How easy it is to forget that Mahmoud Ahmadinejad almost was Time's Man of the Year. The Holocaust-denying Iranian despot was even, for a brief while, described as "Champion of the Dispossessed" and "Global Everyman" on its web site:
Ahmadinejad is engaged in a horrible crackdown, whose scope has widened. Amir Taheri describes it in a Monday OpinionJournal.com column:
The Mashad hangings (of seven young men), broadcast live on local television, are among a series of public executions ordered by President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad last month as part of a campaign to terrorize an increasingly restive population. Over the past six weeks, at least 118 people have been executed, including four who were stoned to death. According to Saeed Mortazavi, the chief Islamic prosecutor, at least 150 more people, including five women, are scheduled to be hanged or stoned to death in the coming weeks.
The latest wave of executions is the biggest Iran has suffered in the same time span since 1984, when thousands of opposition prisoners were shot on orders from Ayatollah Khomeini.
Not all executions take place in public. In the provinces of Kurdistan and Khuzestan, where ethnic Kurdish and Arab minorities are demanding greater rights, several activists have been put to death in secret, their families informed only days after the event.
The campaign of terror also includes targeted "disappearances" designed to neutralize trade union leaders, student activists, journalists and even mullahs opposed to the regime.
..... Since Mr. Ahmadinejad ordered the crackdown, work on converting 41 official buildings to prisons has started, with contracts for 33 other prisons already signed. Nevertheless, Mr. Yassaqi believes that, with the annual prison population likely to top the million mark this year, even the new capacities created might prove insufficient.
There are, however, an unknown number of unofficial prisons as well, often controlled by the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps or militias working for various powerful mullahs.
..... The biggest purge of universities since Khomeini launched his "Islamic Cultural Revolution" in 1980 is also under way. Scores of student leaders have been arrested and more than 3,000 others expelled. Labeling the crackdown the "corrective movement," Mr. Ahmadinejad wants university textbooks rewritten to "cleanse them of Infidel trash," and to include "a rebuttal of Zionist-Crusader claims" about the Holocaust. Dozens of lecturers and faculty deans have been fired.
The nationwide crackdown is accompanied with efforts to cut Iranians off from sources of information outside the Islamic Republic. More than 4,000 Internet sites have been blocked, and more are added each day.
Time gave Ahmadinejad, who would most likely have been the magazine's Man of the Year but for its off-the-wall decision to name "You" (i.e., everyone attempting to influence the world in some way using the Internet), a contemporaneous and mostly softball December interview. In it, he had this to say about freedom in his country and his supposed non-involvement in suppression:
In our country, freedom is practiced in reality. The students say what they want, and I say my piece. They are our own children. They have complete freedom. I cannot impose my views on them. This is amongst the prides and honors of our system and our revolution. We have struggled and spent our youth to reach to this freedom.
..... our judiciary power is a totally independent apparatus. They are not under the influence or pressure of the political groups or parties. Not even under influence of the president. We have a judicial process and a civil law like everyone else.
While there has been sporadic Old Media coverage of the Iranian crackdown, there is a word that is being avoided. See for yourself (all searches done without quotes):
- Google News search on "Ahmadinejad hangings"
- Google News search on "Ahmadinejad hanging"
- New York Times search on "Ahmadinejad hangings"
- New York Times search on "Ahmadinejad hanging"
Why?
Cross-posted at BizzyBlog.com.
