Author: Ophelia Benson

Photos and news published in Iranian media describe continuous crackdowns in Iran. To “increase public security”, the regime’s Security Forces have now started clamping down on “thugs” in Tehran. The drive is a follow-up to the commonplace plan that traditionally starts in the springtime with nationwide morality crackdowns on women labelled “bad hijab” (badly veiled).

Authorities in Iran speak of a steadily increasing number of arrests and claim that “Our decisive confrontation will continue in Tehran down to the very last thug,” said the head of the capital’s metropolitan police force, Ahmad Reza Radan, according to the semi-official Fars news agency.

According to different sources, pictures taken by the Fars news agency and reproduced by several moderate dailies showed a man barefoot and stripped to the waist, with two plastic watering cans round his neck, being grabbed by a police officer, while other images showed black balaclava-clad police officers beating their captives. A number of captives were forced to ride a donkey as a “warning to others”.

Some scenes of humiliation were so repulsive that IRI’s police chief had to admit that some officers had overstepped the mark, but he emphasised that the parading of suspects around neighbourhoods had been carried out with prior approval.

Since the beginning of the morality crackdowns, it is believed that thousands of people have been arbitrarily arrested mostly on a range of “phoney charges” from non-conformity to the Islamic standard dress to alleged drug trafficking. Many thousands of women and young men have been warned or forced to make a written pledge to respect Islamic standard dress. Furthermore, a number of the “culprits” have been turned over to the judicial authorities for the alleged offence of improper dressing.

The worldwide published atrocities of crackdowns against women show women harassed and surrounded by screaming female morality police draped in shroud-like black chadors. A woman with stains of blood in the face is dragged in a police car. Crackdowns on women and newly on “thugs” triggered reactions in the international community by accusing the IRI of harassing thousands of men and women in recent weeks for their allegedly immoral behaviour.

In its statement, Human Rights Watch reports that IRI’s police detained more than 80 people in a raid on a birthday party in the city of Isfahan in May. Police accused some attendees of the private gathering of wearing the clothes of the opposite sex.

Human Rights Watch said the arbitrary arrests threaten basic rights to privacy and urged the IRI to halt what it calls a nationwide crackdown on what Iranian authorities view as deviant dress and behaviour.

Following the sporadic reactions of victims in Iran and international pressure, a number of Islamic factions of the regime, in order to play down the IRI’s constitutional violence, especially against women, simply accused the government of undermining the IRI’s laws by beating and parading the suspects. The parade in the neighbourhood is however permitted with prosecutors’ approval. These suspects, not yet accused, are punished because the punishment indeed serves as a warning and intimidation to other people.

Most people in Iran believe that such accusations are mainly being used as justification for the arrest and repression of political activists and those perceived to be potential threats to the security of the IRI.

Who are these “thugs”?

It is important to mention that the word “thug” in Iran is not completely synonymous to what in the West refers to people with a schizoid relationship with violence. Thugs in Iran are not soccer hooligans, rednecks, skinheads or any similar western group of violent, furiously nationalistic, xenophobic and racist young men who enjoy destroying property and hurting people, finding “absolute completeness” in the havoc they wreak. Thugs in the West may even be employed in high-paying blue-collar jobs.

By contrast, the word “thug” in Iran refers to a group of people who are socially and economically marginalised. They are derived from poor milieus and confront all unfair aspects of their society. Because of the high rate of unemployment, poverty, widespread illiteracy, and a lack of welfare and a social protect system, they are direct victims of such a society and spontaneously revolt against the socio-economic pressures.

Bully thugs with a religious identity can be recruited in IRI’s Security Forces or are systematically used in the organised pro-regime militias called plainclothes (lebas shakhsi) to intimidate IRI’s opponents or beat anti-regime’s demonstrators up. Therefore, a number of IRI’s Security Forces, who now arrest thugs, are in fact the recruited ex-thugs. They now accuse the non-recruited thugs of violence, robbery, drugs, whereas these could be indeed applied to them too, if they were not recruited by the regime.

As seen on some published photos and footages of the crackdowns, a number of these “thugs” do not look like thugs. Some of them wear T-shirts with Latin words written on them; they are shaved and seem to be frustrated young men. Since it is easier for a man to wear the part of the rebellious teenager dress than for a woman in Iran, these urban male youth, labelled “Thugs”, are now new victims of the regime.

Some Iranian young men have been flogged for taking drugs, drinking alcohol or simply for listening to a personal walkman while walking down the street. They react in their manner to the lack of personal freedoms. The regime calls these people “thugs”.

Urban youth in particular calls for social and political freedom. Youth is always the sector of the population which reacts most fiercely and most violently to their aspirations not being fulfilled.

Young Iranians make up an estimated 70 percent of their country’s population. More than half of the country’s population is under the age of 20. The generation born under the IRI’s reign is increasingly showing frustration with Iran’s lack of social freedoms and ongoing troubled economy. Iran’s unemployment rate is now 15 percent (11.20 percent in 2006). Youth makes up a large proportion of the unemployed.

Official figures say youth aged 15 to 19 account for 39 percent of the country’s active work force and the unemployment rate stands at about 34 percent among the age groups of 15 to 19 years old and at about 16 percent among the 25 to 29 years age group.

According to some statistics of 2003, about 20,000 teenagers live on the streets of Iran’s larger cities, but most of them reside in Tehran. The problem has been fuelled by poverty and aggravated by the economic crisis.

A report by the United Nations has found that Iran has the highest drug addiction rate in the world. “According to the U.N. World Drug Report for 2005, Iran has the highest proportion of opiate addicts in the world — 2.8 percent of the population over age 15”, the report said. “With a population of about 70 million and some government agencies putting the number of regular users close to 4 million, Iran has no real competition as world leader in per capita addiction to opiates, including heroin.”

The report added that a government poll had shown that almost 80 percent of Iranians believed that there was a direct link between unemployment and drug addiction. According to Iranian National Centre for Addiction Studies, 20 percent of Iran’s adult population was “somehow involved in drug abuse”.

Many Iranians describe high drug availability as evidence of a plot by the regime. “If they could create enough jobs, enough entertainment, why would people turn to drugs?” It is not only the lack of policy and management, but the interests of corrupt state mafia whose sales in Iran made up a 10 billion dollar market last year, nearly three quarters of the total revenue from Iran’s oil market during the same period.

This new repression proves that hard-line President Mahmoud Ahmadi Nezhad’s promises of economic reform in Iran have failed to materialise into raising the standard of living for most ordinary Iranians in the 21 months since he came to power in August 2005.

The Iranian population, far behind Sri Lanka, remains below the poverty line. A member of Iran’s Majlis (parliament) confessed in Jan. 2005 that “90 percent of the population are living under the poverty line and only ten percent of the people have access to social services provided by the government”, Mohammad Abbaspour said in an interview with a hardline state-run news agency. The situation has since worsened and continues pushing an increasing number of young people below the poverty line.

In the past 27 years, we have witnessed immense pressures on different segments of Iranian society. The IRI dreams of rendering it into a total Islamic society, but people (especially youth) do not bow to an Islamic way of life in any standard. Furthermore, social poverty, homeless tramps, higher unemployment rates, and the lack of social and private freedom, lead to the rise of unsolvable ills for Iranian youth. The incompetent regime treats a majority of this frustrated youth as “thugs”.

According to Article 35 of the Chinese Constitution, Chinese citizens have the right to freedom of speech and freedom of the press. In reality this is utterly false. Consistently, China has shown total contempt for the concept of freedom of speech, and, most worryingly, it is being aided in this by major Western corporations. Throwing aside the pretence of responsible and ethical business, well known corporations including Microsoft, Google, Yahoo, and Cisco Systems are actively assisting the Chinese government’s campaign against human rights, motivated by the promise of potentially huge financial returns.

In contemporary China, journalists, bloggers, academics, and political opponents of the Government routinely face harassment and imprisonment. A brief summary of recent developments makes for sobering reading.

2000:
Academic historian Xu Zerong was detained on spurious charges of ‘illegally providing state secrets’ (in reality, sending historical material dating from the 1950s about the Korean War to researchers outside China) and publishing banned material. This earned him a combined prison sentence of 13 years.

2001:
On July 10, China announced it will put Chinese-American academic Li Shaomin on trial for spying. On July 14, one day after China’s successful bid for the 2008 Olympics, Li Shaomin, an American academic, was tried for ‘espionage’. Then on July 24, Sociologist Dr. Gao Zhan was sentenced to ten years in prison on charges of ‘collecting intelligence for Taiwan’. Routinely, China imprisons academics on trumped up charges of ‘espionage’ in order to silence criticism of the regime.

2002:
Wired News reported that the Chinese government ‘continues to maintain a nearly rock-solid cyberwall’, blocking access to information on the Internet and employing 30,000 ‘Internet police’ to monitor its citizens. Most worryingly, it was revealed that the Internet blocking software was sold to the Chinese government by US companies.

2004:
Journalist Shi Tao warned journalists of the dangers associated with dissidents returning to mark the 15th anniversary of the Tiananmen Square massacre. He was arrested and later imprisoned for 10 years, for revealing a ‘State secret’. Court papers revealed that Yahoo Holdings in Hong Kong had provided details regarding Tao’s e-mail correspondence and IP address tracking, leading to his conviction.

2005:
It was revealed that Microsoft was censoring Chinese weblogs that used words such as ‘freedom’, ‘democracy’, and ‘demonstration’. Microsoft’s justification for this blatant assistance with censorship was that it ‘abides by the laws, regulations and norms of each country in which it operates’. This same year, the Chinese government imprisoned three journalists, dismissed editors of a number of newspapers, banned dozens of newspapers, and confiscated almost one million ‘illegal’ publications. Also in 2005, a court froze the assets of two journalists who had criticised work conditions at factories run by Foxconn, a company which makes the Apple iPod.

2006:
Google agreed to censor search results in China, and set up a special government authorised search engine for China. All other Google search engines are blocked from being used. Google’s motto ‘Don’t be evil’ here looks to be little more than words.

2007:
This February, U.S. Congressman Chris Smith stated in a letter to the Wall Street Journal that Western corporations are failing to prevent censorship and other human rights abuses in China, and are in fact assisting them. ‘There is enormous profit potential, but entering the Chinese market means challenging a repressive regime on basic human rights tenets. Sadly, some of America’s largest tech firms are currently failing this new test of corporate responsibility’, he wrote.

While President George W. Bush continues to mouth platitudes about freedom and democracy, he has failed to apply these standards to China, thereby revealing the power of the economic motive in determining who is eligible for human rights and who apparently isn’t. The outrageous human rights abuses and restrictions on freedom of speech in China continue apace, aided and abetted by quiescent Western governments and Western companies willing to actively assist government censorship in return for a ‘fast buck’.

This article originally appeared in Blurb magazine and is reproduced here with permission.

Picking up this tiny book from a little-known university press, I am reminded of Thomas Paine, Karl Marx, and their fellow pamphleteers of revolution. Even the cover, with its pale blue and declarative font, looks like samizdat. Noam Chomsky and Michael Moore would like to think of themselves as dissident writers in a totalitarian state, but their polemics are widely available and sell by the bucketload. Moore, in particular, has added considerably to Rupert Murdoch’s fortune. But Danny Postel is the real deal.

The first half of Postel’s little book comprises a series of essays in which he attempts to answer the question: why is the Left of the rich world ignoring comrades in the poor world?

Iraq tore the Western left in two. Everyone agreed that the invasion might be catastrophic and that its motives were not the finest. Far-left sects organised massive demonstrations against it. But a large part of the Iraqi left felt that the war was a good idea for the sole reason that, whatever happened, Saddam would go. Their viewpoint was ignored by the antiwar parties but given a voice in the West by a disparate group of writers, journalists, academics, bloggers and trade unionists, who chose to stick by their comrades and, after the war, and unlike much of the antiwar movement, chose to stick by them against the fundamentalist ‘resistance’. This caused a monstrous schism that reverberates to this day.

As Postel makes clear, Iranians tend to be in favour of basic liberal values rather than radical anti-imperialist projects. There are two reasons for this. One is that, under faith-based totalitarianism, the urgent need is to get the rights of free speech, free elections and gender equality before you can embark on any ambitious economic schemes. Another is the example of the Tudeh Party, a Communist organisation that allied with Khomeini to organise the revolution only to be murdered along with thousands of their friends when they had outlived their usefulness to the theocrats. The Tudeh Party have a British equivalent in the Socialist Workers’ Party, recently allied with a reactionary Islamic organisation.

In effect, the Tudeh Party sold itself and its comrades down the river. Postel quotes the journalist Afshin Molavi:

Iranian youth largely dismiss the radical ideas of their parents’ generation, full of half-baked leftism, Marxist economics, Third World anti-imperalism, Islamist radicalism and varying shades of utopian totalitarianism. ‘We just want to be normal,’ is typical of what hundreds of students have told me. ‘We’re tired of radicalism.’

Yet hardly anyone on the planet, aside from a few crazed neoconservatives, is in favour of an attack on Iran. Surely we can agree on that? And Postel gives some fairly convincing reasons it probably won’t happen:

The rhetoric of looming showdowns and enemies at the gate is pumped up by and serves the interest of both regimes. Posturing aside, Bush and Ahmadinejad are in fact involved in a symbiotic dance, a game of Schmittian shadowboxing, if you will, in which each needs the other as an enemy and feeds on the other’s rhetoric.

I’d go with that, and would add another reason: liberal internationalism is dead. Derided by both the right and the left (in my country, the conservative press takes the same line as its liberal counterpart: that Iraq is a waste of our time and money) no leader will be able to get elected by advocating war. Already the tide is turning. Kissinger has been visiting the White House, and Bush’s recent talks (read ‘deals’) with the Iranian regime signifies that we are back to the old Cold War routine of selling weapons to dictators rather than overthrowing them. And this is a sad thing, I think.

Yet most of the Western left still sees the world through what Postel calls ‘the prism of American imperialism, which is no less an American prism for being critical, as opposed to uncritical, of US foreign policy’. Whatever America is against, it will defend. Throw in a puritan instinct to defend faith-based regimes, and a creepy servility towards foreign tyrants, and that is the majority Left position in a nutshell: and one that doesn’t seem to realise its parochialism in putting its own domestic political preferences over the lives of the oppressed.

In a way this book is like an easy introduction to where the Left has gone wrong over the past few years. Postel discusses the great betrayal of Michel Foucault, who went to Iran after the revolution and praised its ‘different regime of truth,’; the pernicious idea that freedom of speech and separation of church and state and the right to vote comprise some kind of imperialist conspiracy; the silence from Western leftists at the regime’s executions, torture, imprisonment and beatings of Iranian feminists and trade unionists and its crackdown on student demonstrations. Antiwar activists claim to speak for the Iranian people, but cannot name a single Iranian dissident – let alone the philosopher Ramin Jahanbegloo, a former political prisoner who gives an interview to Postel in the latter half of this book.

All this can be summed up in a single anecdote, which is worth extensive quotation:

[Shirin Ebadi, Nobel laureate and human rights lawyer] went on a speaking tour in the spring of 2006 to discuss her recently-published autobiography, Iran Awakening. As someone who every day of every week defends the victims of the regime’s brutal abuses – indeed as someone who has done jail time for engaging in that work – the issue of the Islamic Republic’s human rights practices tends to figure centrally in her scheme of things. Which is not to say that it’s the only issue on her agenda, or that it in any way blunts her criticisms of the United States and its foreign policy – quite the contrary. She has spoken out in no uncertain terms against the Iraq War, the detainee base at Guantánamo, and the torture inflicted by US soldiers at Abu Ghraib – and has made it utterly clear that she opposes any US intervention in Iran. And yet, at a public event for her book in London, an antiwar activist instructed her that she should not denounce Iran’s human rights record – indeed not discuss it at all – explaining that doing so only plays into the hands of the warmongers, and fuels the fires of imperialism.

Emphasis is of course mine. This was Ebadi’s reply:

Leaning over the lectern and waving her finger at the activist, she made plain that any antiwar movement that advocates silence in the face of tyranny, for whatever reason, can count her out.

We should be able to unite on opposition to war with Iran. But, as Postel explains, opposition is not enough. We know what we’re against: what exactly are we for? If you can’t answer that, you can count yourself out of any serious debate about the future of the Iranian people.

Reading Legitimation Crisis in Tehran, Danny Postel, Prickly Paradigm 2006