Sunday, August 23, 2009

journalist stories

damn it, I just wrote this post but then lost it all because the internet cut out. Here we go again:

I heard second hand the story of a woman who was recently released after 2 months in Evin prison, a journalist who was close to the Mousavi campaign. She was lucky/unimportant enough not to be stuck in solitary confinement, and shared a cell with a group of mostly other journalists.
The guards told them that Mousavi had been arrested, and oscillated between threatening that they'd be charged as moharebs (ie of waging wage against Islam, an executable offense that I think Ahmad Khatami or another hardline cleric recommended in one of his Friday sermons) and saying Look, it's not your fault, you were deceived by the opposition leadership; just confess that since before the election they'd been planning to incite riots with foreign backing and everything will be alright. At least one prisoner in her cell did end up confessing.
Even in the early days they did manage to get some news from the outside world, mostly through an elaborate system of smuggled pens and messages left on tissue paper in bathrooms that I didn't quite understand the explanation of.
No one she was in contact with was raped or tortured. They were allowed access to lawyers and families after a while (I didn't ask how long).

I wanted to talk to her directly, but the friend who recounted this story said that she would almost certainly be under observation for a period after being released, and it was safer for me to wait and interview her by phone or when/if I return to Iran later this year.

This friend was herself a journalist, and was working part-time for Etemad-e Melli until it was closed down last week. The reason for the closure was, according to her, unambiguously reformist cleric/pres candidate Mehdi Karroubi's claim that political prisoners had been raped, and the closure was permanent. Karroubi is apparently now saying that if the state won't allow his party a media outlet, he'll establish a satellite TV station in Dubai. Maybe he will, she said, But he makes a lot of grand claims.
Even well before Etemad-e Melli was closed down, there'd been a ubiquitous plain-clothed police presence around the office and the police had been, she said, collected intel on everyone working at or visiting the paper, otherwise she would have showed me around.
I met her the other day at the other, less prominent, reformist newspaper where she works. Someone had hung up a couple cartoons on a cabinet near where I was stilling. One showed a diptych of fragile little flower with a soldier's boot going to stomp on it, but then the flower smashing straight through the boot unscathed. I talked for a long time and got advice from a photographer at the office. After looking at each other's online galleries, he showed me his resume on his website. Beside the name of pretty much every newspaper he'd worked with was a date interval spanning 1-2 years and then "(closed down)".

No comments:

Post a Comment