|
By BRIAN MURPHY
ASSOCIATED PRESS WRITER
DUBAI, United Arab Emirates -- The first
line of his first blog from Tehran in September 2006 asks:
"What is freedom?"
Omidreza Mirsayafi answered his own
question. "I don't know," he wrote, "but I know someday I
will see its shadow falling on my land."
Two and half years later, from behind the
gray walls of Tehran's Evin Prison, he phoned his mother.
They talked about his battle with depression behind bars.
She asked if he was taking his heart medicine.
A few hours later, on a chilly mid-March
evening, the 29-year-old Mirsayafi was dead. He was Iran's
first known casualty in the skirmishes between bloggers
challenging the Islamic regime and authorities striking back
with the tools they know best - imprisonment and
intimidation.
This showdown has been building for years
in Iran, with bloggers and social network sites becoming the
main outlet for everything from hard-edged political dissent
to underground videos and music. The role of Iranian
bloggers as liberal opinion-shapers could intensify ahead of
June 12 elections that will decide whether arch-conservative
President Mahmoud Ahmedinejad remains for another four
years. The outcome also could set the tone for Washington's
overtures for dialogue with Tehran, which has so far
resisted Western pressure for greater press and Internet
freedoms.
"Omidreza is a symbol of many things,"
said Jillian York, a project coordinator at the Berkman
Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University, who
exchanged e-mails with Mirsayafi in the months before his
death. "He is a symbol of the free speech battles within
Iran and a symbol that it would get worse."
Dozens of activists are now jailed in
Iran, including at least two prominent bloggers. One of
them, Hussein Derakhshan, helped ignite the Iranian blog
boom in 2001 by posting simple instructions to create sites
in Farsi.
What makes Mirsayafi stand out, however,
was not his notoriety. It's just the opposite. Mirsayafi had
a modest - what could even be called irrelevant - presence
in the Iranian blogosphere.
"Omidreza was just an ordinary blogger,"
said Farhad Moradian, an Iranian Jewish emigre to Israel who
writes a blog from Tel Aviv. "This is the big alarm."
A Facebook page in Mirsayafi's memory was
formed after his death March 18. It was filled with
condolences, rants and shared apprehension.
Said one entry: The "next Mirsayafi could
be me."
Mirsayafi was interested in mathematics
and physics in high school, and drifted toward journalism
after graduating in 1999. He contributed stories on cultural
events to several newspapers. For extra money, he
moonlighted as a computer technician.
Mirsayafi began his blog - called simply
"Rouznegar," or "Diary Writer" - in 2006 as a kind of online
salon to concentrate on daily Tehran life, culture and
music. "Diary" included interviews with leading Iranian
musicians and artists.
But, as is often the case in Iran, he
could not avoid politics.
His first post dabbled in general rhetoric
about liberty. It was tame stuff compared with the bromides
of other bloggers. Over the months, however, Mirsayafi's
writing developed more bite. He was shaken particularly by
the muzzling of other bloggers.
A post on June 22, 2007 broke the dam. He
lashed at authorities by name, including crossing a red line
that few dare to even approach: condemning the memory of the
late Islamic Revolution leader Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini.
Mirsayafi wrote:
"Living in a country whose leader is
Khomeini is nauseating.
Living in a country whose president is
Ahmadinejad is a big shame."
He went on to skewer other Iranian
officials and closed with the line: "Living in a country
that calls itself an Islamic Republic is a disgrace."
Mirsayafi knew he entered dangerous
territory. But he felt his blog was simply too obscure to
draw notice among the hundreds of other Iranian Web writers
from inside the country and abroad, say friends and family.
He described what happened next in a
letter written earlier this year to U.N. Secretary-General
Ban Ki-moon.
On April 22, 2008, four officials from
Iran's Revolutionary Court came to the small house in
eastern Tehran that he shared with his parents. "They
searched everywhere and confiscated my computer and personal
items," he wrote to Ban. "And I was arrested."
Mirsayafi was accused of insulting Iran's
leaders and its Islamic character - charges that can bring
years in prison - and was placed in solitary confinement in
Evin. His family, meanwhile, reached out to Mohammed Ali
Dadkhah, a lawyer who has built a bulldog reputation while
defending bloggers and other political activists.
After 40 days, Mirsayafi was released. As
a guarantee he wouldn't flee the country, his family offered
the deed to property worth about $50,000, said his brother
Amir. Mirsayafi's blog site was shut down.
Authorities had been making cyber-raids
for years. Their first salvo was attempts to block specific
blogs and Web sites. But hackers bypassed the controls by
using proxy sites and other Web shortcuts. Then arrests
started after the election of Ahmadinejad in 2005.
The media rights group Reporters Without
Borders lists 68 bloggers imprisoned around the world,
including two in Iran and nearly 50 in China.
The irony is that many Iranian leaders
have adapted well to the wired age. Ahmadinejad's office
maintains a Web site. So do the Revolutionary Guards, the
military enforcers. Political groups send out text messages
to supporters' mobile phones. Some Shiite clerics have
e-mail addresses.
Mohammed Ali Abtahi, who was a pioneer
political blogger as vice president under former President
Mohammad Khatami, worries that the assault on Iranian blogs
could leave them sanitized of any genuine discourse.
"If the authorities continue with their
reprisals, bloggers will start to censor themselves and
we'll see only nonpolitical subjects," he said.
But Tehran-based bloggers such as Askan
Monfared show no sign of cooling down. He believes the
Islamic regime is panicked by its inability to control the
Web as it does the mainstream media.
"They cannot distinguish between what's
insulting and what is legitimate critique," he said. "There
is no civil society until we reach that point."
On Nov. 2, Mirsayafi was brought before
the Revolutionary Court. The charges were serious: insulting
the country's leaders and making anti-state propaganda. Some
expert witnesses said they didn't believe Mirsayafi's blog
violated the statutes, according to various reports.
The court disagreed and sentenced him to
30 months in prison. He was allowed at first to remain free
while he appealed, but authorities swooped in Feb. 7. His
lawyer said there was no warning or explanation.
Mirsayafi was placed in Evin's Cell 7,
Hall 5 along with his friend, Abbas Khorsandi, a political
activist detained since 2007. Evin is Iran's most notorious
lockup and the final stop for those who run afoul of the
regime.
In 2003, Iranian-Canadian photojournalist
Zahra Kazemi was arrested for taking photographs in front of
Evin and died several days later in the prison. An
investigative panel concluded Kazemi died of a fractured
skull and brain hemorrhage caused by a "physical attack,"
but the findings were rejected by Iran's conservative
judiciary. And an Iranian-American journalist, Roxana
Saberi, was sent to Evin in February and was charged this
week as a spy.
In Evin, Mirsayafi sometimes talked of
suicide, said Shiva Nazar Ahari, secretary of the Committee
of Human Rights Reporters in Tehran. He also worried about
whether he could get more of the prescription drug Inderal,
used to control erratic heart rhythms.
Nazar Ahari said she called Mirsayafi
every few days.
"On one of his last conversations with me,
he said, `I wish I actually did something real to insult the
regime since I ended up in prison anyway,'" she said.
Mirsayafi's sister, Masoumeh, said they
both wrote letters to Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei
in early March asking for forgiveness. They never received a
reply, she said.
On March 18, Mirsayafi overdosed on
tranquilizers supplied by the prison and was only treated in
the prison clinic rather than transferred to a hospital,
according to reports attributed to an inmate physician, Dr.
Hessam Firoozi. Judicial and prison authorities did not
reply to repeated requests for comment by The Associated
Press.
Firoozi, who is serving a 15-month
sentence, called his lawyer. Quickly, word spread from blog
to blog, then on to right groups and the international
media.
Reporters Without Borders said Mirsayafi's
death was a "sad reminder of the fact that the Iranian
regime is one of the harshest for journalists and bloggers."
Jennifer Windsor, executive director of Freedom House, a
Washington-based pro-democracy group, said it highlighted
the "dangerously inhospitable" climate for bloggers.
Mirsayafi was buried the day after his
death. Fellow bloggers joined in a memorial of their own by
posting some of his writings. His first blog post was among
the most widely cited.
It ended:
"I asked: When will we understand the
meaning of freedom?
"I answered: When our wisdom can be
delivered from ignorance, selfishness and foolishness."
---
Associated Press Writer Hasan Sarbakhshian
in Tehran, Iran, contributed to this report.
|
