A Times Editorial

A fragile freedom

While Iranians have felt a loosening of political and cultural restraints, there have been recent signs of resistance and renewed repression from the hard-liners.

© St. Petersburg Times, published April 29, 2000

Americans like to believe that once a totalitarian nation is allowed a little taste of freedom, it won't rest till it gets the whole banquet: a free press, free elections, a free market. It happened across Eastern Europe and in Russia. And, until recently, many Middle East-watchers thought it was happening in Iran.

The Iranian elections in February this year were a rebuke to the repressive Muslim clerics who have run the place like a prison since the 1979 revolution. Reformist candidates swept to a parliamentary majority, unfettered newspapers and magazines began to spring up, and President Mohammed Khatami, a progressive, beat out the mullahs in opinion polls. The nation once characterized by giant glowering portraits of Ayatollah Khomeini presiding over demonstrators chanting "Death to America," women in top-to-toe black veils and a theocracy dedicated to walling Iran off from "Western decadance" was loosening up. Satellite television and the Internet showed the outside world to young Iranians. Relations with the United States and Western Europe thawed. Lipstick, skateboards and cell phones were seen in the streets of Tehran.

But these political and cultural victories are looking more fragile by the day. A few days ago, the anti-reform Iranian judiciary closed 14 progressive newspapers and magazines, arresting a number of editors. Akbar Ganji and Mashallah Shamsolvaezin, two of Iran's most outspoken investigative journalists, were thrown in jail by hard-line judges. Ayatollah Khamenei, Iran's senior cleric, said the newspapers had become "bases of the enemy."

The hard-liners are trying to attack the election results, too. The conservative Guardian Council, which supervises the polls, has invalidated at least 10 parliamentary elections -- all of them seats where reform candidates won. The old anti-Israel and anti-U.S. rhetoric has come back with a vengeance as well: In the southern city of Shiraz, 13 Iranian Jews are charged with spying for the United States and Israel. The evidence against them seems to be slim, mainly based on a trip to Israel taken by several of them. That in itself is illegal, since contact with Israel -- a nation the hard-

liners hate even more than the United States -- is forbidden.

Amnesty International and several European nations have objected to the way the judge investigates charges, delivers a verdict and passes sentence, all in a closed courtroom, and have demanded a new trial. Four of the defendants have supposedly confessed. Facts are hard to come by, since no media are allowed at the trial.

As it stands, the trial has been postponed, but there are fears it's only a matter of time before all 13 are found guilty and imprisoned or even executed. Jews are easy prey for Iranian fundamentalists, representing a nation and a religion that are anathema to the mullahs.

Journalists are a soft target as well. It's easy to charge them with "insulting Islam" or "undermining the revolution." The hard-liners probably figure that if the reformists are not fed a diet of information, their movement will slow, maybe even die.

But Iran's progressives are keeping their cool -- for now. Though many in Iran have expressed outrage over the press crackdown and the arrests, reform leaders have discouraged public demonstrations, fearing the mullahs want an excuse to re-impose rigid order on a society just beginning to question its leaders, its laws and even its faith. This is a clear slap in the face of President Khatami who, only two months ago, declared that Islam and democracy were not incompatible.

Still, it will be hard for the mullahs to make people unlearn what they have learned, forget their few moments of liberalization and cover their eyes once more.

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