Translation
As Part of Crackdown on Journalists, Iranian Security Forces Detain and Beat Canadian Journalist
In his first public remarks after days of demonstrations, Ayatollah Khamenei denied any possibility that last week’s vote had been rigged and defended President Mahmoud Ahmedinejad as the rightful winner of the election. At the same time, the Iranian government continues to arrest journalists, prominent reformists and associates of the opposition candidates, including twenty-six-year-old Mohammadreza Jalaeipour, the top strategist for presidential challenger Mir Hossein Mousavi. We speak to Toronto Globe and Mail reporter George McLeod. On Sunday, he was arrested, briefly detained, and beaten by Iranian security forces.
AMY GOODMAN: Iran’s Supreme Leader has issued a warning that protests against the country’s disputed presidential election results must end. In his first public remarks after days of demonstrations, Ayatollah Khamenei denied any possibility that last week’s vote had been rigged and defended President Mahmoud Ahmedinejad as the rightful winner of the election. Demonstrators calling for a new election had earlier vowed to stage fresh protests on Saturday.
|
Hundreds of thousands of silent protesters flooded the streets of Tehran yesterday despite a continuing government crackdown. Several protesters wore black and carried candles and white flowers to mourn the demonstrators who were killed by Iranian paramilitary and security forces in the past week. The leading opposition candidate, Mir Hossein Mousavi, addressed the protesters Thursday, asking them to prepare for a major march on Saturday.
Meanwhile, President Ahmadinejad appears to have backed down from his initial remarks insulting the protesters, saying, quote, “every single Iranian is valuable. We like everyone.” But at the same time, the Iranian government continues to arrest prominent reformists and associates of the opposition candidates, including twenty-six-year-old Mohammadreza Jalaeipour, the top strategist for Mousavi.
Well to find out more about some of the conditions that those arrested are facing and the crackdown on protesters, journalists and opposition leaders, we’re joined on the phone from Tehran by Toronto Globe and Mail reporter George McLeod. On Sunday, he was arrested, detained and beaten by Iranian security forces.
George McLeod, Welcome to Democracy Now! Can you describe what happened to you this weekend?
GEORGE McLEOD: Well, I was approached by a police officer, who grabbed me. He was a riot police officer. And he took me—I was taken to an outdoor location near the Interior Ministry. And I was hauled off the bike and grabbed by the neck and beaten and hit by about, I don’t know, five officers, I would say. And then I was hauled back onto the bike and taken to the Interior Ministry and taken by the arm, with my arm behind my back, into the basement of the car park down a flight of dark stairs and held there and questioned. And I could see—in that area, I could see about a hundred or so demonstrators who were crouched down with their hands behind their head, so this was some sort of a holding facility. And then I was released. So, I had a few minor injuries, but I consider myself quite lucky compared to what could have happened.
AMY GOODMAN: And the numbers, at this point, of people that you understand who have been detained, of people that have been killed?
GEORGE McLEOD: We don’t—we really don’t know that yet. We know that about 400 were arrested the other day—the other night, excuse me. I mean, it would be in the thousands. And we’ll never know the real number, because, I mean, as I saw with my experience at the Interior Ministry, I was taken in, and I was never charged or even accused of anything. So with the way the system works here, they can detain you without calling it an arrest. They can just hold you. So I don’t think we’ll ever know how many have been arrested, but I’m sure it’s well into the thousands.
AMY GOODMAN: And your assessment of the anti—election results protesters, the people who are supporting Mousavi and other candidates? Is this about the elections or about the government overall?
GEORGE McLEOD: Well, at first, it was about the elections. But I think over the week that’s changed. And what I’m hearing from people on the ground is that this is more about the government and about the system and about the way that this country works. And I think the goals of this movement have changed, and they’ve broadened. And I think probably by if not even tonight, then tomorrow, we’re going to see some very, very serious protests occurring in the capital. I wouldn’t be surprised if we saw rioting tonight, but I don’t know that for a fact.
AMY GOODMAN: And how are you in Tehran right now, George McLeod, since foreign have been banned?
GEORGE McLEOD: Well, the number of reporters is dwindling. I just spoke with an American TV crew, and their cameraman is down at the police station. And they’ve basically been told that they have to leave. And there’s another radio station—excuse me, television station in the UK that’s being thrown out, as well. And on top of that, we’ve been told that we can’t leave our offices, we can’t look at demonstrations, and that if we do, the authorities are not responsible for what happens to us. So that’s basically—I’ve never reported in an environment as hostile as this, in terms of the authorities.
AMY GOODMAN: And how are they enforcing this? And it’s not just foreign reporters like you, coming from Canada, but it’s also Iranian reporters who are reporting for foreign news organizations. How do they enforce this?
GEORGE McLEOD: Well, first of all, I would say it’s much, much worse for Iranian reporters, because, well, with my experience, I’m convinced I wouldn’t have gotten out of there if I wasn’t a foreigner. So the big issue is how Iranians are treated.
And what they do is, well, they throw you out of the country. Perhaps they throw you in jail for a little while. And they’ve said that if it’s at a riot or a demonstration, you could potentially be physically harmed. So it’s serious.
I was just walking down the street near the prayer meeting, and I was briefly detained and searched. My computer was—they looked at my computer hard drive on my laptop. They looked at my photos. They asked me if I work for a security service. So it’s very bad. The grassroots have been told that the foreign media is stoking these protests. They’ve been told that we are basically the enemy, so it’s not a good situation.
AMY GOODMAN: And the Basij, the paramilitary forces that are known for—have killed a number of people?
GEORGE McLEOD: I had a little run in with them about three nights ago. And they are absolutely terrifying. This is a sort of a quasi-legal, hard-line Islamic group that is basically above the law, because they’re said to be following a religious law. And they basically roam the streets after 10:00 at night, armed with chains, sticks, belts, anything they can get their hands on, and they beat anybody they suspect of being protesters. They searched cars, set up checkpoints. And I personally find them terrifying. They pulled me off a bike the other day and eventually let me go, but it’s not a good situation at nighttime here.
AMY GOODMAN: And the people who are protesting, can you describe the silent protest of the young people, what that means?
GEORGE McLEOD: Well, a lot of it—a lot of it is just to prevent sort of—to prevent any agitation from authorities. They believe that if they’re silent, that that will reduce the pressure from the authorities. The one yesterday, of course, there was the added issue that it was a commemorative ceremony for the death of eight protesters. So I think that what the protesters are trying to make very clear right now through their silence is that this is a peaceful movement, this is not a violent—not a violent insurrection.
AMY GOODMAN: George McLeod, I want to thank you for being with us, freelance correspondent for the Canadian newspaper The Globe and Mail, was briefly detained, is now back out on the street. This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, the War and Peace Report. He was speaking to us from Tehran.
Source: http://www.democracynow.org/
Quote this article on your site | Views: 1837Comments (3) |  |
I have witnessed leftwing organisations rounding up enthusiastic activists into what the activists hoped was an organised body with a dedicated leadership but which instead would do nothing with the gathered energy other than guide them repeatedly into futile demonstrations, potential confrontations with police and situations that would provide fodder for the media festival of ridicule of the futility of dissent and a relentless cycle of collection of funds to be squandered on leaflets and banners and PA systems for self-infatuated would-be “public speakers”; an ugly thing to do to enthusiastic youth looking for guidance and the means to intelligent change.
Organisations of the left that have been corrupted to a cosy status quo with the right have a nasty tendency to adopt an oddly uncharacteristic stance at critical times, which seem counter to their goals; anti-war policies become suddenly sensitive to a need to “support the troops”, anti-occupation policies become suddenly concerned as to “what will happen if we pull out?”. We are slow to wake up here in the left.
Today the right wing is unleashing its machinery against the state of Iran with the obvious aim of destabilising the government and more significantly discrediting the Iranian political system. Armies of brave journalists (who never visited Iraq – at least not beyond the green zone – are suddenly swarming into Iran to gather footage of violent demonstrations and confrontations with riot police. Yet strangely. I’ve seen nothing in the footage to compare with what I’ve seen on the streets of Britain and Europe. Urgings and encouragements to unrest and violence are beamed back into Iran by the western media using every available technology; urgings that I never saw in 2000 when the US masses were outraged by the obvious fraudulent theft of their presidency. There is even talk of violent revolution and overthrow of the entire political system and it inspires me to wonder when we will see such urgings from the corporate media in the west?
But to come to my point, what concerns me here is the language of this general theme coming from Democracy Now and the very mouth of none other than Amy Goodman.
These days I am much more ready to burn my idols in the glare of scrutiny but someone so admirable as Amy Goodman deserves care to be objective. Nevertheless, I am troubled at the very outset that Amy’s analysis is at the level of the regime’s responses rather than at the level of the context in which the events are occurring, the reactions and influence of western media or the signs of covert interference by the US and other western governments.
Amy is in the fray yapping at the heels of Ahmedinejad; subjecting his responses to assessment against standards that would not be applied to the US government response to such unrest or even drawing comparisons with how such situations have been handled in the west.
Her opening sentence paints Ahmedinejad in the position of denial and instantly moves to the arrests of “journalists, prominent reformists and associates of the opposition candidates”. There is no attempt at comparison with western government responses to such situations and the deeper analysis of why this happens in Iran but not in the US. This is a question that might lead us to try to imagine the associates of Al Gore, the man who became “overwhelmingly humble” in accepting an obviously fraudulent defeat, calling on his supporters to demonstrate against the outcome of the vote and fomenting a “revolutionary” situation. Such comparisons give us the potential for greater insights to our own political systems than they do to Iran’s.
Amy then also paints Ayatollah Khamenei in the position of denial and her journalistic remark “Hundreds of thousands of silent protesters flooded the streets of Tehran yesterday despite a continuing government crackdown.” Reminds me of the reporting in the US of the attempted coup against Venezuelan president Chavez.
The assertions that demonstrators were “killed by Iranian paramilitary and security forces” is not a matter of certainty and is not consistent with the scale of security forces and riot police on the streets in relation to the scale of demonstrations. In the footage that I’ve seen I’ve been surprised by the subdued government response and assumed that the government was indeed sensitive to international opinion and taking care to avoid foreign speculations.
One would have thought that Amy’s report that “The leading opposition candidate, Mir Hossein Mousavi, addressed the protesters Thursday, asking them to prepare for a major march on Saturday” just screamed out for comparison with Al Gore in 2000. But there was no such analysis.
Amy introduces McLeod stating that “he was arrested, detained and beaten by Iranian security forces”, which inclines one to a dark impression. However, while Amy’s interview with McLeod is contextualised and presented to suggest a desperate government suppressing dissent, it seems to me there is nothing in what McLeod reports that is not experienced by dissenting activists in any western country and would also be experienced by journalists were it not for the fact that the corporate media were less willing to cooperate with the government.
I see nothing in this sequence that doesn’t compare with treatment people receive in western countries:
“I was approached by a police officer, who grabbed me. He was a riot police officer. … I was hauled off the bike and grabbed by the neck and beaten and hit by about, I don’t know, five officers, … I was hauled back onto the bike … taken by the arm, with my arm behind my back, into the basement of the car park down a flight of dark stairs and held there and questioned. …And then I was released.”
As McLeod says himself “I had a few minor injuries, but I consider myself quite lucky” but he adds a dark speculation “compared to what could have happened” that is inconsistent with what he actually experienced.
Again, in his remarks about the Basij, “the paramilitary forces that are known for—have killed a number of people?” I am at least gratified to find a question mark here.
His other remarks: “they are absolutely terrifying. This is a sort of a quasi-legal, hard-line Islamic group that is basically above the law, because they’re said to be following a religious law. And they basically roam the streets after 10:00 at night, armed with chains, sticks, belts, anything they can get their hands on, and they beat anybody they suspect of being protesters” suggest to me that the Basij differ from those “special forces” police we have in western countries that ordinary police call “meat eaters” other that that the Iranian variety are less formally equipped.
Personally, I’m extremely disappointed here by many aspects of this article and Amy’s story.
· The story is accommodated to the corporate media theme of discrediting the Iranian Political System
· It gives no analysis in relation to the higher level discussion of western efforts to foment revolution in Iran
· It journalistically denigrates Ahmedinejad, Khamenei and the response of the Iranian government with no attempt at objective comparison with how politics, government and dissent are conducted in western countries.
I have to say that at this critical time I am left with the strong impression that Amy is emulating the pattern of those left advocates who tend to drop the ball at moments critical to our side of the discussion.
I have no illusions about the Iranian theocracy and as an agnostic, Humanist, humanitarian object to the theocratic domination of Iranian democracy (a perversion of democracy that is mirrored in the West by domination of democracy in the Western Murdochracies by lying, racist, warmongering, holocaust-complicit and holocaust-ignoring, Zionist-beholden, Establishment Mainstream media which determine which of 2 near-identical major parties will win).
In total contradiction of the Western media feeding frenzy over alleged rigging of the Iranian election is the following analysis by Ken Ballen and Patrick Doherty in the Washington Post (June 15 2009) which says: "The election results in Iran may reflect the will of the Iranian people. Many experts are claiming that the margin of victory of incumbent President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was the result of fraud or manipulation, but our nationwide public opinion survey of Iranians three weeks before the vote showed Ahmadinejad leading by a more than 2 to 1 margin -- greater than his actual apparent margin of victory in Friday's election ... Allegations of fraud and electoral manipulation will serve to further isolate Iran and are likely to increase its belligerence and intransigence against the outside world. Before other countries, including the United States, jump to the conclusion that the Iranian presidential elections were fraudulent, with the grave consequences such charges could bring, they should consider all independent information. The fact may simply be that the reelection of President Ahmadinejad is what the Iranian people wanted " (see: Pre-election US survey of Iranians predicted a 2 to 1 margin landslide for Ahmadinejad ).
The Iranian election was certainly rigged BEFORE the election through the theocratic vetting of the all the candidates - but was probably not rigged AFTER the election in view of the US pre-election survey reported by the Washington Post.
The Islamic Council is a body that Iranians like to think serves a role similar to that perceived by Britons of the Monarch (or misguided Australians of the Governor General) - a higher authority, above the level of ordinary politics that can intervene when things \"go wrong\".
There are two polarised camps among the clerics being chiefly identified on the one hand by Ali Khamenei who takes an anti-western stance and on the other by Rafsanjani who takes a pro-western stance. According to my source Khamenei is supportive of Ahmadinejad, which is a good thing for Ahmadinejad because he is the Supreme Leader of Iran, while Rafsanjani is extremely hostile.
Also according to my source, many of the clerics are corrupt and with them, Rafsanjani is in the pay of the US and the primary force behind Hossein Mousavi, who is really a puppet for Rafsanjani, and all the current CIA-assisted unrest.
Rafsanjani seeks a model of government in Iran similar to other Middle-East regimes with US-backed governments in which a privileged elite is extremely wealthy and powerful while the rest are impoverished, illiterate and powerless, which of course, is why US support is so readily at hand for Mousavi. Ahmadinejad, on the other hand is hostile to the US, seeks to eradicate foreign influence in Iran and favours a broader distrinution of wealth and opportunity, particularly in the impoverished south of Iran where he has massive constituency support.
|
Powered by AkoComment Tweaked Special Edition v.1.4.4
Tags: Globe and Mail George McLeod Iran Journalists Mohammadreza Jalaeipour Ayatollah Khamenei