Iranian journalists and bloggers are increasingly under siege in one of the biggest crackdowns on independent voices and dissent in Iran's modern history.
Since last year's disputed presidential election, which brought millions of protesters onto the streets, the authorities have intensified their long-standing suppression of both the traditional Iranian media and the rising number of "citizen journalists" who use new technology to expose human rights violations.
Iran has been described by press freedom organizations as the biggest jailer of journalists in the world.
Hassiba
Hadj Sahraoui, Amnesty International's Deputy Director for the Middle
East and North Africa said: "Since the protests, the government's
growing bunker mentality has led to mounting waves of repression aimed
at suppressing any criticism of the authorities or independent
reporting on the human rights situation in the country.
"Dozens
of newspapers and websites have been closed, and scores of journalists
and bloggers have been arrested and are held as prisoners of conscience
or have had to flee the country for their own safety.
"Contact
with some foreign media has been criminalized and a new 'Cyber-Crimes
Law' is already having major implications for freedom of expression.
The authorities must urgently relax both the long standing and new
sweeping restrictions and immediately release those held as prisoners
of conscience."
The Association of Iranian
Journalists was closed by the authorities in August 2009 and a number
of its officials arrested, including Secretary Badrolsadat Mofidi who
by April 2010 had spent four months in detention without charge or
trial.
Blogging, once an effective way around Iran's
draconian press censorship, is now a risky business. The once-thriving
blogosphere is under fire, with those involved subjected to arbitrary
arrest or harassment. Some have had to flee the country for their own
safety.
Aida Saadat, a freelance journalist and
human rights campaigner, active with the One Million Signature Campaign
and the Committee of Human Rights Reporters was repeatedly
interrogated; and beaten up while walking home. Fearing for her life,
she eventually fled Iran.
She told Amnesty
International: "I could not find any human rights or other organization
to defend me, as a journalist. They had been silenced. The men who
attacked me said 'this is just a warning. Next time we will kill you
for your activities against the people of our country...' This is what
we have been facing. I and so many others had to leave. Our lives were
at stake."
Many of the detainees and those who fled
worked for papers or online publications which supported or could have
been perceived as supporting the defeated reformist candidates in the
presidential elections, or are freelancers, some of whom who had lost
jobs with previously-banned publications while others provided an
independent voice, often about the human rights situation. At one point
officials arrested the entire staff of Kalameh Sabz, a newspaper
established by opposition candidate Mir Hossein Mousavi.
Prisoner
of conscience Isa Saharkhiz, a prominent journalist working with
reformist candidate Mehdi Karroubi, was arrested in July 2009 during
the post election unrest; by April 2010 he had yet to be charged with
any offence. His son, Mehdi, a US-based blogger, explains: "What
happened is at one point they realized that the media is playing a big
role at getting the news out and getting the truth out. So what they
did was they arrested well known journalists, so other journalists who
are working will learn from this... and they will write just what the
state wants them to write."
Other targets included
journalists writing on human rights issues, such as the
internationally-acclaimed Emadeddin Baghi, founder of the Association
for the Defence of Prisoners' Rights. Some journalists have been
sentenced to lengthy prison terms after conviction in mass "show
trials".
Detainees have faced human rights
violations ranging from torture and other ill-treatment, including
beatings, solitary confinement for lengthy periods, to grossly unfair
trials. Many have been held incommunicado for weeks or months without
charge or trial.
Some of those freed still remain
under pressure, having had to give up the deeds to their - or their
relatives' - houses to raise bail. Detainees' families have been
harassed or temporarily detained; some have been warned their loved
ones won't be freed if they speak to the media about their plight.
Criminalizing contacts with foreigners: The 'Velvet Coup'
With
Iran's media limited in their reporting by government censorship and
fearful of crossing the "red line" over the decades, many Iranians have
in the past tuned in to foreign radio stations, or watched
international TV networks via illegal, though previously largely
tolerated, satellite dishes. Since the first election of President
Ahmadinejad in 2005, Iranian security forces have conducted an
increasing number of raids to seize such dishes.
The
authorities have also reduced the number of foreign correspondents
based in Iran; when political unrest erupted in mid-2009, those
remaining were barred from covering mass opposition rallies.
International
media broadcasting in Persian were singled out and their Iranian
contributors targeted. The BBC's Tehran correspondent was expelled.
Maziar Bahari, working for Newsweek, - one of two international
journalists arrested at the time - was released only after making a
dubious public "confession" following weeks of physical and
psychological torture.
Prosecutors in mass "show
trials" accused foreign broadcasters like the BBC and the Voice of
America (VOA) of stage-managing the protests and planning a "soft
coup". Some of the accused were charged with working with foreign
channels in order to "incite and provoke public opinion".
In
January, both the BBC and VOA were included on a list of "subversive"
organizations which Iranians were banned from contacting. Both networks
have had their satellite transmissions into Iran blocked but the truth
is that now any contribution to any overseas Persian-language
broadcaster is regarded as suspicious if not seditious.
From cassettes to Twitter
After
decades of repression, Iranians are adept at finding a way around state
censorship. In the 1970s, Ayatollah Khomeini, then an exiled opponent
of the former Shah, used cassette tapes of his sermons smuggled in from
abroad to denounce the Shah's increasingly autocratic rule. Those
cassettes played an important part in the subsequent Islamic Revolution.
In
1999, the closure of Salam newspaper led to mass student-led protests -
and eventually to violent confrontations between them and the security
forces. Over the next few years, the media became a focal point in the
power struggle between conservative and reformist factions.
More
than a hundred newspapers and periodicals were closed. There was a
explosion of internet use as Iranian writers increasingly turned to it
as virtually the only remaining forum for free expression. Internet
usage in Iran in recent years has grown faster than in any other Middle
Eastern country.
But the authorities have been hot
on the bloggers' heels, filtering and blocking access to many sites,
ranging from those considered "immoral" or "anti-Islamic" to political
websites or blogs critical of the government.
At one
stage, an Iranian official claimed that five million sites were being
blocked. Facebook and Twitter - used to spread information about last
year's demonstrations - were briefly shut down and other internet sites
such as social networking site Badoo have been banned.
Last
February, the authorities announced that access to Google's email
service was to be permanently blocked. Some tech savvy Iranians
continue to find their way around the system, using filter-busting
software, encryption services or "proxy" internet servers outside Iran,
although they have been hampered by speed slowdowns, or even brief
blockages of internet access.
The latest salvo in
the battle came when the Cyber-Crimes Law came into effect in July
2009; human rights groups say it could help the authorities track down
government critics. But images of the killing of Neda Agha Soltan
during a demonstration in July 2009, captured by mobile phone camera
and almost instantly distributed across the world, became the symbol of
the futility of attempts by the authorities to conceal the truth and
control new media and social networks.
It's all led
to what Mehdi Saharkhiz describes as "a cat and mouse game," with
Iranians trying to circumvent official filters as soon as they are set
up. He also points to a huge rise in the number of "citizen
journalists" many of whom have managed to send news or videos for
posting on his US-based website.
During the 2009
protests, he says the amount of video material coming in was
"staggering". Some contributors, he says, are professional journalists
who now prefer to work anonymously in order to keep under the official
radar. Others may be friends or neighbours of political prisoners, or
just individuals who see something they want to share with others.
"Every
person has become a media," he said. "Even taking pictures of this
stuff is extremely dangerous for them. But they want to do this because
they want to be heard. You can't control 70 million people."
