(RSF/IFEX) – RSF has expressed concern over mounting press freedom violations in Iran, where journalists are constantly being threatened or summoned for questioning by officials in the justice and intelligence ministries. In one recent case, on 27 August 2004, Arash Sigarchi was summoned for questioning by the intelligence ministry in Rashat (in Gylan province) and […]
(RSF/IFEX) – RSF has expressed concern over mounting press freedom violations in Iran, where journalists are constantly being threatened or summoned for questioning by officials in the justice and intelligence ministries.
In one recent case, on 27 August 2004, Arash Sigarchi was summoned for questioning by the intelligence ministry in Rashat (in Gylan province) and was placed in police custody for two days. A contributor to the regional daily “Gylan Emroz”, Sigarchi also keeps a weblog called “Panhjareh Eltehab” (“Window of Anxiety” in Farsi). He was questioned at great length about the weblog. The day before the interrogation, he had published an article, illustrated with photographs, about the annual meeting at Tehran’s Khavarn cemetery of the families of prisoners killed in mass executions in 1989.
RSF has also condemned the travel ban preventing Emadoldin Baghi, a freelance journalist and press freedom activist, from leaving Iran to take part in human rights conferences in Europe and the United States. Baghi said that as he was about to board a plane on 5 October, he was handed a letter in which “the special clerical court requested that I be prevented from leaving Iran.”
Baghi, who also heads an association of prisoners of conscience, said, “I have been under increasingly tight surveillance for several months. The surveillance was stepped up even more in the past few days and two agents are constantly following me.”
In 2003, Baghi was sentenced to three years in prison for contributing articles to several reformist newspapers that have since been closed. He resumed his journalistic activity after being released in February 2003 and became editor of the daily “Jomhouriyat”, which the authorities closed in July 2004. He was also given a one-year suspended sentence in December 2003, for which no official reason was given (see IFEX alerts of 10 August, 29 June and 5 March 2004 and 8 December 2003).
RSF also voiced concern about the fate of three other journalists, Hanif Mazroi, Shahram Rafihzadeh and Rozbeh Mir Ebrahimi, whose families have received no word of them since their recent arrests.
Ebrahimi, the former political editor of the reformist daily “Etemad” (“Trust” in Farsi), was arrested at his Tehran home on 27 September. He has worked for several other now-closed reformist newspapers, including the daily “Jomhouriyat”, which the judicial authorities banned on 18 July.
Rafihzadeh’s brother, Bahram Rafihzadeh, told the news agency ISNA, “Ever since my brother was arrested, we have had no information about him or the case against him. Officially, he cannot be allowed any visits until the case against him is ‘clarified,’ but there is no information to be transmitted.”
Mazroi and Rafihzadeh were imprisoned in connection with the blocking of the website Rouydad (http://www.rouydad.info) on 21 August, on the orders of the Tehran State Prosecutor’s Office (see IFEX alert of 27 August 2004).
The national daily “Kayhan” recently accused several journalists in exile working for the BBC, Radio Farda, Rouydad and http://www.gooya.com of belonging to the Prague “enemy network” and collaborating with American secret service agencies. In an article entitled “The spider’s house”, the newspaper’s director, Hossin Shariatmadry, also hinted at the identity of a number of “suspect” Iranian journalists, among them Mazroi, Rafihzadeh and Ebrahimi. Shariatmadry interrogated and tortured many political prisoners in Evin prison. Ayatollah Khamenei personally chose him to head “Kayhan”.
This campaign of accusations in the governmental press is very worrying. Experience has shown that such public denunciations have generally been followed by legal offensives against the media.