Iran Focus

Tehran, Iran, Mar. 18 – Iran’s Interior Minister pointed the finger at Britain and the United States on Saturday for an armed attack in the south-eastern province of Sistan-va-Baluchistan in the town of Zabol which left 22 Iranian officials dead in the early hours of Friday morning.

Radical Shiite cleric Mostafa Pour-Mohammadi also claimed the people behind the attack were the same as those behind a spate of bombings in Iran’s south-western province of Khuzestan earlier this year and in 2005.

“What is clear about the recent events in Zabol and Khuzistan is that those behind the assailants were the same”, Pour-Mohammadi told the state-run news agency ISNA.

“According to reports received, certain American and British security officials have had meetings with certain leaders of bandits and have encouraged them to carry out terrorist attacks [in Iran]”, he said.

Twenty-two Iranian government and provincial officials were killed and at least seven, including the governor of the nearby city of Zahedan, were critically wounded in the ambush as their convoy was returning from a gathering in Zabol to Zahedan.

The Interior Minister’s comments mirrored remarks Friday by Iran’s paramilitary police chief, Brigadier General Ismaeil Ahmadi-Moqaddam, on state television that there was evidence the assailants had held meetings with British intelligence officers.

Sistan-va-Baluchistan Province is home to Baluchis, a predominantly Sunni Muslim ethnic minority. Iran has witnessed escalating unrest in recent months in areas populated by Baluchis, who complain of discriminatory and repressive policies by the theocratic regime.

By Tim Cleary

Two new events have been organised as part of a campaign to defend Iranian asylum seekers in the UK and prevent their deportation to a country they deem unsafe.
As part of the 'Life Without Fear' campaign launched in January, the UK branch of the International Federation of Iranian Refugees (IFIR) is organising a public meeting on the evening of 21 March 2006 to explore the right to asylum in relation to people who have fled the Islamic Republic of Iran. (See 'Life Without Fear' campaign: public meeting) A week later, between 27 and 29 March, the group plans to protest in London to demonstrate its opposition to the UK government's policy of detention and deportation of Iranian asylum seekers.

Home Office statistics [1] reveal that Iranians currently represent the largest group of asylum seekers in the UK, with 820 of the 6,165 applicants in the last quarter of 2005 having fled Iran (up from 750 in the third quarter of 2005). Of a total 700 initial decisions made in relation to Iranians during this period, 595 people were refused asylum, and 'returns' to Iran in the last quarter of 2005 numbered 145 out of a total of 3,525.

Despairing Iranians who have had their asylum claims refused have, on many occasions, resorted to hunger strikes and even suicide due to a fear of being deported. Such action has been documented widely. (See, for example, IRR News stories Another asylum seeker takes own life, Inquest finds asylum refusal was motive for gay Iranian's suicide and Asylum seeker suicide: 'depressed and preoccupied')

Imprisonment, torture, execution
IFIR's secretary in the UK, Siamak Amjadi, told IRR News that 'many asylum seekers flee Iran because of the situation there, but the Home Office just does not believe them. They are in an uncertain situation, but they cannot and do not want to go back. By denying asylum seekers the right to a just process and sending them back, the Home Office is putting their lives in danger'.

In the campaign literature, Siamak Amjadi mentions the threat of imprisonment, torture and execution for people seen to be out of line with the ruling regime in Iran, such as political opponents, homosexuals and labour activists. A statement released on 24 January asserts that 'to flee such conditions is the basic right of people, and many have already done so and continue to do so' and that the UK government is 'in clear breach of its obligations under international conventions on the rights of persons fleeing persecution'.

Against detention and deportation
In reaction to the British government's policy of detaining and deporting thousands of Iranian asylum seekers 'back to their persecutors', IFIR's aims are threefold:

That no Iranian asylum seeker be deported to Iran, which is deemed unsafe;
That there be an immediate stop to all detentions of Iranian asylum seekers and that those currently detained whilst seeking asylum be freed;
That the British government change its policy towards asylum seekers and grant them refuge.
Read on:
www.irr.org.uk/2006/march/tc000023.html
www.irr.org.uk/2006/march/tc000022.html
www.irr.org.uk/2005/april/ha000014.html
www.irr.org.uk/2005/october/ha000040.html
www.irr.org.uk/2004/may/ha000013.html

Footnote: [1] Home Office Asylum Statistics: 4th Quarter 2005, United Kingdom. For further information phone Siamak Amjadi on: 07946 752 534 or 07931 866 985 or email: ifiruk@yahoo.com.
The Institute of Race Relations is precluded from expressing a corporate view: any opinions expressed are therefore those of the authors.

Agence France Presse - The Security Council is inching toward agreeing a revised Franco-British draft urging Iran to suspend uranium enrichment, diplomats said as China suggested that Tehran be given up to six weeks to do so.

The 15-member council met for over one hour Friday to review the revised text, which incorporated comments made by members after a series of informal sessions earlier this week. Members agreed to meet again Tuesday after getting reactions from their capitals.

"The response we got from our colleagues today suggests that we are pretty close to where they wanted us to be," Britain's UN envoy Emyr Jones Parry told reporters.

"Our wish remains that the council should act expeditiously on this text and send the clearest possible signal (to Tehran) ... to reinforce the activities of the (International Atomic Energy Agency) Agency," he added.

French Ambassador Jean-Marc de La Sabliere also said he was "encouraged by the reaction" to the revised text, which he noted was "getting a lot of support."

"We are not very far now from the end of the discussion," the French envoy said, adding that the co-sponsors were awaiting reactions from their capitals to the text. "I hope the reactions will be positive."

Elements of the revised draft released Friday said the UN nuclear watchdog would report "to the Security Council as well as to the IAEA board of governors, in (14) days on Iranian compliance with the requirements set out by the IAEA board".

These include suspending immediately all uranium enrichment activities and resuming implementation of the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty's Additional Protocol that allows for wider inspections of a country's nuclear facilities.

But speaking before the meeting, Chinese ambassador Wang Guangya said the 14-day deadline was too short.

"We must leave sufficient time for diplomacy and for the IAEA (International Atomic Energy Agency) to work ... at least four weeks to six weeks," he noted.

The US ambassador to the UN, John Bolton, responded: "I don't think there's really been much support to go beyond a month," adding, however, that there was some flexibility on the US side on this point.

"The main intent here is to get the Iranians to reconsider the mistake that they've made these last 18 years, trying to pursue nuclear weapons, so the sooner we get that message out and the sooner we hear their response I think the better," Bolton added.

Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov, in an interview with The Financial Times on Friday, also dismissed the 14-day period as "not very feasible".

Lavrov said he saw "a parallel" between the current Iranian crisis and the run-up to the US-led invasion of Iraq in 2003 when the Security Council intervened before UN inspectors had done their job.

"We would not like to see the situation where the value of the professional agencies would be underestimated ... at the expense of us getting to the bottom of the facts," Lavrov said.

Russia's UN envoy Andrei Denisov welcomed the Franco-British draft's reference to the need for IAEA head Mohamed ElBaradei to send his report on Iranian compliance to both the Security Council and the IAEA board of governors.

"This is movement in the right direction but we think it is not enough," he said. "We still think the IAEA should play the leading role."

"It would be logical that ElBaradei report be reviewed by the (IAEA) board first and then sent to the Security Council," Denisov said, stressing that the IAEA was the proper place to assess technical aspects of the nuclear dossier.

Tehran rejects Western charges that it is trying to acquire nuclear weapons and insists it has a right as a signatory to the Non-Proliferation Treaty to conduct uranium enrichment.

Meanwhile Wang said a meeting of senior foreign ministry officials of the Security Council's five permanent members and Germany in New York Monday aimed to "consider the next step of activities by the IAEA".

US Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs, Nicholas Burns, and his counterparts from China, France, Russia and Britain, which are permanent members of the Security Council and have veto-wielding power, plus Germany, will attend the meeting, a State Department official said Thursday.

Germany is one of three European powers -- along with France and Britain -- which have pursued three years of inconclusive negotiations to persuade Tehran to renounce plans to seek nuclear weapons in exchange for economic incentives.

London (KurdishMedia.com) 18 March 2005: The PUK arrested the correspondent of the Kurdish weekly Hawlati in the Kurdish town of Koysanjaq on Friday.
According to Hawlati their correspondent, Hawez Hawezi, was arrested as a result of writing a report in Hawlati, which was critical of the Kurdistan’s administration. Hawezi was arrested on Friday by the PUK Asayish in Koysanjaq and transferred to the PUK Asayish [security Services] prison in Sulemani on the same day.
It was also revealed that Omar Fatah, the head of the PUK authorities, ordered the arrest of the Hawlati correspondent Hawzi.
Hawlati is one of the rear independent papers in Kurdistan.

Iran Focus– A prominent dissident journalist has been released from prison in Iran after serving a six-year term since 2000 for writing a book in which he exposed the role of a number of senior officials of the clerical regime in the murder of dissidents throughout the country.

Akbar Ganji’s release was confirmed by his lawyer. Ganji went on hunger strike for a brief period last year to gain an earlier release date.

The official state news agency quoted the Deputy Prosecutor General in Tehran as saying that Ganji’s sentence officially ends on March 30 and that he was being given prison leave because of the Persian New Year, which falls on March 21.

Top American and European officials and a number of international human rights organisations had called on Tehran to release him.

In a series of articles beginning in 1998, Ganji revealed that the macabre killing of a number of dissidents in Iran had been carried out by the country’s dreaded secret police, the Ministry of Intelligence and Security (MOIS).

Among the extrajudicial killings that Ganji revealed to have been carried out by MOIS agents was the murder of two Anglican bishops and a pastor in Iran in 1994 and 1995. The government initially blamed the opposition People’s Mojahedin (or Mojahedin-e Khalq, MeK) for the killings and set up a show trial of three alleged MeK members, but Ganji later revealed that the Christian priests were killed by MOIS agents in a bid to tarnish the image of the Islamic regime’s opponents.

Ganji also unveiled “insider information” showing that the secret police was behind the bombing of the most revered Shiite shrine in Iran in 1994, in another disinformation exercise designed to discredit the dissident MeK.

He was also convicted of harming “national security” for taking part in a conference in Berlin in April 2000 on the political situation in Iran.

Ganji was an officer in the Revolutionary Guards and later spent a brief spell in Turkey as Iran’s cultural attaché, before turning into an investigative journalist and dissident.

Washington Post
Editorial

IT'S EASY to see the potential advantage to Iran of opening negotiations with the United States on Iraq. The sudden announcement by Iran's national security chief Thursday that Tehran would accept an offer of dialogue made months ago by the U.S. ambassador in Baghdad came as members of the U.N. Security Council were meeting to discuss a council statement about the Iranian nuclear program.

That statement could be the first in an escalating series of steps to force Tehran to give up the enrichment of uranium and fully cooperate with international inspectors. Preventing such diplomatic action has been Iran's main aim since its illegal nuclear program was discovered in 2004; the failure to stop the issue from reaching the Security Council has prompted some visible handwringing and backbiting among the mullahs.

By drawing the Bush administration into talks about Iraq, the Iranians give themselves a shot at splintering or distracting the fragile coalition that may be forming in New York. Already Iranian officials are speaking openly about the possibility that any discussions would expand into the broader security dialogue that Tehran has long coveted with the United States. In Iraq -- where American soldiers are dying from Iranian-supplied roadside bombs and sectarian violence by Iranian-supported militias is steadily mounting -- the Islamic regime has a tacit and sinister offer to make: Back down in New York, and the carnage in Baghdad might just drop off. Even the appearance that the Bush administration might be considering such a trade-off would worsen the situation in Iraq and wreck a year of careful and mostly effective anti-proliferation diplomacy.

The right response to the Iranian initiative is to limit any discussions to short-term U.S. priorities in Iraq and to ensure that the exchange is as open as possible. In theory, the United States and Iran share an interest in preventing an all-out Iraqi civil war, and thus in the establishment of a government that could rein in both the Sunni insurgency and the Shiite militias. But Iran's other objectives in Iraq are mostly inimical: It has promoted the creation of a Shiite ministate in southern Iraq that would control the country's largest oil fields and be dominated by Iran's allies; it hopes that the Sunni insurgency will meanwhile bleed American troops and exhaust U.S. willpower.

The U.S. goal of a broad and cohesive Iraqi government that would fairly balance Shiite, Sunni and Kurdish interests and be defended by a national Iraqi army would, if achieved, check Iranian ambitions. If Ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad can advance that cause through talks with Iran, good. But it will be worth bearing in mind that Tehran has agreed to sit down with him for entirely different reasons.