IRAN- Revolutionary Guards target Internet activists

Reporters Without Borders reiterates its condemnation of the Iranian regime’s persecution of journalists and bloggers after a wave of arrests of Internet users in recent days as a result of Revolutionary Guard monitoring of online social networks.

…The victims of the latest Revolutionary Guard-orchestrated round-up include Mahmud Moussavifar and Shayan AkbarPour, two Internet activists who ran the Rahian Facebook page and a blog called Rahi, which cannot currently be accessed

After plainclothes men arrested them at their Tehran home on 31 May, their families reported them missing because they still do not know why they were arrested or where they were taken.

Two years of President Hassan Rouhani

In the two years since the moderate conservative Hassan Rouhani was installed as president in June 2013, around 100 Internet activists have been arrested and given long jail terms, in most cases on information provided by the Revolutionary Guards.

This persecution of news and information providers is just the continuation of the unprecedented crackdown that began immediately after President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s disputed reelection in June 2009, when at least 300 journalists and Internet activists were arrested arbitrarily, tortured and sentenced to long terms of imprisonment.

Several journalists and Internet activists who were convicted in 2009 and 2010 by rigged revolutionary courts have since been released on completing their sentences but many others are still in prison, where they are often subjected to appalling conditions.

They include Said Razavi Faghih, Saraj Mirdamadi, Masoud Bastani, Reza Entesari, Said Madani, Said Matinpour and Alireza Rajai. Unfortunately there has been no improvement in the inhuman treatment reserved for prisoners of conscience in Iran, especially in Tehran’s Evin prison and in Raja’i Shahr prison.

…One of them, Shirazi, managed to flee the country after being released provisionally and has described the terrifying experience of being held in Section 2A and pressured by interrogators. Her account constitutes yet further hard evidence of the systematic mistreatment of detainees in Iran by security and judicial officials.

Aged 31, Shahi Savandi Shirazi, was transferred to Evin prison’s Section 2A after her arrest by Revolutionary Guards in January 2013 in the southeastern city of Kerman.

“The nightmare began as soon as I arrived,” she told Reporters Without Borders. “Locked up in a very small cell, I could hear the cries of a prisoner being interrogated. I trembled all the time during the first few weeks and couldn’t even hold a pen in my hand (...)

“They knew everything about my online chats and my emails. All my online correspondence had been intercepted. Several of my friends had been arrested a few months before me and I now realized I’d been under close surveillance since then. The interrogators asked us to write about each other. They didn’t just want us to confess to the crimes of which were accused. They also wanted to know all about our personal relations and whether we’d had immoral relations. During interrogation, they made sexist jokes to intimidate us. Once they even threatened me with rape and simulated doing it (...)

“All these confessions were used to incriminate us when our trial finally got under way before Mohammad Moghiseh, the president of the 28th chamber of the Tehran revolutionary court (...) After my provisional release pending the appeal court’s ruling, my husband, with whom relations were not simple, questioned what had happened in prison and didn’t want us to continue living together.

“So I returned to my family’s home in Kerman. But the insulting and contemptuous phone calls continued. The interrogators kept calling me in order to threaten me or to summon me to Tehran for further interrogation (...) Under pressure, I finally decided to leave my country.”