Zahra, an Iranian woman studying at an English university, is in a state of terror. Her husband, an activist in the cause of the defeated Iranian presidential candidate Mir Hossein Mousavi, was arrested a fortnight ago, and has not been seen since. Zahra, whose eyes are lined in green, the colour of the country's reformist opposition, told the BBC: "Why should he be in jail? What was wrong with what we did in Tehran? It was the basic right of all Iranians to take part in the election." She went on: "They don't let my husband call me . . . this is torture." It is torture for Zahra because she has a good idea of what is happening to her husband. The Iranian state media have been broadcasting a series of "confessions" by demonstrators against the alleged rigging of the presidential vote in favour of the incumbent, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. They all tend to say the same thing: "I admit that I demonstrated under the influence of the BBC, the Voice of America and other foreign media."
Their identities are not discernible, because their faces have been obscured. The reason for this was made horribly clear by remarks in The Guardian from a shopkeeper friend of an 18-year-old who had been "questioned" by the Iranian security services: "You could tell straight away he had just been released. His face was bruised all over. His teeth were broken and he could hardly open his eyes . . . [Later] the doctor told me that he had suffered rupture of the rectum." The shopkeeper quoted his 18-year-old friend to the effect that he had not "confessed" despite several days of beating while being hung from a ceiling with his hands and feet tied together. At that point two men tore his clothes off while a third "did it" -- that is, inflicted the assault that ruptured his rectum. He was raped several times in this way, in front of four other detainees, but continued to refuse to sign a confession along the lines suggested by his interrogators. So when we hear Ayatollah Jannati, chief of the Guardian Council, say of arrested Iranian employees of the British embassy in Tehran, "Naturally they will be put on trial, they have made confessions," we should be only too aware of what will have been happening to some of Her Majesty's servants.
Few people, men or women, are able to withstand such interrogations, especially if they have family members vulnerable to the threat of arrest. Even such a strong personality as the Canadian-Iranian journalist and film-maker Maziar Bahari -- who was brave enough to work in Iraq after the invasion of 2003, and also to make films about an HIV-infected man's search for love in theocratic Iran -- has now made a confession. After nine days' detention, Bahari emerged to describe western journalists in Iran as "spies". Immediately before he disappeared, Bahari had given Britain's Channel 4 News footage of members of Iran's volunteer paramilitary force, the basiji, opening fire on a crowd of protesters. Press TV, the Iranian English-language service which broadcasts internationally from London, did not manage to show this film of the basiji in action. However, it did report Bahari's confession without a scintilla of scepticism, thus: "Bahari explained the nature of some of his activities in Iran over the past years and the role that the western media had played in the events which unfolded . . . Bahari specifically highlighted the role of the BBC, CNN [and] Euronews." This account could almost have been designed as a self-advertisement for Press TV; it was launched two years ago by the Iranian government to counter what Ahmadinejad described on its first day of broadcasting as "a media global war" against Iran. |