Iran seizes rights lawyer's Nobel Peace medal

[Flashermac]

By NASSER KARIMI and IAN MacDOUGALL

 

 

TEHRAN, Iran (AP) - Iranian authorities have confiscated Nobel Peace laureate Shirin Ebadi's medal, the human rights lawyer said Thursday, in a sign of the increasingly drastic steps Tehran is taking against any dissent.

 

[color:red]In Norway, where the peace prize is awarded, the government said the confiscation of the gold medal was a shocking first in the history of the 108-year-old prize.[/color]

 

Ebadi won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2003 for her efforts in promoting democracy. She has long faced harassment from Iranian authorities for her activities - including threats against her relatives and a raid on her office last year in which files were confiscated.

 

The seizure of her prize is an expression of the Iranian government's harsh approach to anyone it considers an opponent - particularly since the massive street protests triggered by hard-line President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's disputed June 12 re-election.

 

Acting on orders from Tehran's Revolutionary Court, authorities took the peace prize medal about three weeks ago from a safe-deposit box in Iran, Ebadi said in a phone interview from London. They also seized her Legion of Honor and a ring awarded to her by a German association of journalists, she said.

 

[color:red]Authorities froze the bank accounts of her and her husband and demanded $410,000 in taxes that they claimed were owed on the $1.3 million she was awarded. Ebadi said, however, that such prizes are exempt from tax under Iranian law. She said the government also appears intent on trying to confiscate her home.[/color]

 

Ebadi, the first Muslim woman to be awarded the peace prize and the first female judge in Iran, said she would not be intimidated and that her absence from the country since June did not mean she felt exiled.

 

"Nobody is able to send me to exile from my home country," she said. "I have received many threatening messages. ... They said they would detain me if I returned, or that they would make the environment unsafe for me wherever I am.

 

"But my activities are legal and nobody can ban me from my legal activities."

 

Ebadi has criticized the Iranian government's crackdown on demonstrations by those claiming the June vote was stolen from a pro-reform candidate through massive fraud.

 

Ebadi left the country a day before the vote to attend a conference in Spain and has not returned since. In the days after the vote, she urged the international community to reject the outcome and called for a new election monitored by the United Nations.

 

During the past months, hundreds of pro-reform activists have been arrested, and a mass trial has sentenced dozens to prison terms. Authorities also went after Ebadi's human rights center in Iran.

 

"After the election all my colleagues in the center were either detained or banned from traveling abroad," Ebadi said.

 

Calls to Iranian judiciary officials were not returned Thursday.

 

Norwegian Foreign Minister Jonas Gahr Stoere called the move "shocking" and said it was "the first time a Nobel Peace Prize has been confiscated by national authorities."

 

The Norwegian Foreign Ministry summoned Iran's charge d'affaires in Norway Wednesday to protest the confiscation, spokeswoman Ragnhild Imerslund said.

 

The Foreign Ministry also "expressed grave concern" about Ebadi's husband, who it said was arrested in Tehran and "severely beaten" earlier this fall, after which his pension and bank account were frozen.

 

Ebadi said her husband, Javad Tavassolian, and her brother and sister have been threatened many times by authorities pushing them to persuade her to end her human rights campaigning.

 

Ebadi has represented opponents of Iran's regime before but not in the mass trial that started in August of more than 100 prominent pro-reform figures and activists. They are accused of plotting to overthrow the cleric-led regime during the postelection turmoil.

 

The Iranian Embassy in Norway refrained from giving a comment.

 

The Norwegian Nobel Committee's permanent secretary, Geir Lundestad, said the move was "unheard of" and "unacceptable." He told The Associated Press that the committee was planning to send a letter of protest to Iranian authorities before the end of the week.

 

Ebadi said she planned to return to Iran when the time is right.

 

"I will return whenever it is useful for my country," she said. "Right now I am busy with my activities against violations of human rights in Iran and my international jobs."

 

 

[Flashermac]

Iran clerics start taking control of schools

 

 

TEHRAN, Iran (AP) - Islamic religious authorities have begun tightening their grip on Iranian public schools, a report said Wednesday, as hard-liners expand an ideological "soft war" against Western influence.

 

The effort appears to be part of a wider drive to counter opposition groups and other pro-reform factions that have been emboldened by the unprecedented protests after June's disputed presidential election.

 

Opposition leader Mir Hossein Mousavi strongly attacked the Revolutionary Guard in a new statement Wednesday, accusing the elite corps of using brutal force to crush the massive street protests.

 

Authorities have recently emphasized the need to battle the reach of Western media, viewpoints and cultureâ€â€which resonate strongly in a country where nearly half the population was born after the 1979 Islamic Revolution.

 

Officials also have stepped up blocks on Internet links and closures of the few remaining liberal-leaning news outlets, while expanding state-run media arms and giving hard-liners more sway over education.

 

"Now, the enemy has put soft war on its agenda and the top priority today is to fight the soft war," Iran's Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei said on state television Wednesday during a meeting with Revolutionary Guard commanders and its affiliate paramilitary Basij forces.

 

Mousavi's statement said the Basij, the street wing of the Guard, was created by Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, the father of Iran's 1979 Islamic Revolution, as a popular body to serve the public and not to become stooges of the government and kill citizens holding peaceful protests.

 

"Basij, which the Imam (Khomeini) favored, didn't stand against the people, it stood by the people," he said in the statement. "It was not expected that Basij ... rob the people of their free votes ... and be rewarded for detaining people at gatherings."

 

Mousavi says President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad stole the June 12 election from him through massive vote fraud. Hundreds of thousands of protesters poured into the streets in the weeks after the vote, prompting a violent government crackdown.

 

The opposition says at least 72 people died in the security crackdown on protesters and that many of those detained were abused in custody. The government puts the number of dead at half that figure.

 

Although the street protests died down months ago, Mousavi and other leading opposition figures have refused to silence their protests and their pressure on the country's Islamic leadership.

 

In his Wednesday statement, Mousavi said the Revolutionary Guard has under Khameini, Khomeini's successor, deviated from the values it was once committed to.

 

"Should anyone who rejects the superstition offered to the people in the name of religion ... be beaten up in the streets, tortured in prison and sentenced to long jail terms? Does Islam ... allow that people who seek justice from their rulers be killed?" he asked.

 

Cleric Ali Zolelm, who heads a joint school-seminary committee, said Islamic clerics have already widened control in some schools, the daily Etemad newspaper reported.

 

Full details of the plan have not come out and it was not known whether the Education Ministry would relinquish full oversight. But hard-liners, including Ahmadinejad, have criticized Western influence in school curriculum.

 

"Recently, seminaries took management control of some schools in several provinces," the paper quoted Zolelm as saying.

 

Elementary grades were believed to be the focus of the nationwide plan. It was not immediately clear whether higher grades also would fall under clerical influence.

 

Earlier this month, Iranian officials announced plans to appoint a cleric in every schoolâ€â€a move widely seen as an effort to bring stricter Islamic interpretations into the public education system and address growing divides between clerics and many young, secular-oriented Iranians.

 

An Education Ministry official, Ali Asghar Yazdani, was quoted as saying that the clerics could lead collective prayers in schools and answer religious questions by students.

 

Last month in Tehran, pupils elected a classmate in student elections because his name was similar to opposition leader Mousavi's.

 

In the central city of Isfahan, a student running for school office copied Mousavi's campaign and used the green as his signature color.

 

While Iranian government officials tried hard to stop spread of the news, words of the student vote spread across the nation.

 

- By ALI AKBAR DAREINI