Iran shuts down 24 cafes in Internet crackdown
Dec 16, 2007

Reuters News Agency

Iranian police have closed down 24 Internet cafes and other coffee shops in as many hours, detaining 23 people, as part of a broad crackdown on immoral behaviour in the Islamic state, official media said on Sunday. The action in Tehran province was the latest move in a campaign against fashion and other practices deemed incompatible with Islamic values, including women flouting strict dress codes and barber shops offering men Western hair styles.
"Using immoral computer games, storing obscene photos ... and the presence of women wearing improper hijab were among the reasons why they have been closed down," Colonel Nader Sarkari, a provincial police commander, said. Since Mahmoud Ahmadinejad won the presidency in 2005, promising a return to the values of the 1979 Islamic revolution, hardliners have pressed for tighter controls on "immoral behaviour".
Sarkari told the official IRNA news agency that police had inspected 435 coffee shops in the past 24 hours, and 170 had been warned.
The report did not make clear whether they were all Internet cafes, which have mushroomed in Iran over the past few years and are popular especially among young people. Police were not immediately available for comment.
"Twenty-three people were detained," Sarkari said, adding 11 of them were women.
Many young Iranians are avid users of the Internet, some using chat rooms to socialise with the opposite sex. Mingling between sexes outside marriage is banned and many Web sites considered unIslamic are blocked by the authorities.
The cafe crackdown coincides with a winter campaign against women wearing tight trousers tucked into long boots and other "improper dress" such as short overcoats and hats instead of scarves.
Enforcement of Islamic dress codes that require women to cover their hair and disguise the shape of their bodies has become stricter since 2005, following eight years of reformist rule.
Police regularly clamp down on skimpier clothing and looser headscarves in the summer, but usually for only a few weeks. This year the campaign has run into the winter.
Women found dressing inappropriately may be warned and repeat offenders can be taken to a police station and fined.
"Our people want their women to be able to go in the streets with respect and want their dignity to be protected," senior Iranian cleric Ahmad Khatami told worshippers in Tehran on Friday. "Our people want the society to be morally clean."
In a separate campaign, IRNA said police had inspected 275 restaurants in the capital to check compliance with a new ban on smoking in public places. The ban includes water pipes, known in Iran as qalyan, offered in some outlets.
Of those, 138 received a warning and 17 were shut down, police official Mohammad Reza Alipour said.

A nervous Iranian regime "lashes out" against the population

Asia News

December 18, 2007
Under pressure from the international community, the authorities are carrying out a violent campaign of intimidation to discourage Iranians from participating in any form of protest against the government, or against the male authority figure in the family. Many internet cafes that do not respect Islamic values have been closed, women have been arrested, and executions have been broadcast on state television. And tomorrow, in the prison in Evin, a young wife who was abused by her husband will be sentenced for having rebelled against him. The anxiety of the Iranian regime, under pressure from the international community on the matters of its nuclear programme and its respect for human rights, continues to be "vented" on the population. Concerned that widespread dissatisfaction among the people may give rise to increasingly prominent forms of protest and anti-government demonstrations, the Iranian authorities are carrying out a campaign of intimidation characterized by public hangings, the arrest of students, capital sentences against women and minors, the closing of internet cafes that do not respect Islamic values.
The news of hangings - especially when these are public - are part of the regime's propaganda to stop the people from participating in open-air protests, or even from posing the slightest opposition to authority, whether in the family or in society. Scheduled for tomorrow, in the notorious Evin prison in Tehran, is the execution of a young woman found guilty of defending herself against the violence inflicted by her husband. Rahele killed him a few years ago in order to put an end to a life of abuse. The woman, mother of two children aged 5 and 3, is asking her mother-in-law to pardon her, to spare her from the death penalty. Iran's laws, inspired by the "lex talionis", places in the hands of the victim's family the fate of the person who has committed voluntary or involuntary homicide. But Rahele is herself a victim, a victim of the domestic violence practiced with impunity by husbands and fathers against their wives and daughters.
Last December 11, the state television broadcast the images of a prisoner who was hung from a crane in front of a large crowd. The same broadcaster then disseminated the images of three other condemned persons who were hung from a scaffold in a police courtyard, in the north-western city of Bonjnourd. The practice of filming executions and releasing them on the internet has developed only within the past two years, and according to experts it is a clear sign of the anxiety that reigns among the Iranian mullahs.
The repression is also being unleashed against the places where people meet and where information comes from the outside: universities and internet cafes. Colonel Nader Sarkari, an agent of the state special forces (SSF), informed the official news agency IRNA that between December 14 and 15 alone, 435 coffee shops were raided, 170 were warned, and "23 persons were arrested", 11 of whom were women. "The use of immoral videogames, obscene photos, and the presence of women wearing improper hijab are among the factors that required the imposition of restrictive measures", Sarkari said. The closing of internet cafes coincides with a new wave of oppression against women, under the pretext of "improper dress".
 

Iranian Human Rights Violations Deserve Sanctions
By James Ottar Grundvig
Special to The Epoch Times

December 19, 2007
For the past few years human rights abuses in Iran have been pushed into the shadow by the proliferation of its nuclear weapons program, threats to wipe "Israel off the map," and the state's sponsorship of terrorism in Iraq, Syria, and Lebanon. What a shame that the focus has shifted away from the rogue regime's brutal, three-decade-old treatment of its citizens since the fall of the Shah in 1979.
On Saturday Dec. 1, world leaders met in Paris in a final step to levy more punitive sanctions against Iran. This punishment, however, is for the regime's continuing to enrich uranium in its growing cascade farm of centrifuges in the race to develop nuclear weapons, not for the republic's abysmal record on human rights.
While this vote made the news, it has obscured the Nov. 21 referendum put forth by Canada to the U.N. General Assembly for a resolution that condemns Iran's "ongoing systematic violations of human rights" (CBS News). The sponsorship of this resolution, which has passed the vote in each of the years Canada has brought it to the table, was born out of the 2003 death of the Iranian-Canadian photojournalist, Zahra Kazemi, while kept in the regime's custody.
France had lobbied the European Union separately to further tighten the sanction noose. But as before, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad will scoff at such threats. He has been adept at allowing the brunt of those sanctions to trickle down to affect the population, while not impeding the nuclear program or the arming of terrorist groups, such as Hezbollah and the Iran Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC). He will undoubtedly let his poor countrymen suffer the consequences of the new economic penalties, the world and Iranian people be damned.
In Iran, human rights violations have covered the entire spectrum of abuses, from the passive infringement of barring women from attending soccer matches, to the more deplorable abuses, like coerced confessions, amputations, and multiple executions by stoning, hanging, and shooting.
Many of the less reported crimes against individual freedom fall under the umbrella of Iran implementing its austere form of Islam nationwide. That gender-ethnic-religious bias has emasculated the rights and ambitions of secular-leaning women and lead to the cultural cleansing of the Kurds.
Women used to make up 25 percent of the engineers and scientists of Iran's nuclear program—that was in the 1960s and 70s during the pre-revolutionary days. I doubt women make up a fraction of that group today as they have been relegated to third class citizens with little to no rights.
Kurds, who populate Kurdistan and other provinces in the northwest parts of Iran, have been forced not to speak or teach the Kurdish language in their schools, to assimilate to the doctrine of Islamic law, and have had their own journalists murdered at the hands of the IRGC in its annual crackdown on the Kurds. The first wave of economic sanctions that followed the Iranian Revolution at the hands of the militant Ayatollah Khomeini and the Islamic clerics, coupled with the fatigue of the eight year Iraq-Iran War in the 1980s, worked so well that it made Iran a pariah on the world stage. The sanctions and the war almost bankrupted the country, while the isolation became unbearable.
In 1990, Iran changed tack. It invited the U.N.'s Human Rights Team into the country to show progress, such as releasing a couple of American prisoners, while opening diplomatic channels with Europe, the United Nations, and the World Bank. But just as Iran makes token changes to manipulate the U.N.'s International Atomic Energy Agency, the symbolic acts of "progress" and the opening up to the world are a sham.
While Iran's propaganda machine has worked overtime ever since to get back some of the goodwill it had lost, two seismic events this decade—the 9/11 terrorist attacks and the Iraqi War—have overshadowed the regime's massive human rights violations. And the release of the recent National Intelligence Report, downplaying Iran's nuclear ambitions, doesn't help. These human rights abuses occur inside and outside of Iran's borders. They would include Iran's ramping up of war in Lebanon against Israel, the sponsorship of insurgency in Iraq, and the sponsoring, arming, and training of terrorists. More opaque abuses include political assassinations of Kurds and other enemies of the mullahs in Iraq, Turkey, and beyond.
Inside the republic, the list is long and horrifying. Writers, activists, and critics of the government "disappear" or are imprisoned on trumped up charges, like spying. The revolutionary courts, whose trials are closed to the world, wield absolute and unlimited power. They can overturn any previous decision made by any other court, do so in secrecy, and sentence as they see fit, often invoking the death penalty, which has been the political tool of choice to silence detractors.
The world can and must do more to condemn and punish the regime for its human rights abuses. It must start with the United States in the Bush Administration and carry on through, like a torch, during the presidential elections next year. It must coincide with the European countries' vocal outcries and actions against Iran and become a unified wave with the UN, tying into the sanctions the world has imposed on Iran for its nuclear program. Without such a hard stance, then the abuses and miscarriages of justice, freedom, and rights will continue unabated. That is something the world can't be passive about.