Washington, DC - Iran's new president, Mohammad Khatemi, is facing his first real challenge, even before he takes office on August 3. He was elected by an overwhelming majority of Iranians on May 23 on campaign promises that he would grant more freedom to Iranians, loosen press restrictions, and perhaps even allow political parties to be formed, Mr. Khatemi may soon face a fait accompli by the regime's Intelligence Ministry, which has abducted and secretly tried Iranian writer Faraj Sarkuhi and is now threatening to execute him before the new president takes office.
Since Mr.Sarkuhi disappeared on November 3, 1996, his wife, Farideh Zebarjad, has been touring Western capitals, pleading with parliamentarians, journalists, and human rights groups to speak out in defense of her husband's life. In an open letter sent to European foreign ministers on April 28, 1997, Mrs. Sarkuhi begged them not to allow her husband "to pay with his life for the political mistakes the Europeans commit in dealing with Islamic Iran."
The publisher of a monthly cultural magazine, Adineh, Sarkuhi was one of 134 Iranian writers and intellectuals who signed a 1994 appeal calling on the authorities to abolish censorship. The appeal appeared to have been prompted by the death of fellow writer Ali Akbar Saidi-Sirjani, who died in prison earlier that year - allegedly under torture. Since then, four other writers who signed the appeal have died, either in prison or under mysterious circumstances, while others have gone into exile. All have received anonymous death threats.
On the night of July 25, 1996, Mr. Sarkuhi and five other writers were arrested and interrogated by Intelligence Ministry agents, who burst into their dinner party at the Tehran home of German Cultural attaché Jens Gust. The intelligence agents tied up the diplomat and locked him in the closet while they spread incriminating documents on the dinner table, videotaping the writers in a stage-managed "conspiratorial" meeting, according to Sarkuhi and a second participant, Kameran Bozorgnia, who now lives in Germany. The German government protested vigorously, but never uttered a word about the incident publicly. On Sept. 8, 1996, Sarkuhi was arrested along with twelve others while meeting in a private house to discuss establishing a writers association. They were detained for three days.
Sarkuhi was abducted on Nov. 3 while attempting to board an Iran Air flight bound for Germany, where he intended to visit the wife and children he had sent out of the country earlier that year for safety. His abduction came only days after damaging testimony in a Berlin court by a former senior Intelligence Ministry official, Abdolhassan Mesbahi, that Iran's top leaders had ordered the gangland-style assassination of Kurdish dissidents in Berlin's Mykonos restaurant in September 1992.
In a fourteen page hand-written letter smuggled out of Iran to his wife, which she has circulated to human rights groups, Mr. Sarkuhi described his Kafkaesque arrest and torture and the fake videotaped confessions extracted from him while he was in jail. Among the many extraordinary details contained in Mr. Sarkuhi's letter is a description of how Intelligence Ministry officials doctored his passport to send one of their own agents to Germany using his name, so they could disguise Mr. Sarkuhi's arrest, murder him, and blame it on the Germans. "I believe I was the victim of a plot hatched by the [Intelligence] Ministry of Iran," Mr. Sarkuhi wrote. "I realized that their objective was to use me and some others to counter the Mykonos case."
Mr. Sarkuhi said Intelligence Ministry officials told him he had been declared a missing person. "You will spend sometime here in jail and then be killed, your body dumped either here or in Germany after proper interrogation, interviews and inquiries are carried out," he recalls them telling him.
Stung by mounting protests from human rights groups and from the unusual mobilization of Iranian intellectuals in exile on Mr. Sarkuhi's behalf, the regime stage-managed his "reappearance" at a press conference at Tehran airport on Dec. 20. In front of Iranian and foreign reporters, Mr. Sarkuhi pretended that he had travelled to Germany in cognito, without visiting his wife, because of "family tensions." When asked by one reporter to show the German entry stamp on his passport, Mr. Sarkuhi stated improbably that he had lost his passport in Turkmenistan on the return trip from Germany, while applying for a visa to Canada. The Germany government denied that Mr. Sarkuhi had ever reached Germany and accused Tehran of having abducted him. On Jan. 28, Mr. Sarkuhi was abducted again, this time apparently for good. On June 24, the head of Iran's Judicial Branch, Ayatollah Mohammad Yazdi, told a Tehran press conference that Mr. Sarkuhi would be tried in secret on espionage charges, apparently stemming from his ill-fated dinner with the German cultural attaché in Tehran.
Senior advisors to the Iranian President say that Mr. Sarkuhi has become a pawn in the factional struggle between Mr. Khatemi, who professess allegiance to freer (if not free) speech, and the dour, conservative faction he trounced in the May 23 election. The cultural "conservatives," who advocate segregation of the sexes at Iran's universities and over the past eighteen months have conducted a widely unpopular crackdown on so-called "unIslamic" behavior and dress, are powerful partisans of the Supreme Leader of the Islamic Republic, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. "They intend to show Mr. Khatemi that they will resist any attempt to create a "kinder, gentler" Islamic Republic in Iran," another well-connected source said. Underlying their opposition to any cultural liberalization is a fear, which one hears regularly in the Iranian press, of a "Gorbachev" syndrome, whereby the first steps toward liberalization would generate an uncontrollable popular explosion that would end by sweeping away their regime. If Khatemi's astonishing 70% landslide victory is any measure, they are probably justified in their fears.
While factional politics among Tehran's ruling elite are hard to predict, one thing is clear: when the regime's legitimacy or its very existence are challenged, all the factions hang together as one - including Mr. Khatemi's. This augurs poorly for Mr. Sarkuhi's chances, as his courageous wife, Farideh, admits. Unless overwhelming pressure is brought to bear from the outside, Mr. Khatemi will see nothing to gain by intervening on Mr. Sarkuhi's behalf. On the contrary, such intervention could be risky.
The European Union has long pretended that its "critical dialogue" with Iran has had positive results on specific human rights cases, despite the dramatic worsening of the human rights situation in Iran over the past 18 months. Mr. Sarkuhi is no less a prisoner of conscience than were Soviet writers who disappearanced into the gulag during during the dark days of the Cold War. And he is no less of a hostage than the American, French, Swiss, and German citizens who were seized by pro-Iranian groups in Lebanon as bargaining chips on behalf of Tehran. For all of its pretentions, the European Union has voiced only a mealy demand that Mr. Sarkuhi receive a fair and open trial. Instead, Europe should demand he be released unconditionally, and back that up with a threat to curtail Iran's access to European markets, since that is language Tehran's rulers understand. Furthermore, Europe should hold Mr. Khatemi responsible for Mr. Sarkuhi's fate. It would be too convenient to allow the incoming president to blame internal repression on a rival faction.
Mr. Sarkuhi's execution will mean that the medieval anti-Western elements of the ruling elite are still firmly entrenched, and that Mr. Khatemi is under their thumb. His release from jail, on the contrary, would send a hopeful signal from Tehran that the new President is sensitive to accusations of human rights abuse and is not as powerless as some fear. The answers will be intriguing - except for the fact that a man's life hangs in the balance. Unfortunately, politics in Iran is truly a blood sport.
Kenneth R. Timmerman is the publisher of The Iran Brief, a monthly investigative newsletter on strategy and trade, and serves as Executive Director of the Foundation for Democracy in Iran, a non-profit human rights advocacy group based in Washington, DC