TEHRAN, 8 August 2005 — Iranian human rights lawyer and 2003 Nobel Peace Prize winner Shirin Ebadi yesterday urged her client, dissident journalist Akbar Ganji, to end a 58-day-old hunger strike undertaken in protest at his imprisonment. “I am worried about Ganji’s health. Right now, what matters is his life,” Ebadi, who has written to Ganji to convey her message, told Reuters. “As one of his lawyers ... I sincerely urge Ganji to end his hunger strike and eat food.” Ganji, 46, an outspoken critic of the Islamic state’s clerical leadership, was transferred from prison to a Tehran hospital last month as his health deteriorated.
Ebadi also criticized Iran’s judiciary for refusing to allow her to visit Ganji. “This is unlawful,” she said. Ganji’s wife, Masoumeh Shafiee, and Ebadi have been unable to see him for more than a week.
A journalist who tried to visit Ganji in the hospital two weeks ago, was arrested on charges of “illegal journalistic activities,” the semi-official ILNA news agency said. He was released from Tehran’s Evin prison on Saturday.
On Saturday, Shafiee called on Ganji’s friends to try to persuade him to end the hunger strike, which he says is a protest against the authorities’ refusal to release him on grounds of ill-health. A former hard-line Revolutionary Guard turned reformer, Ganji was jailed in 2001 following a series of articles he wrote linking officials to the murder of political dissidents.
Meanwhile, two people have been killed, eight injured and 145 arrested in unrest among the Kurds of western Iran, Iran’s Interior Ministry said. The deaths in the town of Saqqez followed rioting and a gun battle elsewhere in Kurdish-dominated territories.
The Interior Ministry website named the dead men in Saqqez as Mohammad Shariati, a 55-year-old retired teacher, and 18-year-old Farzad Mohammadi. It quoted an unnamed senior official as saying that police had denied firing their pistols, but investigators were looking into the type of shots fired to work out what had happened. “Public and state-owned buildings, including banks, were damaged,” the official said.
In another development, Iran rejected any involvement in the use of new roadside bombs against US and government forces in Iraq, calling it “comments to justify (Washington’s) failures in Iraq.” “These remarks are made to justify failures in Iraq, since Americans and world opinions are pinpointing (that US) weaknesses are on the rise,” Iran’s Foreign Ministry spokesman Hamid Reza Asefi told reporters.
“As we have said before, the US has no proof for its claims and we have no incentive to meddle in Iraq’s affairs... We have said it in words and proved it in practice,” he added. On Saturday, the New York Times cited unnamed military and intelligence officials as saying that many of the new roadside bombs used to attack US and government forces in Iraq have been Iranian-made.
The report added that the weapons seem to suggest a new and unusual area of cooperation between Iranian Shiites and Iraqi Sunni Arabs to drive American forces out — a possibility that US commanders said they could make little sense of given the increasing violence between Shiite and Sunni sects in Iraq. On Thursday, the United States and Britain pressed Iran and its closest ally in the region, Syria, to do more to prevent “terrorist attacks” in Iraq as the UN Security Council unanimously adopted a resolution slamming such acts as a threat to world peace and security.
