LATEST NEWS: Sorour Sorourian, arrested yesterday and released on conditional terms today (12 April), TOGETHER WITH THREE OTHER YOUTH, is just one example of the manifold troubles the Bahá'ís in Iran are continually experiencing. We should still keep in mind the many other Baha'is still in prison in Iran--more than 30--and hundreds more being denied the most basic rights and freedoms!
"This achievement shows that authorities are sensitive to the negative effect of media. However...not only [is] one of the prisoners, 25 year old youth Miss Sahba Khademi, still under custody, but also the other three have just been temporarily released through placing surety of some property. It appears that by doing so the government in just changing the outer form of detainment to calm the international outcry and objection without really freeing the detainees from the charges they are accused of. Thus they can be called back at any time and imprisoned again."
Read the details of the arrests and the conditional releases here; the latest update can be found here. A spate of other alarming developments are detailed below (from Barnabas' blog Barnabas Quotidianus).
The excellent Iran Press Watch continues to keep us informed about the gravely worrying developments for the beleaguered Baha'i community in Iran. Yesterday they provided a headline round-up of the latest arrests and other concerns;
- Mr. Afshin Ehsanian is arrested in Shiraz on charges of "being a Baha'i".
- Ms. Sahba Khademi, a 24-year old Baha'i is seized in Hamadan - her whereabouts remain unknown.
- Imprisoned Baha'i leaders meet their families; a high-ranking official in the Prosecutor-General's office has advised that their files will be completed by April 21; Shirin Ebadi continues to have no access to the legal case, or her incarcerated clients.
- Ms. Sorour Sorourian, a 25-year old Baha'i, is arrested in Hamadan.
- Mrs. Haleh Hooshmandi presently remains in grave health conditions in prison. Her condition is "deteriorating".
- The home of Mr. Bahnam Rouhani, one of the Baha'is of Yazd, is raided by agents of the Ministry of Intelligence.
- Mr. Ali Ehsani, 29-year old husband and father of two, remains incarcerated incommunicado; his bail was refused.
Each of the above bullet points has a link to more information, which you can find by heading over to this particular Iran Press Watch post.
Persecution threatens survival of Iran's Baha'i community
The seven members of the former "Yaran", the national coordinating group of the Baha'is in Iran, in happier times
Baha'i numbers around the world may be relatively small (there are somewhere around 5 million Baha'is worldwide) and the numbers of Baha'is suffering persecution in Iran may be relatively small, compared with some other well-documented cases of human rights abuse around the world.
But the smallness of numbers doesn't mean that the situation of the Baha'is in Iran is in any way trivial, as a recent article in The Montreal Gazette pointed out. Writing on 23 March, Professor Frank Chalk, Director of the Montreal Institute for Genocide and Human Rights Studies at Concordia University, and Dr Kishan Manocha, a Fellow of the Institute, raise this alarming prospect:
Those of us who study genocide see clearly signs all too familiar and disturbing to ignore in the case of the Baha'i community in Iran, that country's largest religious minority.
The Iranian Baha'i community has been persecuted throughout its 166 year history, but the persecution took on a particularly vicious intensity in the wake of the Islamic revolution in 1979. The revolutionary regime made the eradication of the Baha'i community from Iran one of its ideological goals. Baha'is have been tortured and executed with a sickening frequency and virtually all of the fundamental rights of the Baha'is have been violated.
Ahmadinejad's war against the Baha'is
The persecution of the Baha'is in Iran has been vigorously and repeatedly condemned by the international community, but the passing of resolutions by the UN General Assembly condemning Iran's appalling human rights record makes little impact on President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. As Chalk and Manocha point out:
He behaves, like many of those who have gained influence in Iran, like someone schooled in the ways of the Hojjatieh Society, founded in 1954 as a specifically anti- Baha'i organization.
What does Ahmadinejad's behaviour mean for the Baha'is?
Ominously, a number of recent events in Iran point to something far more sinister at work than a simple clampdown on the freedom of the Bahá'ís. Official efforts to identify and monitor Bahá'ís and their activities, last year's imprisonment of national Baha'i leaders, an orchestrated campaign of hate propaganda in the state-run news media that demonizes Baha'is, and a general upsurge in violence against Baha'is and their property undoubtedly perpetrated by agents of the Iranian authorities - these trends, when considered in the context of a known government plan for the quiet elimination of the Baha'i community as a viable entity, cannot and must not go unheeded and unprotested if the international community is to adhere to the promise it raised of "Never Again" following the Holocaust.
As Barnabas Quotidianus has previously reported, the Baha'i International Community wrote an open letter in early March to Iran's Prosecutor General, Ayatollah Qorban-Ali Dorri-Najafabadi, explaining that the Baha'is are innocent of accusations of spying for Israel and "insulting religious sanctitities" and calling for any trial of the seven Baha'is who were members of the Yaran, the national Baha'i coordinating group, to be fair.
Can a genocide in the making be prevented?
Professor Chalk and Dr Manocha believe that
The case against the Baha'i leaders in Iran has implications that extend well beyond the fate of just these seven individuals. It is, in a very real sense, a test of our capacity to halt a genocide in the making. To do nothing at this stage would be unconscionable.
and conclude
The Baha'is in Iran must be granted their fundamental human rights without condition and accorded full protection under the constitution of the Islamic Republic, for that is the only safeguard against their possible extinction.
Knife edge - latest news
The safety and survival of all the Baha'is in Iran is balanced on a knife-edge. To keep up to date you can visit the Baha'i World News Service's Iran Update (last updated on 9 April).
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