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MEDIA-IRAN: Ban on Newspaper Portends Tighter Censorship

Kimia Sanati

TEHRAN, Sep 12 2006 (IPS) - Few were surprised by Monday’s ban on Iran’s leading reformist newspaper ‘Shargh’ (East), which has for some time been boldly voicing dissatisfaction with the outcome of last year’s elections that brought President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to power.

And then, it was unlikely that the regime would have tolerated the immediate provocation for the ban – a cartoon depicting a donkey with a halo around its head, braying at a puzzled looking knight on a chessboard. The reference was unmistakeably to Ahmadinejad’s brag that he was surrounded by a halo as he addressed the United Nations General Assembly, last year.

“Shargh had become a political club for all the people who had become disillusioned by (last year’s presidential) elections. The ban is a price it is paying for criticising the administration, however mildly, and this is a high alert situation,” Akbar Montajabi, a journalist who wrote for Shargh and several other previously banned newspapers said in his blog, after the ban was announced.

Ahmadinejad’s tenure has marked a turning point in press freedom, described by the Society to Defend Freedom of Press as ‘’one of the darkest periods in Iranian history of journalism”, in a statement released last week. The society cautioned against the trend towards censorship and pressure on journalists.

During the early days of Mohammad Khatami’s reformist presidency, tens of newspapers and other periodicals hit the newsstands and became popular. But since Khatami’s power was limited to administration, pressure on the press continued to come from the judiciary and other bodies. In April 2000, more than 15 newspapers were banned in one single day by the conservative judiciary.

“Since the handover of the government to the hardliners last year, all newspapers have fallen to increasing self-censorship for the fear of another huge crackdown. Newspapers, under pressure from various bodies such as the judiciary, the ministry of culture and Islamic guidance, intelligence ministry and the Supreme National Security Council, have become too conservative in what they write. But the danger of being closed down looms above their heads everyday,” a reformist journalist in Tehran told IPS.


“No major papers had been banned until the government’s own gazette had to be closed down after it ran a cartoon that Iran’s huge Azeri population considered insulting,” she added, asking not to be named.

“To calm the riots in Azeri-speaking cities and towns that left several dead, the paper had to be banned in spite of its affiliation to the government. But most journalists felt that if they were careful enough and didn’t touch certain subjects, their papers could survive. Just a month ago, parliament’s hardline speaker had told anxious journalists that the ‘time to ban newspapers’ was gone. We all started to believe we would at last not have to worry about our jobs all the time,” she said.

“In the past few months, newspapers had repeatedly been advised verbally and sometimes even in written directives not to touch sensitive subjects relevant to national security such as the nuclear issue and the riots in Azeri-speaking cities. The orders came from various ministries or sometimes from the Supreme National Security Council,” she told IPS.

“Just about two weeks ago, our newspaper received a letter from the Islamic Guidance ministry. The letter listed a number of official and ‘reliable’ news agencies that could be quoted by newspapers. Other sources were said to be unauthorized. Apparently, other papers received the same directive, too,” a journalist of the banned daily told IPS.

“The directive has never been officially released by the ministry and nobody dared publish it. The list of officially approved sources attached to the letter excluded some Farsi language internet sites affiliated to hardline and conservative groups and individuals in the system itself who are critical of the government’s performance,” he added.

The Islamic Guidance minister, Hossein Saffar Harandi, a former editor of the hardline ‘Keyhan’ newspaper himself, has recently been more outspoken about his ministry’s plans to bring the Internet under more effective control, too.

Many news sites, such as the Europe-based, Farsi- language ‘Roozonline’ portal, the BBC Persian site, and ‘Emrouz’, a site affiliated to Iran’s opposition Mosharekat Party, as well as personal websites and weblogs of dissidents and human rights activists have long been inaccessible to the Iranian public.

“We have plans to (stop) the mushroom-like growth of internet sites, including weblogs, to make the virtual information space more ‘guided’,” the Baztab newspaper quoted Harandi as saying. Harandi has said that individuals must be held accountable for what they write and publish on Internet sites.

There are already several cases pending against journalists for postings on internet sites by Iran’s judiciary, a bastion of hardliners and conservatives for many years. Omid Memarian, an Iranian journalist who lives in California and writes for various Farsi language Internet newspapers and portals based abroad, including IPS, has to appear before a court on Oct. 28, Nasrin Sotoudeh, his lawyer, told the press here recently.

Memarian will be tried in absentia if he does not come back to Iran for the trial. Another journalist, who publishes his views on the internet, has already been given a suspended six-month sentence in the religious city of Qom, for allegedly insulting the supreme leader Ayatollah Khamenei.

Book publishers are experiencing restrictions too. Publication permits for second or third prints of books, mostly the ones that had received permits during the reforms period or early days of Ahmadinejad’s presidency, have been withheld by the ministry.

“There are almost a million and a half of books in second print waiting for permission to be released to the market now, but the ministry is refusing to issue permission,” a publisher and book store owner in Tehran told IPS on the condition of anonymity. “Many new books, novels and political essays alike, are also being refused permission for publication,” he added.

Ibrahim Yazdi, secretary general of ‘The Iran Freedom Movement’ protested to the Islamic Guidance ministry in an open letter recently for its refusal to authorize the publication of a collection of his speeches and essays, many of them already printed in newspapers and journals, fifteen months after he applied for permission, Shargh reported on Sep. 5.

“In a country where only 3 – 5 thousand copies of a book can printed in the first edition for fear of financial loss, the refusal to give permission for later impressions means that a lot of publishers will go bankrupt and that’s exactly what the ministry wants. The eight years of relative freedom in our business gave birth to a lot of small publishing houses. Now many of the ‘undesirable ones’ will have to close down and the rest will come under greater control,” the publisher said.

On Sep.6 parliament reported the results of a probe it conducted into the performance of the Islamic Guidance ministry during Khatami’s presidency. The report severely criticised the former ministers for too much leniency in the matters of press, publication of books and their contents, music, theatre and cinema and even accused the former officials of financial corruption.

The parliamentary report said out of the 659 books that received publication permits during the reforms period, and investigated by the parliament’s special committee, 518 had been found ‘defective’. These books were found by the committee to have encouraged immorality, ridiculed religious values, or included explicit descriptions of sexual scenes.

“The only means of communication left to reformists is the print media now,” an analyst in Tehran told IPS. “As the dates of elections to the ‘Experts Assembly’ and the City Council elections, set for December, are approaching, hardliners are becoming more and more wary of reformists influencing people through that media,” he said. “The rift in the ranks of hardliners and conservatives, or the principled as they like to call themselves, is growing fast whereas reformists seem to have managed their differences at last, moving towards a single slate of candidates. Shargh was the most widely read reformist paper and could have played a decisive role in all this. It had to be silenced as a preventive measure,” the analyst said.

 
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