Cross-dressed guerrillas fail to terrorize Afghans.

[ satire ] A quirky side-story of the recent coordinated attacks in Kabul, one that went largely unnoticed, was the Afghan police's revelation that some of the operations involved men in drag. Before readers get all excited, we are not talking about a new type of insurgency, a transvestite revolution sprung up out of the blue somewhere in the dry desert of southwestern Afghanistan -- which would certainly amount to a dystopian nightmare come true for religious right-wingers in Kabul and Washington, Tehran and Islamabad alike.

No, we are talking about impressively bearded Taliban men crossing what should rightly be known as "so-called" borders, given that they are as porous as any decent salad spinner, while dressed in drag on their way to unleash havoc against a long-beleaguered population. Their dress-up style is, to employ Madonna's favorite term, girly-girl -- albeit girly-girl of a rural Afghan variety, so nothing tight-fitting or leathery here. The whole ensemble, complete with the black beards, is then hidden underneath a burqa, making a joke of what is an authentic form of modest dress in the local culture. Which raises the question, Can you seriously claim to be fighting for the independence of a culture that you're ridiculing at the same time? Then again, the Taliban are famous for creating the rules as they go, making them only the local reflection of Washington's policymakers and their often ad hoc Afghan policies.

From the aesthetic perspective, a freakish coincidence was conjured as the girly-girl Talibs upon arrest were discovered to be dressed in the eye-catchingly bright colors that are oh so en vogue this spring. It was only two weeks ago that the Guardian's beauty expert, Sali Hughes, was gushing about a very similar palette, welcoming it as the season's loveliest trend. In a nod to the universal unity of all beings, for once the visual aesthetics of rural Afghan girls met with the imagination of trend setters in London, Paris, and New York, paraded in the unlikely person of Taliba drag queen-cum-suicide bombers.

One of those placed in custody was sporting a flirtatious dress in a color that looked suspiciously pink and embroidered across the chest to emphasize the femininity of the...ahrm...gentleman. It all added a new, unexpected meaning to the Taliban's self-proclaimed "Spring" -- may we add, Fashion -- "Offensive." The most visually offensive part of the venture was the fact that the Talibs had not bothered to shave off their beards before putting on the sort of dresses associated with coy and much-coveted Afghan teenage rural girls. We don't mind the hairy legs and chest, but the face? Come on Taliban, if you must do it, do it properly. Shave the beards.

These grown men with full black beards dressed up in bright, girly-girl colors were, needless to say, far from fetching. One cannot help but feel that whoever dreamed up this sartorial strategy had spent his fair share of solitary nights indoors, watching Dick Emery, Monty Python, and Little Britain. As it is, the Taliban paid unwitting homage to the music hall tradition that has long made straight men dressing up as ladies such a key element of British popular comedy. Given the crudity of the end result, neither Dame Edna nor Eddie Izzard could be accused of having inspired this particular instance of cross dressing.

To be fair, there's a long history in Afghanistan of men escaping justice, thieves, and personal enemies concealing themselves in women's garments, but the sartorial switch was historically restricted to the burqa alone and did not involve full dresses and chadors. This new trend reconfirms the Taliban's readiness to embrace anything, however culturally taboo in Afghanistan, as long as it might help them blow up people. The notion that the Taliban, or Afghans as such, are unchanging is one of those fantasies entertained by masochistic liberals prone to admire anyone, including the Taliban, from beyond their own Western civilization. That's another quirky side-story, much longer running.

Well, what the Taliban's sartorial strategist obviously failed to take into account was the speed with which photographs of the drag queens would spread on the Internet. Shared and reshared endlessly, the Afghans' famously dark sense of humor revealed itself in full glory as comments poured in on online social networks. "Tonight is the night, here comes the bride" read one beneath an image of the aforementioned Talib done up pretty in pink. The comment set off a deluge of LOLz. Another witty sarko suggested that from now on, Afghans should refer to the Taliban as "our disgruntled sisters" -- a deliberate reversal of Kabul's favorite euphemism for the group: "our disgruntled brothers."

And so the democratic power of the Internet meant that, within hours, the Taliban's self-created image of fierce, testosterone-filled, über-masculinity was damaged for good. Now, rather than fear, they triggered ridicule and laughter.

Given that it was the Taliban themselves who had done so much to make Afghan women feel ashamed of themselves for being women, it was poetic justice that their dressing up as women led to an outpouring of derision bordering on contempt. Owing in part to the Taliban's own misogyny, no insult is greater for an Afghan man than to be called a woman. And this is just what the Talibs got with their "Spring Offensive."

© T. Dworzak Collection / Magnum Photos.

The Islamic Republic Next Door | Hidden Lives: Afghan Girls in Germany | Making Sense of Suffering | My Heedless Afghan Home

Copyright © 2012 Tehran Bureau

Press Roundup provides a selected summary of news from the Farsi and Arabic press and excerpts where the source is in English. Tehran Bureau has not verified these stories and does not vouch for their accuracy. Any views expressed are the authors' own. Please refer to the Media Guide to help put the stories in perspective. You can follow breaking news stories on our Twitter feed.

9:35 p.m. IRDT, 7 Ordibehesht/April 26 In an interview with Haaretz, the relatively liberal Israeli newspaper, Lieutenant General Benny Gantz, chief of staff of the Israel Defense Forces, said, "I do not believe Iran will decide to develop nuclear weapons." When asked whether 2012 is decisive for Iran, Gantz responded, "Clearly, the more the Iranians progress the worse the situation is. This is a critical year but not necessarily 'go, no-go.' The problem doesn't necessarily stop on December 31, 2012. We're in a period when something must happen: Either Iran takes its nuclear program to a civilian footing only or the world, perhaps we too, will have to do something. We're closer to the end of the discussions than the middle."

Gantz added, "Iran is going step by step to the place where it will be able to decide whether to manufacture a nuclear bomb. It hasn't yet decided whether to go the extra mile." As long as Iran's nuclear facilities are not bomb-proof, Gantz said, "the program is too vulnerable, in Iran's view. If the supreme religious leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei wants, he will advance it to the acquisition of a nuclear bomb, but the decision must first be taken. It will happen if Khamenei judges that he is invulnerable to a response. I believe he would be making an enormous mistake, and I don't think he will want to go the extra mile. I think the Iranian leadership is composed of very rational people. But I agree that such a capability, in the hands of Islamic fundamentalists who at particular moments could make different calculations, is dangerous."

Report: 38 percent voter turnout in Majles elections

Reports from Tehran indicate that in a meeting with "the highest officials" -- usually code words for Khamenei -- two members of the Guardian Council, which certifies election results, said that only 38 percent of the eligible voters cast ballots, of which 8 percent were cancelled or blank. In Tehran, only 18 percent of the eligible voters voted. The Interior Ministry has publicly claimed that 64.4 percent of eligible voters voted in the election. In a television interview the day after the election, Election Headquarters Director Seyyed Sowlat Mortazavi apparently "slipped" and said that turnout was "34 and a few tenths of a percent," before "correcting" himself and giving the official 64.4 percent figure.

New proposal by Russia floated

Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Ryabkov of Russia has put forward a plan that would let Iran avoid a European Union ban on the imports of its crude oil, scheduled to come into force in July. Iran's ambassador to Russia, Mahmoud Reza Sajjadi said, "We need to study this proposal and to establish on what basis it has been made." Ryabkov -- a key adviser to Prime Minister Vladimir Putin, the president-elect -- who leads Russia's delegation to the talks between Iran and the P5+1, said the Russian proposal would be the first in a series of mutual concessions designed to contentions in an agreement between the two sides that would remove suspicions that Iran intends to develop nuclear weapons.

According to the proposal, Iran would stop manufacturing new centrifuges that are used to enrich uranium, and mothball those that have not been put into use yet. "At that stage, as part of the step-by-step approach, the other side could announce that it will refrain from introducing new sanctions," Ryabkov said on April 17 after the latest round of talks in Istanbul. The next round, in Baghdad, is scheduled for May 23.

Meanwhile General Nicolai Yegorovich Makarov, chief of the general staff of the Russian armed forces and first deputy minister of defense, said for the first time that a nuclear threat from Iran and North Korea does exist. "The threat is always there, so we closely monitor the nuclear program developments of many countries," General Makarov said in an RT television interview. "The analysis that we conducted together with the Americans confirms that, yes, there is a probability that the threat exists. And we agreed that it is necessary to create a missile defense system."

Attacks on Oil Ministry websites and communication network

On Sunday, hackers attacked the websites run by the Ministry of Oil and disrupted its communication network. Communications between major divisions of the Ministry between Tehran and the oil provinces, such as Khuzestan, were disrupted for extended periods of time. Deputy Minister of Oil for Engineering and Construction Hamdollah Mohammadnejad said that no classified information or data had been stolen or compromised. He added that the cyber attack occurred through one of the main Internet servers of the National Iranian Oil Company. He added that the Ministry of Oil cyberspace team had regained complete control of the systems and claimed that there was "no disruption in the [operation] of the oil industry." Some Internet security experts, however, have opined that the ministry was too slow to react to the attacks.

New wave of changes in the universities?

Last week, Minister of Science, Research, and Technology Kamran Daneshjoo replaced the chancellor of Tehran's Al-Zahra University, which is devoted to female students. He chose Ensieh Khazali, a daughter of the reactionary cleric Abolghasem Khazali, to replace Mahboubeh Mobasheri. Mobasheri had been appointed to her post after the previous chancellor, Dr. Zahra Rahnavard, wife of former Prime Minister Mir Hossein Mousavi, resigned from the post. The couple has been under house arrest for over 14 months. On Wednesday, Daneshjoo appointed Mohammad Mehdi Tehranchi as the new chancellor of Shahid Beheshti University, also in Tehran, replacing Ahmad Shabani. Observers believe that a second wave of changes in the leadership of the Iranian universities has begun, following a slew of changes that took place in the aftermath of the June 2009 presidential elections.

Drastic reduction in purchasing power

Elyas Naderan, a member of the Majles Economic Commission, criticized the Ahmadinejad administration for its implementation of the plans to eliminate subsidies on basic food stuff and energy. "The law passed by the Majles was supposed to be implemented over a five-year period. The price of energy was supposed to be increased, and the resulting income distributed among the people," said Naderan in the paliament's session on Tuesday. He added, "When the prices of everything have on average increased by 20 percent, the purchasing power of each family has reduced by 40 percent. Thus, the entire cash handout that it receives does not have much purchasing power. The law has been violated in many respects, which is why we have had the increases in the prices. The law for the gradual increase of the [energy] price has not been implemented and, in reaction to [the people's anger about] increases in the price of electricity and gasoline, the government has retreated."

New hardline Internet television channel

The hardline website 598 has reported that the supporters of the reactionary cleric Mohammad Taghi Mesbah Yazdi have launched an online television cheannel. Mesbah Yazdi is the spiritual leader of the hardline political group Jebheh Paydari Enghlelab-e Eslami (JPEE, Durable Front of the Islamic Revolution) that competed with the supporters of Khamenei in the Majles elections of March 2. The channel is called Shabake Paydari (Paydari Network), and can be watched at shabakepaydari.com.The first program, broadcast on April 21, was a speech by Mesbah Yazdi. For now, the channel will have four hours of programming every day. While it is publily claimed that the channel was founded by "a group of seminary and university students," it is widely believed that the JPEE is its founder.

On Tuesday, Bibak News, a website that supports Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, quoted an unnamed official of the new channel threatening that in the coming days it will broadcast "explicit" and "different" programs that will make revelations about corruption and corrupt officials, and "will make angry the enemies of and the opposition to the Islamic Republic and the honorable people of Iran."

Meanwhile a group of students at Imam Sadegh University in Tehran, which is controlled by Ayatollah Mohammad Reza Mahdavi Kani, the influential conservative cleric and chairman of the Assembly of Experts, wrote an open letter to Mesbah Yazdi in which they criticized his followers for regarding him as "the deputy to the Supreme Leader." The letter criticized the JPEE, and warned that it may move in the same direction that the "perverted group" -- code word for Ahmadinejad's chief of staff and close confidant, Esfandiar Rahim Mashaei, and his circle - has been moving. The letter complained about the fissures between the JPEE and the Jebheh Mottahed Osoolgaraayaan (JMO, or United Front of the Principlists), accusing the JPEE of having "immoral policies" and lying. "In its private gatherings, why does the JPEE treat you as if you are the deputy to the Supreme Leader, and members of the JPEE view you as their own spiritual leader, are absolutely obedient to you, and are allies of the 'perverted group'?" Mesbah Yazdi used to be an ardent supporter of Ahmadinejad, and many senior members of the JPEE served in his cabinet.

At the same time, cleric Morteza Agha Tehrani of the JPEE said that three out of the four websites the group runs have been blocked. He claimed that the JPEE tried to form a coalition with the JMO for the recent Majles elections, but the JMO refused.

Revolutionary Guards killed in PJAK attacks

In an attack by fighters of the terrorist Party of Free Life for Kurdistan, known as PJAK, in Paveh in Iranian Kurdistan four soldiers of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps were killed, and at least another four were injured.

Copyright © 2012 Tehran Bureau

Redefining "leftovers," "hot," and "cold," and more lessons from the Iranian kitchen.

[ life+style ] Every time we had people over for dinner, my husband would say to me, "Tori, we didn't make enough food."

"How can that be?" I'd ask. "There are leftovers." It wasn't until we moved to Iran in 2003 for a four-year stay that I understood what he meant. A chicken leg or two is not leftovers. It's ta'rof -- good manners. It's what the guests leave behind so you won't think you served them insufficiently. "Enough food" means that another party can be fed with what is left over at the end of the evening.

The first time we were invited out in Iran, we were served omelets, fish, whole roasted chicken, yogurt and cucumbers, yogurt and spinach, tomato, cucumber, and onion salad, salad with iceberg lettuce and Thousand Island dressing, spring chicken kebabs, and chopped lamb kebabs. All of this was brought to the table just before midnight. Kamran whispered, "Do they think we're cows?"

I tell you this so you won't balk at the amount of food my friend Zohreh Sanaseri (pictured) prepared for our dinner of ghelye (ghalieh) mahi -- a stew of fish, herbs, and tamarind paste. She invited three others to share the stew with us, but made enough for at least ten people.

In four years of living in Iran, I never once encountered ghelye mahi. In fact, it wasn't until a night out at a Persian restaurant in Amsterdam that I ate it for the first time. The flavor was surprising: sharp, sour, sweet, and fishy all at once. It was made with many of the ingredients found in other stews I'd eaten in Iran, but tasted nothing like them. I searched for recipes and tried making it a few times before giving up. None was as good as my first time...

And then I ate ghelye mahi at the home of my friend Zohreh, who hails from the city of Abadan in southwestern Iran. "It was the Paris of Iran," the eldest of her two daughters, who were born in the Netherlands, tells me. "Was," Zohreh emphasizes. "Before the war."

It was the war with Iraq that drove Zohreh and her family out of Iran. She settled in the Netherlands with her husband when she was just 25. "I had never cooked before in my life," she says. "I learned everything here."

"My father tells us she used to burn food all the time and that her cooking was awful," her daughter adds. This seems impossible now because Zohreh's "cooking hand" (dast pocht) is renowned among friends and family. Like many migrants, she learned cooking by calling her mother long-distance and working at her side during extended visits. "For me, ghelye mahi is the most important dish. This is our dish. It is the dish of Abadan and the one food that makes me feel connected to my family and my city."

For our dinner of ghelye mahi, Zohreh had assembled the following ingredients:

6 pounds of cod
A colander full of fresh cilantro
The peeled cloves of a large head of garlic
4 chopped yellow onions
Turmeric
Fresh tamarind paste with the pits in
Jarred tamarind paste
Fresh fenugreek leaves (dried will do if you cannot find fresh)
Black pepper
Red chili pepper

1. Zohreh covers the frying pan with oil and when it's hot adds the four chopped onions. Then she lowers the flame so the onions cook slowly. Her pan was not large enough to hold the entire stew in the end, so she had to divide it into two pans. If you have it, use an extra large sauté pan with deep sides.

Because she is making a huge amount of ghelye mahi, she adds the cilantro in batches, letting each handful simmer down before stirring in the next.

"It seems like a lot, but when it is cooked it's not so much."

"The tamarind already has salt, so I don't add any salt to the dish. If you don't have fresh tamarind paste, you can just use the paste in the jar. But the fresh paste is better."

9. Zohreh takes an extra step, one in no recipe that I found. She coats the fish in flour and turmeric. "It keeps the fish together." She cooks it quickly in oil.

Zohreh adds a bit more sunflower oil to the greens before adding the fish. "The oil brings all the flavors together. In total this dish has about half a glass of oil in it." As she delicately places the fish in the stew, she tells me, "Be very careful adding the fish. It should not break apart."

11. The fish simmers in the greens for a total of 90 minutes. Before we are ready, Zohreh lifts the lid from the pot to show me the way the oil has risen to the top. I feel like I'm looking at an algae-filled swamp with stones peeking above the surface. "When the oil floats to the surface, you know it's ready," she tells me. "This only happens when you simmer it slowly."

What you serve with ghelye mahi adds to the whole experience. It needs rice. (If you want to cook rice as well as your Iranian friends do, I recommend the instructions in Food of Life, by Najmieh Batmanglij.)

Ghelye mahi is a balance of hot and cold. The garlic, fenugreek, and turmeric are hot. The fish and cilantro are cold. The torshi is hot. Together the flavors are perfect.

Trust me. It's delicious, and when we are finished eating there is enough left over for five more people. In fact, writing this piece has made my mouth water. I just might call Zohreh to see if she still has any left. Hmmm...

Copyright © 2012 Tehran Bureau

Press Roundup provides a selected summary of news from the Farsi and Arabic press and excerpts where the source is in English. Tehran Bureau has not verified these stories and does not vouch for their accuracy. Any views expressed are the authors' own. Please refer to the Media Guide to help put the stories in perspective. You can follow breaking news stories on our Twitter feed.

11:55 p.m. IRDT, 8 Ordibihesht/April 27 In the runup to the next round of talks concerning Iran's nuclear program between representatives of the Islamic Republic and the P5+1 -- the five permanent members of the U.N. Security Council, plus Germany -- unnamed U.S. government officials have told the Los Angeles Times that the Obama administration is prepared to accept ongoing Iranian uranium enrichment in what the paper characterizes as a "major concession." According to the Times, the officials said

they might agree to let Tehran continue enriching uranium up to concentrations of 5% if the Iranian government agreed to unrestricted inspections, and strict oversight and safeguards that the United Nations long has demanded.

Iran has begun enriching small amounts of uranium to 20% purity in February 2010 for what it contends are peaceful purposes, although most of its stockpile is purified at lower levels. Uranium can be used as bomb fuel at about 90% enrichment.

The question of whether to approve even low-level enrichment is highly controversial within the U.S. government and among its allies because of the risk that Iranian scientists still might be able to gain the knowledge and experience to someday build a bomb.

But a consensus has gradually emerged among U.S. and foreign officials that the Iranians are unlikely to accede to a complete halt to enrichment, and that pushing this demand could make it impossible to reach a negotiated deal to stop Iran's program short of a military attack.

After talks that took place in Istanbul two weeks ago, which participants on both sides described as much more positive in tone than previous negotiations, another round of talks was scheduled for May 23 in the Iraqi capital of Baghdad. The uranium enriched to what the Times describes as 20 percent -- the actual level is 19.75 percent -- has evidently been used as fuel for the specialized Tehran Research Reactor, which produces radioisotopes for cancer treatment.

The position described in today's report is likely to come under fire from presumptive Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney who, addressing the American Israel Public Affairs Committee's annual conference last month, advocated subjecting Iran to a "diplomatic isolation program" such as the one imposed on South Africa during the latter years of the apartheid era. Romney also mocked the Obama administration's approach -- "Hope is not a foreign policy" -- and made the surprising assertion, referring to the International Atomic Energy Agency, that the West "may not know when Iran will secure sufficient fissile material to threaten the entire world, but the IAEA warns that that hour is fast approaching." Fissile material, in this context, is generally understood to mean the sort of 90-percent-enriched weapons-grade uranium mentioned in the Los Angeles Times story. The IAEA has never suggested that Iran possesses any fissile material at all nor that it is on the verge of initiating production of it.

Copyright © 2012 Tehran Bureau

Debate over Iranian, Saudi influence in island nation obscures nature of social uprising.

The Saudis have been particularly vocal about Iran's reputed hand in the uprising, and former U.S. Secretary of Defense Robert Gates warned in March 2011 that the opposition's debate over dialogue with the monarchy was giving Tehran "ways to...create problems" in the country.

A recent brouhaha on Twitter among Middle East and North Africa watchers and Bahraini activists over analyst Ed Husain's discussion of "Iranian influence" in Bahrain is indicative of how deeply distrustful foreign observers and the royal family of Bahrain are of the Shia-dominanted opposition. Husain's tweets focus on the need for reformers to come together to "beat Iran," informing his followers that the "bottom line on Bahrain" is "support the monarchy with more reforms, or create a pro-Iran colony through Isa Qasim" -- the leading cleric of the Al-Wefaq National Islamic Society, a Shia political party formed in 2001. In contrast, historian Toby C. Jones , who strongly disagrees with the idea that Iran has exercised substantial influence over the protests, remarked last month that the Saudi National Guard deployment signaled that the country was becoming "something of a Saudi colony, now in the sense that policies are merged."

Neither would be enviable outcomes for the country, but despite fears of broad Iranian influence in the country, it is the U.S.-Saudi alliance that has and continues to exercise the most "foreign interference" in Bahrain to the ongoing benefit of a royal family -- the Khalifas -- torn between concession, which Washington tepidly demands of them, and retrenchment, the preferential result for Riyadh.

Any attempts by Tehran to influence Bahraini politics would, of course, largely be aimed at countering the much greater influence exercised by the United States and Saudi Arabia there. Bahrain is the home of the U.S. Fifth Fleet and a major Western arms recipient, arrangements that have increasingly fallen under congressional scrutiny. The Fifth Fleet is the most visible projection of U.S. power in the Persian Gulf, the cornerstone of U.S. military facilities along the eastern Gulf coast in the UAE, Qatar, and Kuwait, whose primary purpose since 1979 has been to contain the Islamic Republic's ambitions (and, from 1990 to 2003, Saddam Hussein's as well).

The Saudis, for their part, have enthusiastically supported these containment efforts and opposed reformers in Bahrain by raising alarms about alleged Iranian influence. Bahrain's royal family is tied to the House of Saud through marriage and Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) commitments, the latter of which brought a 1,300-strong detachment of Saudi National Guardsmen to Bahrain last year to help "restore order." With Iraq now dominated by a Shia government linked to Tehran, Riyadh fears any sort of linkage between Shia groups in Bahrain with Saudi Shiites in their own oil-rich Eastern Province, where the Shia population is concentrated near the Bahraini border.

Riyadh and Manama see, or at least play up the prospect of, the hand of Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps in all major disturbances to the status quo: "the ruling al-Khalifa monarchy prefers a simpler narrative of Shia against Sunni," Foreign Affairs' Kristin Smith Diwan remarked last year. Yet as an activist acerbically retorted to claims that Shiites have been responsible for deliberately aggravating "sectarian" tensions: "How many Sunni mosques did sh. Isa Qasim demolish?" French historian Olivier Roy also dismisses the idea of a Shia Crescent and an "Iranian fifth column" in Bahrain orchestrating the protests. "They [Arab Shiites] depend on Iranian patronage in a hostile Sunni environment," he notes, but they "have long understood the dangers of becoming instruments of Iran."

Indeed, the Islamic Republic is not the first Iranian regime to salivate over the prospect of planting its flag in Bahrain. When the Wall Street Journal warned last year that Iran has been seeking to control Bahrain for decades, it neglected to note that the pro-Western government of Reza Pahlavi sought to annex Bahrain as a "14th province" between 1957 and 1970, hoping a plebiscite would undermine a regional consensus regarding the then-British protectorate's borders. While an attempted coup in 1981 is widely thought to have been supported by the Islamic Republic, and talk of the lost "14th Province" surfaces in pro-Khamenei news outlets, Iran has not formally rejected the 1970 gentleman's agreement supporting Bahraini independence following the U.K.'s exit in 1971. The "PERSIAN GULF"-marked soccer pitch on the Iranian-controlled Gulf island of Abu Musa, also claimed by the UAE, vividly illustrates the tensions among these regional actors.

Yet if Iranian agents are the hidden hands within Shia organizations -- or even trying to set up emigré groups to parachute back into Bahrain, as they did against Saddam Hussein from 1982 on -- they seem to be doing a poor job of pulling anti-regime strings in Samara. If Tehran is secretly encouraging violence (taking the emergence of vigilantes in Sunni communities and more violent anti-regime demonstrators as evidence of a hoped-for clash?), then it is a policy sure to backfire since Bahrain can count on explicit GCC support for suppressing violence initiated by any possible pro-Iranian actors (and tacit U.S. support to "rein in" the situation). The Revolutionary Guards, in effect, cannot swim very well in the Gulf, while the Saudis can just drive over to the island.

And while the Guards have been blamed for terrorist plots before in Bahrain, there's no evidence -- just intimations from the royal family -- that the occasional violence by protestors has been anything but a response to the actions of their heavily armed oppressors: security forces have fired on demonstrators, made prolific use of tear gas, demolished mosques, and been accused of torture.

Mehdi Khalaji of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy suggests that Iran's influence is primarily limited to its efforts to appeal to the "Arab cause" against a Tel Aviv-Riyadh-Washington axis. Olivier Roy also thinks this, and according to the conservative Commentary magazine, an explicit show of pro-Iranian sentiment in Bahrain observed in 2011 was cheap propaganda: pro-Hezbollah posters alongside pro-Qasim ones. Supporters of the opposition point out that this sympathy is fueled not only by religious ties, but by the feeling that if the "international community supported the people of Bahrain, they wouldn't have to rely on Iran" -- or rather, think they can rely on Iran, as the events of the past year show that Bahrainis cannot count on real support from the Islamic Republic at all. A showboating effort to transport exiled dissents into Bahrain didn't even make it within sight of Bahraini warships; Iranian solidarity has so far primarily come in the form of media "incitement."

Tehran might bet on dialogue elevating Qasim to prominence, though it'd be a neat trick to see how such an outcome would actually give Iran what it most wants: a Fifth Fleet base closure and the ouster of the Khalifas. With such a weak hand to play in its own backyard, the Islamic Republic may be finding it more pragmatic to "sit this one out," even though "mounting Shiite suspicion toward Iran" is, according to Mehdi Khalaji, the result.

Ultimately, Bahrain's opposition is Bahraini, a view affirmed even by the so-called Bahrain Independent Commission of Inquiry (BICI), the body tasked by the government to prepare a report on the violence and future reforms. The government does not try to argue that Iran somehow fomented the 2011 uprising, essentially conceding that it was inspired by the Arab Spring's successes elsewhere and based on a set of grievances the royal family has ostensibly committed to resolving for the past decade. This is also the official U.S. position, as attested to by Secretary of State Hilary Clinton at a congressional hearing last March:

Q: Do you see any Iranian involvement in the protests and demonstrations and uprising in Bahrain?

A: ... [O]ur assessment now is that the internal discord in Bahrain is a domestic phenomenon that comes from the demands by the 70 percent Shia population for greater political rights, greater economic opportunities, and it requires a domestic solution.

Though no names were mentioned, it is clear that this exchange occurred with Isa Qasim and his fellow clerics in mind. The ties Qasim cultivated with Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khameini and Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani of Iraq have troubled Washington since before the Second Gulf War. In 2006, Al-Wefaq abandoned its policy of boycotting elections (causing a split within the movement) in order to push reform. And despite the resignation of Al-Wefaq members from parliament in protest of the security forces' actions, and Qasim's criticism of the government, Al-Wefaq has maintained that it wants to participate in a national dialogue to hammer out a resolution to the issues surrounding "February 14," shorthand for both the 2001 constitutional referendum that ostensibly set Bahrain on the path to a constitutional monarchy (it was modified in 2002 just ahead of its ratification, to the chagrin of many reformers), and the protests that began last year with calls for the implementation of democratic reforms.

Likely by virtue of its support for reform and constitutional monarchy, Al-Wefaq, in Laurence Louër's description, "is the only opposition force that can organize legal demonstrations and has been less targeted by repression than other political societies (none of its leaders, notably, are currently in prison)." This makes it an acceptable negotiating partner for disaffected Sunnis -- again, a "preference" for Sunnis by the government weakens as one moves down the ladder of political utility; not everyone can be a magistrate -- but a sellout to those who want the royals to make greater concessions.

Like the other regional monarchies, the House of Khalifa directs the state's electoral, judicial, and welfare policies along sectarian and tribal lines, favoring its most amenable technocrats and clerics. "Finite resources are best spent on satisfying a core constituency whose continued allegiance is sufficient to keep the government in power" -- that's how the Middle East Research and Information Project described the royal family's modus operandi earlier this year. Even without human rights violations to spur on activists, there are tensions throughout the island nation based on years of preferential treatment and the security forces' infamous conduct toward dissidents. Demonstrations and riots in reaction to discrimination and abuse occurred repeatedly between 1994 and 2001, to which the authorities generally responded with more discrimination and abuse. Bahraini security forces have repeatedly been identified as the main perpetrators of violence during the demonstrations by the Bahrain Center for Human Rights, and that is the underlying issue facing Bahraini reformers stuck between a U.S.-Saudi understanding and an unsure Iranian stance.

As Amnesty International noted, no senior official has yet been held accountable for any actions taken against demonstrators. This is worth noting because the culture of impunity among the government forces remains a major stumbling block to dialogue. Prior to the 2011 protests, analyst Justin Gengler observed that "variation in support for the Bahraini government among Shi'i citizens is unrelated to material wellbeing...while among Sunnis economic considerations are quite important in forming political attitudes." In sum, he continues, Shiites' "political orientation stems from dissatisfaction with the system as a whole, in which Shi'i social standing and access to political power is limited on the basis of confessional affiliation," while "ordinary Sunnis expect something in return" for "their nearly unwavering support." Because of these expectations, cracks have appeared in the Sunni edifice.

At the same time, Bahraini Shiites' political representation is becoming increasingly factionalized between Al-Wefaq and the less compromising forces that emerged after the street protests started to exacerbate existing tensions among Shia organizations (some of which are officially banned). And divisions among Sunnis now further complicate efforts to establish a national dialogue. Hardliners oppose ceding ground to the Shia opposition, whether led by Al-Wefaq or not -- and, for some time, it has been the "not" that has been doing the leading out on the streets.

Some elements within the royal family and the Defense Ministry are said to be supportive of Islamist rejectionists who appear to be using sectarian tensions to secure their traditional privileges by raising fears that Al-Wefaq, among others, seeks to establish a Shia-dominated state that would discriminate against the Sunni minority. With the recent Formula One Grand Prix having become a potent symbol for both protestors -- who see it as an attempt at whitewashing -- and the government -- which hopes to keep up an image of "normalization" despite its failures to implement recommended reforms -- there are fears that the situation will deteriorate further as a result of violence and arrests that occurred beyond the raceway. The government's apparent effort to shut out foreign media covering the protests ahead of the race does not bode well for the demonstrators.

Copyright © 2012 Tehran Bureau

[ in focus ] As noted in my blog, here are a few interesting points about Iranian conservative leaders' rhetoric in the run up to talks with U.S., Britain, France, Russia, China and Germany set for May 23 in Baghdad.

In his April 6 sermon Tehran's hardline Friday Prayer leader Ayatollah Ahmad Khatami stated that "The file pertaining to relations with the United States is under the sole control of the Supreme Jurisconsult."

While we should obviously be very wary of reading too much into such statements, Friday Prayer leaders are appointees of the Supreme Leader, and to a large extent fulfill the role of propagating and disseminating Ali Khamenei's line on the crucial issues of the day. Also of note was Foreign Minister Ali Akbar Salehi's presence in the audience.

This was perhaps the first time I've heard Khatami speak in such terms about Iran-U.S. relations. There was obviously no indication in his sermon of what form such relations might take, other than that engagement should be reciprocal, and that Iran should be wary of what it might have to give up to receive something in return. The remarks have been interpreted as a rebuttal to Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani's recent interview with an Iranian international relations journal in which the former president and incumbent head of the Expediency Council emphasized the importance of engaging the United States, and similarly his efforts in the past to do so.

While Khatami's comments were certainly a slighting of the former president, it is interesting to note that rather than categorically repudiate the very idea of engagement, or at the very least condition engagement on a "fundamental reorientation or change in American behavior in the region," as Ayatollah Khamenei has in the past, relations with the United States are said to be determined as the sole prerogative of the Supreme Leader. Without getting into the vicissitudes and intricacies of the many historical failures of diplomatic engagement and who is to blame, there is no doubt a number of historical precedents, as far as Iranian diplomatic missteps are concerned, whereby Iranian overtures or cooperation with the U.S. have fallen victim to internal squabbling and personal rivalries. With the clear caveat that this is all highly speculative, Khatami's comments, alongside a few other senior regime figures and politicians, seem to indicate an impetus to clarify and establish beyond any doubt that the ultimate decision-making power vis-a-vis the prospects of Iran-U.S. relations reside solely with Ayatollah Khamenei, as opposed to the government, and in the event of a success, such a deal would be the sole success of Khamenei. This is obviously a risky strategy given that in the event of failure, the buck will also end with Khamenei alone.

Saeed Jalili's revamped title of personal representative of the Supreme Leader is also indicative that Khamenei is directly taking the reigns in a very palpable fashion, and because of this, senior Principalist politicians and state clergymen, will perhaps be more reluctant in denouncing the talks set for May 23 in Baghdad.

President Ahmadinejad's comments and responses in the coming weeks are anyone's guess however. The recent allegations by sources close to Ahmadinejad that associates and allies of Rafsanjani were active behind the scenes at Istanbul indicates that efforts will be made by those close to the president to publicly criticize in an effort to sabotage the process after having been largely sidelined.

In a more recent Tehran Friday Prayer sermon on April 27, albeit this time by Hojjat ol-Islam Kazem Sedighi (the same cleric who (in)famously blamed Iranian women's "revealing" clothing for earthquakes), the cleric stated that the "the West must show its good intentions in the Baghdad negotiations by removing sanctions." This change of tone seems to be a top-down directive, itself largely the product of Western economic pressure, whose severity has increasingly come to be felt, and this comes through, especially when compared to the rhetoric which came off the heels of the January 2011 Istanbul talks. Whether this rhetorical shift will continue is debatable, but the de-escalation of rhetoric in the United States post-Obama's AIPAC speech, and more recently in Israel, with the pertinent comments of IDF Chief of Staff Lt Gen Benny Gantz and former Shin Bet chief, Yuval Diskin, indicate an atmosphere more amenable to negotiation. While such negotiations might ultimately flounder, they perhaps won't be prejudiced from the outset by the incendiary and inflammatory rhetoric, which had become the staple diet of the aforementioned parties in the past.

Press Roundup provides a selected summary of news from the Farsi and Arabic press and excerpts where the source is in English. Tehran Bureau has not verified these stories and does not vouch for their accuracy. Any views expressed are the authors' own. Please refer to the Media Guide to help put the stories in perspective. You can follow breaking news stories on our Twitter feed.

[ in focus ] In a speech on Friday, Yuval Diskin, who retired as head of the Shin Bet, Israel's domestic intelligence service, last year, spoke out strongly against Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Defense Minister Ehud Barak on the issue of Iran. Addressing the Majdi Forum in Kfar Saba, Diskin declared, "I have no faith in the prime minister, or in the defense minister. I really don't have faith in a leadership that makes decisions out of messianic feelings." He continued, "They are creating a false impression about the Iranian issue. They're appealing to the stupid public, if you'll pardon me for the phrasing, and telling them that if Israel acts, there won't be an [Iranian] nuclear bomb."

Diskin went even further and said that Netanyahu and Barak are not up to the job of opening an unprecedented front with Iran and, potentially, with its allies on Israel's borders. "I have seen them up close. They are not messiahs, the two of them, and they are not people who I personally, at least, trust to be able to lead Israel into an event on such a scale, and to extricate it," he said. Neither Netanyahu nor Barak has responded to Diskin's comments, which were condemned by several high-ranking members of Netanyahu's coalition government.

In recent months, as Netanyahu and Barak's rhetoric concerning a possible military attack on Iran has grown more heated, many political leaders around the globe have warned Israel against such an action. In the United States alone, Defense Secretary Leon Panetta, Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, Director of the CIA David Petraeus, and General Martin Dempsey, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, have variously expressed the views that Iran is not trying to make nuclear weapons, has not made the political decision to do so, and that attacking Iran would have catastrophic consequences for the Middle East and the world.

Perhaps the most significant voices raised in opposition to Netanyahu and Barak's view that the Islamic Republic poses an imminent existential threat to Israel have been those of other Israeli and Jewish leaders, among whom Diskin may now be counted. As noted here, Lieutenant General Benny Gantz, chief of the Israel Defense Forces, publicly stated this week that Iran's leaders are "very rational" and that he believed they would not decide to develop nuclear weapons.

Last May, Meir Dagan, who led Israel's intelligence organization Mossad until late 2010, called the prospect of an Israel Air Force attack on Iran's nuclear facilities "the stupidest thing I have ever heard." In November, Ephraim Halevy, one of Dagan's predecessors as Mossad chief, said that Iran is still "far from posing an existential threat to Israel" and that "the growing Haredi [ultra-Orthodox] radicalization poses a bigger risk than [Iranian President Mahmoud] Ahmadinejad."

Netanyahu and more than a few of his ideological confrères, such as leading American neoconservative Norman Podhoretz, have compared Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to Adolf Hitler, the Islamic Republic to Nazi Germany, and the current Middle Eastern situation to the one in Europe in 1938, right before the breakout of World War II. Netanyahu reiterated this view in a speech last week at a ceremony to mark Holocaust Remembrance Day, at which he asserted, "Those who dismiss the Iranian threat as a whim or an exaggeration have learnt nothing from the Holocaust."

The efforts to draw parallels of that sort have been refuted by some of the most prominent Israeli and Jewish figures. On Thursday, Israeli President Shimon Peres explicitly dismissed Netanyahu's comparison of Ahmadinejad and Iran to Hitler and Nazi Germany. In an interview with the Ynet website, he said, "It's not the same thing. [The] Holocaust is one thing and Iran is another. The comparison is out of place."

On April 19, the day after Netanyahu's Holocaust Remembrance Day speech, Nobel Peace Prize laureate and Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel also rejected his assertions. When he was asked about the prime minister's invocation of parallels between Iran and Nazi Germany, Wiesel said, "Iran is a threat, but can we say that it will make a second Auschwitz? I don't compare anything to the Holocaust."

Copyright © 2012 Tehran Bureau

Press Roundup provides a selected summary of news from the Farsi and Arabic press and excerpts where the source is in English. Tehran Bureau has not verified these stories and does not vouch for their accuracy. Any views expressed are the authors' own. Please refer to the Media Guide to help put the stories in perspective. You can follow breaking news stories on our Twitter feed.

1:05 p.m. IRDT, 12 Ordibihesht/May 1 The tension between Iran and the United Arab Emirates (UAE) has been increasing over three islands in the Persian Gulf: the Greater and Lesser Tunbs, and Abu Musa. The islands, which have been associated with Iran for centuries and are currently administered by the Islamic Republic, are also claimed by the UAE. Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad recently paid a visit to Abu Musa that sparked rhetorical broadsides from both parties in the dispute.

As an apparent show of support for the UAE, the United States has now deployed F-22 stealth fighter jets, generally regarded as the most advanced fighters in the U.S. arsenal, to the Al-Dhafra air base. The UAE base is south of the Strait of Hormuz, through which about a fifth of globally traded oil passes. The number of fighters deployed has not been disclosed. Major Mary Danner-Jones, a spokeswoman for the U.S. Air Force, said, "The United States Air Force has deployed F-22s to Southwest Asia. Such deployments strengthen military-to-military relationships, promote sovereign and regional security, improve combined tactical air operations, and enhance interoperability of forces, equipment and procedures."

Reacting to the news, Defense Minister Brigadier General Ahmad Vahidi said, "We consider such presence in the region useless and harmful and creating an insecure atmosphere in the region.... Guaranteeing the security of the region is possible only through the cooperation between the countries of the region. The presence of other countries[' forces] will only complicate the matter and increase the insecurity."

This past Sunday was declared the National Day of the Persian Gulf in Iran. Demonstrations took place in Tehran in front of the UAE embassy and the Third Biennial International Conference on the Persian Gulf opened at two universities, one in Tehran and a second one in the province of Hormozgan, which encompasses the three disputed islands. The conference focused on environmental concerns and Iran's ownership rights in the Persian Gulf.

IAEA visit to Parchin

Ali Asghar Soltanieh, Iran's ambassador to the International Atomic Energy Agency, said that on May 14 and 15 Iran and the IAEA will resume negotiations and expressed the hope that they will be "constructive and successful." He added that the talks will aim to develop a framework for resolving the outstanding issues between Iran and the agency, and "addressing the unclear aspects" of Iran's nuclear program. When asked whether a visit by the IAEA to Parchin, a large military complex southeast of Tehran in which Iran has been making conventional military hardware and ammunitions for decades, will be allowed, Soltanieh responded, "After the framework is agreed upon [by the two sides], the visit will be possible." Soltanieh said that "Iran will never stop uranium enrichment," seemingly ruling out the possibility that Iran may suspend enrichment activities as a concession to the United States and its allies in the upcoming negotiations in Baghdad on May 23.

Meanwhile, Dr. Fereydoon Abbasi Davani, president of the Atomic Energy Organization of Iran, reported that, beginning on Saturday, the Bushehr light-water reactor has been producing 940 megawatts of electricity and is connected to Iran's electricity grid.

Human rights news

Imprisoned labor activist Reza Shahabi, who has been jailed in Ward 350 of Evin Prison, was transferred to a hospital after half of his body became numb. He has been suffering from extreme pain in his neck and spine, as well as irregular blood pressure and heartbeats. Doctors recommended surgery to treat the pain, but prison officials opposed it. Shahabi went on two hunger strikes over the past few weeks, which further weakened him. He has been sentenced to six years of incarceration.

Another political prisoner, Mohammad Reza Motamednia, who had been on hunger strike since April 9, was also taken to a hospital. A nationalist-religious figure, he was an adviser to two former prime ministers, Mohammad Ali Rajaei, who was assassinated on August 30, 1981, and Green Movement leader Mir Hossein Mousavi. When he began his hunger strike, he declared that he would end it only when Mousavi is released from house arrest. In a courageous letter to Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Motamednia strongly criticized the Supreme Leader, writing, "Have some courage and accept people's demands."

Meanwhile, human rights activist and attorney Mohammad Ali Dadkhah, who has been sentenced to nine years of imprisonment, is supposed to begin his sentence on May 5. Dadkhah, who has represented many political prisoners, has also been barred from practicing law for ten years. He has declared, "I'll go to prison, but will never leave my native land, Iran."

The family of former deputy interior minister and outspoken reformist Mostafa Tajzadeh has written a letter to the judiciary protesting strongly the fact that he has been kept away from all other prisoners for nearly three years in the quarantine section of the prison, which they call completely illegal. He has also been barred from face-to-face visits with his family members.

Khamenei opposes impeachment of Ahmadinejad's labor minister

As noted here, a group of Majles deputies tried to impeach Minister of Labor Abdolreza Shaeikholeslami over the appointment of the notorious former judge Saeed Mortazavi as the head of the Social Security Organization, the large government-controlled organ that provides heath insurance and care to tens of millions of people. After it was announced that Mortazavi had resigned, the motion for the impeachment was quashed. It turned out, however, that Mortazavi's resignation was rejected by Sheikholeslami and, thus, the effort to impeach him has been resumed.

New reports indicate that Khamenei has sent a message to Majles Ali Speaker Ali Larijani that he is opposed to the impeachment. According to the reports, former judiciary chief Ayatollah Seyyed Mahmoud Hashemi Shahroudi has told Larijani that Mortazavi was not the culprit in the crimes that happened in the Kahrizak detention center in the aftermath of the 2009 presidential election, in which at least five young men were murdered and dozens of others were tortured. Shahroudi reportedly affirmed to Larjani that Khamenei is opposed to the impeachment and that he should prevent any move in that direction.

At the same time, reports indicate that Ali Akbar Heidarifar, a leading suspect in the Kahrizak crimes, has been arrested and imprisoned. He, Mortazavi, and the infamous Judge Haddad (Hassan Haddad Dehnavi) are believed to be the main culprits in the crimes.

Confrontation between Ahmadinejad and Larijani brothers

After several pieces of legislation were approved by the Majles, Ahmadinejad refused to issue the executive orders for their implementation. Speaker Larijani thus issued the orders, which articles 85 and 138 of the Constitution permit him to do if the president refuses to do so within 15 days of a law's enactment. Now Ahmadinejad has directed all government organs not to put into effect those laws for which Larijani ordered implementation, calling the speaker's action illegal. Two prominent Majles deputies, Deputy Speaker Mohammad Reza Bahonar and Ahmad Tavakoli, strongly protested the president's action, accusing him in turn of breaking the law.

Without naming him, judiciary chief Sadegh Larijani -- brother of Ali Larijani -- also rebuked Ahmadinejad. He said, "There are hidden ways of corruption that, in my opinion, are far more important than those that are in the public eye. There is a communication octopus that, through wheeling and dealing, has the ability to solve its problems in various places, even with the judiciary. I have identified several manifestations of this, although I cannot speak about all of them. They have a gathering place in a restaurant where these people get together, and even some judges go there. They have food and smoke water pipes, but also discuss their issues." He appeared to be referring to the case involving the embezzlement of nearly $3 billion that roiled the Iranian political scene a few months ago. Among those currently on trial for their involvement in the embezzlement is former Minister of Roads and Transportation Hamid Behbahani, a close confidant of the president and Ahmadinejad's adviser for his Ph.D. degree in civil engineering.

Copyright © 2012 Tehran Bureau

The cynical side to the wrangle over Abu Musa and the Tunbs.

The UAE claims that Abu Musa and two other Persian Gulf islands, the Greater and Lesser Tunbs, administered by Iran belong to them in part. UAE Foreign Minister Sheikh Abdullah ibn Zayed Al-Nahyan called Ahmadinejad's trip a "flagrant violation of the UAE sovereignty." Ali Akbar Salehi, his usually soft-spoken Iranian counterpart, responded that if other countries did not act with "insight and prudence" the situation could become "complicated." The strategically important islands lie along the shipping lanes to the Strait of Hormuz, through which roughly one fifth of all globally traded oil passes.

The three islands were under British authority for most of the 20th century. When the British relinquished control in 1971, just before the UAE declared statehood, Iran under Mohammad Reza Shah Pahlavi seized the islands. The UAE claims that, under an agreement with Britain, Abu Musa was to be administered jointly by Iran and Sharjah, which is now part of the UAE. The UAE has requested the dispute be settled at the International Court of Justice. Iran claims that all three of the islands have belonged to it since "antiquity" -- or at least since the Safavid King Shah Abbas I expelled the Portuguese from the Strait of Hormuz in 1622.

Some have argued that Iranian control of the islands was accepted when the Shah finally agreed to relinquish claim to Bahrain. However, Dr. Roham Alvandi of the London School of Economics and Political Science writes in "Muhammad Reza Pahlavi and the Bahrain Question, 1968-1970" that "the Shah clearly hoped that such a quid pro quo could be achieved as part of a 'package deal' with the British...[but] such a deal was never struck in the course of the Bahrain negotiations."

Ahmadinejad announced he would turn Abu Musa, with its roughly 2,000 residents and an area of slightly less than five square miles, into a tourist destination for Iranians. Following the president's trip, an Iranian television crew produced a news report that highlighted the island's modern infrastructure, which has been financed by the Islamic Republic. The Mehr News Agency called Abu Musa "beloved" by Iranians, who as a result of "false claims" by the UAE have "shown their love for Iranian land." The Iranian Diplomacy website attributed the recent tensions to the "tipping of the balance of power in Iran's favor due to the developments of the region in the last decade." Further exacerbating those tensions, Sunday happened to be National Persian Gulf Day in Iran.

The championing of Iran's claim to the three islands has also reignited another regional dispute, concerning the name of the body of water that is commonly referred to as the Persian Gulf. Most Arab states prefer "the Gulf" and some "the Arabian Gulf" -- the U.S. Navy Style Guide directs American naval personnel to use the latter. Many have argued online that the name of the Persian Gulf is beyond the politics of the Islamic Republic and that its identity belongs to all Iranians. University of Tehran Professor Dr. Sadegh Zibakalam criticized some of the more ultra-patriotic comments in his blog, arguing that the quarrels over the islands and the name of the Persian Gulf offer Iranians "an excuse to express [their] historic spite and hatred against Arabs." He added that some of the harsher Arab responses have parallel motivations.

Largely overlooked is the fact that these nationalist gestures in the virtual world give Iranians the chance to experience a connection to a glorious ancient Persian past, a time before the encroachment of Arab marauders expedited the collapse of the Sassanian Empire. The leaders of the Islamic Republic have often exploited that history as a tool to garner domestic political support, while showing little but disrespect for it otherwise. After the Revolution, if it was not for the citizens of Shiraz who prevented Ayatollah Sadegh Khalkhali from bulldozing the ruins of ancient Persepolis, today this UNESCO World Heritage Site would not exist. Such was the contempt the Islamic Republic's founders had for pre-Muslim Iran. The president's idea that Abu Musa will become a tourist destination is laughable given that true Iranian tourist destinations such as those in Isfahan and Shiraz are today either incompetently managed or almost entirely neglected.

Recent statements from the Islamic Republic's leaders continue to demonstrate their attempt to bury the past. Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei declared that Iranian scholars should stress the greatness of Iran's history since the introduction of Islam, as opposed to its pre-Islamic heritage. Friday Prayers leader Ayatollah Ahmad Khatami, who is appointed by the Supreme Leader, scolded those who have emphasized Iraniat, the study or school of Iranian thought. There are numerous examples of lesser-known clerics and government officials who have disparaged Iranian and Persian national history in a similar manner.

Another twist to the recent surge in Persian nationalism is that it has been brought on by the widely unpopular Ahmadinejad, who only three years ago held onto his office in an election that required massive security intervention to ensure his victory and suppress the subsequent protests. The president and his adviser Esfandiar Rahim Mashaei, sensing that the ruling clergy's policies have alienated large segments of the population, have attempted to generate popular support by emphasizing ancient Iranian history. Pandering to a warped sense of Persian nationalism, Ahmadinejad went so far as to tie a chafiyeh -- the scarf worn by Iranian soldiers during the war with Iraq -- around the neck of an actor portraying Cyrus the Great during the Cyrus Cylinder's 2010-11 visit to Tehran.

Whether or not Ahmadinejad and his team genuinely care about the barren Abu Musa or even Persian nationalism, the impetus for the domestic Iranian community to lean on patriotism when confronted with their Arab neighbors is all too clear. Most of the Arab economies around the Persian Gulf, with an abundance of natural resources and small populations, are growing at near double digit rates. The Iranian economy, grappling with severe international sanctions and gross domestic mismanagement, is hardly growing at all. Youth unemployment is high on both sides, but unlike Iran, most of the Arab states have been able to keep their citizens financially content with payouts. Arab cities like Dubai have become destinations for international commerce even as Iran's government attempts to cut its citizens off from the rest of the world by haplessly stumbling toward a "Halal Intranet." In light of these stark contrasts, it is understandable that some would choose to indulge in a patriotic stupor that hearkens back to a sense of ancient greatness.

The diaspora is not immune to these emotions either. Iran has experienced one of the largest brain drains in the world over the past three decades; many of its dissidents, journalists, and intellectuals are now scattered across the continents. What keeps them most firmly bound to a shared identity is the notion of an ancient glorious Persia, with which they will -- it is imagined -- fully reunite once they return.

Unfortunately, and predictably, in the midst of the recent outburst of nationalist bravado, no one has yet questioned why Ahmadinejad would visit Abu Musa only a few weeks before sensitive negotiations with the P5+1 group over Iran's nuclear program are about to take place. Or why the Iranian president would feel the need to provoke a neighboring country whose commercial ties with the Islamic Republic have been crucial to the struggling Iranian economy.

Despite the lack of tangible gains in a war of names over a body of water and the ownership rights to three indefensible islands with no natural resources, Iranians continue to be heavily motivated by Persian nationalism. Iran's leaders have always been keen to use these sensibilities to their advantage; what prompted the president at this crucial juncture and what he expects to gain are the questions that people should be asking.

Copyright © 2012 Tehran Bureau

The demonization of the humanities (and fetishization of the degree) in Iranian higher ed.

Of the 1.3 million students taking the exam, fully one third would sit for the humanities section of the test, second only to those trying to enter engineering programs. These same students would draw unusual attention some months later as national leaders cast about for reasons to explain what had gone wrong the previous summer. Domestically, the focus turned to academia and the imagined menace of a humanities literature hostile to religion, led by retrograde professors committed to stripping young people of their faith.

In a major speech to academic leaders just before the start of the 2009-10 school year, Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei described the humanities literature as being "based on philosophies whose foundations are materialism and disbelief in godly and Islamic teachings." He added that teaching those disciplines "lead to propagation of skepticism and doubt about religious principles and beliefs." Comments made by the editor of the hardline newspaper Resaalat and fellow traveler Morteza Nabavi were typical: "Many of our universities are under the influence of the humanities, the same humanities in which God is dead. In their...books they say openly 'God is dead and has no place in the political sphere, only humans are central [to such affairs].'"

State planners seeking to retrench the humanities face a thorny challenge. The Islamic Republic has long viewed the expansion and growth of the university system as a cornerstone of its strategy to preserve and strengthen the revolution. By any measure, the state has been phenomenally successful. More than 30 percent of youth ages 18 to 24 are enrolled in some form of higher education, well on pace to reach the state's goal of 60 percent by 2025, an impressive ratio given that as recently as 1996 less than half of high school age students were enrolled in secondary education, much less going on to university. Where war and revolution defined the first generations of postrevolutionary youth in Iran, the shared experience of the current and future generations will be the pursuit of the university degree.

Universities not only provide for the economic and technological self-sufficiency of Iran, but also function as bulwarks against the so-called cultural war, waged by the Great Satan in Washington and her European allies. The problem is those bulwarks are being manned, for the most part, by humanities majors. Of the nearly 3.8 million students enrolled in universities across Iran during 2009-10, more than 1.6 million were enrolled in humanities departments, representing some 45 percent of the total student population. Whereas Iran's university population saw a 17-fold increase between 1978 and 2007, in that same period the number of humanities students increased 25-fold.

Cheaper to organize and support than the sciences, the humanities have provided the leaders of the Islamic Republic with a quick, efficient way of bringing social and educational justice to underserved villages and urban areas, while providing a major point of entry for nontraditional populations into the university system, in particular for women who now comprise some 65 percent of all humanities students. By far the preferred choice of female students, during the 2009-10 school year 648,713 women were enrolled in the humanities departments; engineering came in a distant second, with 176,303 students.

Anxiety over the pernicious effects of the humanities thus comes into conflict with efforts to secure state legitimacy at home. The drive to place limiting quotas on the number of students accepted into humanities departments -- the official policy is to have it down to 14 percent by 2015 -- risks undermining gains made in this area.

Layered within all of the hand wringing over the harmful effects that the humanities are having on Iran's youth are hints of empathy and forgiveness, the sense that the kids know not what they do. Adults are to blame for the addling of youth by academia: "These were children," Nabavi lamented, "who had been nurtured by the Islamic Republic. Suddenly [one day] we opened our eyes and saw that they were soldiers in the anti-religious [Green] movement, willing to take on all manner of risk..."

The notion that young adults are fully impressionable, little more than putty to be molded by the hands of grownups, is a curious conceit given that getting into college in Iran takes an incredible amount of determination and self-motivation. Iranians commonly refer to the metaphor of a reverse funnel when describing their country's university admissions process. Few can pass through the funnel's narrow opening. Once in, however, the payoff is a guaranteed and easy exit out of the wide mouth of the system, after which, in theory at least, there awaits for the student a secure and well-paying job.

While a college degree still offers on average greater social and economic opportunities than those available to non-degree holders, there is mounting evidence that long-term benefits of going to university are approaching balance with its social and economic costs, seen most dramatically in the phenomenon of "waithood," the delayed entry of youth into the labor and marriage markets, and by extension, adulthood. With unemployment rates for young college-educated Iranians greater than the average for the entire country, increasing numbers of youth are living at home with their parents while they await work, not unlike their American peers.

Unlike in the United States, where the current discourse reflects a growing sense that young people who played by the rules but now face diminished prospects in the job market have been sold a bill of goods, young people in Iran appear to be doubling down on the promise of higher education. Bottlenecks that once existed at the undergraduate level are steadily being pushed upwards to the graduate level. Of the approximately 900,000 students who apply each year for master's programs, only 60,000 are accepted, some 6 percent. The figures for Ph.D. programs are even worse: fewer than 5 percent of those seeking doctorates make it through, a meager 6,000 students out of 127,000 applicants.

One explanation for this contradiction, not easily measured or correlated by employment data, is the phenomenal social pressure upon families to get the badge of the college degree. "Most parents in Iran," writes economist Djavad Salehi-Isfahani, "have a simple yet ambitious educational objective for their children -- to enter university." For ordinary Iranians, there exists ample anecdotal evidence that "uneducated" sons and, increasingly, daughters face diminished prospects for marriage and entry into adult social life if they don't finish (at minimum) their studies at the bachelor's level. Parents, concerned for the welfare of their children and anxious over losing face with their friends, family, and neighbors, spend what are often limited resources on their children's education, including private schools and tutors. If the children fail, at least it will not be because they weren't given the best possible shot. "The rest," as one father put it, referring to the perilous job market for young people, "is the fault of society."

The thinking of many kids and their families seems to be, Well if Ali and Sara are not working and are living at home because they can't get married (because they're not working), they might as well "improve" while they wait. Under such circumstances, keeping busy or sargarmai (literally, keeping one's head warm) by getting educated becomes a pragmatic choice.

Analysts regularly depict young Iranians, the overeducated and underemployed 70 percent of the population under 30, as a tinderbox waiting to explode, forever on edge. For now, it would seem, the Islamic Republic doesn't need to deliver jobs, so long as it delivers access to universities. It may prove to be the case that the pernicious influence of universities lies not in the classroom or the inscrutable musings of 20th-century French philosophers, but in the pressures exerted by societies of merit that, from a young age, train their children to blindly pursue a credential more than an education.

Copyright © 2012 Tehran Bureau

[ tech ] Google has taken down the blog of Iranian security researcher Khosrow Zarefarid after he posted the account and pin numbers of three million customers from 22 banks across Iran.

They have not, however, revoked Zarefarid's overall privileges to blog on the Google platform, Blogger, where he maintains the site Banking Problems in Iran.

Zarefarid states on his Facebook page that he lives in Tehran. Before publishing the private banking information he hacked, Zarefarid sent a letter to the banks' CEOs waning them of the flaws in their security. Upon receiving no response, he set out to prove his point. Apparently, he didn't take any money while accessing citizens' accounts.

The Central Bank of the Islamic Republic (CBI) is urging customers to change their pin numbers. In a country with an extremely centralized banking system, the sheer number of banks compromised in this hack are likely to stir panic among private citizens whose worries already include high inflation, fluctuation in interest rates and the ripple effect of international economic sanctions.

News of this latest computer hack in Iran comes as the government advances plans to cut Iranians off from the World Wide Web and to offer a "halal" or "clean internet" in its place. The government currently blocks access to Facebook, Gmail, Google Reader and millions of other sites. Though many question the government's practical ability to do so, plans for a national intarnet would prevent Iranians from accessing all but preapproved information vetted by the government.

Copyright © 2012 Tehran Bureau

From the "clown phase" to "The Godfather," other immigrant experiences have a lot to teach.

The way these communities are depicted in the mass media is a measure of their assimilation into American society. In a widely cited analysis published in 1969, communications scholar Cedric C. Clark argued that minority groups go through four stages of representation in the media:

* non-recognition -- in which the group's existence is not acknowledged by the dominant media;

* ridicule -- in which certain minority characters are portrayed as being lazy, silly, irrational, or simply laughable;

* recognition -- in which certain minority characters are portrayed as being dominant or enforcers of the group's norms; and

* respect -- in which the minority group is portrayed in the same manner as any other group

According to Clark, these stages are part of a minority population's overall evolution within American culture.

Communication scholars often point to the 1972 release of the film version of The Godfather as a pivotal moment in Italian Americans' achievement of recognition and eventual respect. The film thrust the Italian American experience into the American mainstream. Director Francis Ford Coppola transformed a story about organized crime, with all its deplorable facets, into a film that captures the beauty of Italian culture through the journey of an Italian family striving to attain the American Dream. According to film analyst Tom Santopietro, "The Godfather was a turning point in American cultural consciousness. With its emphasis on proud ethnicity, it changed not just the way Italian Americans saw themselves, but how Americans of all background viewed their individual and national self-identities, their possibilities, and attendant disappointments."

Recognition of Iranian Americans has not yet occurred as it did it for Italian Americans with The Godfather. But they are on their way. With its caricaturization of Iranian Americans as shallow self-absorbed dilettantes, Bravo's reality show Shahs of Sunset provides mainstream America a new image of Iranians: not as crazed revolutionary Islamists, but as harmless buffoons. Iranian Americans have effectively entered Clark's ridicule stage of representation -- more colloquially known as the "clown phase" of the immigrant experience -- a period in which the group's members are no longer feared by mainstream America as untrustworthy and potentially dangerous, but are instead ridiculed and humiliated for others' amusement.

In actuality, of course, Iranian Americans fit neither the religious zealot nor the ignorant clown stereotype. In spite of the fact that Iran is currently ruled by a theocratic government, Iranian Americans are significantly less religious than the broader American public. The most recent PEW Research Center study on religion indicates that only 5 percent of Americans are either agnostic or atheist; according to polls conducted by Zogby Research Services for the Public Affairs Alliance of Iranian Americans (PAAIA), the analogous rate among Iranian Americans is double that. They are also among the most successful and well-educated populations in the United States, with numerous individuals highly regarded for their contributions to American business and culture.

Nonetheless, according to one PAAIA-commissioned Zogby survey, one third of Americans are not familiar with an Iranian American; indeed, more Americans indicate that they are familiar with the Iranian government than with someone of Iranian origin. This suggests that their impressions are in large part formed by media reports on Iran. Until recently, Iranian Americans were rarely if ever represented on television in anything other than news-driven shows. Iranian American actors have often been cast as Middle Eastern characters from other countries. And the few Iranian American characters who have appeared in movies such as House of Sand and Fog were largely unsympathetic.

In sum, Iranian Americans were long buried in the non-recognition phase of Clark's schema. The Iranian movie A Separation, winner of the 2012 Oscar for Best Foreign-Language Film, marked one of the first instances in which American audiences of any size saw the Iranian people depicted in a sympathetic manner, coping with issues very like those faced by many American households. Although the film surely improves the image of Iranians generally in the eyes of Americans, it still does not provide that missing image of Iranian Americans as members of the mainstream in their adopted land.

So what is next for Iranian Americans? Like the many immigrants who came before, we too must evolve to the stage of self-realization, in which we can regulate our own image. We are headed in the right direction. Ten years ago, there were no national organizations that could effectively promote a positive image of the Iranian American community. Today there is PAAIA, to which I belong, a national organization devoted to improving the image of Iranian Americans. As part of this effort, PAAIA has supported an upcoming PBS documentary portraying some of the many accomplishments of the community's members, titled The Iranian Americans.

Iranian Americans must continue to move forward from where we are to where we have never been: a stage where we can tell a story that captures our experiences and values in a dignified fashion. If Coppola could make a film about the admirable values of Italian Americans in the backdrop of a crime story, then it is not too much to imagine that Iranian Americans can one day provide their narrative in a way that is compelling to the broader society. Beset by revolution, war, and tyranny, more than one million Iranian Americans now make the United States their home. So many of us have left our homeland in pursuit of the American Dream. And the dream is still with us.

Copyright © 2012 Tehran Bureau

Stronger voter ID verification, but even less transparency in ballot tabulation.

For years, Iranians have voted by presenting their shenasnameh, a document similar to a passport. Typically, voters could cast their ballot anywhere in the country by presenting the shenasnameh, which was then stamped. Iran has not maintained separate voter registration lists, nor has it required that voters cast their ballots at a specific precinct. Iranians often refer to the shenasnameh as a "birth certificate" as it is typically issued at the time and location of a person's birth. It is the responsibility of the local issuing agencies to report to the national authorities the documents they have issued, which they appear to have done less than systematically, especially in the countryside. If a shenasnameh is reported lost, a new document can usually be issued, again locally. For that and many other reasons, the Interior Ministry has since 2008 issued each Iranian aged 15 and over, in addition to the shenasnameh, a national identity card (cart-e melli), which is recorded in a national database with a unique number and a photo.

In part because of the inadequacies of the traditional voter identification process, the government intended to hold the Islamic Republic's eighth parliamentary elections in 2008 electronically. However, the plan was not approved by the Guardian Council, the constitutional watchdog body, due to a lack of monitoring infrastructure for electronic voting. A member of the Majles's Local Councils and Internal Affairs Commission, Ayoub Papari, stated last July that the 2012 parliamentary elections would again not be held electronically for that reason. However, in November, Interior Minister Mohammad Mostafa Najar announced that electronic voting would be fully implemented at ten percent of polling stations around the country in time for the vote. It was also announced that verification of voter identification would be conducted electronically in all constituencies on Election Day.

The March 2 elections saw the beginning of a shift to a new system of voting. For the first time, all voters were required to carry both their shenasnamehs and cart-e mellis to the polls. Verification of cart-e melli numbers was implemented electronically at all polling stations around the country. According to the Interior Ministry, voters had their information transferred online to a supervisory terminal to be verified. However, it is not clear what measures were taken by the Interior Ministry to ensure that the verification systems would keep records of cart-e melli numbers if a system at a polling station, constituency, or city failed to stay connected to the database network on Election Day. In order to verify voter identification online and prevent voters from casting multiple ballots, the verification systems at polling stations need to be continuously connected to the database of names of eligible voters. Any disconnection or power outage that disrupts the verification procedure could make repeat voting possible.

In addition, electronic voting was administered at 1,395 polling stations in 14 out of 207 electoral districts for the first time in round one of the elections. While detailed information about the mechanics of electronic voting in Iran is scarce, it appears that the recently introduced system involves the voter entering preferences on a screen. Amir Shojaan, head of the Center for Innovation, Administrative Development, and Information Technology at the Interior Ministry, described the process as similar to using an ATM. A card is fed into the machine that prevents the voter from casting more than one ballot. The votes are recorded in the memory of the voting machine and later transferred. A paper record is generated in case a recount is ordered. It is not clear what, if any, procedures allow candidates' election monitors to verify that the results are being properly recorded -- where paper ballots are used, monitors can verify ballots cast into the boxes.

The electronic voting pilot project apparently did not meet with the success that officials claimed. While Interior Minister Najar stated after the election that the counting of ballots in the 14 designated constituencies took 60 to 90 minutes, the order in which results were made public by his ministry shows something else. The election results of three of the electronic voting constituencies were among the first to be announced by the Interior Ministry. The results of six others were announced, after a considerable delay, the day following the election, and the election results of the final five were announced yet another day later. Technical issues were reported from the designated constituencies, and it is not clear what infrastructure was put in place to ensure the integrity of the election process. The Interior Ministry's very late announcement of the election results in 11 out of the 14 constituencies is also evidence of lack of transparency and fuels suspicions of vote tampering.

It was already surprising that the Guardian Council okayed electronic voting for 2012 vote despite the recent reports that the necessary infrastructure was still lacking. It is possible that the council and the Interior Ministry plan to hold Iran's 2013 presidential election fully electronically, and that the implementation of electronic voting was expedited in preparation for that crucial contest. Electronic voting could provide the Iranian authorities with the opportunity to more effectively manipulate election results and thus better maintain legitimacy in the eyes of Iranians and the international community. Western policymakers should take note of this year's parliamentary election process, as it may presage more sweeping procedural changes to come.

Copyright © 2012 Tehran Bureau

Remembering Bijan Jazani and other victims of the SAVAK.

[ comment ] One of the most controversial figures in the regime of Mohammad Reza Shah Pahlavi was Parviz Sabeti. In the 1960s and 1970s, most Iranians were not familiar with him by name, though they were exposed to many of his statements, attributed simply to a "high-ranking security official." But he was despised by the opposition to the Shah, among whom his name was synonymous with torture and death. Born on March 25, 1936, in Sangesar in what is now the province of Semnan to a Baha'i family, Sabeti received a law degree from the University of Tehran and joined the SAVAK, the Shah's dreaded security apparatus, in 1957. He quickly rose to become the acting director of the SAVAK's so-called third division -- its political directorate -- and was eventually named to the post on a permanent basis.

After the Shah banned all opposition political groups, in the mid-1960s two armed organizations formed to oppose his rule -- a development Mehdi Bazargan had predicted after he was expelled from his professorship at the University of Tehran amid a series of opposition purges. One was the Mojahedin-e Khalgh Organization (MKO); the other was the Organization of Iranian People's Fadaian Guerrillas. Both began carrying out assassinations of high-ranking military and government officials of the Shah's regime, as well as attacks on government offices, banks, and other facilities; the MKO also targeted U.S. military advisers inside the country.

The Shah's regime responded violently in kind, establishing the infamous Joint Committee to Fight Terrorism, which was headed by Sabeti in practice, though it always had a military officer as its figurehead chief. "By 1970," writes Dr. Abbas Milani in The Persian Sphinx, Sabeti's "power permeated all facets of Iranian life." Torture, beatings, show trials in military courts, executions, and even extra-judicial killings were all normal modes of operation for the SAVAK and the Committee. For example, Mehdi Rezaei, an MKO member, was arrested in April 1972 and executed that September at the age of 20, after enduring horrific torture. Ali Asghar Badizadegan, one of the MKO's founders, was forced into an electric oven according to his comrade Lotfollah Meysami. He was burned so badly that he became paralyzed, and the SAVAK refused to turn over his body after he was executed in May 1972. As Ali Gheissari writes in Iranian Intellectuals in the Twentieth Century, under Sabeti the Committee was also "responsible for the arbitrary detention, interrogation, and torture of many university students during that period."

Two classmates of mine, Mohammad Ali Bagheri, a pious Muslim, and Hamid Arian, a secular leftist, were lost to the political violence of the era. We were all students at the Faculty of Engineering of the University of Tehran, having been admitted in 1972 after passing the national entrance examination, or concours. Bagheri was executed by the regime, while Arian was killed in an armed clash with the SAVAK. Four other good young men that I personally knew, all secular leftists, who were a year or two ahead of me in the engineering department, were also killed: Mahmoud Vahidi and Saeed Kord were poisoned in the notorious Evin Prison, while Mansoor Farshidi and Mahmoud Namazi were killed in an armed clash. Numerous other students, including many friends in the engineering department, were imprisoned, beaten, and given long jail sentences.

To comprehend the atmosphere of terror that dominated the political arena at that time, consider the following. The house of a student friend of mine was raided by the SAVAK, and an engineering book was found there that he had borrowed from the engineering department library. In those days, the borrower's name would be written on a card attached to the back of the book. One of the students who had previously borrowed the book was Nastaran Al-e Agha, an engineering student and a major figure in the Fadaian who was killed on June 22, 1976, in an armed confrontation with the SAVAK. Because the book had been borrowed previously by Al-e Agha, my friend was held in jail for months, just to make sure that there was no connection between the two. Such was the state of terror in the days when Sabeti was at the helm of the Committee and the leading figure in the conflict between the opposition and the Pahlavi regime. His name was identified with a host of brutal acts. He would appear on national television and talk about what had happened every time the regime declared a "victory" against the opposition, and in particular the "terrorist" MKO and Fadaian.

As the revolutionary movement began to gather steam in 1978, Sabeti wanted the Shah to declare a state of emergency, dismiss the Majles, close the U.S. and British embassies to protest the West's role in the protests against the regime, and use an iron fist to put down the demonstrators. But the Shah was weak, and the Revolution was vastly popular. Sabeti left Iran and now lives in Florida in exile, where he has been active in business.

As more crimes were committed by the Islamic Republic, some began to rewrite history to fabricate a more positive image of the Pahlavi regime, and even of Sabeti. In his book Eminent Persians, Milani claims that Sabeti was a "hardheaded realist" with "an unabashed belief in the salutary use of force, even authoritarianism," who believed that "the source of unhappiness [with the Shah's regime] among the Iranian people was not the absence of democracy or free elections.... [They] support an authoritarian king so long as the regime is free from corruption and is moving the country in the right direction." According to Milani, the Iranian people "prefer bread and security to freedom and want." The conclusion is that the crimes committed by Sabeti were due to his "realism."

What brought Sabeti's horrendous crimes to the fore again recently was an interview he gave to the Voice of America in February (see here, as well). In the interview, Sabeti denied that torture, beatings, and other forms of violence against political prisoners was systematic and rampant in Iran's prisons before the Revolution. He attacked national hero Dr. Mohammad Mosaddegh -- as do many Iranian monarchists -- calling him a deluded demagogue, and he did his best to rewrite the political crimes committed by the Shah's regime and his own role in them. The interview prompted a huge wave of protest among Iranian political activists, particularly those who had suffered under the Shah, but also among practically every strata of Iranian society, both inside the country and beyond. See here, here, here, and here, for example. Two political prisoners, engineering students Esmail Khataei and Manouchehr Mokhtari, who had been tortured by the Committee provided vivid accounts of what had happened to them. One hundred and ninety-eight former political prisoners who had witnessed the tortures during the Shah's reign issued a strongly worded statement.

The anniversary of one of the most horrendous crimes committed by the SAVAK during the era of Sabeti's dominance passed recently, one that highlights a defining characteristic of the last years of the Shah's regime: his absolute resistance to any political opening. Many political activists, such as the outspoken reformist Mostafa Tajzadeh, who is currently in jail, have publicly stated that the Revolution would not have occurred if the Shah had loosened the stranglehold he maintained over legal political activity in the country.

On April 19, 1975 (30 Farvardin 1354), nine courageous political prisoners -- Ahmad Jalil Afshar, Mohammad Choupanzadeh, Bijan Jazani, Mashoof (Saeed) Kalantari (Jazani's maternal uncle), Aziz Sarmadi, Abbas Sourki, Hassan Zia Zarifi, Mostafa Javan Khoshdel, and Kazem Zolanvar -- who had been convicted in the Shah's military courts were murdered by the SAVAK. (In that era, the civilian courts refused to stage trials of the Shah's political opponents, unlike today when they are a central tool of repression.) The first seven were members of the Fadaian; the last two were members of the MKO. Jazani was serving a 15-year sentence, Zia Zarifi a life sentence, and the rest ten years each, of which four to seven years had already been served.

Born in 1938 in Tehran to a middle-class family, Jazani was first arrested for his political activities in December 1953, a few months after the CIA-sponsored coup that deposed Mosaddegh. Claiming that his name was Hossien Mahmoodi, he was able to post bail and was released after three months. Arrested in May 1954 at a political gathering (disguised as a wedding ceremony), he again gave a false name and was released. That fall, he was summoned to court over the previous year's case and served a six-month prison term. After his release, he was not allowed back in high school, so he enrolled in Kamal al-Molk's art academy. With a friend, he subsequently founded the Persepolis Advertising Company, which created paintings for local merchants. Jazani was the head painter. The company made good money, and Jazani had a comfortable life.

In 1959, he resumed his studies and received his high school diploma. He also began publishing Nedaa-ye Khalgh with the goal of uniting the opposition to the Shah, but was soon forced to shut down the periodical. The next year he was accepted to the philosophy program at the University of Tehran, and in October 1960 he married his childhood sweetheart, Mihan Ghoreishy. They had two sons, Babak and Mazyar.

Iran was in severe economic straits during that era, due in large part to the Shah's policies, which included extravagant military expenditures. When in the spring of 1960, Iran asked for financial assistance from the United States and the World Bank, the latter demanded the regime reduce salaries and revise certain economic plans in order to receive $35 million. The Kennedy administration also demanded political and economic reform in return for $85 million in assistance. The Shah announced that the elections for the 20th Majles would be open to all parties -- while that did not materialize, the announcement itself indicated that the regime could be forced to retreat. The Second National Front movement was launched and a series of protests organized by university students began, of which Jazani was a leader. He was arrested on May 22, 1965, and incarcerated for nine months. After his release, he organized his group again with Zia Zarifi. Jazani and many other members of the group were arrested in January 1968. This time, he was imprisoned until his murder.

Jazani was a leading leftist intellectual. Through his books The Thirty-Year History of Iran and How Armed Struggle Becomes Popular and other writings, he contributed greatly to the theoretical and practical discussions about how to confront the Shah's regime. In the former book, written in the 1960s, Jazani predicted with remarkable accuracy that if a revolution did topple the Shah, it would be led by Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini. To read more about Jazani and his comrades, see On the Life and the Work of Bijan Jazani, a Collection of Essays (Khavaran, Paris, 1999).

Zia Zarifi was a lawyer. Kalantary was a radio and TV technician. Sourki was a student of political science and an employee of the Central Bank. In 1959, Sourki had formed an opposition group, Razm Avaran, that merged with Jazani's organization in the fall of 1966. Choupanzadeh and Sarmadi were both day laborers. Jalil Afshar joined the Fadaian when he was still in high school. I am almost certain that he was my classmate in ninth grade, though the passage of time means I am not 100 percent sure. I say this because I remember that, about a year after the killings, a high school friend told me about a classmate of ours who had been killed by the SAVAK. Both Khoshdel and Zolanvar were major figures in the MKO.

On March 3, 1975, the Shah announced a ban on all the legal political parties. There were three at that time, all loyal to the monarch: along with the dominant Iran-e Novin (New Iran), there was also Mardom (People) and Pan-Iranist. A joke went that Iran-e Novin was the party of "Yes, sir," while Mardom was the party of "Absolutely, sir." The Shah ordered the establishment of a single new party, Rastakhiz (Resurrection), and declared, "Anyone who does not like this system can get his passport and leave the country."

The Shah's announcement was broadcast on television live throughout the country -- I watched it at home -- including in Evin Prison. It has been reported widely that when the Shah announced his decision, Sourki told his comrades, "They will kill us all." After only seven weeks, he was proved correct.

The executioners were led by Reza Attarpour -- a notorious SAVAK agent under the alias Dr. Hossein Zadeh, he escaped to Israel after the Revolution -- and Colonel Vaziri, Evin's warden. Another SAVAK agent who was involved was Bahman Naderipour, known as Hossein Tehrani, who throughout the 1970s was responsible for savagely beating and torturing many political prisoners. After the Revolution, Tehrani would describe on national television how he had committed torture under direct orders from Sabeti. Here is an excerpt from his first-hand account of what happened on that day, originally published in Kayhan on May 24, 1979:

We took the prisoners to the high hills above Evin. They were blindfolded and their hands were tied. We got them off the minibus and had them sit on the ground. Then Attarpour told them that, just as your friends have killed our comrades, we have decided to execute you -- "the brain behind those executions...." Jazani and the others began protesting. I do not know whether it was Attarpour or Colonel Vaziri who first pulled out a machine gun and started shooting them. I do not remember whether I was the fourth or fifth person to whom they gave the machine gun. I had never done that before...

He went on to describe how Sadi Jalil Esfahani -- another SAVAK agent, known as Babak -- then shot the prisoners in their heads to make sure that they were dead. It was announced that the nine men had been killed as they were trying to escape, while being transferred from Evin (Kayhan, April 19, 1975). I vividly recall reading the official story in Kayhan. The doctor who examined the nine corpses recorded that the bullets had entered through the victims' chests, not their backs, as would have been the case had they been attempting to flee. The SAVAK, of course, did not allow the doctor to question the cause of death in his report.

When Amir Asadollah Alam, the Shah's long-time confidant and Imperial Court minister, asked why the men had been murdered, the Shah answered, "We had no choice. They were all terrorists, and would have escaped, which would have been worse" (The Alam Diary, edited by A. Aalikhani, Maziar Press, Tehran, 2003, volume V, p. 69). From Eminent Persians:

Easily the revelation most damaging to Sabeti's career came after the revolution, from one of SAVAK's star interrogators. During his trial, he revealed what the opposition had known for many years. At the height of terrorist activities, one of the groups had killed a prominent leader of SAVAK. Nine leading figures of the opposition -- all already tried and convicted on different charges -- were taken to the hills outside Tehran and shot in cold blood.... In the course of the revelations, the interrogator made clear that while Sabeti did not directly participate in the act, he was not only informed but was the mastermind.

In his VOA interview, Sabeti repeated the claim that the nine men were killed during an escape attempt.

Just like the Islamic Republic, the Shah's regime adhered to the philosophy expressed by Joseph Stalin: "Death solves all problems. No man, no problem." The graves of the nine courageous men and many others who were executed in the 1970s are in Section 33 of Behesht-e Zahra, Tehran's main cemetery.

One can try to rewrite history, but facts always shine through even the thickest fog of propaganda and lies.

Copyright © 2012 Tehran Bureau

"A country with such vast natural resources should be able to take better care of its people."

[ dispatch ] Sickness and morbidity are conditions so universal that finding elements about them that are unique to Iran is difficult. Still, working as a doctor, especially an ER physician, gives one the rare opportunity to observe a society at its best and its worst. You encounter the neglected, forgotten, and wronged, and yet, perhaps even simultaneously, you bear witness to acts of heroism, love, and affection. By telling the story of one of my days working as an ER physician in an urban hospital in Iran, I hope that I can provide you with a glimpse inside the struggles and challenges of modern Iranian society.

ER service is hard and stressful anywhere in the world. But being underpaid and overworked doesn't help. As a GP, I am paid $600 a month, while I work sometimes as many as 100 hours in a week. My situation is not unique; almost all GPs in Iran are grossly underpaid. The ER where I work, despite several rounds of repairs and refits, still looks battered and run down. The exhausted staff tend to greet patients unenthusiastically and with a touch of aggression. It seems that the ER manages to suck the liveliness out of everyone who works there for any length of time. Although I try my best to greet everyone with a broad smile, by the end of my 24-hour shifts I can barely muster a mere fasciculation of the lips.

These problems plague most ERs in the country; all public hospitals suffer from lack of resources, old infrastructure, underpaid and overworked staff. The private hospitals fare much better, but the main burden of health care is borne by the public facilities. The private hospitals largely limit themselves to performing elective procedures -- mostly cosmetic surgery -- and even though they are required to have an ER, it is routine for them to unlawfully refuse to admit critical patients.

My most unforgettable shift was a bitter cold day in February. By then I had worked in the ER for two months and had adapted to the routine. The day started relatively well, with some ordinary sorts of cases: a man with influenza, a child with diarrhea, and an asthmatic whose condition was aggravated by the thick smog of the city.

Iranians put great stock in antibiotics, especially parenteral antibiotics -- the man with influenza demanded a shot of penicillin, which I refused. I hopelessly tried to explain that he had a viral condition which would not respond to antibiotic treatment, but still he left grumbling and cursing under his breath. I prescribed ORT (oral rehydration therapy) for the child, again struggling to explain to the parents that their child did not need antibiotics or an IV infusion. The father was not having any of it. He yelled at his wife, "Let's go to a real doctor who knows what he's doing."

Sure enough, they took the child with them without even considering ORT. I knew that they would go to a private clinic where a doctor would cater to their every wish as long as they were willing to pay, which would almost certainly mean that the child would receive unnecessary and quite possibly harmful treatment. The only mildly satisfied patient was the asthmatic man, who responded well to treatment but still managed to find something wrong with the speed of service and give me a good ten minutes of verbal abuse when I revisited him on my rounds.

All morning, patients with minor complaints kept coming in; one after another, I had to deal with runny noses and grumbling guts. The problem with our ER, as well as with many others in the country, is that we have no triage system in place. The hospital cannot afford to hire a triage nurse and so everyone who comes in is guided to my office. Unfortunately, Iranians seem to have no understanding of what words such as "emergency" and "urgency" actually mean. In our ER, which is in a rather dodgy part of the city, it is not even first come, first served; whoever is most aggressive or can yell loudest is shown into my office first. I have given up trying to explain that a common cold is not an emergency and just hope that those patients truly in need of care are not overlooked amid the unending stream of patients with minor complaints.

At noon, just as I was starting my lunch (which I have to eat right there in the ER, as there is no one else to cover the floor), one of those serious cases was brought in. It was a man in his 20s, who in the heat of an argument with his family had swallowed a bottle cap full of the herbicide Paraquat. As yet, he was complaining only of burning in his mouth. I administered charcoal and performed a urine sodium dithionate test that proved he was poisoned. Then I had to give them the bad news: the highly fatal poison was in his blood and he needed to be transferred immediately to a center with hemodialysis equipment. The boy and his family were devastated. Given his still minor symptoms, they could not believe how serious the situation was. When I found out that the whole thing had been over a $30 phone bill, I was devastated in turn: a life for 30 dollars.

Every day, I see many attempted suicides. Most of them are not serious cases, but there are exceptions. Most are young adults -- typically a girl whose family has found out about a secret relationship she has with a boy. Having a boyfriend or a girlfriend is still a big taboo in Iran, especially in rural areas and conservative cities. Along with financial woes, it is one of the leading causes of family conflict and consequently suicide attempts. Fortunately, most just take a bunch of pills to ease the family pressure or gain the attention of their loved ones. But during almost every one of my shifts, I face a more serious case. While most are saved, due to lack of follow-up and the persistence of the root causes, many of these young people try again and again until they succeed.

The fate of the boy had caused me great anguish, but before I could regain my composure the EMS staff brought in two bloody bodies and I jumped to look at them: a child and her mother. They were victims of a car crash on the main road nearby; their Iranian-made Kia Pride had collided with a truck, instantly killing two members of their family. Road accidents are a major source of injury and mortality in Iran, and thus a sizable share of my patient load are crash victims -- at my particular location, mainly motorcyclists. I stabilized the mother, who was more critical, as best as I could, called the attending surgeon, and with his consent prepped her for immediate surgery.

Fortunately, the child was stable and unharmed except for a few cuts and bruises. As I was inspecting her, a young man with an insignificant cut on his arm came toward me, yelling. He grabbed my lab coat and threatened to beat me up because he had been in the ER for five minutes already and had not been seen to. I tried to break free, but he was much bigger and stronger. Suddenly, a seemingly frail elderly lady rushed to my aid and to my surprise managed to extricate me. She took me to a corner and sat me down, then started to speak calmly to the young man. By the time security showed up, it all was over. (The security personnel always arrive suspiciously late to such altercations, leaving the medical staff vulnerable to the displays of violence that regularly erupt in the ER.) Fighting back tears and anger, I told the young man that I would tend to him immediately after I finished inspecting the child. She, visibly suffering from physical pain as well as grief at the tragedy that had just befallen her family, took my hand and said, "Khubid aghaye, doctor?" Her compassion in the face of what she was enduring made my day. Are you OK, doctor?

To be honest, I don't blame anyone for being edgy. Life is quite hard for most people around here, but despite widespread poverty, many still manage to be amicable and kind most of the time. If you are a foreigner here visiting, I can assure you that even in the poorest corner you will find many welcoming souls and even many who will share their little food or battered shelter with you. Even the young man came to me a few minutes later, ashamed. He apologized, kissed me on the cheeks (as is customary in Iran), and tried to explain why he had lashed out. I interrupted him with a simple "It's OK," and he nodded. We Iranians hardly ever hold a grudge.

My shift was turning out to be a hectic scenario fit for an episode of ER, and it was only to get worse. A woman in her 70s complaining of hip pain was brought in by her daughter. Suspecting a hip fracture, I ordered an X-ray. Sure enough, she had a femoral neck fracture that would require an arthroplasty. When I told her this and described the potential cost of the surgery, she and her daughter burst into tears and wanted to leave. The cost of health care has spiraled up in recent years, which means that every major medical intervention imposes a catastrophic burden on the average household, let alone poor ones.

Seeing their desperation, I called the supervisor and with her permission filled out a form requesting special presidential aid for the woman. Ahmadinejad has set up a petition system to help impoverished citizens with serious problems: patients are referred to the local ostandari (governor's office), where they receive a presidential letter that requires public hospitals to provide them service free of charge. The doctors in such cases also give considerable discounts or even waive their fees altogether because their cooperation puts them in good standing with the authorities; most of the patients are thus referred to well-connected doctors who want to remain in the official loop. This system has been fairly effective, though it has contributed to the public hospitals' growing level of debt. I hospitalized the mother and told the daughter to take the form to the ostandari the next day. Fortunately, our attending orthopedist needs a lot of official favors!

By eight in the evening, the ER had become overcrowded and it was proving to be too much. I called the supervisor and told her that we could not handle any more patients and that she needed to tell the ambulance dispatchers to direct any further cases in the area to another hospital. For the most part, they complied. From then until the next morning, EMS brought in only two patients; one with chest pain that proved to be nothing serious; the other, a boy of 12 who was a regular at the ER. His name was Sina. An HIV-positive street child addicted to IV heroin, he was usually brought in suffering either from withdrawal or an overdose.

Because of his HIV status, both the juvenile detention center and the behzisti (state welfare organization) refused to keep him for long. This time Sina had overdosed after injecting a mixture of heroin and lemon juice. He responded to Naloxone and I told the nurse to call the social worker, but he fled from the hospital the instant he regained consciousness. Unfortunately, what we can do is limited; the healthcare system is not supported by a functioning social welfare system capable of following up on cases such as Sina's. We thus encounter such patients at successive stages of their ceaseless downward spiral, until one last visit after which we never see them again.

I had previously tried to help such patients and I had tried very hard to help Sina in particular, but I had failed miserably, and every time I saw him I was struck by the extent of that failure: my own failure as a doctor, the hospital's failure, the healthcare system's failure, the society's failure, our collective failure as human beings.

Later a drunken man was brought in by police. While drinking alcohol, like taking drugs, is criminalized in Iran, the authorities prefer not to prosecute most drunks or addicts and they are taken to hospitals instead. (Drunkenness is punishable by 80 lashes under the law, but only rarely is a drunk taken to jail to face this punishment.) While I appreciate the tolerance, there is nothing we can do for them. So I just provided the drunken man with a bed so he could sleep it off.

The tragedy of the shift came at 3 a.m. By then, all was calm and I was snoozing behind my desk when I was woken up by the desperate plea of a chador-clad woman: "Bring him to life." She put a 15-day-old infant swaddled in many layers of clothing and fabric on my desk. I unwrapped the child and looked: cyanosed and mottled, he was dead. He had been dead for at least half an hour. I put on my stethoscope and searched for a heart sound. There was none. I started CPR and with the first chest compression I saw a frothy fluid coming out of his mouth. I asked the woman what she had fed him. "Water and sugar," she answered. After a few minutes of CPR, I gave up. There was nothing that could be done.

"He is dead, my dear lady," I said.

"But he is warm," the woman pleaded.

"Dead..."

"For God's sake."

"I swear to the same God -- he is dead."

The woman was the infant's aunt. The father was in jail for drug trafficking, the mother was sick, and the aunt was the only refuge for the child. Out of desperation, she had given him water and sugar, so much that it had suffocated him. Perhaps something could have been done if he had been brought in an hour earlier. Perhaps something more could have been done a few days earlier or even a few months earlier, before he was born, but by the time he was taken to me it was already too late, much too late.

As I filled out the forms to transfer him to the morgue, his aunt was speaking to another of the infant's relatives. Pointing in my direction, she said, "They killed him." I wanted to answer, "You killed him," but I just said, "He was dead," and suddenly I burst into tears, the events of the night having finally gotten the best of me.

The last hours of my shift passed quietly. I was seated behind my desk, exhausted and burnt out. The emotional and physical toll of the preceding 24 hours coupled with a sleepless night had left me a wreck. The sun rose slowly from the horizon and redness crept upon the deep black of the sky. The morning-shift janitor started to wash the floor of the ER, the foul smell of ammonia awakening me fully. And then finally relief: the next doctor came to take over from me and my shift was done.

Being a doctor in Iran is not as rewarding as one might think. As I said, the work is hard and the pay is not good, especially for us GPs. But the really hard part is that you are reminded every day how little you can do and how dependent the well-being of individuals is on the uncertain commitment of society and government. People here have a right not to be pleased with the healthcare system. A country with such vast natural resources should be able to take better care of its people.

Ashfia Hasani is a pen name.

Copyright © 2012 Tehran Bureau

Embracing the cauliflower.

[ life+style ] In college, at the end of my occasional weekend visits, my father would send me back to the dorm with a warm kuku sabzi, wrapped in foil to keep in my mini-fridge as a healthy study snack.

For those unfamiliar with the dish, kuku is a Persian frittata and sabzi means green (as in the color) or greens (as in vegetables). Kuku sabzi is made by finely chopping a mountain of fresh herbs and cooking them with spices and just enough eggs to bind them into an aromatic green sponge.

It tastes much better than it sounds. The difference, I often tell my friends, is the proportion of eggs to other ingredients. While omelets are mostly eggs filled with stuff, kuku is mostly filling held together by eggs, a subtle but crucial difference.

Skeptical at first, my hallmates learned to love kuku sabzi, placing orders when I went home to bring back "more of that good spongy stuff."

Like its egg-based cousins the tortilla, omelet and frittata, kuku can take infinite forms. Until my twenties, however, I had only ever tasted kuku sabzi. Similarly, when it came to khoresht, Persian stews served over rice, I could list only a handful of the most classical dishes.

In a diaspora, the collective imagination defines the homeland. And that definition tends to be strict.

The people making Persian food for me -- my father and his sister, my empathetic American mother, the small cluster of Iranian families in their social circle -- cooked to fulfill nostalgia, to evoke a sense of home in smells and in tastes. They craved the food their mothers (and mothers-in-law) had prepared, holiday meals, the standards.

An Iranian-American friend once told me that while visiting family in Tehran, she had sampled traditional dishes made with low-cal, low-fat substitutions. "People are modern. They change it up!" she said. "They make khoresht with ground turkey instead of lamb."

I have never been to Iran and therefore have never tasted such progressive variations. I've had plenty of accelerated versions -- rice quick steamed rather than soaked overnight, broiled chicken in lieu of an elaborately prepared stew. But never radical departures from the established palette.

The diaspora craves not variety.

At the end of my freshman year, my father retired and decided to move back to his country. My steady kuku connection gone, I spent the rest of my academic career grazing strange processed foods when up all night studying. Just like everybody else.

Years went by, during which I had kuku maybe once a year, often for Persian New Year. As cookbook author, Najmieh Batmanglij, points out in her recipe, "The green herbs symbolize rebirth, and the eggs, fertility and happiness for the year to come."

Eating kuku always made me miss my father, as the unique scent and flavor combination triggered sensory recall. This, too, might be why I never considered the existence of alternative kuku: loyalty to childhood memories; the sense that my Iranian-ness had been jettisoned when my father left and might be further diluted by any departure from the orthodox.

Then one evening a few years ago, my Farsi teacher hosted a Shab-e Yalda party, to celebrate the longest night of the year. She invited students and friends and served dried fruit and nuts. We stayed up late and, as is the tradition, told each other's fortunes by opening a book of Hafez poems and letting the opening lines illuminate the year to come.

She also served a cauliflower kuku. Cauliflower! It had never before occurred to me that one could stray so far from the herb sponge. Timidly I tried a piece. There has been no looking back, and no end to the variation since. I know now that cauliflower kuku is nothing new, just a recipe never served in my home where we stuck to the absolute classics. I've grown to think of it less as a betrayal of kuku sabzi and more as a distinct dish possessing a flavor combination all its own.

Today, cauliflower and feta kuku (with tons of cumin) is one of my favorite dishes to make for a dinner party or potluck. This weekend I hosted a brunch and made two, one with half cauliflower, half Brussels sprouts -- a suggestion I discovered online.

There are several tricks I've learned from practice, consulting the experts, online research and Najmieh Batmanglij's phenomenal book New Food of Live: Ancient Persian and Modern Iranian Cooking Ceremonies, which boasts a number of excellent kuku recipes, gorgeous photos and interesting historical tidbits.

These include:

Adding baking soda. For an extra fluffy kuku, add one teaspoon of baking powder and one tablespoon of flour for every six eggs or so.

Starting on the stove and finishing in the oven. It's not done unless the top is golden brown.

Being creative. Don't be rigid in your definitions!

Enjoying the dish with friends and family. Persian food is meant for social gatherings.

And, finally, saving the leftovers. Kuku is great the next day as a room temperature snack. As my dad would stay, you never know who might drop by.

Homepage photo: Mes Petites Recettes de Cuisine blog, which also provides the classic recipe in French.

Copyright © 2012 Tehran Bureau

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