The Latest from Iran (10 March): The View from Washington

2305 GMT: Back on the Road Again. Off for flight to UK and work in Liverpool so will be quiet for a while. Thanks to everyone for backing up EA on an eventful day.

2300 GMT: Political Prisoner Watch. Reports that student activist and weblog writer Fouad Shams has been released from prison after 96 days. Saeed Nourmohammadi, a member of the youth branch of the Islamic Iran Participation Front has been freed after 4 1/2 months in detention.

NEW Iran Interview: Habibollah Peyman “Change Through Social Awareness”
Iran Analysis: Corruption Within the Government?
The Latest from Iran (9 March): Political Acts

2255 GMT: Maintaining Control. Radio Zamaneh headlines, "Iran's Supreme Leader May Approve Changes to Electoral Policies", but the more you read, the more this is an assertion of Khamenei's authority rather than reform.

Meeting members of the Assembly of Experts, the Supreme Leader said that he will approve the changes in “general policies of the elections” under discussion in the Expediency Council, headed by Hashemi Rafsanjani.

However, Khamenei added that the opinion of the Expediency Council regarding election policies is “debatable”, and once he is informed of their decision, he will enforce what he deems necessary. Hardly a ringing endorsement of the Council's moves for change.....


2240 GMT: Economy Watch. It's not the headlines over the sanctions that should be garnering attention; instead, keep an eye on the companies ceasing business with Iran.

Royal Dutch Shell has announced that it has stopped selling gasoline/petrol to Iran which, despite its oil reserves, is dependent on imports to meet domestic demand. Shell still receives revenues from an oilfield deal completed in 2005. (The New York Times also reports that Shell "has a natural gas development in the works" but --- and here is where a Washington conference comes in useful --- informed insiders say there is little likelihood of the project moving ahead in the foreseeable future.)

Ingersoll-Rand, a manufactuer of air compressors and cooling systems, has also said that it will no longer allow its foreign subsidiaries to sell parts or products to Iran.

2230 GMT: More In-Fighting. Kayhan editor Hossein Shariatmadari, in an editorial “Outrageous Overstatement”, has gone after Presidential Chief of Staff Esfandiar Rahim-Mashai for his recent “base,” “hyperbolic”, and “pompous” remarks. Shariatmadari accused Rahim-Mashai of seeking to undermine the presidency, distort the principle of velayat-e-faqih (clerical authority), and cause rifts among the principlists.

2225 GMT: Watch This Closely. Earlier this week Mr Verde picked up on the challenge of the head of Iran's judiciary, Sadegh Larijani, that he was going to root out corruption in the Government and punish those responsible, including a high-ranking official.

Well, Sadegh's got back-up from the Parliament that his brother Ali heads:

A majority of Iranian lawmakers have asked Judiciary Chief Ayatollah Sadeq Larijani to decisively deal with the case of a major ring of corrupt government employees.

Larijani announced on Sunday that the judicial system had arrested 11 members of a ring of corrupt employees who embezzled millions of dollars by forging government documents.

Ayatollah Larijani stated that 11 key members of the ring have been arrested and all of them have made confessions.

In a letter sent to the Judiciary chief on Wednesday, 216 MPs also thanked him for his efforts to ensure that the members of the gang were arrested.

But the MPs said that based on the available information, the embezzlement ring has been active in more than one state organization and therefore the rest of its members should be tracked down and arrested.

They said they have been informed that certain people with high-ranking positions played more active roles in the ring than those who have been arrested.

The lawmakers urged Larijani to deal with all the members of the ring, regardless of their positions.

"Certain people with high-ranking positions"? First Vice President Mohammad Reza Rahimi, by chance?

2200 GMT: Back from a most interesting day of Iran panels. Hoping to collect thoughts for an analysis, but I'm very tired. So, for now, thanks a million to everyone for all the great support.

1300 GMT: March on Washington. I'm off to Capitol Hill to see some folks about Iran. We'll be on the road for awhile, so keep us up-to-date with developments by posting in our Comments section.

1220 GMT: We have posted the thoughts of Dr Habibollah Peyman, the head of the banned Movement of Combatant Muslims, on the strategy of the Green Movement.

1115 GMT: Kiarostami Speaks Out. The prominent Iranian director Abbas Kiarostami has published an open letter in a Tehran newspaper calling for the release of Jafar Panahi and Mahmoud Rasoulof, fellow directors who were detained last week.

Kiarostami has also sent an English translation thorough a friend to The New York Times, which prints the text.

1105 GMT: Political Prisoner Watch. Persian2English summarises news of a series of releases on bail:

Emad Bahavar, member of reformist group Nehzat-e Azadi [Freedom Movement of Iran] , and Yashar Darolshafa, a student activist, were released last night.

Political activist Mehrdad Rahimi was released last night after posting a $70,000 bail. Rahimi, who was arrested over two months ago, was under pressure to submit to confessions on live television.

Political activist Hamideh Ghasemi, journalist Ahmad Jalali Farahani, and Saleh Noghrekar were also released after a month in prison.

Saleh Noghrekar is the nephew of opposition leader, Zahra Rahnavard. He was released on a $50,000 bail.

Mehdi Amizesh, children’s rights activist, was also released on bail after two months in prison.

1055 GMT: Mahmoud Knocks, K arzai Not at Home. Here is the not-so-dramatic of the saga of President Ahmadinejad saying he would go to Afghanistan on Monday (Sunday), Ahmadinejad not going to Afghanistan (Monday), Ahmadinejad saying "oh, I meant Wednesday" (Tuesday).

Well, the good news is that the President finally got to see Kabul's sights, and Hamid Karzai is one of them. Initial reports indicated that the Afghanistan President was not at home, but the two men finally showed up at a press conference.

With US Secretary of Defense Gates still in Afghanistan --- his visit with Karzai on Monday was the likely reason for the postponement of Ahmadinejad's trip --- the Iranian President took a swipe at Washington, "I believe that they themselves are playing a double game. They themselves created terrorists and now they're saying that they are fighting terrorists." Gates had put out the "double game" charge against Tehran earlier in the week.

1045 GMT: I Don't Even Like the Guy. If Jahan News was trying to undermine Mehdi Karroubi with the claim that he was very nice to Saeed Mortazavi, the Ahmadinejad aide who has been blamed for the post-election abuses at Kahrizak, the effort does not appear to have worked. Karroubi hasn't reacted, but Mortazavi is more than a bit upset. His office put out this statement:

Mr. Mortazavi attended a memorial service held for the mother of his colleague in Nour Mosque on Saturday....Mr. Mehdi Karroubi was present at the beginning of the ceremony and left approximately half an hour before Mr. Mortazavi arrived. Therefore, Mr. Karroubi and Mortazavi never encountered each other.

It is not clear what the intentions of this website was in reporting the warm exchange of pleasantries and kisses between these two individuals [Karroubi, Mortazavi]. The intention to disseminate such false news reports is also a matter to reflect upon.

The son of Mr. Karroubi was one of the suspects the former Tehran prosecutor [Mortazavi] dealt with and the Etemade Melli newspaper owned by Mr. Karroubi was banned by him therefore such fabricated stories aimed at influencing public opinion will have no success.

0450 GMT: We're off for some downtime before the Wednesday conference. Back in a few hours.

0435 GMT: The War on Football. Yesterday we noted that Iranian authorities had issued a warning, for an unspecified reason, to a football publication.

Well, here's an even more serious football story from Iran Human Rights Voice:

Football journalist Abdollah Sadoughi was arrested in the city of Tabriz, north-west Iran, on 18 January, after publishing a poster supporting the city’s Traktor Sazi football team. He is held without charge at Tabriz prison, and is on hunger strike in protest at what he considers to be his baseless detention....

Abdollah Sadoughi, aged 33, a member of Iran’s Azerbaijani minority, writes for the Iranian publications Goal, Corner and Khosh Khabar (Good News). He supports Tabriz’s Traktor Sazi football team. The authorities have accused him of acts “against national security” including supporting “Pan-Turkism” for publishing posters, one of which says, in the Azerbaijani Turkic language, “All of Azerbaijan feels pride with you”, alongside an image of the football team. Abdollah Sadoughi maintains he had permission from the relevant authorities to print posters [but] Azerbaijani Turkic is not recognized as an official language in Iran....

In late February, Abdollah Sadoughi began a hunger strike. According to media reports, soon after starting his hunger strike he was transferred to solitary confinement and held in filthy conditions, and then moved to a cell with criminal convicts. On 2 March 2010, having lost considerable weight and suffering from various medical problems, he was transferred to the clinic within Tabriz prison. Abdollah Sadoughi has been able to meet his lawyer and his family, most recently on 6 March, when he said he would continue his hunger strike until he is released or brought before a court.

0430 GMT: Does the Movement Live? Mohammad Sadeghi offers a spirited response to those who claimed 22 Bahman (11 February) marked the end of the Green Movement:

Any measure of the movement's success must focus on the incredible changes brought about in Iran thus far, rather than the outcome of specific tactics. Conversations on the proper role of government, which would have been unthinkable less than a year ago, are now commonplace throughout the country. The government is constantly on the defensive on issues ranging from sexual abuse in prisons to its failed economic policies. Although the regime maintains tight control over all levers of power in society -- police and security forces, the media, the oil industry, etc. -- its popular support has been steadily slipping since June's presidential election. These changes have taken place because of the millions of Iranians who see it as their duty to peacefully protest in the streets, document the regime's brutality, and spread this documentation around the world. In other words, the movement owes its greatest successes to the horizontal organization and innovative use of technology that [critics are] so quick to dismiss.

0315 GMT: Now in place in Washington for Wednesday's open hearing on Iran and US-Iran relations. Will get an insider's look later today but already one point of note has emerged: the Ali Larijani mission to Japan for a possible uranium enrichment deal should be taken seriously.

That impression is accompanied by signals from Iranian state media of confidence that the push for tougher international sanctions on Tehran will fail. Under the headline, "Anti-Iran plot failing, Israeli envoy laments", Press TV carries Agence France Presse's quotation from Israeli Ambassador to the UN Gabriela Shalev: "The chances now seem grim regarding sanctions that will be crippling." Shalev said Russia and China "are still looking to the diplomatic track" and appear reluctant to back a new round of sanctions.

Back in Iran, the trial of 12 police officers charged with post-election abuses in Kahrizak Prison has begun.

Iran Film Special: Watching Shrek in Tehran

My colleague Brian Edwards writes for The Believer magazine:

Downtown Tehran, winter: impossible traffic, the energy of 9 million Iranians making their way through congested streets, the white peaks of the Alborz Mountains disappearing shade by shade in the ever-increasing smog. The government’s declared another pollution emergency, and the center city is closed to license plates ending in odd numbers. The students at the university, where I am teaching a seminar on American Studies, are complaining openly about the failures of their elected officials.

"Nahal" and I are sitting in a café off Haft-e Tir Square. She is smart and dynamic, a graduate student and freelance journalist who is quick to criticize the US government and the perfidy of CNN. When I mention that, a few days ago, I had overheard Friday prayers and was taken aback by the chanting of Marg bar Amrika! (“Death to America”) she retorts: “But you call us the Axis of Evil!”


Our conversation turns to the movie Shrek. Nahal loves Shrek so much that she’s seen the first installment of the DreamWorks trilogy “at least thirty-six or thirty-seven times”. Her obsession is, apparently, shared by many Iranians. The image of Shrek appears everywhere throughout Tehran: painted on the walls of DVD and electronics shops, featured in an elaborate mural in the children’s play area of the food court at the Jaam-e Jam mall. Once, from a car, I passed a five-foot-tall Shrek mannequin on the sidewalk; like his fellow pedestrians, he wore a surgical face mask to protect him from the smog.

Nahal explains: “You know, it’s not really the original Shrek that we love so much here. It’s really the dubbing. It’s really more the Iranian Shrek that interests us.”

The Iranian film industry has a long and illustrious tradition of high-quality dubbings. In the post-Revolution era, and the ensuing rise of censorship, dubbing has evolved to become a form of underground art, as well as a meta-commentary on Iranians’ attempt to adapt, and in some way lay claim to, the products of Western culture. A single American film like Shrek inspires multiple dubbed versions—some illegal, some not—causing Iranians to discuss and debate which of the many Farsi Shreks is superior. In some versions (since withdrawn from official circulation), various regional and ethnic accents are paired with the diverse characters ofShrek, the stereotypes associated with each accent adding an additional layer of humor for Iranians. In the more risqué bootlegs, obscene or off-topic conversations are transposed overShrek’s fairy-tale shenanigans.

But still, I asked her, why Shrek, of all things? Was it the racially coded weirdness of Shrek’s cast of characters that somehow spoke to Iranians? Did Shrek himself symbolize the repressedid of people living in a sexually censorious society? Or was it simply the impossible lushness and the tactile pleasures of American CGI technology itself?

But Nahal found my questions beside the point. Because our Shrek, she told me, isn’t an American film at all.

Perhaps the question I should have been asking was this: What does it mean that Americans and Iranians make such different things of each other’s cinemas? I returned to Tehran last winter to try to make more sense of these cultural readings and misreadings, and in particular to try to better understand the debate in Iran over Iranian directors like Abbas Kiarostami, lionized in the US but not generally admired in Iran. Kiarostami, the director of Taste of Cherry (1997), The Wind Will Carry Us (1999), and Ten (2002), is the reason that Iranian cinema is currently upheld—by critics in France and America and elsewhere around the world—as the greatest since the French New Wave brought us Jean-Luc Godard, François Truffaut, Jean-Pierre Melville, and Eric Rohmer.

And yet, to many people within his own country, Kiarostami, as one Iranian film critic said to me, is considered “a crime against the cinema of the world.”

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I’ve arrived in Tehran at an auspicious time for filmgoers—February marks the beginning of the annual Fajr Film Festival, which includes multiple competitions (the national and international competitions as well as those for documentaries, shorts, Asian cinema, and “spiritual films”), plus retrospectives and screenings of classic films. But more importantly, the festival is the only time the censors allow all new Iranian films to be screened; only after the premieres will they determine what can be shown in wider release. The festival, thus, is a precious ten-day window of unrestricted viewing.

A colleague from home has connected me with an editor in Tehran who has in turn put me in touch with a young film critic named "Mahmoud". He and I speak on the phone before we meet. He wants to take me to an unusual place. He says: “I think it will be very interesting for your research.”

The next morning I find Mahmoud outside the Bahman Cinema wearing a Woody Allen trenchcoat.

“Let’s walk,” he says. “Ali is waiting for us.”

"Ali", Mahmoud tells me, has a sizeable—and illegal—collection of classic Hollywood films, lobby cards, and posters—though that only begins to describe what I’d soon encounter. As to why such a collection would be considered illegal, apparently it is illegal for “non-official” people to own 35 mm films at all. Also, much of what Ali owns is considered “immoral” material. A poster of a semi-clad Marlene Dietrich in The Garden of Allah (1936), in other words, can get you into serious trouble.

“Ali is the Henri Langlois of Iran,” says Mahmoud. This reference to the famed creator of theCinémathèque française (the archive in which Langlois preserved miles of footage from destruction during the Nazi occupation of Paris and, later, from oblivion) is as much for Ali’s daring as for his near-obsessiveness. And Ali has taken risks, to be sure: twice he has been arrested and sent to jail. The last time he was arrested, in the early 1990s, the Islamic Republic confiscated a truckload of tins of film. Mahmoud estimates three thousand canisters of film were lost; fortunately, Ali had many others hidden elsewhere.

As we walk through the grime of downtown Tehran, Mahmoud talks of his other film-critic friends who have been sent to jail. “The authorities accuse the critics of advertising Western values with their reviews,” says Mahmoud. “These films have sex in them. They tell us, ‘You are advertising sex.’”

According to Mahmoud, the censorship rules governing what’s allowed onto Iranian screens are haphazard and idiosyncratic. One day, the Ministry of Culture will allow a film, but the next, the Supreme Council of Clergymen (an unofficial group that Mahmoud calls a “powerful, mafia-like organization”) may reverse the ministry’s finding and the picture will be banned.

I struggle to keep up with Mahmoud’s quick pace. As if to underscore his indictment of the government’s haphazard and idiosyncratic censorship methods, Mahmoud leads me past an endless string of street vendors offering pirated DVD copies of banned movies. Back in the US, it’s nearly time for the Academy Awards. Here on the streets of Tehran, I buy copies of many of the contenders for $1.5 --- Benjamin Button, Slumdog Millionaire, Frost/Nixon, Revolutionary Road.

We finally arrive at Ali’s apartment. He invites us inside what seems less a home than a storage space—posters stacked against the wall of a cramped sitting room, lobby cards piled in a cluttered kitchen, bags and bags of film canisters arranged haphazardly in the hallway. Ali’s bedroom is a crumbling crawl space lined with metal shelves. The majority of his bathroom is given over to film canisters, with only a tiny bit of real estate allowed to the toilet and the curtainless shower.

Ali is about sixty and wears a plaid shirt under a worn tweed jacket. He tells me that he started collecting early, and explains his clever methods of subterfuge. When Hollywood films were screened throughout Iran under the Shah’s regime, they were licensed for a brief run, after which they were returned to the studio’s Iranian headquarters in Tehran. But rather than pay to ship the bulky prints back to the US, the studios allowed the film stock to be destroyed in front of witnesses. (The preferred means of destruction was to take an ax to the reels.) Ali, who worked as a projectionist, substituted worthless copies of easily accessible Iranian films for the Hollywood pictures, then secreted away cans holding the more valuable films by United, Paramount, Disney, etc.

He keeps his collection—worth millions of dollars, according to Mahmoud—scattered in a number of locations south of downtown, in basement apartments and storage rooms. Ali pulls out catalogues showing prices being paid at Sotheby’s for posters that he owns. “Here look: ten thousand dollars.”

Over the years, Ali has come to serve as a valuable resource for the film communities in Tehran, and as such, occupies a strange place both above and below the government’s radar. He tells me of the day in the early 1970s when he met director William Wyler, who had come to Iran for a screening of his film Roman Holiday. The Tehran branch of Paramount couldn’t get its hands on a copy of the film in time, and someone thought to contact Ali. He supplied his copy for the screening. He continues to provide rare films for Iranian film students and scholars, and his screenings are reminiscent of the ones with which Langlois inspired the French New Wave.

Mahmoud tells me: “Everybody knows Ali in Iran, but nobody knows where his archive is.”

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