The Foreign Minister of Iran, Mr. Manoucher Motaki, came to New York, supposedly in order to speak before the UNGA meeting titled a mouthful: “UN Conference to Review Progress Made in the Implementation of the Programme of Action to Prevent, Combat and Eradicate the Illicit Trade in Small Arms and Light Weapons in All its Aspects.” This is actually an important meeting because of the large number of people, all over the world, that are killed with small, and so called “light” weapons. But we know that the problem that involves Iran specifically these days are not the small guns, but the missiles and atomic heads, as well as all sorts of weapons of mass destruction. In effect, yesterday the UN Secretary-General met the Iranian Minister on all kind of subjects - other then the small weapons. The press was hanging around trying to take pictures of the Iranians, and the Minister seemed to enjoy the hoopla, but he did not speak to the press. All we know is from Mr. Kofi Annan and his spokesman.

The meeting the Secretary-General had with Mr. Motaki was in order to suggest he speed up the response to to the recent proposals on ending the impasse over Iran’s nuclear development programmes. Mr. Annan called these “technical proposals” made by the Permanent Five and Germany. At a “stake-out” before their meeting, Mr. Annan said to the reporters that he sought the Iranian answer will not come before the G8 meeting - so he already thinks that not much will be said before mid-August, but interestingly, it became known that before this time, in July, Iran intends to invite its “regional partners” to a meeting in Tehran in order to exchange views on Iraq - so I got the impression that the US has not seen yet any horizon in its approach to Iraq - the murkier the more interesting it gets - and the likelier it is that it will reach poker game dimensions - all what is needed now is a “quartet.” on the other hand, can indeed the US solve the Iraq mess without the help of Iran?divertissements

In the meanwhile Iran, while feverishly working on its “programmes,” provides the UN with all sorts of divertissements and we will pick up here the newly floated Human Rights Council on whose opening we cried already in our June 25, 2006, article. We will first talk about the quality of Iran’s delegates, as observer state, and then we will point out one peculiar human rights issue - the problem with Shia Arabs that are citizens of Iran and happen to sit on top of some of the choicest oil puddles of Iran. This is specially interesting when we also remember how Iran is trying to outdo the Arabs when it comes to express hatred to Israel is all of this a game of hit your own Arabs while saying you help the outside Arabs?

Nasrin Alavi, June 23, 2006 brought to our attention that the appointment of the notoriously repressive judge Saeed Mortazavi to the United Nations’ new Human Rights Council is an international scandal. The material on openDemocracy.net is titled, probably thanks to the attention to the football/soccer World Cup: “Tehran’s red card to human rights.”

The United Nations inaugurated its new Human Rights Council in Geneva on Monday 19 June 2006, replacing the discredited human-rights commission. It should be a historic, optimistic moment, but between the thought and the act falls the shadow. The launch of the new body was witnessed by two Iranian representatives whose human-rights records - even by the standards of the Islamic Republic - are infamous: justice minister Jamal Karimirad and Tehran’s prosecutor-general Saeed Mortazavi.

Mortazavi was the presiding judge of the infamous Court 1410 and hailed as the “butcher of the press” for his vicious rulings against journalists and free thinkers. He is credited with the closure of more than 100 publications and the harassment and imprisonment of many writers, activists, lawyers and bloggers in recent years. Shirin Ebadi, the lawyer and Nobel laureate, has even accused Mortazavi of being present in 2003 when Iranian-Canadian photojournalist Zahra Kazemi was tortured and killed.

Mortazavi’s arrival at the UN has rightly provoked an outcry from human-rights groups. He is undeterred. His first official meeting in Geneva was with Zimbabwe’s infamous minister of justice, Patrick Chinamasa.

Mortazavi also told Iranian news-agency reporters in Geneva that the United States “should be put high on the agenda of the UN Human Rights Council” for abuses in Bagram, Guantánamo, and Abu Ghraib (he added that “nuclear technology for peaceful purposes” is a basic right of all nations).

Mortazavi comes to the United Nations concerned by “Islamophobia” and “the instrumental use of human rights by the west”, arguing that the “holy concept” of human rights should be more susceptible to Islamic sensibilities.

Yet the regime that appeals to Islamic traditions is readily willing to crush dissent when it suits it to do so and it has imprisoned many prominent members of the Shi’a clergy such as Mohsen Kadivar, Abdollah Nouri and Mojtaba Lotfi just to name a few. It is also unique in Iran’s Islamic history for having kept under house arrest a Grand Ayatollah (Montazeri). In 2004 Grand Ayatollah Montazeri, stated that the Iranian people did not go through a revolution in order to “substitute absolutist rule by the crown with one under the turban”.

Nasrin Alavi is the author of “We Are Iran: The Persian Blogs (Portobello Books, 2005).” She spent her formative years in Iran, attended university in Britain and worked in London, and then returned to her birthplace to work for an NGO for a number of years. Today she lives in Britain.

Also by Nasrin Alavi on openDemocracy.net: “Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s fear” (November 2005), “Inside Iran”(February 2006), and “Iran: the elite against the people” (May 2006).

Saeed Mortazavi’s authoritarian methods have less to do with any specific culture or religion, than with common elements shared by culturally disparate states such as Zimbabwe and Iran whose governments exhibit contempt for human rights.

It is courtesy of Mortazavi that Iran could be called the “biggest prison for journalists in the middle east”. Yet this ominous accolade also indicates that large numbers of Iranians are willing to stand for their rights and raise their voice in the debate about their country’s democratic future.

One such veteran Iranian journalist, the recently exiled Massoud Behnood, who was imprisoned by Mortazavi. Behnood, writes online that the Iranian regime’s promotion of Mortazavi to the Human Rights Council frontline may well be a demonstration of Tehran’s current confidence.

Indeed, there is a sense of growing bravado in the recent stance of the Tehran regime. This was audible in the supreme leader, Ayatollah Khamenei’s speech addressed to United States leaders on 4 June 2006: “if you could hurt the Islamic Republic, you would not waste even one minute”. Today, the Americans appear bogged down in Iraq and far from creating a secure springboard for further regime change; instead, they seem to have empowered leaders uncannily reminiscent of Iran’s ruling ayatollahs.

Iraq’s largest and most influential Shi’a party, the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq (Sciri) was initially headed by an Iraqi-born ayatollah, Mahmoud Hashemi Shahrudi, who today presides over the Iranian judiciary.

It seems that the Iraqis are only beginning a journey that Iran set out on a quarter of century ago. Yet despite the international posturing by Iran’s government, the ruling elite are beset by internal strife. Moreover, Iran’s economy (supported by one of the world’s largest oil reserves) is crippled by corruption and negligence. The Mahmoud Ahmadinejad presidency has not produced employment or prosperity, and is damaged by an inflationary spiral that has been exacerbated by government policies. It must also ultimately answer to the demands of Iran’s educated youth who make up 70% of the population.

It has taken two decades, but even grand ayatollahs and other warhorses of the revolution have turned against the system they helped to create. Akbar Ganji, imprisoned for six years by Saeed Mortazavi for exposing a power-network behind the murders of writers and intellectuals, is one who challenges the regime and remains a consistent defender of human rights against the system’s cultivation of fear.

Nasrin Alavi argues “Iranian writers, activist and journalists like Ganji have been at the front-line of the battlefield that is at the heart of the struggle for the future of Iran. They have not asked to be precision bombed into democracy, nor have they sought financial aid to start a revolution. They are peacefully but assuredly struggling to change their societies from within. The least that the United Nations can do - for its own legitimacy, if not for the Iranian people - is to expel from its midst an infamous opponent of human rights and human freedom like Saeed Mortazavi.”

openDemocracy.net also published the Nobel Prize winner Shirin Ebadi who wrote on the Human Rights council and on Human Rights Watch. Her important book is “Iran Awakening” (Random House/Rider 2006).

Further, from Human Rights Watch we learn the last update about Shia Arabs living in Iran’s Khuzistan. We bring here the June 28, 2006 posting on www.hrw.org the article:

“Iran: Retry Ethnic Arabs Condemned to Death - Iranian Arabs Accused of Plotting Against State.”

During the past year, Iran’s southwestern province of Khuzistan has witnessed ethnic unrest among its Iranian-Arab population. The province is home to nearly two million Iranians of Arab descent. Protests erupted in Khuzistan’s capital, Ahwaz, on April 15, 2005, following publication of a letter allegedly written by Mohammad Ali Abtahi, an advisor to President Mohammad Khatami, which referred to government plans to implement policies that would reduce the proportion of ethnic Arabs in Khuzistan’s population. After security forces tried to disperse the demonstrators and opened fire on them, clashes between protestors and security forces turned violent. The violence spread to other cities and towns in Khuzistan. The next day, Abtahi and other government officials denied the existence of the letter and called it fake.

Ahwaz and other cities experienced several bombings after the April 2005 protests. In June 2005, four bombs in Ahwaz and two others in Tehran killed 10 people and injured at least 90. Two other bombings in Ahwaz, one in October 2005 and another in January 2005, killed 12 people. The government has reportedly arrested hundreds of Iranian Arabs since April 15, 2005.

HRW calls on Iran’s judiciary to rescind the death sentences of at least 10 Iranians of Arab origin convicted of plotting against the state, and retry them before courts that meet international fair trial standards, Human Rights Watch said today. At least 10 Iranians of Arab origin have been condemned to death following secret trials in the southwestern province of Khuzistan, which has seen ethnic unrest among its Iranian-Arab population in the past year. “We always oppose the death penalty, because it is cruel and flawed. But sentencing people to death after such an inadequate trial is especially outrageous.” Said Sarah Leah Whitson, executive director of the Middle East and North Africa division.

All the men were charged with armed activity against the state and were tried before Revolutionary Courts. Human Rights Watch spoke with one of the two defense lawyers for the men sentenced most recently, who confirmed that all trials were held behind closed doors and without any independent and impartial observers present. “These men are accused of serious crimes, but they clearly haven’t had a fair trial.”

The lawyers did not have an opportunity to meet with their clients to discuss their case with them, but had to prepare a defense based on the prosecution file presented to them. The trials have all been closed to the public, and defense lawyers remain the sole source of non-official information as to what occurred.

On March 2, the authorities hanged Ali Afrawi and Mehdi Nawaseri in Ahwaz, the capital of Khuzistan province. The authorities accused them of carrying out two bombings in Ahwaz that killed six people on October 15, 2005.

On June 6, Judiciary spokesman Jamal Karimirad said that a Revolutionary Court had sentenced six men to death, after it found them guilty of bombing oil pipelines in July 2005. He did not provide any information about the condemned men, or about when or where their trial was held.

Defense lawyers told Human Rights Watch that on June 8, 2006, the Third Branch of the Revolutionary Court in Ahwaz sentenced another four men to death following a one-day trial on June 7. The court found the men, Zamel Bawi, Jaafar Sawari, Raisan Sawari, and Abdulreza Nawaseri, guilty of armed activity against the state.

Human Rights Watch said that the Iranian government is obliged as a party to the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights to provide persons accused of crimes with “fair and public hearing by a competent, independent, and impartial tribunal.”

“A summary trial behind closed doors does not meet the international standards binding Iran,” said Whitson. “For Iran to put these defendants to death would be the ultimate violation of their rights.”

Zamel Bawi’s lawyer, Saleh Nikbakht, told Human Rights Watch that during his client’s trial on June 7, the Revolutionary Court prosecutor charged the four men under Iran’s penal code as mohareb, meaning “enemies of God.” The accusation of being mohareb is leveled against anyone charged with taking up arms against the state and committing violent acts, and is punishable by death.

According to Nikbakht, the state presented evidence that the defendants had purchased homemade bombs which they deactivated and hid, a charge that carries a 10-year prison sentence. But the lawyer said that since the prosecutor presented no evidence that the men had actually carried out any violent acts, they had not committed a capital offense under Iranian law.