The former president of Iran should be put on trial, not feted by St Andrew’s University.
The Guardian – Comment Is Free – 31 October 2006
{Join the debate on comment section of The Guardian website. Log on and post an opinion:
http://commentisfree.guardian.co.uk/peter_tatchell/2006/10/arrest_khatami_dont_honour_him.html}
The former President of the Islamist dictatorship of Iran, Mohammad Khatami, will today be awarded an honorary doctorate of law by St Andrews University in Scotland. Critics say it is the moral equivalent of honouring Chilean ex-dictator Augusto Pinochet.
During his eight-year tenure as President of Iran, from 1997 to 2004, thousands of Iranians were detained without trial and subjected to savage tortures by Iran’s secret police. Over 200 people were executed.
Well known victims of state-sanctioned murder during Khatami’s rule include the Iranian-Canadian photographer, Zahra Kazemi, who was tortured and battered to death by Iranian security agents in 2003, and four copper mine workers who were shot dead in Shahr Babak, Kerman province, in 2004, when they staged a peaceful protest against redundancies.
Khatami never spoke out against these abuses, let alone acted to halt them.
Yesterday, the Metropolitan Police Commissioner, Sir Iain Blair, and the Attorney-General, Lord Goldsmith, turned down requests for Khatami’s arrest.
The police were presented with affidavits by two Iranian refugees who say they were falsely imprisoned and brutally tortured while Khatami was in office. Safa Einollahi, 29, and Ali Ebrahimi, 34, claim that, as President, Khatami was ultimately responsible for their torture. He failed to use his office of state to protect them and thousands of other torture victims.
Einollahi and Ebrahimi had applied to the Met Police to have Khatami arrested under Section 134 of the Criminal Justice Act 1998. This requires the arrest of any individual, regardless of nationality, where there is evidence that they committed, condoned or colluded with acts of torture. The legislation has a universal jurisdiction, and therefore covers torture committed by Iranians against Iranians in Iran .
Section 134, which incorporates the UN Convention Against Torture 1984 into UK law, also holds high state officials responsible if they fail to stop torture. There is no evidence that Khatami made any attempt to halt the use of torture by Iran’s security agents, which makes him culpable under Section 134.
The Sunday Times reports – http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,2087-2426688,00.html – that Einollahi was arrested in July 2003, soon after attending a student rally in Tehran .
“I was left blindfolded for eight hours in a room so tiny that I couldn’t move,” he said. “Then I was interrogated by two agents who wanted the names of my activist friends. They beat me until I passed out. I was left bleeding and injured for a day in a cell with no light.”
A report by his doctor documents how his torturers thrust batons and bottles into his rectum. It states that he is awaiting surgery for a loss of bowel control, and cites other lasting physical and psychological damage.
Ebrahimi says he was arrested in 1999 for participating in a sit-in protest at Shiraz University against the government’s mistreatment of students.
During his six-month imprisonment he reports that he was strung up, beaten on the soles of his feet with thick cables, pummelled with batons, had a nail wrenched from his finger with pliers and was anally raped with a bottle.
“I feared for my life,” he told The Sunday Times. “They threatened me with the end, they said nobody knew where I was, nobody could do anything. I didn’t know if it was day or night. I thought I would be executed. But somehow I survived. I feel I have been born again in Britain. I want to use my freedom of speech in Britain to speak out against what is happening to my people in Iran .”
Despite the compelling prima facie evidence in Einollahi’s and Ebrahimi’s affidavits, Sir Ian Blair and Lord Goldsmith have pre-empted any judicial consideration of the case against Khatami. They have not only vetoed his arrest, but the police have refused point blank to even question Khatami about the allegations.
What is the point of having human rights laws if people accused of serious crimes like torture are never even questioned by the police, let alone bought before a judge to have the evidence against them assessed?
Yet again the hypocrisy of the Blair government is exposed. It talks tough about tackling human rights abuses but looks the other way when confronted by evidence of an alleged torturer in our midst.
It gets worse. New Labour now stands accused of encouraging the honouring of tyrants. The Scotsman http://news.scotsman.com/politics.cfm?id=1602492006 reports that when Jack Straw was Foreign Secretary, he approved the granting of an honorary degree to Khatami by St Andrew’s University, apparently in the hope that it might facilitate better relations with Iran .
Leaving aside the doubtful proposition that feting Khatami would do anything to endear Britain to Iran’s current hardline leaders, how can Straw even consider endorsing the bestowment of an honour on a man who presided over mass torture and who has defended the barbarities of Sharia law, which include the death penalty for gay people, unchaste women and Muslims who turn away from their faith?
Straw and his friends at St Andrew’s claim that Khatami deserves an award because, in Iranian terms, he was a reformer. Some reformer.
Sure, compared to a hardliner like President Ahmadinejad, Khatami is relatively moderate. But this is like saying Albert Speer should be honoured because he was less extreme than Adolf Hitler.
Moreover, despite his reputation as a reformer, Iran experts claim Khatami maintains close links with the current hardline regime in Tehran. “It’s clear Khatami is being used as a tool of diplomacy which is designed to capitalise on his reputation as a reformist president,” said Mark Thomas of the Royal United Services Institute.
The torture of Einollahi and Ebrahimi are just two abuses out of thousands that happened during Khatami’s eight-year rule.
In mid-2003, a wave of strikes and demonstrations by workers and students was violently suppressed, with over 4,000 arrests. Most of those arrested were brutally tortured.
The following year, 14 year old Kaveh Habibi-Nejad died after he was flogged in the town of Sanandaj for the crime of “eating in public” during the Ramadan fast. Two trade union activists were jailed for taking part in a peaceful May Day rally in the city of Saqez in 2004. Mahmoud Salehi got five years and Jalal Hosseini was sentenced to three years. The same year, Khatami’s henchmen publicly hanged a 16 year old girl, Atefeh Rajabi, for the ‘crime’ of sex outside of marriage.
It was Khatami’s government that initiated large-scale ethnic cleansing of Ahwazis, Iran’s persecuted Arab minority in the south-west. Tens of thousands were removed from their land, with little or no compensation, and forcibly relocated to distant northern regions of the country.
Khatami recently likened the Lebanese fundamentalist movement, Hezbollah, to a “shining sun which warms up all oppressed Muslims.” According to Human Rights Watch http://www.hrw.org/english/docs/2006/10/18/lebano14412.htm it was not just Israel that was guilty of indiscriminate attacks during the recent conflict. Hezbollah’s tactics also included the use of cluster bombs and the killing of innocent civilians.
Lib Dem leader, Sir Menzies Campbell, is Vice-Chancellor at St Andrew’s University. Astonishingly, he had originally agreed to present the honorary degree to Khatami today. It was only at the twenty-third hour that he had a change of heart and cancelled, citing a parliamentary engagement in London .
Laila Jazayeri, of the Association of Anglo-Iranian Academics, was quoted by the Scotsman http://news.scotsman.com/politics.cfm?id=1602492006 as saying that she had “no doubt” that Sir Menzies’s withdrawal was partly due to protests over Khatami’s human rights record as Iranian President.
Urging the university to reconsider its decision to honour Khatami, she said:
“It’s shameful that a university with the history of St Andrews should invite a cleric with blood on his hands to receive an honorary degree. They should withdraw their invitation.”
“Khatami has always been a central pillar of the theocratic and brutal regime in Iran, which is responsible for the execution of more than 120,000 Iranians.
“It is ironic that Khatami should be invited to St Andrews University when, during his presidency, the Iranian regime responded to the just demand of students for democracy by ordering vicious dawn attacks on dormitories.
“Students were beaten using knives, chains, and batons, resulting in fatalities and hundreds wounded. Some were even thrown out of the second and third floor windows,” said Ms Jazayeri.
The National Union of Students is against Khatami being given an honorary doctorate. It wants the award to be withdrawn unless Ahmad Batebi, a student jailed in 1999 following pro-democracy protests, is freed. It also blames Khatami for sanctioning the crushing of student activists.
“How can a man who imprisoned and oppressed thousands of students in Iran be given a degree by an academic institution?” queried Banafsheh Zand-Bonazzi, a New York-based Iranian democracy activist.
“Khatami and all other leaders of the Islamic Republic of Iran are criminals and should be put on trial at the International Criminal Court on charges of torture and other crimes against humanity,” according to Mohamed Ali bin Mahmoud, the Muslim Affairs spokesperson for the lesbian and gay human rights group, OutRage!
“Under his presidency, there was widespread persecution of political, religious, sexual and ethnic dissidents.
“During a visit to Harvard University in September 2006, Khatami was questioned about the execution of gay people in Iran. He declined the opportunity to condemn the death penalty for homosexuality; preferring instead to reiterate his opinion that same-sex relationships are a crime deserving punishment,” said Mohamed Ali bin Mahmoud, who is a refugee from Islamist oppression.
Khatami justified the criminalisation of homosexuality to his audience at Harvard: “In all schools of thought and in all religions there is punishment and punishment is not a form of violence…Punishment is seen as a response to violence or deviance in society and if there is no punishment in a society a society cannot run effectively.”
For highlighting Khatami’s abuses, no doubt I will be bombarded with the usual criticisms from the anti-war left: “Tatchell is a neo-con…he’s doing Bush’s dirty work” and so on. Not true. I do not support a US attack on Iran. But nor do I believe that the Iranian regime should spared criticism for its barbaric human rights abuses. Khatami and his cronies (together with all other tyrants and torturers, including Bush, Blair and Olmert) should be prosecuted at the International Criminal Court. Human rights law is pointless unless it is enforced. We should act in solidarity with the oppressed people of Iran, not fete and reward their oppressors.