IRANIAN JOURNALISTS ABROAD STRONGLY PROTEST TO MR. SAHHABI’S "CONFESSIONS"
PARIS 3 June (IPS) In a strongly worded letter sent Sunday to the leader of Islamic Republic of Iran Ayatollah Ali Khamenehe'i, the Association of Iranian Journalists Abroad (AIJA) protested to the "shameful" action of the Islamic revolution tribunal by publishing in the evening daily Keyhan a letter attributed to veteran journalist Ezzatollah Sahhabi in which he warns his children against trying to save him from jail.
In the letter, Mr. Sahhabi, the owner and publisher of the reformist "Iran Farda" bi-weekly "confesses" to his "mistakes" and "repents" from his past activities he describes as being aimed at overthrowing "peacefully" to present theocracy and replacing it by a secular system "with the help of CIA" and other "counter-revolutionary" organisation.
Observing that the Editor of Keyhan Mr. Hossein Shariatmadari, a high-ranking officer of the Intelligence Ministry specialising in obtaining confessions from dissidents under physical and psychological tortures, is appointed to that job by Mr. Khamenehe'i, the Rome-based AIJA denounces such "degrading and inhuman" process and calls on Mr. Khamenehe'i to order the "immediate" release of Mr. Sahhabi as well as other imprisoned journalists, "all jailed on your order".
"We know, you know and everyone in Iran and in the world knows that these confessions are fully fabricated and totally baseless. Confessions of Mr Ali Afshari, one of the leaders of Iranian students broadcast last month by the servile Voice and Visage of the ugly face of your regime and the one now published under the name of Mr. Sahhabi are methods used by dictators stronger than you, Stalin and Hitler and smaller ones like Milosevic, among many others. The dictators and their infamous regimes have died, but the victims survived", the Association warns.
International journalist associations, including the Paris-based Reporters Sans Frontieres and the New York-based Campaign to Protect Journalists have both "awarded" the Iranian clerical leader as the "world’s most dangerous enemy" of journalists and freedom of the press.
Protesting to the Mr. Afshari’s "confessions" broadcast last month by the VVIR, the British National Union of Journalists decided on possible actions against the Iranian Radio and Television, including an international boycott of the organisation that is chaired by Mr. Ali Larijani, a former Revolutionary guards intelligence officer.
On the orders of Mr. Khamenehe'i, some 60 publications have been closed in Iran in the past year and a dozen of journalists and editors placed behind bars, charged of "lese-majesty" against Ayatollah Khamenehe'i. ENDS AIJA SAHHABI 3601