Iran Democracy Monitor: No. 111

IRAN’S WAR ON FREE MEDIA
The Iranian regime is waging a systematic campaign of intimidation and pressure on Iran’s media sector, a new report from the Paris-based journalist watchdog group Reporters Without Borders has found. The study, issued on May 5th to coincide with World Press Freedom Day, details that the Iranian regime has incarcerated more than 200 journalists and bloggers in recent years. The report also singles out Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei as two leading “predators” of the press for the past year, responsible for orchestrating “a relentless crackdown marked by Stalinist-style trials of opposition politicians, journalists and human rights activists.”

The impact of this campaign, observers say, has been profound. “In prior years we objected to the banning of newspapers or called for the release of journalists,” says one Iranian journalist. “But now no newspapers are even left for banning in Iran.” (Tehran Rooz, May 5, 2011)

HUMAN RIGHTS MONITORING, IRANIAN STYLE
Irate over growing Western criticism of its domestic repression, the Islamic Republic is setting up a human rights monitor of its own. Iran it setting up a news agency dedicated to covering human rights violations in the United States and Europe, Mohammad Karim Abedi, the vice-chairman of the majles' Human Rights Committee, has told the Fars news agency. The goal of the new news outlet, according to Abedi, will be to “demand revival of human rights in the US and England,” and to “shout [sic] human rights violations in Europe.” (Tehran Fars, May 16, 2011)

[Editor’s Note: A launch date for the as-yet unnamed news agency has still to be announced. Its creation, however, will mark the institutionalization of Iran’s periodic reports on Western human rights violations – usually issued in response to the Islamic Republic’s frequent poor rankings by the U.S. Department of State and various nongovernmental human rights organizations. The most recent was released by the Iran’s Foreign Ministry in November 2010.]

SPINNING THE IRANIAN ECONOMY
The official statistics on unemployment and job creation being reported by the administration of Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad are skewed and misleading, a top Iranian economist has charged. Ahmadinejad has said publicly that the Iranian government had successfully created nearly two million jobs between March 2010 and March 2011. However, according to Ahmad Tavakoli, an economist who heads the Iranian parliament’s top research body, the Ahmadinejad administration failed to similarly report figures for national GDP, which has been declining over the past three years. This sort of partial disclosure, says Tavakoli, has allowed Ahmadinejad and other governmental officials to misrepresent the country’s overall economic health. (Bloomberg, May 17, 2011)

THE WAR OF IDEAS BETWEEN IRAN AND THE WEST HEATS UP
Iranian elements sympathetic to the regime appear to be fighting back against Western broadcasting to Iran. A new news website called Radio Dirooz, or “Radio Yesterday,” was established in May in an apparent effort to counteract the message of Radio Farda (“Radio Tomorrow”), the Voice of America andRadio Free Europe’s Persian-language radio channel. The website has not yet been formally endorsed by regime authorities, but its coverage – which “selects and summarizes reports of Radio Farda or comments by experts and reposts them, recast and with its own spin” – closely mirrors official attitudes toward the U.S. broadcaster, which Iran’s Culture Ministry accused last year of being part of a “soft war” by the West against the Islamic Republic. (Radio Free Europe, May 17, 2011)