Jun. 15, 2004
NIR BOMS & REZA BULORCHI
In recent years, summer in Iran has been marked by uprisings, strikes, public protests and the government’s harsh crackdown against them. There are signs this summer will be no different.
As the anniversary of the anti-government uprising of July 1999 approaches, widespread arrests of dissident students and women are taking place.
By Nir Boms
FrontPageMagazine.com | July 6, 2004
Non-Governmental Organizations (NGOs) are usually associated with humanitarian relief and peaceful advocacy work. As such, it is not everyday that an NGO is in charge of recruiting “suicide volunteers” to dispatch overseas to strike at “world arrogance.”
Yet that was precisely the case at a three-day conference in June sponsored by the Iranian government and its state-financed “Committee for Commemoration of Martyrs of the Global Islamic Movement,” which the mullahs bill as an NGO.
Khatami’s “vision.”
May 04, 2004, 8:26 a.m.
By Nir Boms & Erick Stakelbeck
“I never said that we have no political prisoners. We have them, and that is incontestable. They have been jailed for what they believe in.”
With this admission, made during an April 27 event marking Iran’s “National Youth Day,” Iranian President Mohammed Khatami merely acknowledged what the rest of the world has known for the past 25 years: The Islamic Republic is a graveyard for political dissidents.
August 4, 2004
By Nir Boms and Reza Bulorchi
It is not often that legal rulings in other countries make headlines in the United States. But two recent verdicts in Iran have made activists in the U.S. and around the world take notice.
Last week, Hashem Aghajari, who was previously sentenced to death by the Iranian Supreme Court, received a five-year prison sentence following appeals and a rare intervention that came directly from Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. Continue reading