Shame On Iran
Longer than many people might have predicted, Iran’s political opposition is continuing to challenge the ruling hard-line mullahs. The street protests that shook the country after the bogus June 12 presidential election have faded, but the courage to speak out against the regime’s mounting abuses has not.
Earlier this month, Mehdi Karroubi, the reformist cleric who placed fourth among the presidential contenders, stunned many Iranians by charging that some of the thousands of men and women who were arrested for protesting after the disputed election had been raped. Even after the government rejected the accusations as “sheer lies,” Mr. Karroubi was defiant. He called for an investigation and said four people were ready to testify if their security is guaranteed. He said that if the government continued to deny the facts and “terrorize” him for truth-telling, “I will disclose all the untold stories.”
Corroboration has come from the opposition leader Mir Hussein Moussavi. He said “establishment agents” were responsible for the rapes, and, on Thursday, an unnamed parliamentarian said that an official inquiry had proved that rapes took place. It is a sensitive topic. Rumors about sexual misconduct in Iran’s prisons have been around since the 1979 revolution, but this is the first time they have been discussed publicly.
Oddly, the government seemed to have less trouble acknowledging that some detainees had been tortured. Those incidents were “mistakes,” Qorbanali Dori-Najafabadi, a top judiciary official, told a news conference. Iran’s Constitution and law prohibit torture; however, the 2008 State Department human rights report cites numerous credible reports over the years in which security forces and prison personnel tortured prisoners.
The government should be ferreting out and putting an end to these abuses. Instead, it continues to conduct cruel mass show trials designed to intimidate the opposition and legitimize the illegitimate — the re-election of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.
During Tuesday’s trial — in which former officials, journalists and academics were accused of fomenting a foreign-inspired “velvet revolution” — prosecutors went a step further and struck at the entire reform movement by asking the judge to ban the two reform parties.
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