by Armanen on Tue Aug 28, 2007 6:45 am
Islamic Republic of Fear
Aug 23rd 2007
From The Economist print edition
Restoring the revolution, taking away civil liberties
THE head of Iran's judiciary is a confident man. Despite foreign attempts at slander, Ayatollah Mahmud Hashemi Shahrudi recently declared, his country has presented a fine image to the world of Islamic law at work.
If news were limited to such mercies as the recent release, on bail, of Haleh Esfandiari, a 67-year-old Iranian-American academic, after six months in jail on charges of espionage, or the amnesty granted to 4,000 other prisoners on the occasion of the birthday on August 20th of Imam Hussein, a revered Shia martyr, Mr Shahrudi's confidence might be justified. But these welcome developments come against a darkening backdrop, as the administration of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad intensifies a campaign to reimpose the moral fervour, and xenophobic zeal, of the 1979 Islamic revolution's early years.
The rest of the world may be more concerned about Iran's nuclear ambitions. But for many Iranians, the issue that has begun to outweigh other troubles, such as poverty, unemployment and the danger of war with America, is human rights.
This is not surprising. Recent months have seen the largest crackdown on civil liberties since the 1980s. Purges of suspected liberals have decimated university faculties, and repeated closures have all but silenced the once-vociferous opposition press. Ms Esfandiari was the best-known of four Iranian-American scholars incarcerated earlier this year for alleged ties to American intelligence. Her colleagues remain in prison. But since the spring a wave of arrests has targeted everyone from women's-rights advocates to student leaders, trade unionists and critical journalists, packing the country's prisons so tight that police are commandeering other buildings as makeshift lock-ups.
Political activists are not the only ones at risk. Security officials boast that their campaign against “bad hijab”, which includes the warning, booking or detaining of women deemed insufficiently clad, but extends also to youths sporting “Western-style” haircuts, rock-music fans, shopkeepers selling indecent garments, and unmarried couples, has alone netted more than 500,000 offenders since April. And unlike previous dress-code enforcements, which tended to relax after a few weeks, this one appears to be growing stricter. Signs have appeared outside public hospitals declaring that only women wearing the head-to-floor chador, and not merely the headscarf, will be helped.
As much as the scale of the crackdown, its severity is raising eyebrows. Much of the police action has been accompanied by complaints of brutality, and in many cases by documentary evidence such as graphic footage of beatings, posted on dissident websites. Despite prison crowding, punitive use of solitary confinement appears to have grown more common. The number of executions nearly doubled last year, to 177, bringing Iran the unsavoury distinction of being the world's heaviest user of capital punishment per head of population. This year has seen not only a further jump in the number of judicial killings but a return of mass public hangings, which are sometimes broadcast on state television.
Such harsher treatment, say rights activists, is partly a product of the paranoid atmosphere generated by a government that has deliberately associated any form of civil disobedience with alleged foreign plots. Recent remarks by the country's chief of police made this link explicit. Once they had dealt with “propagators of moral decay”, he said, his forces would turn their attention to those who “theorise on corruption”, such as critics whom he tied to foreign conspiracies aimed at a “soft overthrow” of the Islamic Republic.
The dissent within
But foreign spies and decadent liberals are not the regime's only critics. Mr Shahrudi, the chief judge, has himself voiced dismay over the government's policies. In July he condemned the stoning to death of a man accused of adultery, and sponsored this month's mass amnesty in what was seen as a sign of discomfort with police excess. He has also joined a broad range of former officials, economists, oil executives and businessmen in attacking Mr Ahmadinejad's erratically autocratic economic policies, which have included forcing banks to slash interest rates, splurging on costly infrastructure projects and replacing respected technocrats with cronies.
Many establishment figures agree that, rather than American bluster, it is these policies that endanger the country. To paraphrase Mr Shahrudi in a recent interview, if Iran wishes its revolution to be a model, a good start would be to get its economy in order. Another way might be to treat its people better.
Too energetic a friendship
Aug 23rd 2007 | ANKARA
From The Economist print edition
An attempt to bypass Russia annoys the United States
COCKING a snook at America seems an odd way to launch a second term in office for a government eager to prove its pro-Western credentials. Yet that is what Turkey's mildly Islamist Justice and Development party (AK) appears to be doing, just weeks after its landslide victory in the July 22nd parliamentary election.
Turkey's prime minister, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, dispatched his energy minister, Hilmi Guler, to Iran last week where he concluded a raft of deals. They include the establishment of a joint company to carry up to 35 billion cubic metres of Iranian natural gas via Turkey to Europe, and the construction of three thermal power plants by Turkish companies in Iran.
America swiftly complained. “If you ask our opinion, do we think it's the right moment to be making investments in the Iranian oil and gas sector, no we don't,” sniffed a State Department spokesman. There were mutterings about possible sanctions. But Turkey insists it has the right to pursue its interests. And Iran is delighted. “Nobody can come between Iran and Turkey,” Iran's president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, crowed recently.
Mr Erdogan's critics have seized on his dealings with Iran as proof that he is trying to steer Turkey away from the West. In fact, they have just the opposite aim: to boost Turkey's chances of joining the European Union by making it a vital energy corridor for oil and gas flowing between the energy-rich former Soviet states, the Middle East and Europe.
This is not as far-fetched as it sounds. EU countries import half their energy, with around a fifth of their oil and gas coming from Russia's state monopoly, Gazprom. The need to diversify sources was driven home in 2005 when Gazprom arbitrarily increased the price of gas it supplies to Ukraine by pipeline. Russia's use of its energy riches to flex its muscles on the world stage is one reason why America is lobbying so hard for the creation of an east-west energy corridor—a network of oil and gas pipelines running from former Soviet Central Asia and Azerbaijan via Turkey, and on to European markets.
The first big step towards weakening Russia's grip was the inauguration in 2005 of a multi-billion-dollar pipeline carrying Azerbaijani oil from offshore Caspian fields to the Turkish port of Ceyhan, in the southern Mediterranean. This provocation, from the Russian point of view, was compounded by the launch of a parallel line carrying natural gas from Azerbaijan (and eventually, Turkmenistan and Kazakhstan), which was completed last year. But Gazprom hit back by raising the price of the gas it sells to the Azerbaijanis, who rely on Russia for nearly half their supply.
This, in turn, forced them to use more of their own gas, leaving them unable to fill the Turkish pipeline, which lay idle until last month.
In a further blow, Gazprom announced a venture with Italy's Eni in June to build a line across the Black Sea from Russia to Bulgaria. All this makes it less likely that Turkey will, by 2011, achieve its dream of extending a recently completed pipeline to Greece as far as southern central Europe.
That is why Turkey has turned to Iran, according to Necdet Pamir, a veteran Turkish energy analyst. Iranian gas would not only help to fill the Nabucco pipeline, another mooted conduit from the Middle East or Central Asia, bypassing Russia, but would also reduce Turkey's own dependence on Russian supplies: over half of Turkey's natural-gas demand is met by Gazprom. Unlike the former Soviet producers, Iran controls several shipping lanes and borders Turkey. “The paradox for America is that Iran is the only country other than Iraq that can truly undermine Russia's [energy] supremacy,” observes Mr Pamir.
It's a custom of the human condition for the masses to remain ignorant. It's what they do. In fact, that IS how "the peace" is kept. Whatever democracy we have here is a spectator's sport.
