Top Stories
AP: "Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad said on Tuesday that the West's hostile policies could harm further talks over the country's disputed nuclear program. The warning delivered in a speech at the northern Iranian city of Karaj came as Iran and the permanent members of the U.N. Security Council, as well as Germany, are set to engage in another round of talks in Istanbul in late January. 'If you take an action that is a continuation of the previous path, this will make the job difficult. It will close the road (to dialogue),' he said in the live TV broadcast. 'Cooperation benefits all. We do not expect them to take actions that are hostile.' The U.N. Security Council imposed a fourth and tougher round of sanctions on Iran in June after Tehran refused to halt its disputed nuclear program. Ahmadinejad, however, asserted during the speech that sanctions have only strengthened Iran." http://wapo.st/fCD3Uf
AFP: "Iran is yet to agree on an exact date for the next round of nuclear talks with world powers due to be held next month in Istanbul, foreign ministry spokesman Ramin Mehmanparast said Tuesday. 'There is an agreement on the venue of the meeting but the date has not been finalised yet. Consultations are ongoing to organise talks in Istanbul somewhere around the end of January,' Mehmanparast told reporters. A senior Iranian official said in Damascus on Monday that next month's talks could resolve the dispute over Iran's nuclear programme. 'We think (the negotiations), in line with the agenda decided in Geneva, could clear the way to resolving problems,' said Ali Bagheri, deputy to Said Jalili, Iran's nuclear negotiator. 'Continuing the negotiations in Istanbul could bring gains to both the parties concerned,' Bagheri told a news conference after talks with Syrian President Bashar al-Assad." http://bit.ly/i23JKR
WSJ: "India's central bank Monday asked the country's lenders to effectively curb trade with Iran, a move which is seen as an indication of New Delhi's growing ties with Washington. The Reserve Bank of India late Monday told the country's lenders to stop processing current account transactions with Iran using the Asian Clearing Union arrangement, a policy which will increase deal costs and make trade cumbersome. This comes days after the central bank said that all payments for the import of oil or gas should be settled in any permitted currency outside the ACU mechanism on Friday. While the RBI didn't explicitly mention Iran, the Islamic Republic is the only major crude oil exporter inside the ACU. New Delhi is treading a thin line: it is increasingly engaging with the U.S. to satisfy its ambition of playing a greater role in global affairs, but it can't afford to upset Tehran because it depends on them for oil and for support on its dispute with Pakistan over Kashmir... Explaining its call Monday, the Reserve Bank of India said that the directive to settle Iran trade payments outside the ACU arrangement was determined by 'the difficulties being experienced by importers/exporters in payments to/receipts from Iran.'" http://on.wsj.com/g8Suw0
Nuclear Program & Sanctions
NYT: "Iran on Tuesday executed two men, one of them said to be a member of an exiled opposition group and the other convicted of spying for Mossad, the Israeli intelligence service, according to official reports. Iran's judiciary reported that the alleged spy, Ali-Akbar Siadat, had been hanged at Tehran's Evin Prison after being found guilty of passing on to 'Iran's enemies' information about the country's military capability, including the missile program operated by the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps. According to the charges against him, Mr. Siadat had met with Israeli agents on repeated occasions over the course of six years while traveling to destinations including Turkey, Thailand and the Netherlands. He was said to have received payments of $3,000 to $7,000 for each meeting. He was arrested in 2008, according to the official IRNA news agency." http://nyti.ms/ec6Kaf
AFP: "Fuel consumption across Iran has fallen since the government began scrapping subsidies on energy goods, a top official said on Monday, adding the economic restructuring has been generally well received. 'In the first nine days of the launch of the subsidy removal plan, the energy consumption has fallen,' Deputy Economy Minister Mohammad Reza Farzin told AFP in an interview. President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's government began scrapping subsidies on sensitive energy and food products from December 19 despite much debate and initial criticism from lawmakers and economists. As a result, prices of petrol, diesel, cooking gas and electricity and water skyrocketed by up to five times. The government plans over a five-year period to completely phase out the subsidies, which cost the state's coffers about 100 billion dollars annually. Farzin said that since the plan came into effect the government had seen an across-the-nation fall in fuel consumption, something it had been wanting to achieve for years. 'In the past nine days, our petrol consumption which was about 60 million litres (13.1 million gallons) a day is now at 55 million,' he said." http://bit.ly/eS7X58
Bloomberg: "India's central bank allowed companies from the South Asian nation to trade with Iran in currencies other than the dollar and euro, a move that may help the Middle Eastern country hit by United Nations sanctions. Companies will be allowed to settle current account and trade transactions with Iran outside the Asian Clearing Union or ACU, a regional payment settlements arrangement, the Indian central bank said in a notification yesterday. Participants in the ACU settle transactions in either dollar or euro, according to the ACU's website. The change will make it flexible 'to an extent' for Indian importers and exporters to step out of the ACU's settlement mechanism and deal in more currencies, said Rahul Tripathi, assistant professor in international political economy at Goa University in the Indian state of Goa. Iran is facing United Nations sanctions and measures from the U.S. and the European Union aimed at curbing the country's nuclear program." http://bit.ly/gTnO5m
Human Rights
NYT: "Iran has allowed relatives to visit two German journalists who were detained in October as they allegedly sought to report the widely publicized case of an Iranian woman who could be stoned to death for adultery and murder, official Iranian media and German officials said on Tuesday. It was not immediately clear whether Iran intended the encounter as a political overture to Germany, which is one of the outside powers negotiating with Tehran over its nuclear program. The meeting was held Monday night in the city of Tabriz, where the two Germans are detained, about 370 miles northwest of Tehran. German news reports quoted an Iranian official on Tuesday as dampening speculation that the meeting would soon lead to the release of the two journalists. An Iranian Foreign Ministry spokesman, Ramin Mehmanparast, said that Iran had acted on 'purely humanitarian grounds' to permit the meeting with relatives, but that the journalists' destiny remained with the judiciary, which would determine their future." http://nyti.ms/hfj16z
Guardian: "Iran has arrested the family of a Kurdish student whose execution, scheduled to take place on Boxing Day, was delayed because of protests outside the prison in which he has been held for three years. A source close to the family of Habibollah Latifi, a 29-year-old student activist, said his parents and his three brothers and three sisters were arrested last night. Human rights activists fear Iran might carry out the death penalty in secret. At least 10 other Kurdish activists who have been active in the campaign to prevent Latifi's execution were also arrested. Among them was Simin Chaichi, a prominent Kurdish poet. Latifi was scheduled to be executed yesterday , but the prison governor halted the execution when around 300 protesters gathered outside Sanandaj prison, where he has been since 23 October 2007. His parents were then given permission to meet him after dawn. PUK media, an official news website of the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK), reported that Jalal Talabani, the president of Iraq and the founder of the PUK, had intervened to persuade the Iranian authorities to stop Latifi's execution." http://bit.ly/gee41g
Domestic Politics
AP: "Corruption charges against one of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's most trusted political advisers provided the latest evidence of deep rifts within the Iranian president's own conservative political camp. The challenge by Ahmadinejad's rivals - one of them the head of the judiciary - could set the tone for a bitter fight leading up to the next big political moment in Iran, parliamentary elections less than a year away. 'This case isn't going to bring down Ahmadinejad, but it may get very ugly,' said Abdulkhaleq Abdulla, a regional political analyst at Emirates University. 'It's a commentary on the troubled state of Iranian politics at the moment.' Ahmadinejad has faced a growing internal backlash from conservative leaders - including influential parliament speaker Ali Larijani. They are upset by the president's combative nature and deepening links with the vast military-economic network run by the Revolutionary Guard, Iran's most powerful force which led the crackdown on the reformist movement after Ahmadinejad's disputed re-election last year." http://wapo.st/hgxsoi
Opinion & Analysis
Ray Takeyh in IHT: "The Islamic Republic today is garnering attention primarily for its nuclear defiance. However, beneath the glare of inconclusive summits and boisterous claims of economic empowerment, a critical question remains: Just how stable is Iran's clerical regime? For much of the Washington establishment, the opposition Green movement is a faded memory, a protest wave against electoral fraud that was suppressed by the Islamist regime to the point of exhaustion if not extinction. Such sentiments fail to engage with a more fundamental question, namely how to assess the viability of an opposition movement in a country whose politics have proven so evasive. The Islamic Republic is not a typical authoritarian state but a distinct ideological construct. Such regimes require an explanation, an argument to justify their repression and meddlesome adventures abroad. The custodians of the theocratic state may engage in atrocities, but they are doing so to advance history's cause, to realize a certain sublime ideal. In such a state, the uniformed officer, the plainclothes policeman, the Revolutionary Guard all require an overweening ideological cover to justify their brutalities to themselves. The subtle and subversive victory of the Green movement is to hollow out the state and demonstrate to its loyalists that they are not defending a transcendent orthodoxy but craven and cruel men addicted to power at all cost. In the words of the reformist cleric, the late Ayatollah Hossein Montazeri, in the violent crackdown following the elections in June 2009, the Islamic Republic ceased to be either Islamic or a republic." http://nyti.ms/hlvpCc
Omid Memarian in The Daily Beast: "When world-renowned filmmaker Jafar Panahi was sentenced to six years in prison earlier this week, the verdict reverberated both inside and outside Iran. Not only did authorities in Tehran hand down an exceptionally harsh sentence, they also decreed that the 50-year-old Panahi will be banned from filmmaking, screenwriting and traveling abroad for the next 20 years. According to his relatives, Panahi has also been banned from talking to the media. Along with Panahi, Muhammad Rasoulof, another filmmaker involved with Panahi's movie, was also sentenced to six years in prison. Actors and filmmakers the world over have signed a petition, calling for Panahi's release. 'I was shocked and disheartened by the news of Jafar Panahi and Mohammed Rasoulof's conviction and sentencing,' director Martin Scorsese said in a statement this week. 'It's depressing to imagine a society with so little faith in its own citizens that it feels compelled to lock up anyone with a contrary opinion. As filmmakers, we all need to stand up for Panahi and Rasoulof. We should applaud their courage and campaign aggressively for their immediate release.' And on Tuesday, the U.N. General Assembly expressed its 'deep concern' about 'recurring human rights violations in Iran' by approving a resolution that noted the severe limitations on freedom of thought and freedom of religion in Iran. The resolution criticized arbitrary arrests as well as the long prison sentences handed out for prisoners of conscience... The crackdown, observers said, is yet another indication of how the government of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is trying to quell dissent and tighten its grip on power." http://bit.ly/fXjoP0
Meir Javedanfar in The Guardian: "On 10 December, 250 Basij students from Abu Ali Sina University in the Iranian city of Hamedan gathered in front of the mausoleum of two Jewish saints and threatened to tear it down, in revenge for what the students claimed were Israeli threats to infringe on the al-Aqsa mosque in Jerusalem... The hostile act of tearing down part of the tomb is unprecedented in the modern history of Iran, as graves of Jewish saints in Iran (which also include Daniel) have always been considered holy and respected by Jews and Muslims alike. In fact, many Muslim families go to such graves to pray for the health of their loved ones, alongside their Jewish compatriots. Even more worrying is the revisionism of Jewish history flourishing in Iran under the government of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. The narrative being promoted by this regime is that it was Mordechai who was a murderer because he ordered the massacre of more than 70,000 Iranians. This is being called an 'Iranian holocaust.' The eminent Oxford University Professor Homa Katouzian, in his book Sadeq Hedayat: His Work and His Wondrous World, traces this fabrication back to an article published in Iran-e Bastan in 1934. According to Professor Katouzian, this publication, 'imitating German antisemitism, fabricated sensational reports of Jewish plots.' Not only did this publication reverse the facts in the story of Esther and Mordechai but it also, among other things, distributed reports that Jews were 'selling fatal medicine to Muslims.' One of the goals of such articles was to emphasise and promote what it saw as the Aryan roots and historical commonality between Iran and Nazi Germany. Such false reports provided the foundation for anti-Jewish Islamist campaigns in the 1940s. For years afterwards, no one took notice of such antisemitic material, let alone promoted it. This has all changed since Ahmadinejad took power in 2005. These days one can hear about the fabricated and highly anti-Jewish 'Iranian holocaust' from Iranian politicians." http://bit.ly/e6Peda
Fox News: "The weekend arrest of an Iranian economist who criticized Iran's decision to reduce subsidies in the wake of international sanctions is the latest sign that cracks are starting to show in the Iranian economy. Fariborz Raeis Dana was taken into custody after saying in an interview with BBC Persian last weekend that the subsidy cuts are a 'hallucination' because they will not bring the cost reductions the government is seeking but will drive up unemployment and poverty while the government builds its weapons arsenal. Dana was reacting to the squeeze Iranian citizens are feeling after the government this month started to cut its longstanding food and fuel subsidies. The move has caused gas prices to skyrocket -- from 36 cents a gallon to $1.45 a gallon, according to Mehr news agency -- along with price hikes on everything from electricity to bread. With Iran's unemployment rate -- estimated at anywhere from 12 to 22 percent -- already straining the system, other economists suggest the subsidy cuts will lead to rapid inflation, above what is unofficially estimated to be 20 percent. Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad last week was quoted saying the economic sanctions -- meant as punishment for the country's uranium enrichment efforts -- have 'no impact on Iran's decision-making process' and that the country's 'nuclear path is irreversible.'" http://fxn.ws/hekv63 |
Eye on Iran is a periodic news summary from United Against Nuclear Iran (UANI) a program of the American Coalition Against Nuclear Iran, Inc., a tax-exempt organization under Section 501(c)(3) of the Internal Revenue Code. Eye on Iran is not intended as a comprehensive media clips summary but rather a selection of media elements with discreet analysis in a PDA friendly format. For more information please email Press@UnitedAgainstNuclearIran.com
United Against Nuclear Iran (UANI) is a non-partisan, broad-based coalition that is united in a commitment to prevent Iran from fulfilling its ambition to become a regional super-power possessing nuclear weapons. UANI is an issue-based coalition in which each coalition member will have its own interests as well as the collective goal of advancing an Iran free of nuclear weapons.
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