Few were surprised by last Monday’s ban on Iran’s leading reformist newspaper, Shargh (East), which has, for some time, boldly voiced dissatisfaction with the outcome of last year’s elections that brought President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to power.
The newspaper ran a cartoon the previous Thursday depicting a donkey — a symbol of ignorance in Iranian culture — with a halo around its head, braying at a puzzled-looking knight on a chessboard. The reference was to Ahmadinejad’s brag that he was surrounded by a halo as he addressed the United Nations General Assembly last year.
”Shargh had become a political club for all the people who had become disillusioned by [last year’s presidential] elections. The ban is a price it is paying for criticising the administration, however mildly, and this is a high-alert situation,” Akbar Montajabi, a journalist who wrote for Shargh, said in his blog this week.
Ahmadinejad’s tenure has marked a turning point in press freedom, which the Society to Defend Freedom of the Press has described as ”one of the darkest periods in Iranian history of journalism”. The society cautioned against the trend towards censorship and pressure on journalists.
During the early days of Mohammad Khatami’s reformist presidency, numerous newspapers and periodicals hit the newsstands and became popular. But Khatami’s power was limited to administration, so pressure on the press continued to come from the hard-line judiciary and other bodies. During Khatami’s 1997 to 2005 tenure, the judiciary shut down more than 100 pro-reform newspapers and jailed dozens of editors and writers on vague charges of insulting authorities. In April 2000, more than 15 newspapers were banned in one single day.
”Since the handover of the government to the hard-liners last year, all newspapers have fallen to increasing self-censorship for the fear of another huge crackdown,” said a reformist journalist in Tehran, asking not to be named. ”Newspapers, under pressure from various bodies such as the judiciary, the Ministry of Culture and Islamic Guidance, the Intelligence Ministry and the Supreme National Security Council, have become too conservative in what they write. But the danger of being closed down looms above their heads every day.
”No major papers had been banned until the government’s own gazette had to be closed down after it ran a cartoon that Iran’s huge Azeri population considered insulting,” she added.
”To calm the riots in Azeri-speaking cities and towns that left several dead, the paper had to be banned in spite of its affiliation to the government. But most journalists felt that if they were careful enough and didn’t touch certain subjects, their papers could survive,” the journalist said. ”In the past few months, newspapers have repeatedly been advised not to touch sensitive subjects relevant to national security such as the nuclear issue and the riots in Azeri-speaking cities. The orders came from various ministries or sometimes from the Supreme National Security Council.”
According to a journalist of the banned daily: ”About two weeks ago, our newspaper received a letter from the Islamic Guidance Ministry. The letter listed a number of official and ‘reliable’ news agencies that could be quoted by newspapers. Other sources were said to be unauthorised. Apparently, other papers received the same directive, too.
”The directive has never been officially released by the ministry and nobody dared publish it. The list of officially approved sources attached to the letter excluded some Farsi-language internet sites affiliated to hard-line and conservative groups and individuals in the system itself who are critical of the government’s performance,” he added.
The Islamic Guidance Minister, Hossein Saffar Harandi, a former editor of the hard-line Keyhan newspaper, has recently been more outspoken about his ministry’s plans to bring the internet under control.
Many news sites, such as Emrouz, which is affiliated to Iran’s opposition Mosharekat Party, and the Europe-based, Farsi-language Roozonline portal, as well as personal websites and blogs of dissidents and human rights activists have long been inaccessible to the Iranian public.
”We have plans to [stop] the mushroom-like growth of internet sites, including web logs, to make the virtual information space more ‘guided’,” the Baztab newspaper quoted Harandi as saying. He has said that individuals must be held accountable for what they write and publish on internet sites.
There are already several cases pending before Iran’s judiciary against journalists for postings on internet sites. Omid Memarian, an Iranian journalist who lives in California and writes for various Farsi-language internet newspapers and portals based abroad, has to appear before an Iranian court on October 28, Memarian’s lawyer, Nasrin Sotoudeh, said recently.
Memarian will be tried in absentia if he does not appear. Another journalist has been given a suspended six-month sentence in the religious city of Qom for allegedly insulting the supreme leader, Ayatollah Khamenei.
Book publishers, too, are experiencing restrictions. Publication permits for second or third editions of books, mostly those that had received permits during the reform period or early days of Ahmadinejad’s presidency, have been withheld by the Islamic Guidance Ministry.
”In a country where only 3 000 to 5 000 copies of a book can printed in the first edition for fear of financial loss, the refusal to give permission for later impressions means that a lot of publishers will go bankrupt and that’s exactly what the ministry wants,” a publisher said. ”The eight years of relative freedom in our business gave birth to a lot of small publishing houses. Now many of the ‘undesirable ones’ will have to close down and the rest will come under greater control.”
On September 6, the Iranian parliament released the results of a probe it conducted into the performance of the Islamic Guidance Ministry during Khatami’s presidency. The report criticised the former ministers for too much leniency in matters of press, publication of books and their contents, music, theatre and cinema and even accused the former officials of financial corruption.
”The only means of communication left to reformists is the print media,” said an analyst in Tehran. ”As the dates of elections to the Experts Assembly and the City Council [set for December] are approaching, hard-liners are becoming more wary of reformists influencing people through the media.
”The rift in the ranks of hard-liners and conservatives, or the principled as they like to call themselves, is growing fast, whereas reformists seem to have managed their differences at last, moving towards a single slate of candidates. Shargh was the most widely read reformist paper and could have played a decisive role in all this. It had to be silenced as a preventive measure,” the analyst said. — IPS