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.

Marzieh Vahid-Dastjerdi, minister of health, has announced that a total of 306 people died as a result of the earthquakes in East Azerbaijan province on Saturday. According to the minister, 210 women and children, and 49 men lost their lives in hospitals. The rest, she said, were already dead by the time rescuers pulled them out of the rubble.

Aftab News, a website close to Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, reports that many more probably died. According to the website, the official toll reflects a few dozen villages, whereas nearly 500 other villages have been destroyed upwards of 40 percent (including 80 which were completely leveled). For example, 251 were reported dead in only eight villages around the town of Haris. But the epicenters of those two quakes were not even there, raising the possibility that fatalities are much higher than reported. One of the epicenters was in the town of Varzaghan, an area with many villages in the mountains, where access is difficult.

According to Ahmad Alirezabeigi, governor-general of East Azerbaijan province, 12,000 homes have been destroyed or partially damaged. This is an area which, according to Hossein Derakhshan, head of the public relations department of the Organization for Rescue and Aide, 155,000 people lived.

Meanwhile, Mohammad Ashrafi, deputy governor-general for development of East Azerbaijan estimated that damage to homes and infrastructure was in the range of $750 million.

Media Coverage

After only reporting briefly on the earthquakes on Saturday night, a few hours after they had struck, the Voice and Visage of the Islamic Republic [state-controlled radio and television] broadcast a comedy on Sunday night.

Conservative website Asr Iran called the broadcast "strange," especially "when people are mourning."

"How do those who have lost their loved ones feel when they see that the television is broadcasting music and comedy?"

Shafaf News, the website close to Tehran Mayor Mohammad Baqer Qalibaf, asked, "What needs to happen in order to declare a [period of] national mourning?"

Majles deputies from East and West Azerbaijan provinces have also expressed anger about the lack of this declaration. Nader Ghazipoor, a deputy from Orumieh, asked rhetorically, "Are the lives of the Azeri people not important [thus given no coverage on Voice and Visage]? Are they not at least as important as soccer games [that are constantly broadcast on state television]?"

Tabriz deputy Masoud Pezeshkian said, "It is as if 70-100 percent of 200 villages have not been destroyed, more than 300 have not been killed, and many have not become homeless."

Tabnak, another conservative website, asked, "Why does the death of its citizens not appear to be important to the government?"

Mohammad Reza Rahimi, first vice president of President Mahmoud Ahmainejad, visited the earthquake-stricken areas, and said that the government will rebuild everything there in two months. He also said that the government will support the families in the ravaged areas until they go back to work. Rahimi rejected the assertion that the government was slow to react to the events. "The government went immediately to work after the earthquakes," he said.

More conservative and regime-aligned websites and newspapers have still not been giving prominent coverage to the earthquakes and their aftermath. Raja News, Fars News Agency, Jahan News, and Mashregh News, all linked with the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps and the Basij militia, have been giving more coverage to Ayatollah Khamenei's speech to a group of hardline academics. Kayhan ignored the news on Sunday, and its front page headline on Monday was dedicated to Khamenei's proclamation that "the political-social geography of the world is changing toward Islam." Likewise, Resalat, published by the pro-Khamenei Islamic Coalition Party, ignored the earthquakes Sunday, and the news was missing from its main headlines on Monday and Tuesday.

Instead, these sites criticized those that had criticized them, accusing them of "exploiting the situation." See here, for example.

Former President Mohammad Khatami, the Coordination Council of Kurdish Reformists, the Reformist Youth of Sistan and Baluchestan, a group of actors, directors and musicians, including Oscar-winning director Asghar Farhadi, Islamic Iran Participation Front [the largest reformist group], and the Coordination Council for the Green Path of Hope, and Advar-e Tahkim Vahdat [the organization of university graduates], have all issued statements expressing condolences and offering help.

Switzerland, Singapore, Taiwan, Turkey, Germany, the United Nation's UNICEF and many red cross societies around the world have declared their readiness to help the survivors of the earthquakes, but the Iranian government has said that it needs no help and will address the problem on its own.

The White House press secretary issued this statement:

The American people send the Iranian people our deepest condolences for the loss of life in the tragic earthquake in northwestern Iran. Our thoughts are with the families of those who were lost, and we wish the wounded a speedy recovery. We stand ready to offer assistance in this difficult time.

As reported by Tehran Bureau, social networks have played a more important role in spreading the news about the earthquakes and asking people for help. Even student groups at universities in Tabriz, Orumieh, Ardabil and Zanjan, which are associated with the traditional conservatives, have been active in spreading the news and seeking help.

Alaahverdi Dehghan, the Majles deputy representing Varzaghan, said that "the depth of the catastrophe has not been explained accurately [to the people]. If that had been done correctly, the situation would have been much better."

Dr. Abbas-Ali Tasnimi, head of the International Center for the Study of Earthquakes in Tehran, said in a press conference that more than 1300 aftershocks have occurred in Ahar and Zarvaghan, each stronger than 3.0 on the Richter scale.

Ahmadinejad and other officials

While the nation is focused on the earthquakes in East Azerbaijan, Ahmadinejad and a large group of his ministers and their families went to Saudi Arabia. Even Ali Nikzad, minister of roads and urban development, accompanied him. The reason for the trip is a conference in the Kingdom about developments in Syria. Not only was this trip not canceled, Ahmadinejad and his entourage left a day earlier than planned.

While the survivors of the earthquakes needed urgent help, Zaher Rostami, head of Iran's Red Crescent Society, took off for Libya to investigate the disappearance of several members there. He was accompanied by deputy foreign minister Amir Hossein Abdollahian.

Copyright © 2012 Tehran Bureau

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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.

2:20 a.m. IRDT, 26 Mordad/August 16 President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, visiting Mecca for a meeting with other Muslim heads of state following a personal "invitation" from Saudi King Abdullah, according to the Islamic Republic News Agency, was conspicuously seated next to the king at the start of the conference. The impetus for the meeting of the 57-member Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC), however, reveals how much of the tension in the region brought about by the Arab Spring is being shaped by hostility between Riyadh, strongly backed by the United States, and Tehran. The OIC is expected to vote to suspend Syria's membership, notwithstanding Iran's opposition to the move. (Reuters, meanwhile, reports that Ahmadinejad faces domestic criticism for choosing to attend the summit just days after the deadly earthquakes in East Azerbaijan province.)

Saudi Arabia's foreign policy since 2011 has been aimed at containing perceived Iranian efforts to exploit the popular ferment in the region, which has even trickled into its restive Shia-majority, oil-rich Eastern Province. Saudi Arabia wishes to court the new (Sunni) Islamist rulers who have gained from the Maghreb to its own Gulf waters, but as the Guardian notes, "It has its own concerns about the rising regional influence of the Muslim Brotherhood, whose focus on electoral politics represents a major challenge to the Saudi model of partnership between clerics and hereditary rulers." Unlikely rumors in the Iranian press that the House of Saud is mulling "constitutional" reforms as a result of these developments are likely seeking to play up the spectacle of an autocratic monarchy cheering on self-determination and noninterference in Syria after criticizing the United States for insufficiently supporting ousted Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak and then deploying special police forces to suppress Saudi and Bahraini protestors closer to home.

In response, Saudi Arabian media outlets such as the state-run Al Ekhbariyah satellite TV channel have countered with reports accusing Iran of fermenting unrest in the Levant to distract the world from its own domestic crackdowns on dissent and charging the ayatollahs with "hand[ing] over the bread and butter of the Iranian people to Hezbollah."

Saudi Arabia has been seen as the guiding hand in the Bahraini monarchy's crackdown on demonstrators who have been castigated alternately as American, Israeli, or Iranian stooges. The Bahraini press has advanced the alleged links to the Islamic Republic in particular, despite a lack of hard evidence that Tehran has offered protestors much more than self-serving rhetorical support. The conservative Resalat newspaper recently ran an editorial reiterating previous criticisms of Saudi Arabia's military presence in Bahrain, denouncing the House of Saud as "helpless and affiliated pawns of the United States and the Zionist regime." And Press TV has been editorializing against Saudi Arabia's new intelligence chief -- Prince Bandar ibn Sultan, who has been famously close to previous American administrations -- describing him as "the linchpin" between the CIA and Mossad.

Syria is the most urgent point of contention for the two countries, though; as Tehran's primary Arab ally, it is a far greater prize than Bahrain. Iranian weapons, money, and advisers have all been reported in Syria, as have Saudi intelligence and funding. The Saudis are seeking out rebel groups who might make themselves amenable to their objectives in Syria; Tehran maintains strong support for Assad but is constrained both militarily and diplomatically. In reaction to the growing push by Western and Gulf states against Assad, Iran is now attempting to revive support for the abortive U.N. peace plan. Fars News Agency reports that the Iranian Foreign Ministry will be hosting a diplomatic forum on Syria. Of the key regional players in the conflict, Lebanon publicly declined the conference invitation, while Russia and Iraq sent delegates; Saudi Arabia and Turkey were apparently not invited at all. Iranian Foreign Minister Ali Akbar Salehi broadcast the Islamic Republic's initiative in the Washington Post, decrying the actions of "some world powers and certain states in the region [that are] using Syria as a battleground for settling scores or jostling for influence."

Asian News International reports that Iranian National Security Council head and primary nuclear negotiator Saeed Jalili announced ahead of a visit to Lebanon that "what is happening in Syria is not an internal issue but a conflict between the Axis of Resistance on one hand, and the regional and global enemies of this axis on the other." He continued, "Iran will not tolerate, in any form, the breaking of the Axis of the Resistance, of which Syria is an intrinsic part." As Tim Lister of CNN noted, the loss of Syria as an ally would have broader consequences for Iran and its confrères in the region: "Hezbollah's nightmare is a hostile Israel on one side and a hostile Sunni Syria on the other, even if its internal position in Lebanon is secure."

Saudi Arabia's place in the nuclear imbroglio between Israel and Iran is less discussed, but since the Saudis are widely believed to tacitly support an Israeli strike on Iran (while publicly denouncing the possibility), it is likely that they will follow the Americans' lead; "sources" cited by Xinhua claim "that Riyadh may permit Israel to use its airspace in a coordinated operation with Washington." Still, unconfirmed reports of tensions between the Saudis and Americans over Israel's war plans have surfaced. The Israeli daily Yedioth Ahronoth reports that Saudi Arabia has warned the Obama administration that it will intercept any Israeli planes that violate its airspace in the event of a strike on Iran. Unnamed Israeli officials cited in the report blame a White House pressure campaign for forcing them to back away from a military option, though the Israeli government publicly denies that it has received any such warning.

The report, if true, actually suggests that U.S. relations are more strained with Israel than they are with Saudi Arabia. And more importantly, the United States and the Gulf Cooperation Council continue to broadcast a deterrence strategy aimed against Iran. In the second such story carried by a major U.S. news outlet this summer, the New York Times reports that U.S. officials are said to be expanding a regionwide missile defense system directed at Iran with new weapons sales to Kuwait. The Wall Street Journal detailed other specific steps of this nature being taken last month in Qatar.

Copyright © 2012 Tehran Bureau

@TehranBureau | TB on Facebook

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.

2:55 p.m. IRDT, 26 Mordad/August 16 On Wednesday morning, Tehran Prosecutor Abbas Jafari Dolatabadi announced that on the occasion of Eid al-Fitr, the celebration that marks the end of Ramadan, 90 political prisoners had received clemency from Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and would be released. Many of them are young people who were arrested while participating in the demonstrations that followed the June 2009 presidential election. Dolatabadi also announced reductions in the sentences of 40 others incarcerated on political charges. As of Wednesday evening, 61 of the prisoners, including seven women, had been released; most had already served almost their entire sentences. There was a report from Tehran last week that 13 political prisoners have been lashed as part of their sentences -- six of those 13 are among those who have been released. The names of those who have been freed so far are listed here.

Among the better-known prisoners who have been released are Mehdi (Koorosh) Koohkan, Ali Malihi (pictured at right), Hamzeh Karami (pictured on homepage), Esmail Sahabeh, and Rahman Boozari. Koohkan, a cultural activist, was arrested in February 2010 and sentenced to three years, six months, and four days of incarceration, 148 lashes, and a 250,000 toman fine (about $200 at the time). Malihi, a graduate of Sharif University of Technology, is in charge of public relations for the opposition Organization of University Graduates. He was arrested in February 2010 and sentenced to four years of incarceration. Karami, a senior Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps commander during the war with Iraq, served in various positions in the administrations of former Presidents Akbar Hashem Rafsanjani and Mohammad Khatami, and was a major figure in Mir Hossein Mousavi's 2009 presidential campaign. He was arrested in the aftermath of the election, sentenced to 11 years of imprisonment, and barred forever from again holding government office. While in jail, he wrote a letter to Khamenei describing his torture. Sahabeh, a member of the youth committee of the outlawed reformist Islamic Iran Participation Front, was arrested in October 2009 and held for two months until he posted bail. In August 2010, he was sentenced to four and a half years of incarceration. Boozari, a journalist, has worked for several reformist newspapers, including Shargh, Kargozaaraan, and Hammihan. He was arrested in May 2011.

Attorney, university professor, and former Majles deputy Ghasem Sholeh Sadi has also been released. In 2002, he declared that Khamenei's rule was illegal and was detained for a time as a result. He was arrested again in April 2011 and sentenced to one year of incarceration. That October, his sentence was increased to three years after he was charged with "insulting the Supreme Leader."

Meanwhile, the release list includes none of the most prominent political prisoners -- those who have the ability to organize peaceful demonstrations, and who have been repeatedly spoken out even from behind prison walls. In fact, Abolfazl Ghadiani, one of the oldest political prisoners at age 67 and a prominent member of the leading reformist group, the Organization of Islamic Revolution Mojahedin, who had been hospitalized for heart problems, was returned to Evin Prison after his family's request for a medical furlough was rejected. Ghadiani -- who was incarcerated for five years before the 1979 Revolution -- has been imprisoned for 18 months. Originally handed a one-year sentence, once he completed that term he was given an additional two years. He has had heart surgery three times; on none of those occasions was he granted a furlough and, in fact, was returned to prison before he had recuperated. During his trial, he declared, "We did not revolt [in 1979] so that Mr. Khamenei can rule like a king. I know my record indicates my support for Velaayat-e Faghih [rule of the Supreme Leader] in the past, but that was a grave mistake. Velaayat-e Faghih leads to dictatorship." Moreover, the prison sentence of journalist Mahsa Amrabadi has been increased from one to two years. Her husband, journalist Masoud Bastani, is himself serving a six-year sentence. At least 40 Iranian journalists remain in prison. And Fatemeh Karroubi, wife of Green Movement leader Mehdi Karroubi, just reported that she has not been allowed to visit her husband -- now entering his 18th month of extralegal "house arrest" -- during Ramadan.

Supreme Leader urged to strip Ahmadinejad of power

Iran, the state newspaper controlled by supporters of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, reported in its Monday edition that former Foreign Minister Manouchehr Mottaki and former Interior Minister Mostafa Pourmohammadi, both of whom served in the first Ahmadinejad administration (2005-09), have written a letter to Khamenei urging him to take away the president's remaining authority. Other reports indicate that the letter was also signed by former Power Minister Farhad Rahbar (currently chancellor of the University of Tehran) and former Economic and Financial Affairs Minister Davood Danesh Jafari. According to Iran, the letter suggests that the Supreme Leader form a national committee consisting of the heads of the other branches of government and some elder statesmen to run the country until next year's presidential election. The letter, according to Iran, was intend "to make it look like the country is in a crisis, and propose illegal ways of addressing the hypothetical crisis."

Farda, the website that is close to Tehran Mayor Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf, reported that a group of Majles deputies has written a similar letter to Khamenei. According to Farda's "informed source," however, the content of neither letter is as strongly anti-Ahmadinejad as Iran's description would have it. Mottaki has not denied the existence of the ministers' letter, but he too implied that it was not as described by Iran. According to Farda's source, Khamenei has yet to respond to either missive.

Panetta accuses Iran of forming pro-Assad militia

U.S. Defense Secretary Leon Panetta accused Iran of setting up and training a Shia-Alawite militia to bolster the government of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad. The force is apparently called the "Army of the People." Reaffirming Panetta's claim, General Martin Dempsey, chairman of the Joint Chief of Staff, said that the Syrian armed forces are "taxed" after almost a year and a half of constant operations and "that's why Iran is stepping in to form this militia, to take some of the pressure off of the Syrian military." Dempsey asserted that the army has problems with resupply, maintenance, and morale.

Tehran Bureau contributor Ali Chenar submits the following:

Ayatollah Khamenei paid an unexpected visit to the earthquake-stricken area of East Azerbaijan province. He inspected relief efforts and spoke to the residents of Sarand and Koovich villages in the township of Haris. Expressing his condolences, he told residents, "All Iranian people are with you in this trial." He asked the residents to be patient and at the same time emphasized that authorities should rally to speed up relief and reconstruction efforts.

The visit took place after severe criticism of the government from people around the country for what many social media users said amounted to ignoring the disaster. President Ahmadinejad, for instance, did not visit the disaster area, but instead left Tehran for the Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC) summit in Saudi Arabia a day early. Many conservative outlets attacked the timing of his decision as "irresponsible." As one columnist rhetorically asked, "Would you have gone to Mecca if you had to run in an election next year?"

Copyright © 2012 Tehran Bureau

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'Short-term solutions to big problems.'

[ Q&A] w/ Kevan Harris, a postdoctoral research associate at Princeton University. He recently received his Ph.D. in sociology from Johns Hopkins University and is a 2011-12 USIP Jennings Randolph Peace Fellow. He writes a weblog called "The Thirsty Fish."

What are the primary reasons that the Iranian rial has lost half of its value against the U.S. dollar in just one year? Iran's currency was valued at about 10,000 rials to the dollar in the summer of 2011. It plummeted to more than 20,000 to the dollar in the summer of 2012.

Inflation in Iran's economy has not been this bad since the end of the Iran-Iraq War or the economic crisis of the early 1990s, which also caused high inflation. The rial's value began to slide rapidly at the beginning of 2012 after the United States announced new sanctions above and beyond the latest U.N. sanctions. The slide was due partly to the psychology of sanctions.

In that sense, a certain percentage of the public -- and their expectations -- helped cause the more rapid slide. They don't think the Central Bank can stabilize the rial in the medium term. People who have money are buying gold, dollars, and real estate to protect their wealth. Everybody is making individual decisions that are pushing the rial down because everyone is holding onto foreign currencies.

What is the impact on the Iranian public?

With increased sanctions, the demand went up for gold, foreign currency and anything independent of the rial. In fact, the real estate market in Tehran has been growing over the last six months. It had slowed in previous years due to a housing crash just like everywhere else. People are even putting money into real estate in poorer neighborhoods, which means people are continuing to take money out of the banks and investing it in housing.

What has happened in the last six months is very similar to what happened to the Russian middle class in 1999 and Argentine middle class in 2001. The Iranian middle class is going through the same process. They are seeing the value of their money in the bank erode. It is a shock.

After the Russian and Argentine financial crises, both countries ended up with more nationalist leaders in power -- Vladimir Putin and Nestor Kirchner. Policymakers in the United States might want to remember that. Financial crises do not always produce what you want or expect.

What is the Iranian government's response?

The government is trying to respond with various short-term measures. For example, the price of rice has gone up only slightly compared to the price of chicken partly because the government has exchanged oil for stockpiled rice with India. Everybody eats rice in Iran and not everyone can afford chicken, so the government is attempting to prioritize those goods which have the widest consumption.

The government also went back to a tiered currency regime similar to what it had in the 1980s, during the Iraq-Iran War, and through the 1990s. Various types of imports and transactions had different exchange rates. Today, the official exchange rate is used for strategic imports such as food and medicine. That is another reason the price of rice did not go up a lot.

The price of chicken went up a lot, however, because Iran is not a socialist country. It cannot control the price of everything. Chicken farmers and wholesale buyers respond to market prices. The government capped the store price of chicken, but the price of chicken feed was going up because much of it is imported.

Along with cutbacks in subsidies, which also caused domestic inflation, the chicken farmers' costs became so high that they could not make a profit. So they basically stopped selling. Chicken prices went up drastically because there was no chicken on the market. The government was slow to respond -- and then did what it always does. It found a place in the world with something cheap to sell. Iran imported frozen chicken from Latin America, just as it now imports beef from Brazil. Each of the goods has its own story, but the rice-and-chicken dynamic is illustrative of the government's strategy for dealing with inflationary shocks.

The state also stopped its phased subsidy reductions. It had planned to further cut longstanding subsidies for electricity, gasoline and utilities, but parliament told the president in the spring to continue the current level of subsidies. The president initially refused, but under parliamentary pressure has deferred any new price hikes. So U.S. and E.U. sanctions have forced the Islamic Republic to stop the subsidy reduction program that the International Monetary Fund and the Ahmadinejad government had been working on for years.

What roles have U.S. and international sanctions played in Iran's currency drama? In July 2012, Parliamentary Speaker Ali Larijani said that only 20 percent of Iran's economic problems were due to international sanctions. What is your assessment?

It is hard to put a number on what percentage U.S. and E.U. sanctions have on currency devaluation and inflation because both are produced by a combination of factors -- what individuals do based on future uncertainty and the sometimes contradictory policies of the government.

The Central Bank has suggested that it may change the official exchange rate. What impact will that have? Will it solve the problem? Are there any side effects or dangers?

Some economists, including many in Iran, say the country needs a single rate. People make money playing the official and unofficial currency rates off each other. But the state does not have the luxury of unifying the rial's value. So it is trying all sorts of stop-gap measures, which in the long term are harmful. They create opportunities for speculation. But the state, which is dealing in the short term, is in a double bind. Letting the official rate devalue would lead to such an inflationary burst that prices could go up even more.

The other option is what the state is doing now, prioritizing who gets money. It is giving money to strategic sectors and industries that it cannot let slide, like the auto industry, the oil sector and businesses related to petroleum. It gives them the better exchange rate. Yet these are short-term solutions to big problems.

In the 1980s, the government also tried to plan what food and consumer goods came into the country. The government had to basically take over the market, and this is what they are doing again -- only for those items or industries that it feels are strategic, like rice, as opposed to chicken. Politically, you cannot have a whole town without rice; it is impossible.

What will happen if the rial continues to lose value?

People will probably continue to "euro-ize" and dollarize their transactions if the value falls. But Iran will always find another country to make a deal with. There is a long list of countries that will pursue their national interests and deal with Iran. The whole world economy is slowing down, so everyone is looking for cheaper deals. There will probably be more smuggling as well, as people turn to the black market for goods which may be in short supply.

This article is presented by Tehran Bureau, the U.S. Institute of Peace, and the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars as part of the Iran project at iranprimer.usip.org.

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Forthcoming documentary to track U.S. snowboarders on Iranian slopes.

[ film ] In the 30 years since the fall of the Shah, we have seen many attempts at "cultural diplomacy" between the United States and Iran. American artists, filmmakers, actors, and athletes have visited Iran in hopes of reestablishing good relations. Next spring, three American snowboarders plan to follow in their path with a trip to the mountains in hopes of experiencing Iranian "powder." Directors Marjan Tehrani and Nick Catania will follow and film them for a documentary titled Boarders without Borders.

In 2007, Nick Catania read an article about snowboarding in Iran. Surprised, the 43-year-old documentary filmmaker saw an opportunity for a new kind of snowboarding movie. Catania approached his friend Brian Sachson, who would become the film's producer, and described his idea of bringing American snowboarders to Iran, where they would meet Iranian boarders and provide an intriguing subject for a documentary. Five years later, Catania's dream is becoming a reality.

Finding snowboarders who would agree to travel to Iran hasn't been easy. The codirector of the film, Marjan Tehrani, who also directed another Iran-based documentary, Arusi, said it comes down to education, or a lack thereof. "People know very little about Iran at the end of the day.... It's fear and not really knowing what to expect." Tehrani is familiar with shooting in Iran, but usually does not focus on sports (Arusi was about an Iranian American marrying his American wife in Tehran). Catania has worked on other "action sports" films.

Obviously, the imprisonment of three American hitchhikers until last year made things tougher. Boarders' families, already concerned about the prospect of their loved ones traveling to Iran, had a new set of fears. But rejections made the crew even more passionate about the project, says Sachson. "Every time we've ran into an obstacle, it gives more of a driving force to make the film -- just to show audiences what it's like over there."

Thus far, Boarders Without Borders has confirmed that professional snowboarders Gabi Viteri and Olympic medal-winning Hannah Teter will be along for the trip. Teter has won Olympic gold and silver in the halfpipe competition, a fan favorite in which snowboarders jump off one side of a steep, snow-covered structure and perform aerial acrobatics. For Viteri, a 22-year old Burton-sponsored snowboarder who's never been to the Middle East, the trip goes beyond sports. "I am a big believer," she says, that "bringing the world together and not seeing each other as separate beings but all as one will solve a lot of the world's issues at hand right now." The movie team already has a group in Iran ready to welcome them and help navigate logistics once they touch ground in Tehran. Using Facebook, the directors have also connected with Iranian snowboarders to arrange for a meeting on the slopes with the Americans.

Viteri, Teter, and another as yet unnamed boarder will do their riding on the slopes of the Alborz Mountains, just north of Tehran. Last March, Nokia sponsored a snowboarding competition at the Dizin International Ski Resort in the Alborz, and in 2008 Iran hosted its own international snowboarding festival at the range's Tochal resort. At that competition, Iran's team, up against countries like Australia and Slovenia, finished first.

American athletes' journeys to Iran in recent decades have left a mixed legacy. In 1998, for instance, the U.S. wrestling team visited Iran for the first time since it became the Islamic Republic for an international competition. At the time, one American wrestler told the Associated Press, "I never know what to expect wherever I go, but more so here because other countries don't call us 'Great Satan.'" The crowd greeted the American wrestlers with cheers -- the loudest given to any of the visiting countries -- when the team donned a U.S. flag their Iranian hosts had surprised them with before the introductions.

"We had brought our own flag, but we had no need for it, because they had one already for us. That showed caring," said the American wrestling coach. For many, it was a watershed moment, proof that no matter the political differences between their governments, Americans and Iranians could unite when it came to shared cultural interests.

But just four years later, the U.S. wrestling team canceled another trip to Iran. American wrestling officials cited a "credible threat" to the players' safety.

Tehrani, who was raised by her Iranian father in Berkeley, California, sees the project as part of her lifelong mission. "I hope relations really shift. That's what this project is for me...allowing the youth of Iran and the States to connect on a different level than most films I do see about Iran." Unlike those pictures she's encountered, Tehrani says Boarders without Borders will not be about politics, but instead about "youth cultures coming together and doing what they love."

Some see public cultural visits to Iran by Americans and other Westerners as naïve. Given the Iranian government's alleged support for terrorist groups and its controversial nuclear program, they say, it's the threat that Iran poses that should be the West's focus, regardless of potential "people to people" connections. The directors of Boarders without Borders disagree. Tehrani explains, "If we base our understanding on what we know politically, it's such a lost opportunity to learn who a people are and what a place is all about."

The plan is for the film crew and snowboarders to head to Iran in March, in time for the Iranian New Year, and stay for several weeks. Before then, the filmmakers hope to raise money through Kickstarter; they estimate that they will need $125,000 to fund the picture. For Teter, the trip and the opportunity to highlight Iran's emerging snowboard scene can't come fast enough. "A lot of people think it is a bad idea.... That makes me want to go even more, because we'll be able to see and show this beautiful country of Iran and the snowboarders there that nobody seems to know much about."

by the same author | Cycle of Repression and Protest: Iranian Arabs in Khuzestan (with Robin Mills)

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"I don't know who all of his [Mitt Romney's] advisers are, but I've seen some of the names and some of them are quite far to the right. And sometimes they might be in a position to make judgments or recommendations to the candidate that should get a second thought."

Romney is a novice when it comes to foreign policy, as his numerous gaffes during his recent trip to Great Britain, Israel, and Poland evidence. Short of an outright military attack, however, I do not believe that he can take a harder line toward Iran than President Barack Obama has. After all, the Obama administration has imposed extremely harsh and comprehensive sanctions that are hurting millions of Iranians. Still, I believe it is important to take a look at Romney's foreign policy advisers and how they view Iran.

Last October, the Romney campaign officially announced its team of 24 "special advisers" on foreign policy and national security, two thirds of whom served under President George W. Bush, who led one of the most hawkish administrations in memory. In 1998, three of those advisers (Paula Dobriansky, Robert Kagan, and Vin Weber) signed the infamous letter sent by the neoconservative Project for the New American Century that urged President Bill Clinton to make toppling the regime of Saddam Hussein official U.S. policy, a wish eventually fulfilled with the invasion of Iraq in 2003. A total of 40 foreign policy advisers to Romney have now been identified -- including unofficial ones such as former Secretaries of State Henry Kissinger, George Shultz, and James Baker -- over 70 percent of whom served under Bush. These simple statistics alone provide important clues to what a Romney administration's foreign policy would look like.

In an article last month, the Wall Street Journal's Sara Murray described Romney's foreign policy team as a mix of "moderate and hawkish neoconservative[s]." His senior foreign policy adviser, Daniel (Dan) Senor, was the spokesman for L. Paul Bremer, the American viceroy following the U.S.-led invasion and occupation of Iraq. Other members of the team include John Bolton (another signatory of the 1998 Project for the New American Century letter), Cofer Black, Eliot A. Cohen, the aforementioned Paula Dobriansky, Walid Phares, Richard S. Williamson, Eric Edelman, Michael Hayden, and Dov Zakheim. (There is also an unconfirmed report that Amir Abbas Fakhravar, once dubbed Iran's "Ahmed Chalabi," has been working as a Middle East consultant to Romney's foreign policy team.) What are the backgrounds of these advisers and where do they stand on Iran?

Daniel Senor

Daniel Senor, usually referred to as Dan, is a cofounder, along with the influential neoconservatives William Kristol and Robert Kagan, of the Foreign Policy Initiative think tank. In addition to his job in Iraq, Senor was White House deputy press secretary in 2003. Illustrating the value he places on honesty, he told journalists in 2004 at the height of the violence in Iraq, "Off the record: Paris is burning. On the record: Security and stability are returning to Iraq."

Senor has advocated the same type of duplicity regarding Iran. He has said that the Obama administration should not talk openly about the consequences of a potential military attack on the Islamic Republic. During a campaign call, he declared,

The administration has gone out of its way to convey that the military option is not serious. I mean, just look at the things Secretary [of Defense Leon] Panetta has said over the last year, whether it was at the Halifax conference, whether it was the Saban conference at Brookings [Institution].... He went out of his way to talk about how disastrous military action against Iran would be for the United States, for the global economy, for the region.

During Romney's recent trip to Israel, Senor said, "If Israel has to take action on its own, in order to stop Iran from developing that capability, the governor [Romney] would respect that decision." In a subsequent "clarification" of his comment, he said that Romney hopes that diplomacy and sanctions will succeed in halting Iran's nuclear ambitions, but added, "Gov. Romney recognizes Israel's right to defend itself, and that it is right for America to stand with it."

John Bolton

Bolton, who served as ambassador to the United Nations and undersecretary of state for arms control under George W. Bush and assistant secretary of state for international organization affairs under Bush's father, hardly needs an introduction. Specifically concerning Iran, he is an inveterate proponent of a military strike. Even in the midst of analyzing the fall of former Egyptian dictator Hosni Mubarak, Bolton suggested that "the U.S. needs to bomb Iran." This has been described as his "default setting," even though he has acknowledged that a military strike on Iran would not destroy its nuclear program. In a June op-ed published by the right-wing Washington Times, Bolton expressed his happiness over the lack of progress in the recent nuclear negotiations:

Fortunately, however, the recently concluded Baghdad talks between Iran and the U.N. Security Council's five permanent members and Germany (P5+1) produced no substantive agreement. [my emphasis]

Bolton has also supported an Israeli strike on Iran and has even proposed a nuclear attack. He has campaigned tirelessly for Romney, espousing a hawkish foreign policy on the candidate's behalf. "Of all the candidates, Mitt Romney possesses the strongest vision for America's leadership role in the world," Bolton declared in his January statement endorsing the former governor. He has also said, "Mitt Romney will restore our military, repair relations with our closest allies and ensure that no adversary -- including Iran -- ever questions American resolve." Bolton has been mentioned as a possible secretary of state in a Romney administration.

Cofer Black

Black has been described as Romney's "trusted envoy to the murky world of the U.S. intelligence community." He was director of the CIA's Counterterrorist Center from 1999 to 2002, and then served two years as the State Department coordinator for counterterrorism. From 2005 until 2008, he was vice chairman of Blackwater USA, the private mercenary army that was the State Department's biggest security contractor during the Iraqi occupation, in which capacity its employees committed numerous crimes (see Jeremy Scahill's outstanding book on the company). During his tenure with the CIA, Black led its counterterrorism operations at a time when the agency was using harsh interrogation techniques, including waterboarding. He also played a leading role in George W. Bush's rendition program, whereby suspected terrorists would be taken to secret sites in countries that the CIA knew employed torture for interrogation.

Regarding Iran's nuclear program and the U.S.-Israeli cyberattacks on it, Black said, "The Stuxnet attack is the Rubicon of our future.... Your world, which people thought was college pranks cubed and squared, has now morphed into physical destruction...from the victim's view, of a national resource. This is huge."

Eliot A. Cohen

Cohen is a professor at Johns Hopkins University and a member of the Council of Academic Advisers of the American Enterprise Institute, a neoconservative bastion. Cohen was undersecretary of state from 2007 to 2009, when Condoleezza Rice was at the helm of the State Department. After the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan in 2001, Cohen became known as a leading proponent of invading Iraq. In an op-ed published by the Wall Street Journal, Cohen wrote,

After Afghanistan, what? Iraq is the big prize.... One important element will be the use of the Iraqi National Congress [of Ahmed Chalabi] to help foster the collapse of the regime, and to provide a replacement for it.

It later turned out that Chalabi was acting as an Iranian agent.

Cohen also propagated the discredited claim that Iraq was involved in the September 2011 terrorist attacks on the United States:

We know that he [Saddam Hussein] supports terror. There's very solid evidence that the Iraqis were behind an attempt to assassinate President Bush's father. And we -- by the way, we do know that there is a connection with the 9/11 terrorists. We do know that Mohamed Atta, the ringleader of the 9/11 terrorists, met with Iraqi intelligence in Prague.

Regarding Iran, Cohen has argued for toppling the Islamic Republic. Again writing in the Wall Street Journal, he declared,

It is, therefore, in the American interest to break with past policy and actively seek the overthrow of the Islamic Republic. Not by invasion, which this administration would not contemplate and could not execute, but through every instrument of U.S. power, soft more than hard.

Paula Dobriansky

Dobriansky served as undersecretary of state for global affairs from 2001 to 2009 (the post was renamed democracy and global affairs in 2005). She is currently a senior fellow at the Harvard University John F. Kennedy School of Government's Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs, and a member of the leadership council of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies. In the 1990s, she supported advocacy efforts aimed at pressuring the U.S. government to pursue a militaristic post-Cold War posture -- including taking on regimes in the Middle East even before the 9/11 attacks -- and she was an early proponent of attacking Iraq. Arguing that the United States should do more to bolster the opposition to Iran's government, Dobriansky, together with Christian Whiton, wrote in Foreign Policy in November 2009,

Conventional wisdom holds that discussing Iranian governance would only complicate ongoing nuclear-related negotiations. But history shows the opposite can be true.... Now is the time to begin laying a foundation by preparing for election monitoring and giving the Iranian opposition an open channel to the outside world.

Walid Phares

Phares, originally from Lebanon, moved to the United States in 1990. He is the director of the Future Terrorism Project at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, presents himself as a "Middle East expert," and refers to himself as "Professor Phares," although I could not identify the university that employs him. While still in Lebanon, Phares was involved with the Lebanese Forces, the right-wing Christian militia that played a leading role in the September 1982 massacre of up to 3,500 Palestinians in Beirut's Sabra and Shatila refugee camps. Although he has been "lionized" by right-wing, pro-U.S. Muslims as "a hero to Muslim liberals," Ali Gharib has reported on Phares's links with Islamophobic anti-Shia movements.

Phares has been busy exaggerating the "Iran threat," advocating a tough line. He claimed that Obama's Iran policy will fail and that "Iran's threat to block the Strait of Hormuz could spiral into a regional conflict." Concerning Iran's nuclear activities, he said,

The Iranian regime is convinced that they are going to go forward with their program. That program includes the nuclear weapon, but also the delivery system. They're working very hard on missiles, both intercontinental when they can, and regional, and certainly they can put Israel, most of the Arab countries, Europe, Moscow, India, and our fleet in the Gulf and in the eastern Mediterranean in their range. But they are also going to try to negotiate gain time. In the meantime, the buildup of their weapons system is on. It's not stoppable.

His assertions run counter to statements by senior Obama administration officials and the International Atomic Energy Agency that Iran is not making nuclear weapons and has not made the decision to do so. The claim about "intercontinental" missiles is an utter fabrication. He has also repeatedly exaggerated "Iran's global terrorist reach."

Richard S. Williamson

Williamson was Bolton's predecessor as assistant secretary of state for international organization affairs, holding the post under both Roland Reagan and Bush Senior. In the George W. Bush administration, he served as ambassador to the United Nations for special political affairs and ambassador to the United Nations Commission on Human Rights. He has also been involved in the resolution of the conflict in the Darfur region of Sudan. In a recent debate at the Brookings Institution, Williamson criticized Obama's Iran policy, saying, "There is no credible threat of force. No one in Tehran or in the region feels that the Obama administration will use force." In a June interview with the Israeli newspaper Haaretz, he declared,

When Mitt Romney is president, Iran will understand that there is a new sheriff in town and that his position is that the only thing worse than the U.S. using force would be for Iran to have nuclear weapons.

He blasted Obama's "feckless and ineffective leadership" on both Iran and Syria, adding,

Iran knows there is no credible military threat from Barack Obama. As Bismarck said, diplomacy without a credible use of force is like music without instruments. And when Israel has talked about the range of options they may have to consider to protect their own interest, the Obama administration has done its best to make it difficult if not impossible for Israel to do what it must.

Eric Edelman

Edelman was undersecretary of defense for policy in 2005-09; he also served as ambassador to Turkey and Finland. He was particularly close to Dick Cheney when he was vice president. In July 2007, he criticized then Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton for asking the Pentagon to provide the Senate with an outline of its plan to exit Iraq, saying in a letter to her,

Premature and public discussion of the withdrawal of U.S. forces from Iraq reinforces enemy propaganda that the United States will abandon its allies in Iraq, much as we are perceived to have done in Vietnam, Lebanon and Somalia.

In an article, "The Dangers of a Nuclear Iran," published by Foreign Affairs in November 2011, Edelman, together with Andrew Krepinevich and Evan Montgomery, advocated U.S. military attacks on Iran's nuclear facilities, claiming,

Iran's acquisition of a nuclear bomb would upend the Middle East. It is unclear how a nuclear-armed Iran would weigh the costs, benefits, and risks of brinkmanship, meaning that it could be difficult to deter Tehran from attacking the United States' interests or partners in the region.

The authors did not explain why the Islamic Republic would want to attack U.S. "interests," whatever they may be, knowing well that such an attack would provoke a devastating response.

Michael Hayden

Hayden, a retired four-star Air Force general, appears to be among the "moderates" in Romney's foreign policy team. He was director of the National Security Agency in 1999-2005, and principal deputy director of national intelligence in 2005-06. He then served as CIA director from May 2006 to February 2009. Upon his departure from the CIA, he defended the harsh interrogation techniques and torture the agency used on terrorism suspects, and advised Obama against "going too far in dismantling the agency's controversial counter-terrorism programs," even though he admitted that the information gained via torture was "modest." He recently claimed that the nuclear threat posed by Iran is getting "scarier." He has supported the cyberspace war waged on Iran's nuclear program by the United States and Israel, calling it "a good idea." But he has also cautioned against military attacks on Iran, opining that they would heighten the odds that the Islamic Republic will eventually decide to make nuclear arms. He stated, as well, that during the George W. Bush administration, it was determined that "attacking Iran was a bad idea."

Dov Zakheim

Zakheim appears to be another relatively moderate figure. Deputy undersecretary of defense for planning and resources in 1985-87, he worked for the next 14 years as a consultant to the Office of the Secretary of Defense. From 2001 to 2004, he was undersecretary of defense. In an interview last year with the Jerusalem Post, Zakheim stated that attacking Iran would be counterproductive and rejected the notion that Iran would attack Israel: "There is less than a 1 percent chance that an Iranian missile will get through these [Israeli] defenses. Iran, however, is worried about Israel's 'alleged' nuclear program, and their fear is 100 percent, so why would they want to take a 1 percent chance if there is a 100 percent chance that they will be destroyed?" Zakheim also warned Israel about the danger of attacking Iran. "The U.S. will be attacked in Afghanistan and Iraq, and this could turn the administration against Israel like never before," he said. His son Roger Zakheim, who works with the House Armed Services Committee, is also advising the Romney campaign.

The Nation has dubbed Romney's foreign policy team the "neocon war cabinet." Given the overwhelming neoconservative dominance of that team, Iran and its people could well expect an overt military attack from a Romney administration, on top of the undeclared war that has long been waged against the country via economic sanctions, cyberwarfare, assassinations of nuclear scientists, and support for groups that carry out terrorist operations inside Iran.

All opinions expressed are the author's own.

Copyright © 2012 Tehran Bureau

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Raising the stakes in an increasingly internationalized and deadly conflict.

The controversy over the existence and possible uses of these weapons has been compounded by what the Wall Street Journal describes as American fears of intervening in the region once again on a flimsy basis: "Because of the faulty intelligence about Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction that were used to justify the Iraq war, U.S. officials are extremely cautious about using reports of Mr. Assad's chemical stockpiles to support military intervention."

A consensus among the U.S., European Union, and Israeli intelligence agencies has formed which holds that Syria began chemical weapon research in earnest during the late 1970s and that its chemical warfare infrastructure was largely built during the 1980s -- at the same time as Iraq developed a similar infrastructure -- possibly with assistance from West German companies. The U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency long suspected that the same European firms that helped Saddam Hussein develop his chemical weapon program used to devastating effect in the war with Iran, and later, against Iraq's own Kurdish population were also involved with the Assads.

According to the Nuclear Threat Initiative, whose reports come to the same conclusion as that of the Center for Strategic and International Studies, Syria maintains several manufacturing plants and storage bases for chemical weapon delivery systems and weaponized agents such as Sarin and VX. There is disagreements over where exactly these sites are, and how many exist -- information regarding several of these locations may not have been revisited since the early 1990s. Estimates of the number of sites range from around four to "dozens."

Syria is known to possess stocks of Scud-series ballistic missiles, produced domestically in Aleppo, which is now under siege. The missiles are capable of delivering chemical weapons, but the number of launcher systems dedicated to this end and their effectiveness are not well understood. Syria has been unable to procure more advanced ballistic missile equipment from Russia following the fall of the Soviet Union, and is reportedly reliant on North Korean technical assistance to upgrade its homemade Scuds. Though Syria has successfully conducted tests of chemical weapon-capable missiles, a persistent rumor dating back to July 2007 is that a test of a Scud equipped with a chemical warhead resulted in a failed launch that killed dozens of personnel. Iranian technicians were reportedly present, as part of what Western intelligence agencies assert is a joint Syrian-Iranian program to increase Syria's chemical weapon capabilities. Tehran, for its part, denies that the "dual use" materials -- chemicals that can be used both for nonmilitary manufacturing/scientific work and as "precursor agents" for chemical weapons -- it has exported to Syria are for military applications. According to WikiLeaks disclosures, the American and British governments suspect that private companies in India are secretly supplying additional "dual use" materials to Syria.

Concerns have been voiced around the world about security at Syria's chemical warfare sites and the possibility that any weapons stored there could fall into the hands of terrorist groups. Several jihadist outfits are now operating in Syria with a strong sectarian bent against the ruling Alawites. Three important chemical weapons sites are alleged to be in the cities of Damascus, Homs (Hims), and Hama, all of which have been the site of heavy fighting between Syrian security forces and assorted insurgent factions, most notably those associated with the Turkish-based "Free Syrian Army" coalition. (Another major site is thought to be in Latakia, Syria's largest port and an occasional way station for the Russian Navy, making it one of the most secure pro-regime areas in the country right now.) It would still be extremely difficult, as the Israeli daily Maariv noted, for a successful chemical weapon transfer or theft to occur, "as a number of components, each kept separately, as far as known, have to be gathered and assembled for operational capability to be achieved."

A recent imbroglio over Reuters' Syria coverage clearly illustrates the stakes in the information war being waged over Syria's chemical warfare capabilities. The news agency had posted a story asserting that rebels had obtained their own chemical weapons from Libya, where several stockpiles not destroyed by the defunct Qaddafi regime in the early 2000s were found after its overthrow. The story, forecasting a confrontation between two chemical weapon-possessing sides, was retracted after it was discovered that Reuters' website had been hacked by pro-Assad "hacktivists." A report suggesting that rebels were in possession of chemical weapons would fit into the Assad camp's narrative about the nature of the ongoing civil war.

Allegations of Syrian WMDs are shaping up to be a major pro- and anti-intervention debating point as the civil war worsens. Syria -- identified as part of an expanded "Axis of Evil" by former U.N. Ambassador John Bolton (now an adviser to Mitt Romney) and as part of an "axis of terror" by former Israeli Defense Minister Shaul Mofaz -- and its alleged WMDs have become, in effect, a sideshow to the Iranian nuclear debate that has been going on since the early 2000s. In September 2007, a Syrian nuclear facility -- which the Israelis said included a reactor capable of enriching uranium to military-grade levels -- was destroyed by the Israeli Air Force, in defiance of the Bush administration's preference for a diplomatic solution. Tehran is clearly as much of a consideration for the United States, Israel, and the Persian Gulf states as the chemical weapons are. "Washington is mortified by Assad's methods, and it has been seduced by the prospect of an easy proxy victory over Teheran," wrote Geoffrey Aronson in Foreign Policy last month. And the Cato Institute's Doug Bandow warns that talk of toppling Assad will only incite more Syrian saber-rattling on chemical weapons, creating a diplomatic situation in which foreign military intervention will become increasingly likely.

The U.S. government asserts that it knows where Syria's chemical weapons are and that the State Department is satisfied they are secure. Israeli generals have issued similar statements asserting that they are on top of things and are ready to act -- statements likely calculated less as prelude for direct intervention than as reassurances that the conflict can be contained. In what was either a slip-up or deliberate hint dropping, a spokesman for the Syrian government said that "all of these types of weapons are in storage and under security and the direct supervision of the Syrian armed forces and will never be used unless Syria is exposed to external aggression." The weapons -- "if they exist," the spokesman later clarified, reaffirming Syria's policy of deliberate ambiguity regarding chemical weapons -- would be used only against "external aggression" and not the Syrian people. On the other hand, two high-ranking defectors have asserted in recent weeks that Assad would use chemical weapons on the citizens of his own country if he became sufficiently desperate, as the Iraqi government did during the 1990s.

The Syrian Foreign Ministry holds that "Syria has consistently argued that all countries in the Middle East region should be subject to the same [WMD disclosure and inspection] standards, referring to Israel's weapons programmes and capabilities." The Syrian state media rounded on foreign press reports by noting that many of these outlets wrongly reported the existence of Iraqi WMDs during the lead-up to the 2003 U.S.-led invasion. Pro-regime commentators also argued that if the United States was truly committed to a political solution to the conflict, it would do better to interdict weapons entering the country, whether smuggled in from Iraq, or those now being openly supplied to the rebels by Turkey.

It would be difficult for Israel to launch a preemptive strike in Syria at a moment when Israeli political and military leaders are waging a whisper campaign against each other over Iran's alleged nuclear capabilities. It is also unlikely that Syria would deploy chemical weapons against any of its neighbors, especially Israel due to its retaliatory capabilities. The specter of Syrian chemical weapons does not guarantee direct foreign intervention, but it does amplify the significance of the conflict. As commentator Iyad El-Baghdadi opines, "With the mix of regime Migs, Jihadis, FSA gains & chemical weapons, I think a #Libya-style intervention in #Syria can be back on the table."

The specter of chemical weapons certainly offers those in favor of overthrowing Assad yet another reason to put more of their weight behind pro-Western rebel groups, or to clandestinely insinuate their operatives into the conflict on a larger scale. To return to El-Baghdadi's assessment, "Let's not kid ourselves - #Syria under Assad will not have a Tahrir square. That ship [h]as long sailed."

Photo: Adobe of Chaos. H/T: Le Monde

Copyright © 2012 Tehran Bureau

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[ Q&A ] w/ Haleh Esfandiari, director of the Middle East Program at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, and the author of "Reconstructed Lives: Women and Iran's Islamic Revolution" and "My Prison, My Home: One Woman's Story of Captivity in Iran."

Why are 36 Iranian universities now barring women from 77 academic fields, including engineering, accounting, education, counseling, and chemistry?

Rather than announcing across the board restrictions on women in higher education, the government has cleverly left it to individual universities to implement these new policies. Universities are acting individually to adopt quota systems favoring men. The goal is to limit the number of women in certain disciplines or to bar them altogether from certain fields of study. Some universities are enforcing single-sex classes and are requiring professors to teach the same course twice.

The Ministry of Higher Education has remained inexplicitly silent in the face of these measures, and many interpret this silence as approval. By separating male and female students, university authorities also hope to limit interaction between the sexes.

In recent years, women have been winning more places in universities in competitive, nation-wide exams. These new measures seem intended to redress the balance in men's favor. So far, no university has adopted a policy of single sex faculty, such as men restricted to teaching male students and women restricted to teaching only female students--although that reversal seems more possible now too. In the early years of the revolution, the regime toyed with the idea of segregating university classes and barred women from some fields of study, including agriculture and veterinary sciences. But segregation proved impractical and was never implemented, and women gradually gained access to all disciplines.

Iran is now reverting to the failed policies of the past. The decision by Qom University, located in a shrine city and the center of religious learning in Iran, not to allow women to study economics, commerce or industrial engineering may not be surprising. But Tehran University's decision was unexpected. It is Iran's oldest institution of higher education. It pioneered coeducation when it opened in 1936. Tehran University is now accepting only male students in a number of engineering fields and also in mining, forestry and even mathematics.

What are the politics behind these sweeping new restrictions? Why now? Is it related to the role that women played in the 2009 protests against the disputed presidential election?

President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's government is chauvinist about women generally. Barring women from certain fields of study comes hand-in-hand with the reversal of Iran's family planning program--one of the most successful in the world. Iran's Supreme Leader recently described the family planning program as misguided and called on women to have larger families.

But politics may also be a factor in the education restrictions, partly because young educated women were at the forefront of street protests after his contested reelection in 2009. Worldwide, levels of education and activism often overlap. Education can also affect the national social structure. In Iran, for example, the legal age of marriage for girls is 13, but the mean age of marriage is 23. A woman of 23 is likely to have experienced some level of higher education and be less prepared to agree to marry a man less educated than she is.

In 1998, two decades after the Islamic Revolution, Iran was cited as one of the top ten countries worldwide that had closed the gender gap between boys and girls in education. For several years, more than 60 percent of the university student body was female. So what impact will this decision have on the progress achieved in recent years?

After initial hesitation, the post-revolution government built on the foundation laid by the monarchy to provide women with equal access to education at all levels. Traditional families also sought higher education for their daughters because they felt comfortable allowing them to live in other cities to attend universities and live in dormitories or even on their own. Women across the country excelled in university entrance exams. During the reformist presidency of Mohammad Khatami (1997-2005), the fact that 60 percent of university student body was female was widely seen as a major achievement.

In 2006, a Tehran taxi driver proudly recounted how his daughter was studying at Isfahan University and was sharing an apartment with four other girls. Four young women living alone and unchaperoned in a large and distant city! This would have been unheard before the revolution.

The impact of these recent decisions, which indicate the growing conservative influence, are almost certain to deepen discontent among young women. University degrees are key to employment in an economy where good jobs are scarce. The rate of unemployment among those under thirty already stands at over 20 percent; among women, it is over 28 percent. The decision actually risks mobilizing more women in future protests.

Why is the government reducing gender quotas -- reportedly by 30 to 40 percent -- for traditionally accepted fields, such as education, economics, administration, psychology, library services and literature?

It reflects a fear of educated and powerful women who are aware of their rights and frustrated about discrimination. Educated women also challenge the culture of men breadwinners and heads of family. The Ahmadinejad government seems to think it can discourage women from pursuing higher education if universities introduce a quota system in favor of men, segregate classes and bar women from many fields of study.

Women may now respond by pursuing higher education through the internet, which the government may have a harder time restricting. Over the last three decades, Iranian women have shown again and again they can come up with new ways of pursuing their goals and frustrating the government's best-laid plans.

This article is presented by Tehran Bureau, the U.S. Institute of Peace, and the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars as part of the Iran project at iranprimer.usip.org.

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When compassionate action is tantamount to political protest.

[ news analysis ] What does the Iranian government's delay in covering the August 11 earthquakes in East Azerbaijan indicate to the Iranian people? A host of things, it seems, and different things to different people.

Among government supporters, many believe there was no delay at all in the state's response to the disaster. The conservative Resalat newspaper declared that anyone speaking to the contrary is beating the enemy drum. Reporters who fabricate such rumors are not journalists, Resalat asserted, but vicious "news peddlers." Some conservative bloggers have written that all "rumors" regarding the state's indifference toward the impacted region should be laid to rest after Ayatollah Ali Khamenei's visit there.

It would be very difficult to gauge the effectiveness of the official rescue operation in East Azerbaijan. Less than two days after the earthquake, the government claimed that the rescue operations had concluded, and as successfully as such things can conclude. Meanwhile, independent sources, as well as parliament members from East Azerbaijan, spoke of closed roads, lack of food and water, and people yet to be rescued from under the rubble.

We can speak with more certainty regarding the coverage the earthquake received in the state media. The state broadcaster, we know, initially marginalized the event, downplaying the extent of damage inflicted by the disaster. For more than 24 hours, television stations made no change to their prearranged programming, and reports on the earthquake were delivered as second or third items on the regularly scheduled news programs. Nearly all state-owned newspapers failed to make the earthquake the lead story on their front pages.

Why should the Iranian government want to downplay the earthquake? What possible reason could exist? Again, it depends on whom you ask. The range of responses can help us understand something about what Iranians are making of the whole situation. When the causes of an event are not known, the conjectures offered by people tell us a great deal about the society in which they live.

The most implausible explanation for the delay may well be the most probable one: the tragedy occurred on an evening considered particularly sacred in Islam, an evening during which, as the state media had been reminding the people for days, the celestial gates of mercy are flung wide open. The government, some say, did not want to contrast this theological belief with the harsh reality of the disaster.

Such an explanation does not spring from nowhere. It requires, for example, a critical attitude toward religion. If offered by a secular person, it indicates a total rejection of the theological conception of the sacred. If offered by a believer, it signifies the ability to see a difference between one's own version of Islam and the version offered by the state.

Another explanation refers to the tensions among the various national identities within Iran. The population of the impacted region is Turkish, and some critics believe the Fars-dominated government did not cover the disaster adequately for the same reason that Turkish, Kurdish, and Baluch regions in Iran regularly receive a smaller share of national resources and a less significant role in shaping the national identity. Such complaints have been on the rise, particularly in Azerbaijan. To offer racism as a cause of the situation requires, at the very least, an acknowledgement of the tensions that exist within the Iranian national identity. For many, particularly in Azerbaijan, it goes beyond acknowledgement and becomes a call for redefining the coordinates of that identity.

Yet a third explanation posits that the problem was one of mismanagement, and of misaligned priorities in particular. The earthquake happened a few days before two major foreign relations events: the Quds Day demonstrations, led by the government in support of Palestine; and the summit of the heads of the Non-Aligned Movement in Tehran. The explanation is that the government is so focused on these events that everything else is consequently treated as a matter of secondary importance. An Iranian poet, Mohammad Reza Alipayam, posted a little ditty on his blog that echoed this sentiment.

Who ever told you we're a lazy government?

We're engaged in all Arab issues, to the hilt.

Stop nagging about the earthquake in Iran:

Right now we have Damascus and Aleppo to deal with.

Compared to Alipayam's other poems, it's a mild one, but it obviously made an impression on the government. Alipayam was called in for questioning (for the first time) and, by last report, is now in jail.

Each of the three explanations levels a serious criticism against a major tenet of the Islamic Republic: the idea of a single, true religion; the notion of a seamlessly unified nation; and the vision of Iran as an aggressive force within the region.

It brings us to the original question: What do the Iranian people make of the government's failure to cover the earthquake in East Azerbaijan? For those who have not taken any direct action in response to the earthquake, the situation is yet another widening of the rift between them and the government.

But for those who have chosen to take any independent action in regard to the earthquake, it's a different game altogether. Because the government's failure to cover the event was in such stark contrast to the population's awareness of the event (through independent and foreign sources), and because both the state and the people were aware of this awareness, any independent act of assistance toward the victims of the earthquake also acquired a political dimension. If you donated blood or money to the relief efforts, wrote about or drove to the impacted region, you were practically part of a protest against the government's attitude toward the situation. The simplest expression of humanitarian sentiments could not be read without a political lens. Opposition websites found themselves in the enviable position where simply reporting humanitarian acts -- soccer players fundraising for victims, college students giving blood, actors traveling to the scene of the tragedy -- was tantamount to reporting acts of political resistance. Resalat, after all, was correct in its assessment.

The few organized liberal institutions in Iran, as expected, took advantage of the situation. Many NGOs, including those working toward educational reform and even the embattled Iranian Alliance of Motion Picture Guilds, organized their own convoys of assistance. Turkish nationalists organized major fundraisers. And even the warring factions within the regime itself began biting at each other's necks over who would get to own the superior moral position.

The Islamic Republic has always claimed a monopoly on absolute moral superiority. With every passing year, this claim, which once yielded considerable political power, is further reduced to the level of political playacting. China, for example, has experienced a similar phenomenon. The Chinese government's rhetoric of revolutionary and socialist values, too, is increasingly losing its role in sustaining the legitimacy of that regime (though that is not to say that, in either case, there are not other sources of legitimacy). China experienced a very similar drama in the aftermath of the 2008 earthquake in Sichuan. In that drama, even the number of victims acquired a political significance, and any investigation into the event was seen as treason.

For now, the Iranian government's discourse of moral superiority still serves a real function. It still echoes true with a portion of the population. (What we must ask is: Exactly which portion, and how large is it?) At the same time, this discourse contributes to the spontaneous creation of spaces such as the one described in this article, where dissidence finds easy manifestation. The ready access to information, combined with the population's awareness of itself as a critical subject, erodes the effect of this type of rhetoric. At some point, it may even be too expensive for the regime to maintain a discourse of absolute moral legitimacy, because the section of the population that believes it will have been reduced to a very thin margin. The regime and the population would then speak to one another more and more directly about the actual issues at hand. Such a conversation would inevitably be a more violent one.

Copyright © 2012 Tehran Bureau

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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.

10:15 p.m. IRDT, 30 Mordad/August 20 In his sermon for the Eid al-Fitr prayer in Qom, Grand Ayatollah Yousef Sanei, known as a supporter of the Green Movement, addressed the recent reports that Israel may be preparing to attack Iran. "I did not intend to discuss this issue," he said, "but we see that the occupying and stubborn Zionist regime has spoken about attacking Iran, and has become so fearless that it has not backtracked from its threats." After rebuking Israel for its treatment of the Palestinians and threats against Iran, Sanei declared,

I support human rights and freedom for all the people [presumably encompassing the people of Israel], but it is our duty to respond to any possible attack by the Zionist regime in such a way that this regime will never think of such things.

He continued,

I warn the Zionist regime that if it takes any military action against Iran, it will be playing with gunpowder and the reaction that it will experience will be such that it will not recover from it; in that case we will not be caring about human rights.

He then criticized those in Iran who make provocative statements:

We must all do our best to prevent the Zionist attacks on Iran, because if they happen, Iran will be hurt greatly, even though the Zionist regime will be hurt even more. In a war, they do not distribute bread and halvah. We should not act, God forbid, as warmongers in our country and provoke a war. The nation is currently in a special condition, and the most important task is to shut the Zionist regime up with our thoughts, pen, and correct efforts and actions.

Khamenei: We are fighting for ourselves in Syria

Melli-Mazhabi, the website of the Nationalist-Religious Coalition, reports that Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei has reacted angrily to criticism behind the scenes from senior officials concerning Iran's continued support for Syrian president Bashar al-Assad. Accusing critics of being uninformed and incompetent, Khamenei reportedly declared, "Syria is our first line of defense. We are fighting there for ourselves. Our enemies will come after us after Syria, and to slow down and resist this plan, we are fighting in Syria." The Islamic Republic has always claimed that it supports Syria because Iran, together with the Palestinians and Lebanese Hezbollah, represent the "resistance front" against the United States and Israel.

At the height of insurgency in Iraq in 2004-06, during its occupation by U.S. and British forces, Hossein Shariatmadari, the managing editor of the hardline newspaper Kayhan, which is considered a mouthpiece for Khamenei, said, "Let's face it. The Iraqis are doing the fighting for us."

Ashton condemns Ahmadinejad's remarks on Israel

European Union foreign policy chief Catherine Ashton issued a statement through a spokesman in which she responded to Ahmadinejad's recent comments about Israel, including his description of the country as a "cancerous tumor." According to the statement,

The High Representative strongly condemns the outrageous and hateful remarks threatening Israel's existence by the Supreme Leader and the President of the Islamic Republic of Iran. Israel's right to exist must not be called into question.

Ashton called on Iran "to play a constructive role in the region and expects its leaders to contribute to de-escalate tension and not fuel it."

In remarks during his recent trip to Saudi Arabia, Ahmadinejad said that Israel "was an embarrassment to humanity." On Friday, during a speech marking Quds (Jerusalem) Day, he said, "In the new Middle East, there will be no trace of the American presence and the Zionists." Last week, Khamenei also said Israel would one day be returned to the Palestinian nation and would cease to exist, though he did not threaten a war.

United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon also issued a statement that condemned Khamenei's and Ahmadinejad's remarks:

The Secretary-General condemns these offensive and inflammatory statements. The Secretary-General believes that all leaders in the region should use their voices at this time to lower, rather than to escalate, tensions. In accordance with the United Nations Charter, all members must refrain from the threat or use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of any State.

Eid al-Fitr: Sunday or Monday?

Over the years, there has always been some difference between the Shia Marjas (sources of emulation for the masses) about when the last day of the fasting month of Ramadan falls, and thus also the following day of the Eid al-Fitr celebration. For the past several years, regime hardliners have tried to force the grand ayatollahs not to take any position on the issue and accept the proclamation by Khamenei, who is not even considered as a true Marja by many senior clerics. This year, he declared that Sunday marked Eid al-Fitr and led the special prayer for the event at the campus of the University of Tehran. However, seven major Marjas refused to accept his proclamation and declared that Monday is Eid al-Fitr. Even Radio Qom had its regular program for the fasting month on Sunday.

The most important of the seven are Grand Ayatollahs Naser Makarem Shirazi, a conservative and usually pro-hardline cleric; Hossein Vahid Khorasani, the most senior cleric in Qom, father-in-law of judiciary chief Sadegh Larijani, and a critic of Khamenei; and Ali Sistani, perhaps the most important Shia Marja, who lives in Najaf, Iraq. Shirazi said on Saturday that "it is impossible for Eid al-Fitr to be on Sunday."

The other four senior clerics who differed with Khamenei are Seyyed Mohammad Taghi Modarresi (who lives in Iraq), Eshagh Fayyaz, Seyyed Mousa Shobeiri Zanjani, and Seyyed Sadegh Shirazi, who has harshly criticized the Islamic Republic's leadership since the 1979 Revolution, and in particular the execution of officials who served in the regime of Mohammad Reza Shah Pahlavi (there was an attempt on his own life in 2008).

Shirazi's and Khorasani's websites could not be accessed for several hours on Sunday, presumably because the hardliners wanted to minimize the reach of any statements that might call into question the timing of Khamenei's special prayer. A report also indicates that Sistani's website was hacked on Sunday.

Alef: People no longer trust the government

As reported by Tehran Bureau, there has been widespread criticism of the government and state media's reaction to the two large earthquakes in East Azerbaijan province last week and their aftermath. In an editorial, Alef, the website published by Majles deputy Ahmad Tavakoli, a leading critic of Ahmadinejad, said that the people have been trying to deliver their aid to survivors directly, rather than through official channels, which local government organs have been trying to prevent. Alef asked,

Question: How can one analyze this phenomenon?... Can we not conclude that one of the most important reasons for the phenomenon is that people's trust in the officials and government taking proper actions has been hurt? This question has occupied the minds of many of our people, and [thus] it is necessary that the officials reconsider their policies and behavior. Baseless promises and lack of correct statistics and complete transparency in the bureaucracy are some of the reasons for the distrust.

Read here an eyewitness account of how the people were unified to help Azerbaijan, "Iran's eye," and here for the latest developments in the relief effort. Pictures of life one week after the earthquakes in the city of Ahar, which was near the epicenters, are available here.

Iranian appeals court reaffirms scientist's jail sentence

An appeals court has reaffirmed the ten-year prison sentence handed down to Omid Kokabee, a young Iranian physicist. Kokabee was arrested in February 2011 at Tehran's international airport, right before he was to return to the University of Texas at Austin, where he is a doctoral student (he previously received another Ph.D. in Spain). After he spent 15 months in solitary confinement, he was charged with "communicating with a hostile government" and "illicit earning." It is, however, widely believed that the true reason for his imprisonment is that he has refused to work for Iran's nuclear program. His attorney, Saeed Khalili, has called the charges "irrational and baseless" and said that he was not allowed to speak to his client during the trial.

New York Times: Iraq is helping Iran skirt sanctions

On Sunday, the New York Times reported that Iraq has been helping Iran to work around the sanctions imposed on it by the United States and its allies. According to the Times,

When President Obama announced last month that he was barring a Baghdad bank from any dealings with the American banking system, it was a rare acknowledgment of a delicate problem facing the administration in a country that American troops just left: for months, Iraq has been helping Iran skirt economic sanctions imposed on Tehran because of its nuclear program.

The little-known bank singled out by the United States, the Elaf Islamic Bank, is only part of a network of financial institutions and oil-smuggling operations that, according to current and former American and Iraqi government officials and experts on the Iraqi banking sector, has provided Iran with a crucial flow of dollars at a time when sanctions are squeezing its economy. [...]

Iraqi banking experts said last week that the bank was still allowed to participate in the Iraq Central Bank's daily auction at which commercial banks can sell Iraqi dinars and buy United States dollars. These auctions are a crucial pathway for Iranian access to the international financial system. Western officials say that Iran seeks to bolster its reserves of dollars to stabilize its exchange rates and pay for imports.

Iraqi and American officials with knowledge of Iraqi banking practices say Iranian customers are able to move large amounts of cash through the auction, and from there into banks in regional financial centers like Dubai, United Arab Emirates, or Amman, Jordan, and then into the international banking system.

According to many reports, Iran has also been using Afghanistan and Lebanon to avoid the sanctions, sell its oil, and import what it needs. Some of Iraq's oil exports are reportedly shipped to Afghanistan first, and then sent along to the broader international market.

Copyright © 2012 Tehran Bureau

@TehranBureau | TB on Facebook

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.

11:15 p.m. IRDT, 31 Mordad/August 21 The Israeli media is once again filled with reports that a "decision" is about to be made on whether or not to attack Iran before the year is out. Over the past week, the tone was struck by a number of news items and editorials which indicated that Israel is on the verge of going it alone and launching an airstrike unless the United States holds it back. Israel's Channel 10, for instance, aired an "exclusive report" claiming that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is now "apparently determined to attack Iran before the [November 4] elections in the United States." If the Obama administration wishes to restrain Israel at this point, it would -- according to this narrative -- have to provide assurances that it will collaborate on an attack next year if no international agreement on Iran's nuclear activities has been reached.

According to the Jerusalem Post, Netanyahu is arguing behind closed doors that "taking action to set back the [Iranian nuclear] programme is legitimate because [a] delay could give birth to numerous unforeseen developments" and that Israel should act even though it cannot expect to destroy the program. Defense Minister Ehud Barak and Ambassador to the United States Michael Oren hint that an attack would be worth the risk because even slowing down the program's progress could set in motion the collapse of the Islamic Republic. "One, two, three, four years are a long time in the Middle East," the ambassador told an interviewer last week.

This talk -- broadcasting an official preference for regime change even as the P5+1 talks continue -- is a substantial departure from the silence that preceded Israeli Defense Force operations against Iraq in 1981 and Syria in 2007. Has Israel decided to "condition" the media to an "inevitable" preemptive strike in 2012/2013, or this the same overhyped forecasting of an "imminent decision" that has been augured since 1992? Taking the latter view, Time's Tony Karon suggests that the "loose talk" is at least in part aimed at securing maximum concessions on sanctions. Indeed, as a 12-week period begins of which former Mossad chief Ephraim Halevy claims Iranians "should be very fearful," it is worth observing how various media items could be aimed at compelling Israel's allies (and enemies) to take more seriously warnings that the use of force is imminent and thus accede to Israeli demands.

The center-right daily Maariv first reported that both the Obama and Romney teams had given private assurances to Israeli leaders that the United States would militarily back any Israeli attack on Iran. Channel 10 reported that President Barack Obama's top campaign strategist is arranging a meeting, perhaps as early as September 25, with Netanyahu at which the president "will assure Israel that the US will use force to stop Iran's nuclear weapons drive by next June at the latest if the Islamic Republic has not halted its program by then."

Maariv also reported that former Home Front Defense Minister Matan Vilnai -- now ambassador to the People's Republic of China -- is pushing back on a censored television report in which Israel's top general said the home front was not ready for a military conflict. The government has denied suggestions that Vilnai's replacement, Avi Dichter, was selected to sway Netanyahu's cabinet in favor of an attack. Opposition leader Shaul Mofaz, a former defense minister, declared of Dichter's appointment that "the prime minister is spearheading a mistaken, corrupt and cynical process." Turning directly to Netanyahu, Mofaz stated, "You are playing a dangerous and irresponsible game with the future of the entire nation." Meanwhile, the pro-Netanyahu daily Israel Hayom reported that President Shimon Peres's public denial that any attack would take place before the U.S. elections might constitute a "severe violation" of secrecy laws.

And while these reports and statements have been coming out, a series of editorials in both the American and Israeli media have offered the view that the United States must now take drastic steps to stop Israel before it acts unilaterally. Amos Yadlin, a former military intelligence director who now chairs the influential Institute for National Security Studies, told the Times of Israel that "the American threat has to be a great deal more credible" to stop Israel from attacking Iran in 2012. Ron Ben-Yishai, who writes for Yedioth Ahronroth, cites an unnamed "senior official in Jerusalem" to argue that if the United States wants to forestall an Israeli airstrike, it must commit to an attack on Iran's nuclear sites after November if "significant progress" has not been made toward resolving international concerns.

Former American diplomat Dennis Ross contends, in an interview with Al-Monitor, that Israel is not bluffing. "Before, they were trying to condition the rest of the world. Now [the public discussion is] much more to prepare the Israeli public if they act." In a New York Times op-ed, he outlines a series of steps that the United States can take "to synchronize the American and Israeli clocks so that we really can exhaust diplomacy and sanctions before resorting to force." Ross concludes, "Although some may argue that these actions will make a military strike more likely next year, they are almost certainly needed now in order to give Israel's leaders a reason to wait."

On the subject of Israel this past week, however, the Iranian press chose to focus on Quds Day, the state-sanctioned "Palestinian solidarity day" -- the date always coincides with the last Friday of Ramadan -- established in 1979 by the regime to protest the Israeli occupation of East Jerusalem. Solidarity events were held in cities all over the world, including Jerusalem itself. Iran's state-run Press TV reports that "millions of enthusiastic Iranian people held massive rallies in Tehran and more than 550 cities and towns" to "show Iranians discernment, loyalty to the Supreme Leader and Iran's support for Palestine." The Ministry of Culture proudly proclaimed through Fars News Agency that it would host an international conference on the "resistance, Islamic awakening and liberation of Palestine" in conjunction with the rallies. A number of hardline clerics, parliamentarians, and media outlets praised the embattled government of Syria and accused other Islamic countries of being "passive" and "indifferent" toward the Israeli occupation.

Amid the Quds Day events, President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad -- whom Golnaz Esfandiari at Payvand reports is once more being subjected to intense criticism in conservative papers -- again called "the Zionist regime" a "cancerous tumor" and thunderously reiterated many of the anti-Semitic tropes for which he has become infamous. In turn, the Israeli press devoted a fair amount of column space to analyzing the Iranian president's -- and Hezbollah leader Hassan Nashrallah's -- bombastic comments in light of the nuclear question. Ahmadinejad's inflammatory statements are often cited by Israeli officials as a reason to strike Iran sooner rather than later.

Editor: Dan Geist

Copyright © 2012 Tehran Bureau

@TehranBureau | TB on Facebook

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.

10 a.m. IRDT, 1 Shahrivar/August 22 A week and a half after two large earthquakes devastated hundreds of villages in Iran's East Azerbaijan province, the semiofficial Mehr News Agency published an item Tuesday on its website that suggested the death toll was far higher -- as much as 52 times higher -- than the officially reported figure of 306. In a dispatch on the "strengths and weaknesses" of rescue, relief, and reconstruction efforts in the quake-affected region, Mehr, which is owned by the Organization for Islamic Propaganda, enumerated "fifteen courses of action by the Red Crescent Society that were not part of its [normal] duties"; among them, it stated that the Society had helped in "holding 16 thousand memorials" for the dead.

In Iran, memorials are traditionally held on the third and seventh days after a death; given the lingering effects of the disaster, it is likely that most survivors in the region were unable to abide by this tradition of two memorials in the first week post mortem -- yet even if it had been followed in every case, Mehr's report would suggest the actual death toll was 8,000.

However the Mehr dispatch is interpreted, a death toll of 8,000 or even one approaching 16,000 is not unimaginable if considered within the context of other reports on the extent of the destruction caused by the two major quakes that occurred on the afternoon of August 11 and the 55 recorded aftershocks. As noted by Tehran Bureau, Hossein Derakhshan, head of public relations for the Organization of Rescue and Relief, said last week that the earthquakes significantly damaged or destroyed 12,000 homes in an area where 155,000 people lived. To date, though, no other reports on the calamity and its aftermath have indicated that the number of deaths was close to the figures suggested by the Mehr dispatch.

Mehr and other government mouthpieces have tried to portray the trip that Ayatollah Ali Khamenei made to the region this past Thursday as having energized relief operations. Iran's Supreme Leader had kept silent for the first two days after the earthquakes while Present Mahmoud Ahmadinejad flew off to Saudi Arabia, seemingly oblivious to the plight of the survivors. Khamenei visited the devastated area only after the regime had been subjected to days of criticism -- including from conservative quarters -- over what many Iranians perceived as its relative passivity in the face of a major disaster. At the same time, the grassroots rallied to aid the stricken region; nongovernmental organizations, as well as a few celebrated actors and athletes, set up substantial relief operations that delivered food, tents, drugs, and other badly needed items.

In its dispatch, Mehr claimed that Khamenei had demanded that officials do a better job, while government officials have been arguing that the popular efforts were directly inspired by his trip. For example, East Azerbaijan Governor-General Ahmad Ali Reza Beigi, claimed that the Supreme Leader's presence created "unity among people and returned calm to the area." Basij commander Brigadier General Mohammad Reza Naghdi said that, in order to go to East Azerbaijan, Khamenei had to break his Ramadan fast -- as Muslims on journey may do -- and claimed that this was an indication of the "spiritual and love-filled relations between the masses and the Supreme Leader."

On Tuesday, as well, the U.S. Treasury Department's Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) announced that it had issued a temporary order to facilitate the transfer of money to Iran expressly devoted to relief and reconstruction efforts. According to the OFAC press release,

Since the August 11, 2012 earthquake that hit northwestern Iran, the United States has made it clear that it would offer assistance to the Iranian people as they recover and rebuild. The Iranian government has not accepted the U.S. offer of assistance, but non-governmental organizations (NGOs) have been assisting in the relief efforts. To assist their efforts, OFAC issued a temporary general license today, which authorizes, for the next 45 days, NGOs with 501(c)(3) status to collect funds to be used in direct support of humanitarian relief and reconstruction activities in response to the earthquake. The general license is a demonstration of [the] Administration's commitment to supporting the Iranian people affected by this tragedy, and responds to the American people's desire to provide immediate assistance.

Under the general license, which will remain in effect until October 5, 2012, an NGO can transfer funds up to $300,000 during the 45-day period to Iran to be used for humanitarian relief and reconstruction activities related to the earthquake response. NGOs interested in transferring more than $300,000 during the 45-day period may apply for a specific license. It is important to note that the general license specifically forbids any dealings or involvement with individuals or entities designated for support for the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction or terrorism, such as the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), as listed on the Treasury Department's List of Specially Designated Nationals and Blocked Persons (SDN List).

Donations of food and medicine to Iran already do not require a license from OFAC. These donations, when intended to be used to relieve human suffering, are exempt from the sanctions on trade between the U.S. and Iran, as long as the donations are not being sent to the Government of Iran or any Iranian individual or entity on the Treasury Department's SDN List.

The press release concludes with the arguable claim that "for all practical purposes, such donations to the Iranian people, including transactions needed to ship permissible donations, can occur without a specific license from OFAC."

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Visiting leaders must be pressed to address the dire situation of the Iranian people, activists say.

The Islamic Republic has heavily invested in the summit, in hopes that it will demonstrate to the world that it is not isolated internationally, contrary to what the United States and its allies assert. Senior officials have been pointing to the large number of delegations that will take part, seemingly blind to the fact that the true power of any international movement rests in its economic strength and popular support through democratic governance.

The NAM was founded in 1961 in Belgrade, the capital of the former Yugoslavia, by five major political figures: Yugoslavian President Marshal Josip Broz Tito a hero of the Balkan anti-fascist forces during World War II; Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser, a hero of the Arab world and ardent advocate of pan-Arabism; Sukarno, Indonesia's independence leader and first president; Indian Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru, a leader of the country's struggle for independence; and Kwame Nkrumah, president of Ghana and leader of its independence movement. The group consisted of countries that chose to ally with neither the Soviet Union nor the United States during the Cold War.

Before the 1979 Revolution, Iran was not a member of the NAM. In addition to its close alliance with the United States and Great Britain, Iran was also a member of the Central Treaty Organization (CENTO), which it cofounded in 1955 along with Iran, Iraq, Pakistan, Turkey, and Britain; the United States joined the organization three years later. After the Revolution, CENTO was dissolved and the Islamic Republic of Iran joined the NAM, becoming one of its most active members.

Kaleme, the website that is close to Green Movement leader Mir Hossein Mousavi, has reported on the vast sums that the government has been spending in preparation for the summit. Among various expenditures, the website noted the 120 billion tomans (approximately $100 million at the official rate of exchange) that have been spent on building renovations; the purchase of 200 Mercedes-Benzes, each priced at 350 million tomans (for a total of around $58 million), along with hundreds of other vehicles; and the rental of two entire highrises, as well as dozens of additional luxury apartments. According to Kaleme, a company owned by a Mr. "Gh.," said to be associated with Esfandiar Rahim Mashaei, President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's chief of staff and close confidant, has been contracted by the Iranian government to transport summit guests during their stays in Tehran -- up to 10,000 visitors, including the delegations and journalists, are expected to attend.

The six-day period during which the summit will be held has been declared a holiday in Tehran, at an estimated loss to the nation of $5 billion. It was also announced that during the Persian month of Shahrivar (August 22 to September 21), the government will make available to each adult Tehrani an additional eight gallons of subsidized-price gasoline, thus further encouraging residents of the capital to view the summit as a vacation opportunity; the announcement apparently came as a surprise to officials at the Ministry of Oil, who professed to know nothing about it.

Aside from the economic loss that will result from the holiday, the total direct cost to the nation of holding the NAM summit may approach $1 billion. By comparison, Interior Minister Mostafa Mohammad Najar said that 60 billion tomans (around $50 million) have been devoted to help the tens of thousands of survivors of the two major earthquakes that struck East Azerbaijan province less than two weeks ago. All of this is happening while Ayatollah Ali Khamenei has ordered the development of what he has called the "resistance economy," one in which waste is avoided and belts are tightened to counter the effect of the economic sanctions that have been imposed on Iran.

The democratic opposition, and in particular the Green Movement, should use the summit as an opportunity to raise its voice, make the NAM's member states unavoidably aware of the political and social repression in Iran, and rejuvenate the movement, many activists say. The nation is paying dearly for the summit, and those who will attend it will be the nation's guests. As the host, the Iranian nation has the right to demand certain actions from those guests. The Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps has been tasked with providing security for Tehran during the summit. That itself is indicative of the ruling elite's concerns about the potential the event holds for the Green Movement.

Steps have already been taken in this direction. There have been calls on the leaders of the NAM to exert pressure on the Islamic Republic to free all of its political prisoners, in particular Mousavi, his wife Dr. Zahra Rahnavard, and Mehdi Karroubi. At the minimum, the leaders have been asked to demand that they be allowed to visit the trio. Several political groups in the diaspora (see, for instance, here and here), as well as political and human rights activists, have written either public letters to the NAM leaders, or sent letters to their offices around the world. A letter by a group of activists to the NAM leaders states in part,

Given the general goals of the NAM Conference for stability and reduction of tension in the international arena, one must consider the fact that respecting the fundamental rights of every citizen of every nation contributes to the stability of each nation, thus promoting international peace and security. In light of the perilous situation that Iranians are experiencing, we ask that when you attend the 16th Summit, you convey to Iranian officials your concern about the political prisoners. Ask for visitation rights and their immediate release, particularly for [former] Prime Minister Mousavi, his wife, and former Parliament Speaker Karroubi.

The Coordination Council for the Green Path of Hope, the temporary leadership council while the Green Movement leaders remain under house arrest, has sent a letter to United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon that states, "The freedom-loving people of Iran expect you, as part of your duties, to use the trip to Tehran to meet with Mousavi, Dr. Rahnavard, Karroubi, the families of the political prisoners, and representatives of the political and civic organizations that have been outlawed."

Social networks have called on the residents of Tehran to remain in the city and for people elsewhere around the country to head to the capital and crowd the streets, so the foreign reporters who will be allowed en masse into Iran for the first time in three years can see their gatherings. Due to the summit, it is unlikely that the Revolutionary Guards will use force to disperse the people. Others have urged the people to go to their roofs during the summit and shout "Allah-o Akbar" or other slogans; see also here and here. There have also been calls to write slogans on walls around Tehran that can be seen by the foreign visitors. A group calling itself the Green Students of the Universities in Tehran has called for peaceful demonstrations in Tehran for four consecutive days during the summit and announced marching routes. Meanwhile, others have called on the people to create noise throughout the city to give the NAM leaders the impression that they have entered a war zone. Another group has protested the fact that Egyptian President Mohamed Morsi plans to take part in the summit, while Iranians wholeheartedly supported the democratic revolution in his own country.

All such efforts must be intensified in the coming days. This is a golden opportunity to protest the terrible conditions in the country and have members of the international community at the highest level hear those protests. Having paid an extravagant price to hold the summit in Tehran -- aside from extensive concessions that many believe the Islamic Republic made behind the scenes to encourage other NAM members to participate -- the nation can turn this into an occasion in which thousands of foreigners, from journalists to politicians, can see and hear with their own eyes and ears the cries of a great nation under siege from all sides.

The regime is well aware of the opportunity the summit presents for the rejuvenation of the Green Movement. In addition to the state's announcing a holiday for the people of Tehran, subsidizing gasoline to encourage them to leave the capital, and putting the Revolutionary Guards in charge of security, Brigadier General Ahmad Reza Radan, deputy commander of the national police, has said that his forces will be on high alert during the six days of the summit.

All opinions expressed are the author's own.

Copyright © 2012 Tehran Bureau

@TehranBureau | TB on Facebook

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.

12:05 p.m. IRDT, 3 Shahrivar/August 24 Agents of the Ministry of Intelligence and special forces of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps attacked a camp Thursday in Sarand, a village between Tabriz, the capital of East Azerbaijan, and Varzagan, a town near the epicenters of the two large earthquakes that struck the northwestern province nearly two weeks ago. They arrested a reported 45 social activists who had volunteered to help the survivors. A partial list of those who have been arrested is given here.

Apparently, the day before, two security agents, posing as volunteers, had entered the camp and inspected the storage area. According to an eyewitness account, the Revolutionary Guard forces first tried to seize all the donated items, mostly food, blankets, tents, and medical supplies that had been brought to the camp to be distributed among the people. The volume of items is very large and the volunteers told the Guards that they had no problem working with the Red Crescent Society to distribute the aid. They even said that they could give a complete list of all the items and their origins. The Guard commander, however, apparently emphasized that his forces would seize all the items. The volunteers responded that the fact that they have been able to collect so many items to be distributed among the earthquake survivors means that the donors trusted them, evidently more than they did the government.

The Revolutionary Guard special forces tried to use the excuse that the camp and the storage area did not meet sanitary standards, and thus they had to close them, but the volunteers with the help of the villagers resisted. More forces were then brought in and the volunteers were arrested. Police cars now control the entrance to the camp. There have already been several reports indicating that Ministry of Intelligence agents prevented volunteers from helping children, including several child psychologists. There was a report that a Revolutionary Guard commander had taken some of the aides to his own home, but was arrested.

One of the leaders of the volunteers was political prisoner Hossein Ronaghi Maleki, who had been granted a furlough. An Azeri himself, he had volunteered to help the people of his province, and the judiciary officials who handle his case had not opposed his participation in the relief operations. Another report indicates that three volunteers in Gorgan in northeast Iran, who are believed to be supporters of the Green Movement and were collecting donations for the earthquakes' survivors, have been arrested.

One of the arrested volunteers, human rights advocate Saeed Shirzad, is now reported to be in a prison in Ahar in the earthquake-stricken area, and has gone on a hunger strike to protest the arrests. The following have also reportedly gone on hunger strike to protest their arrests: Milad Panahipoor, Navid Khanjani, Vahed Kholoosi, Misagh Afshar, Hooman Taheri, Sepehrdad Saheban, and Hossein Ronaghi Maleki.

In an interview with the pro-Green Movement website Rahe Sabz (JARAS), civic activist Amir Kalhor explained that the activities of the volunteers were completely apolitical. Their only goal was to help the people, because the government and the Red Crescent Society had failed to do their jobs. According to Kalhor, it was the government that made the work political so as to justify the arrests.

Kalhor provided more details of the arrests. According to him, the governor of the town of Haris in the earthquake-stricken area ordered invasion of the storage area to take away all the donated items. Security agents tried to do just that, but the volunteers and the people resisted it, telling the security agents that, "We will not give you even one bottle of drinking water. They belong to the people." The volunteers and local people then formed a human wall around the camp to prevent the agents from entering it and, thus, the camp was surrounded by the security forces for seven hours. The Revolutionary Guard special forces were called in. They invaded the camp, after which all communications between the volunteers and outside were cut off, and they were arrested.

Kalhor also said that the Red Crescent Society was not doing its job properly. For example, those families who were known to the local Society workers, received ample aid, multiple tents, and so forth, and those who were not received much less. People were afraid that wolves would attack their cows and sheep and, thus, were sleeping next to them at night to protect them. The volunteers brought fences for them to put around the animals to protect them, whereas the Society had refused to do it. In one area with a large population there were only two medical doctors to help the people, and the Society refused to bring in more, and thus the volunteers brought in volunteer doctors that wanted to help the people.

Mir Hossein Mousavi, a leader of the Green Movement, has been returned to house arrest after he was hospitalized Thursday. The reason for his hospitalization is said to have been clogging of the arteries, for which he underwent treatment that took three hours. Mousavi's wife, Dr. Zahra Rahnavard, reportedly accompanied him to the hospital, but no other visitors were allowed.

The news of the former prime minister's hospitalization was first reported by Advar News, the website of the dissident Organization of University Graduates. Mousavi, Rahnavard, and Mehdi Karroubi have been under house arrest for 18 months. In Karroubi's case, the house arrest has been virtually a solitary confinement, while Mousavi and his wife are rarely allowed any visits from their three daughters. Dr. Ardeshir Amir Arjomand, senior adviser to Mousavi who lives in Paris, has confirmed that Mousavi has been returned to his own home and put once again under house arrest.

It appears that the hardliners have been pressuring the Mousavi family not to divulge any information about his health. Mousavi's brother, Mir Mahmood Mousavi, told the Kaleme website, "Knowing what is going on is people's right, but due to the interest and expediency of [the Mousavi family] we are not supposed to provide any information" about Mir Hossein. Told that people would like to learn about the state of his brother's health, Mir Mahmood Mousavi responded, "This is not the entire story. We are in a very complex situation, and based on the current condition of Mir Hossein's [extended] family, please allow us to be sensitive about what is going on. At the same time, there are certain conditions and problems that are not reported by the press, and the domestic and security problems limit us in expressing our views." Saying that he respects people's wishes, Mir Mahmood Mousavi said, "For now, it is advisable for us not to provide the information. God willing, people will learn about it through channels that will not cause any problems [for them]."

Meanwhile, Dr. Ali Shakouri Rad, a physician and member of the central committee of the outlawed Islamic Iran Participation Front, the country's largest reformist group, said that one of the arteries to Mousavi's heart had been clogged. His physicians installed a stent in it and used balloons to open the clogged artery. Mousavi was under the care of hysicians for one day, and then was released by them and returned home. His daughters met with their father Thursday night. According to Shakouri Rad, the physicians said that Mousavi is in stable conditions and in generally good health. He criticized the fact that Mousavi was not allowed to be treated by his own doctor, saying, "Addressing problems with the heart is an urgent matter that, if not done immediately, can be dangerous. He must be treated by his own doctor whom he trusts. It is not right to take him somewhere to be treated by a doctor who is not known to him."

Copyright © 2012 Tehran Bureau

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"The vast majority of the population inside and outside Iran are becoming more and more frustrated. And what we see online is a reflection of that."

[ interview ] After 17 years running Iranian.com, Jahanshah Javid, the website's founding publisher and editor, is leaving to start a new project. I emailed him some questions, which he answered while traveling through Latin America.

When and why did you start Iranian.com?

It was in July of 1995. I had thought about launching a print magazine for Iranian Americans in English. There was no medium that appealed to the growing number of English-speaking emigrants. But there were practical problems. It would cost a small fortune to print a quality magazine and maintain a staff. And who was going to buy it? Very few bought or subscribed to Iranian newspapers and magazines even if they could find them in local outlets. The Internet was very young and untested but it had enormous potential for reaching a worldwide audience at a fraction of the cost of conventional media. So I hooked up with my cousin Karim Ardalan, who had just started an Internet development company, and launched The Iranian, a bimonthly online magazine. I would gather and prepare the articles, and my cousin would post them online. The Internet gave the power to publish practically anything and everything without state control. With all the problems with censorship in Iran, it was a tremendous opportunity to exercise freedom of speech.

Can you briefly take us through the evolution of the first edition to what it is today?

For the first year or so, new content was published every two months. That's how long it took to find, write, and publish new articles. Eventually as viewership grew and more people submitted articles, it became easier to gather and post content. The site became a monthly and soon later, around 1997, it was updated every day. But the updates were all done manually by myself and people could not express themselves directly. Finally in 2007 I teamed up with a group of private investors in northern California and Iranian.com was transformed into an interactive site.

It is difficult for me to measure and understand Iranian.com's impact in these 17 years. I have been involved too deeply in its day-to-day operation to be able to give an objective assessment. That's for others to judge and make sense of its huge archive of hundreds of thousands of pages -- the largest of any Iranian site. But one thing I am sure of: Iranian.com has been the freest, most diverse and progressive forum in the history of Iranian media. Its motto "Nothing is sacred" meant anyone could publish virtually any opinion, story, photo... without fear of state or religious persecution. That was a first for Iranians.

You studied journalism and media in the 1990s. The profession has obviously evolved drastically and is continuing to change today. What role do you think your education played in how you approach your work?

I started my journalism career as a translator for the Islamic Republic News Agency in Tehran. I had just turned 19. I had no skills and or understanding of news and media, except that as a young supporter of the revolution I felt an obligation to promote it. That changed when I was sent to London to attend a summer journalism course at City University. The teachers were all experienced journalists and what I learned was that facts and freedom of expression were most important for a healthy society. I thought that healthy society could be the Islamic Republic where a free press and critical opinion could allow everyone to participate and improve society together. But the government became more and more repressive and my belief in a utopian religious society eroded.

In 1990, I left Iran and began studying journalism and communication at the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque and later Hunter College in New York where I received my B.A. in media studies in 1995. I enjoyed my classes and professors enormously. They helped me understand what was wrong in Iran and why free speech is so important in maintaining open societies. I am glad to see the children of many Iranian emigrants have chosen to study media -- something their parents would never do in Iran where practicing real journalism is fraught with danger. Even today, most Iranians don't see journalism as a skill. They think anyone can do it. Comedian Hadi Khorsandi said it best: They asked an Iranian why he closed his pizza parlor and started a TV station and he replied that making pizza required skill!

How does Iranian.com work operationally and managerially as far as producing content is concerned? How are editors, bloggers, staff structured, and with so much content is it possible to fact-check everything and make sure due diligence is done before everything is published?

I have been the only editor/publisher since the beginning. In recent years I have had volunteer help to moderate the news section and comments. We make sure that no one breaks the law as far as slander is concerned, and we do not allow profanity in the comments. Other than that anyone can post or submit whatever they like. It is impossible for us to check who is telling the truth or what is the real identity of anonymous writers who make wild claims or outrageous comments. That has caused some instances of abuse but as a whole the freedom to post freely has encouraged Iranians to set aside their fears and allowed them to express themselves in ways they could never imagine before.

On social media and different media sites, one would get the impression that the Iranian community is deeply divided. Do you feel that only a niche group is compelled to express their opinion on comments sections and that perhaps they're not reflective of the community as a whole?

The Iranian community is polarized but not really divided. Because of the extremely unnatural situation in Iran where the government represents only a small minority of religious zealots, the vast majority of the population inside and outside Iran are becoming more and more frustrated. And what we see online is a reflection of that. There's a lot of anger and it's getting worse as the regime gets more and more isolated and militaristic. We will not be able to escape its nasty effects online.

Do you feel that comments sections contribute to constructive dialogue and better understanding or does it serve as a platform for the various groups to diverge even further while attacking one another with anonymous profiles?

The comments section is not where you'd often find civilized discussion especially when the topic is about politics or religion, but it's still better than no discussion at all. I think there are better ways of managing comments and one of them is by allowing each user to moderate comments under his/her own posts and even block users. Just like in Facebook.

Why do you believe Iranian.com has been able to economically sustain for so long? Is it the business model, user participation, content?

It has survived economically because I have been the only person who got paid. And got paid very little. Except for the cost of the server, we haven't had any other significant expenses. So it's been very cheap to maintain. But survival alone is not enough. In order for Iranian.com to grow and stay updated with the latest technology trends it needs to make more money. Owners, shareholders, expect a return on their investment as well.

After 17 years, why are you leaving Iranian.com?

I sold my shares because Iranian.com is being redesigned to make it more user-driven and much less reliant on an editor or moderators. Basically once the new design is implemented, I would have no role in the publishing operation. So it's the best time to move on and start something new and somewhat different.

What's next?

Iroon.com! Unlike Iranian.com which in many ways has been focused on freedom of expression, Iroon.com will measure Iranian moods and views in some interesting, unconventional ways. For instance we will have a mood meter on the top bar which will register the collective happiness or unhappiness of users on a daily basis. The site can be accessed in Persian or English mode and will include some basic social networking functions. Users will be able to blog and post surveys, links, videos, music and photos.

I hope Iroon.com will be up and running by the end of August.

On a personal note, you've been traveling through South America and have compiled an amazing portfolio of travel photography. Most Iranians I know are primarily concerned with the day-to-day happenings inside Iran and are not necessarily interested in other countries inside the region, let alone on a different continent. So why South America now and what has this experience meant for you both personally and professionally?

I spend half my days, seven days a week, following Iran and Iranian-related things online. The other half I try to dedicate to enjoying life through traveling. I've been very lucky to have had a job, which I love, that allows me to work anywhere there's wifi. I've been traveling for almost four years. I spent the first three years mostly in Mexico and Europe, as well as a road-trip across the U.S. And for the past 10 months I've been moving around South America: Chile, Argentina, Brazil, Colombia and now Peru. It's such an amazing part of the world, full of breathtaking natural wonders and rich, warm cultures. Forget Europe. Discover Latin America!

Travel is the best thing I've ever done. You learn so much about yourself and others. You realize Iran could be a much better place.

Copyright © 2012 Tehran Bureau

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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.

6:40 a.m. IRDT, 10 Shahrivar/August 31 The conference of the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM), whose 120 member states represent the largest bloc in the United Nations, is entering its sixth and final day. U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon, who arrived in Tehran on Wednesday, has met with Majles Speaker Ali Larijani and a group of legislators, Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, and Saeed Jalili, secretary-general of the Supreme National Security Council and Iran's chief nuclear negotiator. Martin Nesirky, Ban's chief spokesman, described the sessions as "very serious meetings."

Criticism of the state of human rights in Iran

After meeting with Larijani immediately after his arrival, Ban participated in a press conference during which he criticized the state of human rights in the Islamic Republic. "We have discussed how [the] United Nations can work together with Iran to improve the human rights situation in Iran. We have our serious concerns on the human rights abuses and violations in this country," Ban said. Larijani, who was seated beside him, frowned at the remarks. As I noted last week, the Iranian opposition called on Ban to protest the gross violations of human rights in the country and demand a meeting with opposition leaders Mir Hossein Mousavi, his wife, Dr. Zahra Rahnavard, and Mehdi Karroubi. Unconfirmed reports from Tehran indicate that Ban made the request, but was turned down.

Perhaps in reaction to having been prevented from meeting with the Green Movement leaders, Ban declined to meet with the families of three Iranian nuclear scientists who have been assassinated over the past 30 months. The website Bultan (Bulletin) News, which is linked to Iranian security and intelligence units, reported that the families of Dariush Rezaeinejad, Masoud Ali Mohammadi, and Mostafa Ahmadi Roshan unsuccessfully tried to meet with Ban.

Former U.S. assistant secretary of state attends Khamenei meeting

At his meeting with Khamenei, Ban was accompanied by U.N. Under-Secretary-General for Political Affairs Jeffrey Feltman. Before joining the U.N., Feltman served as U.S. assistant secretary of state for Near Eastern affairs from August 2009 to June 2012, and as ambassador to Lebanon from July 2004 to January 2008 -- in which post he came in for repeated criticism from Hezbollah leader Sheikh Hassan Nasrallah. He previously served at the Coalition Provisional Authority office in Irbil during the U.S. occupation of Iraq (January to April 2004) and at the U.S. Consulate General in Jerusalem, where he was deputy principal officer (August 2001 to November 2002) and then acting principal officer (November 2002 to December 2003).

During the meeting with Ban, Khamenei said that Iran was ready to do what it can to help with the Syrian situation, but added, "The bitter reality about Syria is that a group of governments have forced the Syrian opposition to wage a war with Syria's government on their behalf; such a war is the current reality in Syria."

Ban urges Iran to resolve nuclear standoff, denounces rhetoric on Israel

Addressing the leaders of the NAM conference on Thursday, Ban called on Iran to resolve international concerns about the nature and intended purpose of its nuclear program. According to the official transcript provided by the secretary-general's office, Ban stated,

There is no threat to global peace and harmony more serious than nuclear proliferation.

Assuming the leadership of the NAM provides Iran with the opportunity to demonstrate that it can play a moderate and constructive role internationally. That includes responsible action on the nuclear programme which is among the top concerns of the international community.

This concern has been demonstrated in repeated Security Council resolutions, including under Chapter VII authority, calling for transparency and full cooperation with the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA).

For the sake of peace and security in this region and globally, I urge the Government of Iran to take the necessary measures to build international confidence in the exclusively peaceful nature of its nuclear programme.

This can be done by fully complying with the relevant Security Council resolutions and thoroughly cooperating with the IAEA.

I urge, also, constructive engagement with the P5+1 [the five permanent members of the Security Council, plus Germany] to quickly reach a diplomatic solution.

And I urge all the parties to stop provocative and inflammatory threats.

A war of words can quickly spiral into a war of violence. Bluster can so easily become bloodshed.

In an implicit, but unmistakable criticism of Iran's leadership, Ban condemned the rhetoric employed by Khamenei and Ahmadinejad concerning Israel. "I strongly reject threats by any [U.N.] member state to destroy another, or outrageous comments to deny historical facts such as the Holocaust," he told the NAM leaders. "Claiming that another U.N. member state, Israel, does not have the right to exist or describing it in racist terms is not only utterly wrong, but undermines the very principles we have all pledged to uphold." Ban's full speech can be heard here.

Ban's official photographer banned from "sensitive places"

The conservative Blogh website reported that Iran did not allow Ban's official photographer to accompany him to "sensitive sites." The reason given by officials, according to an "informed source," was that Iranian intelligence believes that he is linked to Western intelligence agencies.

Morsi parts ways with Islamic Republic over Assad

Egyptian President Mohammed Morsi, who took part in the NAM summit to the chagrin of American and Israeli officials, strongly condemned the regime of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, denouncing it as "oppressive" and proclaiming his solidarity with the Syrian opposition. Morsi said, "The bloodletting in Syria is the responsibility of all of us and we should know that this bloodletting cannot stop without active intercession by all of us to stop this." He asked Iran to help end the bloodshed. An excerpt from his speech may be heard here. The United States has supported the positions taken by Ban and Morsi in Tehran.

Syrian Foreign Minister Walid al-Moallem walked out of the summit hall in protest during the speech by Morsi, whom Moallem accused of "interference in Syrian affairs" and instigating bloodshed in the country. Al-Alam, Iran's Arabic-language television channel, claimed that Moallem had simply left the hall to speak to its reporter.

Morsi had a private meeting with Ahmadinejad during which, according to the Iranian press, they discussed Syria; no details were made public. The Egyptian president did not meet with Khamenei, but did so with former Foreign Minister Ali Akbar Velayati, who is now Khamenei's senior foreign policy adviser. Morsi returned to Egypt a few hours after delivering his speech to the summit.

Translation of Morsi's speech manipulated by Iran state media

While Morsi was denouncing Syria's regime, the translator for Islamic Republic of Iran Broadcasting was busy altering his speech. As the Egyptian president was condemning Assad, the translator simply stopped translating. When Morsi referred to the developments in Syria as a "revolution" -- "enghelab," in Farsi -- the translator instead used the word "fetneh" (sedition), the same term that Khamenei and other regime hardliners use for the Green Movement.

Several hardline media outlets attacked Morsi. A story on Jahan News, the website run by Majles deputy and former Revolutionary Guard commander Ali Reza Zakani, called his statements about the Assad regime "strange" and "baseless," and said he took "extreme and irrational positions against Syria." Asr-e Iran and Baztab-e Emrooz, two other conservative websites, also criticized his statements about the Syrian regime. The Basij groups at several Tehran universities sent a letter to Morsi in which they declared that "they were stunned by his positions" and advised him to "reconsider his government's policy about Syria."

Meanwhile, Mehr News Agency, which is owned by the Organization for Islamic Propaganda, accused the Western powers of reporting only selected parts of Morsi's speech. Mohammad Javad Larijani, the Iranian judiciary's human rights chief (and the Majles speaker's older brother), said that the fact that Ban and Morsi could both express positions in opposition to Iran's indicates the Islamic Republic's "high patience and tolerance." He did not explain how Iran might have prevented them from voicing their views.

Rafsanjani attends speech with Ban and Morsi

Khamenei delivered a speech to the summit in which he strongly criticized the United States. His speech was attended by Ban, Morsi, and Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani. A picture of the three sitting together has attracted wide attention. The Iranian press reported that "Ban did not want to miss any important point" of Khamenei's speech and took many notes.

Mesbah Yazdi: NAM ineffective

Meanwhile, an editorial on Bibak News, the website that is close to the hardline cleric Mohammad Taghi Mesbah Yazdi, said that the NAM is an ineffective movement and under the thumb of the West. "Some of the member states are puppets of the arrogant powers. They do not believe in themselves, and quarrel with each other, which has prevented the Movement from reaching the summit of its power and influence," the editorial stated.

Copyright © 2012 Tehran Bureau

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The idea of infidelity in a changing society.

[ society ] I'm sitting by a swimming pool chatting with a group of women: A., a teenager; M., her mum; and four others in their late 30s and early 40s -- two of them single, two married mothers. They are middle-class, well-educated, well-traveled Tehranis who all speak some English. We are lolling in bikinis and sarongs in M.'s private, high-walled garden near Karaj, an hour from the bustle and noise of Tehran. The air is clear, peach and walnut trees shade us, and roses pop with color in the sun. There's cherry-steeped vodka on the table, a bucket of ice and cola, and cigarettes being lit. There is one man with us, M.'s husband, but he's on domestic duty, picking fruit, peeling fresh walnuts, serving drinks, and preparing our barbecue lunch. I'm only half listening to the flowing talk as I paint my toenails. It's exactly the kind of intimate female atmosphere that Iranian women are so good at creating and as usual they're discussing the state of relationships.

In Tehran, my cousin H. and I talk a lot about men. Like me, she's in her late 30s and single, kind of keen on getting married and kind of not. Unlike me, she's still a virgin and very curious about sex in the West. So we compare etiquette and options, typical and outrageous behaviors. We try to shock each other. She's certainly had adventures of her own, even if she hasn't gone "all the way." Last year, she surprised me by assuming all my friends had "open relationships," some idea she'd gotten from the television. This year, she and her friends are all talking about cheating. "What about cheating? Do women cheat? Is it common?" they ask me.

Cheating. It's not a word or concept I think about much. When I think of my friends -- of drunken kisses while relationships were on the rocks, of illicit crushes and people hopping from one partner to another a little too quickly -- the women are as guilty as the men. But this sort of thing happened in our 20s when relationships were, though not exactly open, more fluid as everyone searched for the most suitable life-partner. And somehow we never called it cheating. There were betrayals and broken hearts of course, but the stakes weren't really very high. Then I realize why. None of us were married.

Here it's different. Marriage, as well as being a cherished institution, is also the only legal context for sexual relationships between men and women. Which means, of course, that cheating is a big deal, a terrible betrayal. But despite the high stakes, cheating is apparently on the rise. And for the first time, women are at it as well as men. According to the pool party, some married women are finding younger boyfriends and don't even want to divorce their husbands.

So what does it mean? Is the Iranian marital bedrock about to split open? Are these the signs of a sexual revolution? Or have relationships become so cynical that old-fashioned love is dead? I'd say no to the latter. Tehran is definitely a city with love in the air. And the system itself, with its moral police patrolling the streets, creates a palpable atmosphere of erotic intrigue. The park near me is full of couples sitting on benches gazing into each other's eyes or walking hand in hand, whispering. After dusk, they are shadows lying on the dark grass, sharing cigarettes and kisses, alert to each other and to the potential for arrest. The malls are hotbeds of relationships -- numbers are sought and text messages exchanged between roving groups of girls and boys who barely pretend to shop. Although Islamic law is too strictly enforced for anything momentous to happen, things are definitely changing and everybody's talking about it.

Around the pool, we discuss the current divorce rate; the consensus is that it's one in three, although no one knows the source of this data. They say that women are marrying later, like R., my dentist cousin. She says her studies simply don't give her enough time for a boyfriend. And more women than ever before are choosing not to marry at all, like my cousin H. and her friend L., who at 37 aren't sure they want to give up their freedom and submit to the humiliating Islamic marriage laws -- a wife, for instance, needs her husband's permission even to leave the country. The government is so worried about these changes and their effect on the population that it just launched a campaign endorsing marriage, promoting families, and decrying the single life as the corrupting influence of the West.

The women I'm with today are from what might well be the last generation of women in Iran who wanted and were expected to be virgins when they married. A woman has also been expected to have just one sexual partner in her entire life -- her husband. It's the younger generation who are pushing boundaries. And cheating is less of an issue for them than just plain old having sex. It's difficult: Where do you do it? Most young people live with their families until they marry because of the exorbitant property prices and high unemployment. Only the very rich can afford to live on their own. It's illegal, of course, to live with a boyfriend and extremely rare, although L. tells me she's heard of it happening. You're not even supposed to hold hands in public.

Last year, I met N., a 24-year-old woman, at the ski resort of Dizin. She was in love with a Bulgarian skier and it was no secret they were sleeping together in the group-shared apartments her parents had paid for in the mountains. Rihanna videos played constantly, vodka flowed, the boys were on the PlayStation, and there was a general party atmosphere. When we got back to Tehran, N.'s big complaint was that she was still expected to be a virgin when she married, but the guys weren't. "I don't want to marry an Iranian man," she said. She did add that they made generous and romantic lovers but she still wanted to marry a foreigner a bit more accepting of a woman's sexual freedom, hence the Bulgarian. But when she wrote love messages on his Facebook wall, he got angry with her and told her it was over, just a holiday romance. It hit her hard. The last time I spoke to her she was applying for a visa to Canada.

Back at the pool, they discuss this clash between traditional and modern expectations. But not everyone is disapproving of the changes. L., who is single and lives with her elderly mother, tells me that a married man is pursuing her online. She's not planning to meet him in real life. No point, she says. The chances of him leaving his wife are so low. He's unhappy in his marriage, but he's sweet and sensitive, she says, and has become her friend. She thinks that looking for happiness outside an unhappy marriage is not necessarily the same as cheating.

I've only spoken to one man about cheating. A middle-aged guy, Mr. S. He brought up the subject himself when we were driving to dinner last week. He told a story of a property developer friend of his who was sleeping with one of his tenants. He brought her lunch everyday, then spent a few hours in her apartment. She was a doctor, unmarried. He was married with kids. Mr. S. was highly disapproving, but also fascinated. When I asked why cheating was on the rise, he said he didn't know about women, but men were cheating because their wives weren't satisfying them in bed. From the way he said it, I think he meant that if the marriage contract was not being honored in this way, the man had the right to seek his sex elsewhere. At this point, I changed the topic of conversation.

In Iran, it seems more common to acknowledge the practical aspects of marriage, unlike the overriding romanticism of the Anglo-Saxon culture I'm familiar with. For starters, you aren't just marrying a person when you marry in Iran; you're marrying a whole doting family who'll want to see you every week and play a major part in your life. I've met women here who've broken up with men they love, at great emotional cost, to find a partner whose family will get on well with their own -- a personal sacrifice that I think is much rarer in Britain.

Last year, I met a colleague of my cousin H. in a cafe. K. is slant-eyed and long-fingered with sharp cheekbones and a wide mouth -- a real beauty. Over frothy cappuccinos, she told me that she wasn't in love with her husband when she married him and she isn't now. She said she's desperate to experience an intense love affair with a man, with or without sex, and she's always on the lookout for that kind of chemistry. When I told her that no woman I know would ever admit so openly to not loving her husband, she just shrugged and smiled. "I'm an unusual woman," she said. "I'm complicated."

I meet her again this year at her home. While my cousin sleeps after a delicious home-made meal of ghormeh sabzi, K. shows me her wedding album. In the photos, she's heavily made-up and has a serious expression. She tells me that she was 22 when she married and when she looks at the albums now she feels sad because she was too young. The groom was her uncle's neighbor. They met at a wedding. She wanted to marry and his family was a good match with hers, so they did. As she tells me this sorry-sounding tale, her gorgeous, chubby son dashes in and out of the room vying for her attention and smiling a cherubic smile. Her husband is away until the evening on business, and she tells me how jealous she feels when he's gone, imagining that he might be talking to other women. "He's a great father," she says, "and a great husband." She's clearly both happy and not happy with her married life and I appreciate her frankness. Hers is exactly the kind of complicated story I like.

Back at the pool, we break for lunch, M.'s husband has grilled us chicken in a pomegranate marinade. He's been slaving away at it all afternoon. The talk turns to visas and exit strategies. One of the women, Z., has just won the U.S. green card lottery after 12 years of trying.

On our way home, I tell H. again that I've never really thought about cheating before. She has a good insight as to why.

"All your films are about cheating, but you call it love," she says. And she's right. The agony of falling in love with someone you aren't married to is one of our favorite dramatic subjects. But we rarely focus on the betrayed, the cuckold. Casablanca, Brief Encounter, Doctor Zhivago -- these are epic romances for us. In Western culture, love has been used to justify all kinds of bad behavior for decades, if not centuries. I'm not sure it's the same in contemporary Iranian literature, which for more than 30 years has had to bend itself to please government censors. But a quote springs to mind from Iran's past.

From Jalal ad-Din Rumi, 13th-century Persian poet and mystic:

"Out beyond ideas of wrong-doing and right-doing, there is a field. I will meet you there."

I'm not sure I've come across any more adultery-justifying line, in English literature at least.

Except somehow from Nabokov:

"Curiosity is insubordination in its purest form."

by the same author | The Open Secrets of Ramadan

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[ transcript ] On Thursday, in the middle of a three-day trip to Iran to attend the summit of the Non-Aligned Movement, United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon spoke to a gathering of faculty and students at Tehran's School of International Relations. As he did in his first public remarks after arriving in the Iranian capital on Wednesday, Ban addressed the Islamic Republic's troubled human rights record in unambiguous terms. "Social activism and critics should never be conflated with national security [concerns] and seen as a threat to the society or the state," he declared. "I have urged the authorities during my visit this time to release opposition leaders, human rights defenders, journalists, and social activists to create the conditions for free expression and open debate." The secretary-general discussed a range of other matters as well, from women's rights to the conflict over Iran's nuclear program, while making repeated reference to the vibrancy and historical significance of Iranian culture. The text of his speech follows. -- The Editors

It is a great pleasure for me to have this opportunity of addressing a very distinguished group of professors and particularly young people.

I thought that most of the audience would be young people. I now realize that this is [also] a mixture of distin[guished] scholars.

As the secretary-general of the United Nations, I have been addressing many different groups of people. Do you know who would be the most difficult group of people to speak to? [T]he group of professors. What can I say to the professors who are teaching? I was taught and educated by professors.

So you are the eminent professors in every aspect of studies, and I really hope that this opportunity briefly maybe will give us some opportunity of addressing the issues of our common concern, [our] common interests for the future of [the] young generation and particularly, since you are going through a very important transition toward a greater democracy [and] social and economic development, while you have to address many challenges.

This is a basic purpose -- normally, whenever I visit, wherever I visit some countries, I normally meet the presidents, prime ministers, [and] foreign ministers, so the agenda are more or less fixed. We always talk about international peace, regional conflicts, or development issues, or human rights issues. But from them, I take more or less fixed positions which I have and they have their fixed positions. But I want to have some inspiring ideas and good ideas from young people and also some professors who would have some good professional visions for the United Nations, the Iranian government, and people who could work together.

As you know, I am visiting Iran for the first time as the secretary-general of the United Nations. This is a great opportunity for me to participate in the Non-Aligned [Movement] summit meeting, and I sincerely congratulated the leadership of the Iranian government. This will provide a good opportunity for them to raise their political profile in the international community, and also demonstrate their moderate and constructive leadership in the international community.

I really wanted to speak with you about your path as a country, your place in the family of nations, and your potential for the future, because I believe in this country's future.

My first relationship with Iran dates back to 1974. I stayed here in Tehran for about 40 days as a young diplomat. [Now] I couldn't recognize anything, because there was a huge change. I never saw, at that time, such huge high-rises and apartments. It has become a very crowded but vibrant society.

Then after that, as vice-minister, I visited here in 2000. And this is my third visit, but the first visit as the secretary-general, [so] this is quite meaningful.

As I said, I really wish to have this kind of meeting in a café or some other place rather than this fixed venue, but I would like to have some broader exchange of views.

Let me begin by expressing my deep sadness for all of the victims caused by the recent earthquake in the northwestern part of Iran. I express my condolences. My resident coordinator and the disaster risk reduction experts have visited the site of the earthquake. The United Nations stands ready to help your people, as always.

Ladies and gentlemen,

Let me just tell you frankly. Many people when I decided to come just advised me, "Why are you going there? That country has a lot of problems, why don't you just stop?" But I thought that, you know, as the secretary-general, believing in the power of engagement, power of diplomacy, I thought that I have the responsibility to visit any member state of the United Nations.

And, moreover, this meeting of the Non-Aligned [Movement] summit [...] where 120 countries are participating, this is a great opportunity for me to engage not only Iranian people but also many other leaders here. In fact, I have been meeting many people and tomorrow I am also going to meet many leaders.

I believe in stating concerns directly and finding peaceful solutions to even the most difficult challenges.

I believe in the values of the United Nations.

That is why I am here, and I [have felt] very much appreciated by [the] Iranian people and the government leadership, and also by members of the Non-Aligned Movement. That makes me happy to be here.

I have also a strong sense that the people of Iran know what kind of society they wish to build. I wanted to come and encourage you, to know what are your aspirations and how the United Nations can work together [with you].

I very much welcome to see for myself directly, personally, a country that figures prominently in the global awareness.

Persian cultural and artistic traditions have enriched humanity for centuries -- many hundreds and thousands of years. Your poetry is unrivaled in its imagery and depth of feeling. In fact, yesterday my resident coordinator, Ms. [Consuelo] Vidal, was telling me how much she was impressed by this artistic language of Persian. Persian language itself is a poem, so whoever or whenever you speak the Persian language, it sounds and looks like poems. I agree with that. Your architectural wonders have filled people with awe -- from the explorers of old to travelers today.

Iranians are rightly proud of these achievements.

As one of our founding members of the United Nations, Iran also has a long history with the United Nations. Through the years, we have worked together on many issues of concern. [...]

Today, we look out upon a global landscape full of challenges. A prolonged economic crisis worldwide, a jobs crisis, climate change, a rising tide of intolerance.

One thread runs through whatever solutions lie ahead: the need for more effective international cooperation.

We need every country to see the national interest in the global interest. When national leaders and peoples only talk and care [for] their national interests, you cannot expect that the international community will be able to have harmonious development and prosperity. We need every country to put its best face forward for global concern and global prosperity.

Here in Iran, poverty and maternal mortality are down -- that's good. Literacy for girls is up. Women now make up more than half of all university [students] in Iran -- that's again fantastic. This welcome trend must continue with women entering an ever-broader range of professions and fields of study. We'll discuss this matter through an exchange of views, but there are many areas that we have to do more when it comes to women.

In a larger sense, I believe Iran would benefit from fully drawing on the activism of civil society.

Of course, unleashing the potential of civil society means accepting its diversity of views, even when these views might seem challenging to authorities. Social activism and critics should never be conflated with national security and seen as a threat to the society or the state.

I have grown up in a country [South Korea] where all this democratic transition has formed through a very turbulent period. We were, at least, under [a] military dictatorship, thoroughly [for] two years, but before and after even, there were a lot of social and political turbulences. [South Korea was effectively under military rule for almost 27 years, from May 1961 to February 1988.] So they always tried to identify the causes of [criticism from] social, civil society with the national security priorities. I think it should not be confl[a]ted with the national security.

I know that the state of the economy is at the forefront of concerns; rising prices, declining economic opportunity, a lack of jobs. I know this is hitting young people particularly hard.

Expanding opportunities for youth is a generational imperative.

This is especially true in a place like Iran, which has one of the youngest populations in the world, with more than 60 percent of the population under the age of 30. So you are very young people, on average.

You are also a highly networked society. Well over half of your population uses the Internet, again, led by young people.

With freedom and space, Iran's young people can be a primary engine for driving your country's progress and standing.

Distinguished professors,

Young leaders,

Ladies and gentlemen,

In order to build a future of opportunity and hope for all of the people of Iran, important issues must be addressed and universal values upheld.

The United Nations and the international community are fully behind the people of Iran in your long struggle for democracy and human rights.

The first human rights charter was developed by Cyrus 2,500 years ago. This [is] something [that is] very commendable and you should be very proud of.

Today, Iranian scholarship and Islam itself offer a rich and pluralist tradition of interpretation and application of the law, and I encourage Iran to allow greater space for different and divergent perspectives to play out in public debate.

Many other countries with strong Islamic traditions have in this way found a path to complying with international standards, for instance on the use of corporal punishment or the death penalty, while remaining true to their Islamic identity and values.

I welcome the efforts by Iran's judiciary to prevent the execution of juvenile offenders. But I encourage further steps to restrict and even abolish the death penalty in law and practice.

Many other human rights challenges remain, civil and political rights, due process, and discrimination against women and minorities.

Restricting freedom of expression and suppressing social activism will only set back development and plant the seeds of instability.

It is especially important for the voices of Iran's people to be heard during next year's presidential election.

That is why I have urged the authorities during my visit this time to release opposition leaders, human rights defenders, journalists, and social activists to create the conditions for free expression and open debate.

I also urge Iran to strengthen cooperation with the human rights mechanisms of the United Nations, in particular the special rapporteur. I have discussed this matter with your leadership.

Ladies and Gentlemen,

Serious questions also persist over nuclear issues.

It is in Iran's interest to take concrete steps to build international confidence in the exclusively peaceful nature of its nuclear program.

That is why I urge Iran to uphold its responsibilities as a U.N. member state and party to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, NPT, and to comply with relevant Security Council resolutions.

And I urge all parties in the region to recognize the need to resolve this situation through diplomatic and peaceful means. This is what I discussed with [Majles Speaker] Dr. [Ali Ardashir] Larijani and also Foreign Minister [Ali Akbar] Salehi yesterday and also today. They both assured me that they are optimistic about the prospect of negotiation.

Provocative and inflammatory remarks and threats should be avoided by all means and all parties.

Under the Charter of the United Nations, all member states have a clear obligation to refrain from the threat or use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of any other state.

Every country has a responsibility to exercise maximum restraint and to refrain from any hostile behavior that could inflame tensions and further complicate the search for peace.

Let us remember that it was Iran itself, 38 years ago, [that] proposed the establishment of a nuclear-weapon-free zone in the Middle East.

Efforts that would lead to a Middle East zone free of nuclear weapons and all other weapons of mass destruction are already under way. I have appointed a special envoy, and he is now working very hard to convene [a] meeting before the end of this month. This represents a unique opportunity for all states in the region to constructively address common security problems on an equal level.

This is clearly in the interests of all states and a goal well worth pursuing.

Ladies and gentlemen,

I believe we can make progress on all of these challenges and more.

Our collective responsibility is to build bridges of mutual understanding. This is the very heart of the Alliance of Civilizations, which is an initiative by the United Nations, an initiative inspired by Iran itself through [the] Dialogue among Civilizations [promoted by former Iranian President Mohammad Khatami]. This is what your country has proposed. All nations should be true to that higher calling.

I remember that when I was working as the chief of staff to the president of the General Assembly in 2001 and 2002 -- this was right after September 11 -- this Dialogue among Civilizations was convened in the General Assembly. And it was a very important, meaningful, and constructive meeting of the General Assembly at that time, right after September 11.

As you know, [there] is another issue; the U.N. General Assembly has condemned Holocaust denial. Anti-Semitism has no place in the 21st century. Likewise, Islamophobia, a new word for an old phenomenon, is equally defamatory.

When leaders or ordinary people utter such sentiments, it is they who are diminished. When academic institutions or think tanks lend their support to pseudo-scholarship, they are betraying their own principles.

Distinguished professors,

Young leaders,

Ladies and gentlemen,

My purpose today is to highlight the cost of Iran's current trajectory, both at home and in the international arena.

Any country at odds with the international community is one that denies itself much-needed investment and finds itself isolated from the thrust of common progress.

Any country at odds with itself deprives itself of its people's energy and goodwill, and sets the stage for future instability.

I understand that Iran has suffered at the hands of external actors. You went through a terrible war with your neighbor. You have felt unduly singled out.

But I also know that you can overcome the current difficulties and build a better future.

At the entrance of the United Nations there is a magnificent carpet -- I think the largest carpet the United Nations has -- that adorns the wall of the United Nations, a gift from the people of Iran. Alongside it are the wonderful words of that great Persian poet Saadi. I quote:

All human beings are members of one frame,

Since all, at first, from the same essence came.

When time afflicts a limb with pain

The other limbs at rest cannot remain.

If thou feel not for other's misery

A human being is no name for thee.

End of quote.

This wise counsel is as relevant today as when it was written nearly 800 years ago.

One thing I am very proud of is that the Iranian government has been making a tradition to provide very nice woven carpet portraits of the secretaries-general of the United Nations, starting from Trygve Lie, the first secretary-general, up to me. And I always feel very proud whenever I see this portrait of myself; it looks much more handsome than I am. And I really thank you for that nice gift. It's not to me but to the United Nations. It will be there as long as the United Nations exists, and I thank you very much.

Again if I may quote this poet Saadi's words, those words motivate me to stand alongside all those here seeking more justice, more opportunity, and a greater say in shaping their own destiny.

Ladies and gentlemen,

Let us all, most of all, make constructive contributions to global problem-solving at a time of such profound challenge and change.

Thank you very much for your attention. Thank you.

Original content copyright © 2012 Tehran Bureau

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Half of 19.75 percent enriched uranium stockpile consumed; no rise in production rate.

The media

The New York Times devoted a front-page article to the report, written by Jodi Rudoren and David E. Sanger. The article, datelined Jerusalem, could be taken as offering an Israeli perspective on the IAEA report. After describing the "tough box" that Israel has gotten itself into, repeating the claim that Iran's nuclear program is an "existential threat" to Israel -- something that even many Israeli leaders have disputed. Sanger and Rudoren finally mention, on the article's 183d line, that "Iran contends that its nuclear work is for peaceful purposes." I will come back to this point shortly. The article also claims that Iran's nuclear program is "speeding up" and "close to crossing what Israel has said is its red line: the capacity to produce nuclear weapons in a location invulnerable to Israeli attack."

According to the Washington Post story by Joby Warrick -- headlined "Iran Speeding Up Uranium Enrichment at Underground Plant" -- Iran has "substantially increased the production of a more enriched form of uranium in recent months."

The Rupert Murdoch-owned Times of London published a brazenly deceptive headline over its item on the IAEA report, falsely claiming that it found that "Iran is stockpiling weapon-grade uranium."

The story by Reuters' Fredrik Dahl was titled "Iran Doubles Underground Nuclear Capacity," but it did not mention that only one third of the centrifuges at the underground Fordow site are working (see below), and the newly installed centrifuges are of the inefficient IR-1 type.

David Albright and his organization, the Institute for Science and International Security (ISIS), among the report's early recipients, also quickly released their analysis of it. Over the past several months, ISIS has fueled the hysteria over Iran's alleged cleanup operations at the Parchin military -- not nuclear -- site in southeast Tehran (see, for example, here, here, and here). ISIS's latest analysis routinely uses the phrase "military dimensions of Iran's nuclear program," although even the IAEA, politicized by its director-general, Yukiya Amano, still uses "possible military dimensions" when it discusses its suspicions.

The Guardian, whose security reporter Julian Borger has been a critic of Iran's nuclear program, offered more reasonable coverage of the IAEA report. In his story, Borger states that in the view of Western officials, "there is no sign of a 'game-changing' acceleration in the program that would warrant the military action threatened by Israel." Tom Collina and Daryl Kimball of the Arms Control Association reported correctly that although Iran has installed more centrifuges, it is not using them.

Analysis of the report

It must be emphasized that the report plainly states,

[T]he Agency continues to verify the non-diversion of declared nuclear materials at the nuclear facilities and LOFs [locations outside facilities] declared by Iran under its Safeguards Agreement...

So, once again, there is no direct evidence that Iran is making nuclear weapons, which is in line with what many senior U.S. political and intelligence officials, including Defense Secretary Leon Panetta, CIA Director David Petraeus, Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, and General Martin Dempsey, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, have been saying over the past several months. In the following analysis of the report, I move sequentially through its various sections and subsections, discussing only the most important or "controversial" elements.

Introduction

The introduction to the IAEA report is utterly politicized. Under Amano, the agency has arrogated the role of enforcer of the United Nations Security Council resolutions -- a power that the Statute of the IAEA does not bestow upon it. Multiple sections of the report begin with some variant of the following phrase:

Contrary to the relevant resolutions of the Board of Governors and the Security Council, Iran has not suspended its [X] activities...

Apparently, the agency has felt compelled -- no doubt as a result of the criticism to which it has been subjected by objective analysts and experts -- to justify its new political role, which it tries to do in the introduction.

Clarification of unresolved issues

The main sticking point has been the IAEA demand to be allowed to visit Parchin. Having analyzed Iran's nuclear program for years, I support a visit to the site. But the fact of the matter is that the agency has no authority to visit Parchin, unless permitted to do so by Iran under a separate agreement. Iran's Safeguards Agreement with the agency stipulates that the IAEA inspectors can visit only those sites that have been declared by Iran as being nuclear. Even the agency acknowledges this, albeit implicitly, because it has been negotiating with Iran over the visit to Parchin.

Iran did sign the Additional Protocol of the Safeguards Agreement in October 2003, which allows the IAEA to conduct intrusive inspections of both nuclear and nonnuclear sites. While the necessary ratification by the Majles was pending, Iran carried out the Additional Protocol's provisions on a voluntary basis until January 2006. Because Britain, France, and Germany, which had negotiated the voluntary implementation with Iran reneged on their promises, the Majles ultimately refused to ratify the Additional Protocol, and Iran stopped implementing its provisions.

Concerning a particular building at Parchin that the IAEA wants to visit, the report states,

Iran has been conducting activities at that location that will significantly hamper the Agency's ability to conduct effective verification.

This is a reference to the assertions in several of ISIS's many "urgent" reports on the Iranian nuclear program.

Uranium enrichment: Natanz

The report affirms that the vast majority of uranium enrichment at the Natanz facility involves the production of low-enriched uranium (LEU) at no more than 5 percent enrichment. According to the report, Iran's stockpile of such LEU reached 6,876 kilograms, of which 1,566.8 kilograms were then used to produce LEU at 19.75 percent. Iran has also produced 124.1 kilograms of LEU at 19.75 percent at Natanz. (The ISIS analysis, as is routine for the group, adds the statement that this much LEU, "if further enriched to weapon grade," is enough to produce so many nuclear bombs. Currently, the stockpile of LEU at 5 percent enrichment or lower is enough for five bombs. However, so long as the LEU is monitored by the IAEA, there is no way of enriching it to bomb grade; to do so, Iran would have to expel the IAEA inspectors, thus alerting the world.) Iran has also not increased production of 19.75 percent LEU at Natanz.

The report also states that Iran has made little progress in installing more advanced centrifuges. Even the more than 6,100 empty IR-1 centrifuge casings that Iran has placed at Natanz have not become operational, implying either caution on Iran's part, or that it is finding it difficult to obtaining all the required materials to complete the installment and bring them online.

In summary: nothing new. Iran continues to produce LEU, but there is no evidence of diversion from peaceful to nonpeaceful purposes.

Uranium enrichment: Fordow

The most important news here is that Iran has installed 1,076 IR-1 centrifuges at Fordow, -- not any of the more advanced ones, such as the IR-4 and IR-6, which Iran had announced its intention of installing. This brings the total at the facility to 2,140 IR-1 centrifuges, of which only 696 were enriching as of August 14. The rest are not even connected by pipes. According to the report, 65.3 kilograms of 19.75 percent LEU have been produced at Fordow, bringing the national total to 189.4 kilograms. The rate of production of LEU at 19.75 percent is more than Iran needs for fuel for the Tehran Research Reactor (TRR); Iranian officials have discussed plans to build four more such research reactors.

In summary: More centrifuges have been installed, but only about one third of all the centrifuges are operating, production of LEU at 19.75 percent has not increased, and the idle centrifuges are not even connected.

Reprocessing activities

Reprocessing activity refers, for example, to the separation of plutonium from spent fuel so it that can be used for bomb making. In February 2008, Iran informed the IAEA that it was not conducting any reprocessing activities. The agency sought to cast doubt on this assertion, stating, "It is only with respect to TRR" and other declared nuclear facilities "to which the Agency has access that the Agency can confirm that there are no ongoing reprocessing related activities in Iran" (emphasis mine). In other words, Iran is under pressure to prove a negative, an impossible task.

Heavy water related projects

Iran operates a heavy water production plant near Arak. Such a plant is not covered by Iran's Safeguards Agreement. Yet in its report, the IAEA laments that Iran has not allowed it to visit the plant since last year.

A 40-megawatt heavy water nuclear reactor under construction in Arak is safeguarded by the IAEA. It will not come online before 2014 at the earliest.

Parchin military site

The report rehashes ISIS's "urgent" reporting on the alleged activities at one building in Parchin, interpreting the available evidence -- satellite images -- in the most extreme way. Perhaps clandestine nuclear-related work is going on there. But there are other equally plausible interpretations of what is observable in the satellite images. Iran has rejected the allegations about the site, as in an August 29 letter to the IAEA that states, "The recent activities claimed to be conducted in the vicinity of the location of interest to the Agency, has nothing to do with specified location by the Agency." The images do provide a valid rationale for the agency to visit the site; Iran has said it will permit such a visit if the agency shows its documents related to the allegations, which the IAEA has so far refused to do.

Modified Code 3.1

As part of the Sa'dabad Agreement of October 2003, reaffirmed by the November 2004 Paris Agreement, Iran agreed to abide by the modified Code 3.1 of the Subsidiary Arrangements of its Safeguards Agreement, until the Majles ratifies the modification in the Safeguards Agreement. The modified code obligates a member state to inform the IAEA of any decisions regarding the construction of any new nuclear site, rather than waiting until 180 days before the introduction of any nuclear materials into such a site. Iran observed the modified code until March 2007. After the Security Council began to issue resolutions sanctioning Iran for its nuclear activities, the Islamic Republic declared that it would no longer abide by the modified Code 3.1.

The IAEA contends that this is a unilateral alteration of the Safeguards Agreement, which Iran is not allowed to make. However, as I have previously described, the IAEA is correct only if the modification to the Safeguards Agreement was approved by the Majles, which never occurred.

Additional Protocol

A remarkable passage in the IAEA report states, "Contrary to the relevant resolutions of the Board of Governors and the Security Council, Iran is not implementing its Additional Protocol." Aside from the fact that Iran did implement the Additional Protocol on a voluntary basis for an extended period, Iran is a sovereign nation and, as such, cannot be compelled to ratify any international agreement. Even the U.N. Charter recognizes this. And if a sovereign nation chooses not to ratify a given agreement, it is obviously unacceptable to demand that it nonetheless implement the agreement. I am in favor of Iran implementing the Additional Protocol again, but presenting its refusal to do so as a violation of its obligations courts both ridicule and outrage.

Iran's reduced capacity for breakout

Breakout capacity is the ability of a nuclear nation to swiftly enrich its LEU to high-enriched uranium (HEU) to produce a nuclear weapon. Clearly, converting LEU that is at 19.75 percent enrichment to HEU is much easier than converting LEU at 5 percent or lower. According to the IAEA report, of Iran's 189.4 kilograms of 19.75 percent enriched uranium, 96.3 have been sent or fed into the uranium conversion facilities. Once uranium is converted to fuel pellets or rods, it is almost impossible to convert it back into materials that can be enriched to HEU. This implies that Iran now has only 93.1 kilograms of uranium enriched to 19.75 percent. This is much less than the approximately 143 kilograms of such uranium that Iran had at its disposal when the last IAEA report on its program was issued in May, which means that Iran's breakout capacity is actually lower than it was three months ago. About 200 kilograms of LEU at 19.75 percent would be needed for further enrichment for a single bomb.

As the Washington Post article noted, albeit several paragraphs after exaggerating the IAEA report, the agency had found that Iran had "converted much of the new material to metal form for use in a nuclear research reactor." The Washington Post even quoted an unnamed Obama administration official acknowledging that the converted 19.75 percent enriched uranium could not be "further enriched to weapons-grade material." But this admission appears deep within the article.

Even if Iran were to take that step -- which, at least for now, is highly unlikely -- it would probably do so when it has enough LEU at 19.75 percent for several bombs, which means at least a ton of the material, which would take about two years to produce. It would then need another six to nine months to develop the nuclear device. Developing and testing a nuclear warhead would require even more time.

This is a point that the politicized IAEA, ISIS, and many others fail to mention, even though it is extremely important. If one is to take seriously Ehud Barak's concept of a "zone of immunity," then Iran is already within the zone, but has not moved to build a nuclear weapon. As Jim Walsh of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, an expert on the Iranian nuclear program put it, if Iran does want to make the bomb, it is too late to stop it because, "You can't bomb the knowledge out of their heads and you can't destroy Fordow."

In addition, I interpret Iran's reported activities as aimed at obtaining a better deal from the United States and its allies. Under tremendous economic pressure and facing the constant threat of an Israeli military strike, the Islamic Republic's leadership is trying to create maneuvering room for itself by increasing its enrichment capacity. Even the aforementioned New York Times article lends support to this interpretation, quoting a senior U.S. official on the Iranian regime: "They have been very strategic.... They are creating tremendous capacity, but they are not using it."

The best strategy is thus to focus on keeping Iran's capabilities latent. This implies reaching an agreement whereby Iran implements the Additional Protocol and the modified Code 3.1, and ships out its LEU at 19.75 percent; in return, the United States and its allies lift their sanctions, which have succeeded only in hurting ordinary Iranians. The framework for such a solution has been clear for some time.

All opinions are the author's own.

Copyright © 2012 Tehran Bureau

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