Sakineh's Forced Confession

Sakineh Mohammad Ashtiani is still alive; she has apparently confessed "sin of adultery" to Iran TV.

Appearing on TV for the third time since her case caught the world's attention, Ashtiani reiterated her previous televised "confessions" that she was involved in the murder of her husband. "I am a sinner," she said. Her face was blurred and the interview, conducted in her native Azeri language, was subtitled in Farsi.

During the interview, Ashtiani also accused Mina Ahadi, an activist of the German-based International Committee Against Stoning (Icas), who has been successful in bringing her case to the world's attention. The broadcast, on Iran's Channel 2, portrayed Ahadi as "a communist dissident exiled in Germany", who had taken advantage of Ashtiani 's case for her own benefit.

There were also alleged confessions from her son Sajad Ghaderzadeh, her lawyer Houtan Kian and the two German journalists detained while interviewing Ghaderzadeh and Kian last month.

The programme stated that her lawyers, Mohammad Mostafaei and Kian, promoted her case because "they were looking for excuses to claim asylum in western countries".  Mostafaei, Ashtiani 's first lawyer, was arrested and subsequently forced to leave Iran after giving interviews to foreign press. He is now in Norway. Kian, who represented Ashtiani after Mostafaei, has been jailed since October and claimed that Ashtiani was beaten and tortured before appearing on TV for the first time.

Forced TV confessions, especially of political prisoners, are common in Iran.   I have met many Iranian former political prisoners and all said they have been tortured so that they would publicly confess their “sins” and recant their allegiances and beliefs.

 In his disturbing book “Tortured Confessions",  historian Ervand Abrahamian explains that the use of systematic torture in Iran’s prisons is not conducted to obtain information, but a public confession and ideological recantation. For the victim, whose honour, reputation and self-respect are destroyed, the act is a form of suicide.

In Iran, a subject's "voluntary confession" reaches a huge audience via television. The accessibility of television and use of videotape have made such confessions a primary propaganda tool, says Abrahamian, and because torture is hidden from the public, the victim's confession appears to be self-motivated, increasing its value to the authorities.  Similar public recantation campaigns have been led in Maoist China, Stalinist Russia and by the religious inquisitions of early modern Europe.

"I want the world to know" - 21st anniversary of the 1988 massacre in Iran

In the coming days, families will gather on a derelict plot next to the cemetery of religious minorities in the district of Khavaran, in south-east Tehran. They call it ‘the rose garden of Khavaran’ – for a rose, in a culture where it is often safer to use poetry, represents a fallen freedom fighter. The Iranian leadership calls it the ‘place of the damned’ or the ‘cemetery of the infidels’. There, in unmarked mass graves, lie thousands of political prisoners killed by the Islamic regime.

Their families have been coming there early September – and at other times - for the past 20 years to commemorate what they call “the national catastrophe” - the biggest and most under-reported state crime in Iran’s modern history. Braving military harassment and sometimes arrest, they return to Khavaran again and again.

In July and August 1988, the Islamic regime had executed in secret thousands of political prisoners throughout the country – men, women and teenagers. They were intellectuals, students, leftists, members of opposition parties and ethnic and religious minorities. Many were jailed for no more than distributing leaflets, having a banned book or being accused by ‘a trusted friend of the regime’.

The slaughter was efficient and relentless. All day long, prisoners were loaded on forklift trucks and hanged from cranes and beams in groups of six at half-hourly intervals. Others were killed by firing squad. Those not executed were subjected to horrific torture. The killing was ‘an act of violence unprecedented in Iranian history, unprecedented in form, content and intensity,’ wrote the US historian Ervand Abrahamian in his book on Iranian prisons Tortured Confessions.

‘When they took me to the death committee in (Tehran’s) Gohardasht prison, the lobby was piled high with sandals, glasses and blindfolds. That’s all that was left of our friends. They are all gone and I am alive. Iam alive to tell their story. That is my only goal,’ says Mehdi Aslani, 52, who survived the massacre and now lives in exile in Germany.

The regime has never acknowledged the massacre, revealed how many were executed, nor why. Amnesty International has recorded the names of 2,800 victims, but survivors believe it was probably between 5,000 and 10,000. The execution of such a large number of people within such a short time, without any due process, violates many international human rights treaties to which Iran is signatory; yet the world has remained largely silent. Most of the perpetrators are still in power today. ‘Nobody has been brought to justice’ says Drewery Dyke, Amnesty’s Iran researcher. ‘Impunity for such appalling crimes only leads to further human rights abuses.’

The husband and two brothers of Rakhshndeh Hosseinpoor, now 56, were killed by the Islamic regime. She now lives in Germany with her son. ‘They have ruined so many lives. I’ve lost three members of my family, but some families have lost six or seven. So many children are without fathers and mothers, so many young widows, so much pain that never goes away... We need justice.’

‘We need people to know about the massacre of 1988 because it isn’t just the problem of the survivors and their families,’ says Reza Moini, another survivor, who works as a human rights activist in Paris. ‘It was a political act, a social act, not a private one. We need the truth for tomorrow’s youth.’

This post is based on an article I have written on the massacre for the New Internationalist. I have researched this topic for many years, gathered lots of evidence and documents, and interviewed a dozen survivors in Germany, the UK, Belgium, France and the US. I have yet to find a mainstream publication willing to run an in-depth article on the 88 massacre.

Iran - detained opposition leaders at risk of torture to force TV confessions

I was dismayed to hear that many callers on a BBC 4 programme on Iran over the weekend believed that the demonstrations against the outcome of the 12 June election – and the claim of the fixed election itself – were part of a foreign-led plot against the Islamic regime. Even the Independent newspaper’s Robert Fisk suggested in a recent opinion piece that much of the reported demonstrations and violence by security forces were fantasy.

That is exactly what the regime is hoping to achieve. Iranian opposition websites claim the regime is torturing jailed Iranian reformists to force them into TV “confessions” aimed at implicating Mir Hossein Mousavi and Mehdi Karroubi, the defeated reformist candidates, in an alleged conspiracy, or the US and UK.

Amnesty International is gravely concerned that several journalists and opposition leaders – including Mohsen Aminzadeh, Abdollah Ramazanadeh and Mostafa Tajzadeh - detained in the wake of the elections may be facing torture to force them to make televised ‘confessions’ as a prelude to unfair trials in which they could face the death penalty.

On Friday 26 June, cleric Ahmad Khatami, who is a member of the Assembly of Experts, called on the judiciary to punish, severely and without mercy, those involved in the demonstrations. Ominously, he used the term moharebeh or enmity against God, a charge that can carry the death penalty.

Televised “confessions” have repeatedly been used in the past by the Iranian authorities to incriminate political activists in their custody or force prisoners of conscience to recant their beliefs or allegiances. Many have later retracted these “confessions”, stating that they were coerced to make them, sometimes after torture or other ill treatment. Iranian historian Ervand Abrahamian documents this practice in Tortured Confessions: Prisons and Public Recantations in Modern Iran.

Mohsen Aminzadeh, Abdollah Ramazanadeh and Mostafa Tajzadeh are among hundreds of politicians, journalists, academics, students and human rights activists, who have been detained, some briefly, across Iran since the election. Most are either supporters of Mir Hossein Mousavi or Mehdi Karroubi, or are close to ex-President Khatami who supported Mousavi’s campaign. Others have been critical of incumbent President Ahmadinejad’s policies.

According to official statements, well over a thousand others have been arrested. Protesters were dealt with brutally by security forces. Many were beaten and, according to the authorities, up to 21 people have been killed, although the true number is likely to be higher.

Amnesty is asking people to call on the Iranian authorities to exercise restraint in dealing with the protestors and to ensure that those arrested are not tortured or otherwise mistreated.