EZZATOLLAH SAHHABI REPORTED ALIVE BY HIS CHILDREN
TEHRAN 8 June (IPS) Haleh Sahhabi, the daughter of the 76 years-old veteran politician and journalist Ezzatollah Sahhabi confirmed that her father was alive, thus ending persistent rumours that he had passed away in prison.
Speaking to Iranian and foreign correspondents during a press conference organised Wednesday by families of the jailed Islamist-nationalists and other members of the Iran Freedom Movement, Ms. Sahhabi said her brother, Hamed, had been authorised to meet the aging father in a swimming pool "somewhere in the posh northern residential area of Tehran.
The place is well known to Iranians, as it is where that the "Master Key", the nickname given to Hojjatoleslam Ali Fallahian, the former Intelligence Minister by acclaimed investigative journalist and writer Akbar Ganji and some of his notorious deputies like Mr. Sa’id Emami and other "inmates" would use to "relax" in the company of their "girl friends", according to Mr. Ganji and other journalists who investigated the case known as "Serial Murders".
But while Ganji, Emameddin Baqi and other colleagues are in jail, Mr. Fallahian is jockeying in the presidential race that opened today, fighting against nine other candidates, including the outgoing President Mohammad Khatami, approved by the leader-appointed Council of Guardians to seek presidency, despite the fact that he is under an international warrant issued against him by the German Judiciary for his role in the assassination of four Iranian Kurdish leaders in Berlin in September 1992.
Mr. Emami, alias Eslami, killed himself in prison in 1999 after an investigation committee appointed by Mr. Khatami "disclosed" that he and some other high-ranking officers of the Intelligence Ministry had murdered five prominent dissident politicians and intellectuals in November 1998.
According to Ms. Haleh, during the meeting that took place with the presence of Islamic revolution court’s agents and prison guards, Mr. Sahhabi had "regretted" a letter he allegedly wrote to his children, "protesting" to their efforts to get him out of prison by alarming international public opinion in the one hand and "repenting" his past "mistaken" activities, on the other.
"My father told my brother that he had to (reluctantly) write that letter as a result of our interviews with the press and he is not happy about that", Ms. Haleh told journalists.
Mr. Sahhabi was jailed alongside of ten others on charges of activities and propaganda against the Islamic Republic and offending the leader during a conference that was organised in Berlin in April 2000 by the Heinrich Boel cultural institute discussing the future of reforms process in Iran.
Attended by seventeen prominent Iranians including some influential journalists, respected scholars and intellectuals as well as a dissident lawyer, a female publisher and a cleric, the meeting was denounced by ruling conservative establishment as an American and "Zionist" sponsored "forum" to debate ways and means to topple the clerics from power.
As a result, and aiming at further clipping the wings of the popular President, Ayatollah Ali Khameneh'i instructed the Islamic Judiciary he controls the shut the burgeoning independent press and place behind bars the pro-reforms journalists.
In the letter that was communicated to the hard-line daily "Keyhan", the organ of the leader’s private security service by the Islamic revolution tribunal, Mr. Sahhabi remonstrated his children for having written to the General Secretary of the United Nations Mr. Kofi Annan as well as other prominent national and international personalities and agencies, including the reformist-controlled Majles (parliament), confessing that he had "collaborated" with the CIA to "smoothly" replace the present theocracy with a Western-type democracy.
"Some Internet reports are saying that our father has suffered a heart attack and been transferred to an unknown location, but we are not sure about the credibility of these reports", Ms. Haleh had told earlier the independent Iranian Students News Agency ISNA.
Ms. Haleh also confirmed that the family had received a photocopy of Mr. Sahhabi’s controversial letter and though the calligraphy looks like that of his hand writing, but the style is definitively not his.
Sahhabi, the owner and publisher of the pro-reform "Iran Farda" (Tomorrow’s Iran) and an influential member of the recently banned Iran Freedom Movement (IFM) was transferred to an undisclosed prison that informed sources say is under the control of Mr. Khameneh’i and specialises in extracting confessions, in the form of TV "interviews" or written documents from political prisoners "admitting" invariably to "mistakes", "collaboration" with the regime’s "enemies", particularly the United States and Iranian "counter-revolutionaries" abroad, aiming primarily at changing the Islam-based regime into a secular system of government.
"Can anyone deny that (previous) efforts by me and others like me to transform the (Iranian) government into a non-religious one were in line with of the wishes of the United States?" the Islamic revolution court quoted Sahhabi as having told his children from his prison cell, where he is held alongside with Mr. Ali Afshari, a student leader and Hojjatoleslam Hasan Yusefi-Eshkevari, a prominent Islamist reformer condemned to death by the leader-controlled Clergymen’s Special Tribunal on charges of apostasy and opposing the leader.
Mr. Sahhabi’s written "repentance" followed a televised "confession" by Mr. Afshari where he too, had admitted "mistakes" that included "studying" best ways of changing the regime in "collaboration" with IFM and other Islamist-nationalist groups, and apologised to the "Great, Esteemed supreme leader". The tow men were sentenced to four and four and a half year imprisonment each.
During the Wednesday press conference, families of the jailed nationalist religious personalities, rounded up in two raids shortly before and after the Iranian New Year (21 March 2001) on orders of Mr. Khameneh'i, denounced the "illegal" detention of their men in solitary cells in undisclosed prisons, their "unbearable, unacceptable, difficult situation" in prison, the "psychological tortures" they are subject, the long, nocturne hours of interrogation and "fabricated" charges brought against them by the Islamic Judiciary.
"From information at our disposal, obtained from the prisoners and confirmed by investigative MMs (Members of the Majles) and lawyers, the cases they (Judiciary) have levied against the detainees are absolutely baseless, the files are bare empty" said Mrs. Farzaneh Roosta’i, a journalist and the wife of Dr. Reza Ra’is-Toosi, an IFM member and university professor.
Mr. Ra’is-Toosi had been arrested with 19 other IFM and Islamist-nationalist personalities last March in a night raid mounted on the house of Mr. Mohammad Basteh-Negar, another IFM leader.
"If law is to be respected, all these men must be freed immediately and presented with apology, but as they have not the courage to acknowledge their wrongdoing, they are keeping the innocent men in prison in order to extract from them confessions to so-called illegal activities they had never been involved with", she observed.
According to Mrs. Roosta’i, her husband, like other detainees, had lost more than 12 kilos in the three months they have been kept in solitary confinements, "some of them looking so sick, so thin, so yellowish that the families had difficulty recognising them", she revealed, criticising the Judicial authorities for "ignoring" all the many letters written to them by the detained families or the enquiries made by the Majles "Article 90 Commission" that investigate political prisoner’s cases.
Meanwhile, in a letter to Mr. Maurice Copithorne, the United Nations Special Rapporteur for Human Rights, the Los Angeles-based Students Movement Co-ordinating Committee for Democracy in Iran (SMCCDI) expressed concern for what it described as the "danger of death threats" to the life of Mr. Sahhabi and other political prisoners.In the "International Appeal To Save The Lives of Iranian Political Prisoners From Deadly Liquidation", the organisation informs the world community "death threatens the lives of political prisoners and warned that the ruling "monopolists plan a mass assassination of all political prisoners in Iran".
"A similar event took place in 1988, when a bloody liquidation of political prisoners resulted in the annihilation of opposition figures in the country", the SMCCDI reminded, referring to the assassination of hundreds of Iranian dissidents under the presidency of former President Ayatollah Ali Akbar Hashemi-Rafsanjani.
Other international journalist organisations, particularly the Paris-based "Reporter Sans Frontieres" (Reporters Without Borders) and the "Committee to Protect Journalists" that is based in New York both called on the incumbent President to "resolutely" work in favour of press freedom.
Calling on Mr. Khatami, whose re-election seems certain, the two organisations that had "awarded" Mr. Khamenehe'i as the world’s "most terrible predator of journalists and enemy of the press" observed that the elections are held as almost all independent and pro-reform publications are closed and a dozen of leading journalists imprisoned. ENDS SAHHABI ALIVE 8601