The Iranian authorities opened a mass trial of more than 100 reformists yesterday, accusing them of conspiring with foreign powers to stage a revolution using terrorism, subversion and a mass campaign to undermine last month’s presidential election.
As state television showed pictures of the defendants clad in grey prison uniforms, many of them shackled, the leading reformist opposition party, Mosharekat, labelled it “a laughable show trial” and said that “even a cooked chicken would laugh at the charges”.
The scale of the trial, which was not announced in advance, shocked many. The president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, is due to be sworn in for his new term of office this week, and the timing of the trial appeared to be an attempt by the government to stop antigovernment protests.
Many of those in court in Tehran were prominent reformists allied to the opposition leader, Mir Hossein Mousavi, who maintains that the election was stolen. They include Mohammad Ali Abtahi, a former Iranian vice-president, and Mohsen Mirdamadi, the leader of the largest reform party, the Islamic Iran Participation Front. The press was banned from the hearing and no defence lawyers were present.
Although most of the accused had been arrested at home, and were intellectuals or politicians whose offence can only have been criticism of the regime or support for Mousavi, they were charged with crimes such as attacking military sites and government buildings.
The opposition said that the confessions cited by the prosecution had been forced.
Last night Mousavi called on his website for the resumption of nightly protest chants of “God is great”.
Also among those charged, though in her absence, is Shirin Ebadi, who won a Nobel prize for her human rights work in Iran and is now on a mission to garner support for prisoners held in her country.
Ebadi, 62, made a passionate plea for the West to show support for the opposition in Iran as the regime continued its crackdown on the reform movement, which continued to mount street protests last week.
“The European Union should withdraw ambassadors,” said Ebadi, a lawyer, stabbing the air with her index finger, furious about the arrests that followed the disputed reelection of Ahmadinejad.
Ebadi was out of the country on a speaking tour when the protests erupted. She has remained abroad on the advice of her lawyers at the Centre for the Defence of Human Rights in Iran, which she founded. They have said she is more useful abroad, pressing the case of the prisoners.
Her absence from the country clearly rankles. “Tehran is my home,” she said firmly. Immaculately made up, with short, coiffed hair, she is determined to combat what she sees as injustice in her country. “I will go back to Tehran despite the fact that my family, my husband and my daughter, have been threatened.”
She said the authorities in Tehran had told her husband: “What your wife is doing is not right. She is talking too much. Stop her.”
Under the shah, Ebadi was appointed one of the country’s first women judges. Because of her gender she was removed from the bench by Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini when he returned from exile in 1979.
As a lawyer she has defended cases that nobody else in Iran would take on. “All of the arrests since the election were illegal,” she said. “We abide by the law, but the government doesn’t. They are putting people under pressure to make confessions.”
Three members of her legal team have been arrested since the elections. One was taken off a Turkish Airways plane as he waited for the plane to depart. “Iran is not secure for anyone at the moment,” she said. “If I gave in to fear, I would not be able to work,” she added.
Ebadi believes that a more forceful response from Europe would influence the regime. “The most important issue is to draw attention to human rights in Iran. I would like to ask the West not to just focus on nuclear energy,” she said, referring to Tehran’s uranium enrichment programme, which the international community believes is aimed at making an atomic bomb. “Don’t they care about the Iranian people?”
She believes that Iran will eventually develop a more liberal regime, but not through outside interference. Iran yesterday confirmed that it had arrested three American tourists who had wandered over its border while on a walking holiday in Kurdistan and was holding them in custody. The US State Department said it was investigating.
Source:The times
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