "Iran is not being discussed at the council right now." Nor is the General Assembly exactly seized of the matter (as they like to say at the U.N.). The current president of the Assembly is Nicaragua's Miguel D'Escoto Brockman, a former Sandinista and current pal of the Tehran regime. In March D'Escoto made a five-day pit stop in Iran, his visit apparently bankrolled by the Iranian regime. This week he's making use of the U.N.'s headquarters in New York to host a conference on remodeling the global financial system. What of the U.N. agencies? They have a substantial presence inside Iran, and Iran has a substantial presence inside them. As I've written previously in these columns, Iran sits on the governing boards of an array of U.N. agencies, and is currently chairing the 36-member executive board of the U.N.'s flagship agency, the U.N. Development Program--which as part of its brief serves as coordinator for other U.N. operations in the field. In that capacity, as a UNDP official assures me, Iran does not deal with day-to-day management of the UNDP, but merely exercises "oversight." On the current "situation" in Iran, the UNDP top official, Administrator Helen Clark, has remained silent. So, as protesters die in Iran while calling for freedom, where is the U.N.? With Ban Ki-Moon and the crew above manning the mother ship of global diplomacy, the best rejoinder I can come up with is, the further away, the better. =============================== |
All of us, every single man, woman, and child on the face of the Earth were born with the same unalienable rights; to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. And, if the governments of the world can't get that through their thick skulls, then, regime change will be necessary.
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Where´s the UN? Busy! UN wants more money - GLOBAL IRS.
ReplyDeleteF*ck them!