This report in The Washington Post left me almost as breathless as when I first saw the video of Neda Soltan‘s dying moments.
As a blogger, it hit me especially hard.
The headline on the last blog item that former Iranian vice president Mohammad Ali Abtahi published before his June 15 arrest — “It was a huge swindling” — left no doubt that he believed that his country’s presidential election had been stolen.
His more recent entries, from prison, have taken a different view.
“The majority of detainees know there was no real cheating,” the onetime opposition leader wrote in a recent posting.
“Whoever understands present-day Iran realizes that the street riots are against Iran’s glory, history and people,” he wrote in another.
Abtahi has been allowed to continue blogging from his prison cell by his “good friend the interrogator,” he writes, and he wants the Iranian people to know that he did not come under any pressure to change his mind about what he once decried as massive rigging by President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s supporters to keep the hard-liner in office.
But Abtahi’s family and friends say they don’t buy it. The blog, they say, is just one more example of a pervasive campaign by the government to purge the opposition through show trials and forced confessions after protests over the outcome of the June 12 election shook the foundations of the Islamic republic. The official results showed that Ahmadinejad won in a landslide, but the opposition believes that the tally was fraudulent and has said the election should be annulled.
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“By having him write on his own weblog, they are trying to repeat attempts to make his confession acceptable to others,” said Abtahi’s wife, Fahimeh Mousavinejad.In one post, Abtahi expresses amazement that other prisoners have not yet confessed to their roles in the plot to overthrow the government, and he urges them to come clean. He is relieved, he writes, to be able to concede the truth, which he maintains is not influenced by what his interrogator wants him to say.
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Iranian officials say they are pleased by Abtahi’s apparent change of heart.“In prison, where he became acquainted with the truth, he is now propagating the truth and thinking freely,” said Ali Akbar Javanfekr, media adviser to Ahmadinejad. He said the former vice president had shown courage by sharing his new views with his readers. “He is now enlightening people. We are happy about that,” Javanfekr said.
The blog, at http://www.webneveshteha.com/en, was abruptly taken offline Tuesday by its host in the United Kingdom. It was not clear why.
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Opposition parties have said repeatedly that the confessions were made under duress, and they have called the trials kangaroo courts. “In ideological and political cases in Iran, most of the time there is no evidence,” said Abdolfattah Soltani, a human rights lawyer who was released last week after 75 days in prison. “Pressure is exerted on the defendants, and their words are used to convict them and others.”But Ahmadinejad and his supporters among the Revolutionary Guard Corps commanders, Friday prayer leaders and lawmakers say the confessions prove that the defeated presidential candidates masterminded the post-election unrest.
“We must thank the sons of the Revolution, the intelligence ministry and Revolutionary Guards,” said Hojjatoleslam Ali Saeedi, the supreme leader’s representative in the elite Guard Corps, according to the Khabaronline Web site. “With their humane and Islamic actions, they managed in a short time to force these perverts to confess their wrong beliefs.”
I shudder to imagine the nature of those “humane and Islamic actions.”
You can see Abtahi’s final free postings in English here.
If you wake up one morning and find me blogging in support of the Stop the War Coalition or the Republican party, you can be damn sure that I was coerced.