The New York Times Blog
On Friday, Iran’s President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad floated a bizarre conspiracy theory: that any rape or torture of political prisoners in Iranian detention centers in recent months had been carried out by “enemy” agents, not the government. According to Reuters, Mr. Ahmadinejad said in remarks at Tehran University that were broadcast live on state radio: “In some detention centers inappropriate measures have taken place for which the enemy was again responsible.”
As my colleague Michael Slackman reports, Mr. Ahmadinejad’s speech may be most important for seeming to fly in the face of efforts by Iran’s official leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, to soften the accusations of a wide-ranging, opposition conspiracy. However, his euphemistic reference to rape and torture in the broadcast suggests that the government feels pressure to come up with some sort of explanation for those abuses.
Recently two prominent members of Iran’s human rights community, the feminist lawyer and journalist Shadi Sadr and the blogger and activist Mojtaba Samienejad, published essays online from inside Iran arguing that far from being a new phenomenon, prison rape has a long history in the Islamic Republic.
On Tuesday, an Iranian-American librarian and translator, Frieda Afary, published an English translation of an essay Ms. Sadr wrote this month for the Iranian Web site Meydaan in which she argued that reformist politicians complaining of recent incidents were ignoring “all the women who have been raped in prisons since the 1979 Revolution.” (Read more...)
Video posted online last Friday, which Iranian bloggers say shows a demonstration by the families of political prisoners outside Tehran’s Evin prison on the first day or Ramadan.
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