Borzou Daragahi’s Washington Times National Weekly Edition
article of November 18-24 entitled, “Tension Boils in Iran as Iraq is
Pressured,” encapsulates the boiling cauldron that is Iran. As reported
by Daragahi, tensions within the Islamic Republic of Iran (IRI) regime and its
competing factions of reformers and hard-liners have again surfaced for
international public purview in the wake of heightened anxieties over George
Bush’s impending showdown with Saddam Hussein and Iraq.
As reported by The Times, the struggle over who shall lead
Iran’s 65 million people is presently seen as a contest between “moderate” IRI
President Mohammed Khatami and hard-line rivals in control of the judiciary,
armed forces, broadcast media, and veto-power over laws passed in the Iranian
majlis, or parliament. This contest serves as the backdrop for Iranian
student unrest against the IRI regime, which crystallized earlier this month
with demonstrations at Tehran University by approximately 5,000 students against
the death sentence pronounced by the government against scholar Hashem Aghajari,
for questioning the role and legitimacy of theocratic, clerical rule in the
Islamic Republic. The Daragahi report for The Washington Times
chronicles constantly larger crowds of protestors in Tehran, with spreading
activity in the provincial cities of Tabriz, Isfahan, Urumiyeh, and Hamedan.
The end game is yet to be seen.
American and European observers interested in this unfolding story and all
of the derivative implications for both the Middle East and the world will be
especially advised to focus on the four year old political and social movement
known as Marze Por Gohar, or the Glorious Frontiers Party.
Its story is not simply one of clinical interest to journalists and policy wonks
following geopolitical developments and strategies. The testimony and witness
of its adherents and followers to a desire for the reestablishment of civil,
economic, religious, and cultural freedom in Iran is a poignant, moving odyssey
interwoven with intense personal sacrifice, suffering, and sometimes death
itself.
Marze Por Gohar’s mission statement states that its long term
goal is “to establish a democratic and secular government in Iran, based on full
restoration of civil and human rights for all of Iran’s citizens regardless of
their ethnicity and creed.” Its envisioned foreign policy for Iran is rooted in
the former’s “complete sovereignty” accompanied by “total respect of other
nations who respect our national borders and accept our self-determination.”
Founded on July 8, 1998 in Tehran, Marze Por Gohar’s foundations
are rooted in the vision of a group of nationalistic, but secular writers and
journalists. It is noteworthy to the Western observer that this vision found
its earlier foundational expression in the creation of the Mehr Society,
whose purpose was to “propagate and promote the pre-Islamic culture of Iran.”
Here, one again encounters what Sandra Mackey has brilliantly explained to
American and European observers in her magnum opus, The Iranians--that
pre-Islamic and Islamic Iran present a kaleidoscope of ideas and ideologies
often packaged and expressed as competing identities in locating the heart and
soul of the Iranian national psyche, a quest often elusive for Iranian and
Westerner alike.
Marze Por Gohar’s evaluation of the nature of the Islamic
Republic of Iran (IRI) is unequivocal. Its web site states that:
This belief became channeled into action in the internationally publicized
pro-Democracy uprising in Iran conducted by university students in July of 1999
as a precursor to this month’s spate of activity in Tehran and provincial
cities. On the fifth day of the July 1999 uprising, July 13, 1999, Marze
Por Gohar activists and leaders were arrested and sent to the notorious
Towhid detention center in Tehran. In the aftermath of these arrests by the IRI
regime, an unspecified number of party members were forced to flee Iran, “to
rebuild the organization’s networks” from outside the country. At the same
time, the chronicled experiences of IRI-directed incarceration and torture in
Towhid prison in the summer of 1999 give the American and Western reader a
glimpse of a Kafkaesque house of horrors located on Sepah Avenue, or Imam
Khomeini Avenue, behind the Foreign Ministry headquarters in Tehran. In
translated notes posted on the Marze Por Gohar web site, the
reader is told that this prison has a long, sordid history. Dating back to the
time of Reza Shah and initially a prison for women, it was later utilized by the
infamous “Office of Information and National Security” or SAVAK,
of the Pahlavi regime as an anti-terrorism center or Komiteh Moshtarak
Zed-e-Kharaabkaari. Later the facility was adapted by the Islamic
Republic of Iran (IRI) for purposes of incarceration and interrogation under the
auspices of the Ministry of Information and Internal Security, or
VEVAK. The Marze Por Gohar web site informs the reader
that this last acronym and organization have a motto, in Arabic–“Salvation
Through Verity.”
The Western web browser, researcher, human rights advocate, political
scientist, or journalist looking for specific accounts of Orwellian thought
control and sadistic physical torture by the institutions and organs of the IRI
regime directed specifically against Iranian opponents of political repression
and ecclesiastical theocracy will not be disappointed. The translated notes of
Marze Por Gohar activist Roozbeh Farahanipour on his tenure in
Towhid prison in July of 1999 subsequent to arrest by IRI authorities, chronicle
the barbarism characteristic of the instruments of the Central State in all
totalitarian political structures historically. In these translated notes,
strains of Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag Archipelago permeate the
Farahanipour testimony, both in the cruelty of the State’s self appointed quest
to exterminate the conscience, will, and soul of the dissenter, as well as in
the courage and tenacity of those most moved to resist its tentacles. The web
browser is treated to accounts of unspeakable sanitary conditions; the
employment of prolonged sun exposure of prisoners in cages on the roof of the
prison at 113 degree Fahrenheit temperatures; hanging prisoners from the ceiling
of individual cells (in one case with weights attached to a man’s testicles);
and such ritualistic acts of sadism in Farahanipour’s account as:
Chicken-Kabob, which is a method where they cuff your ankles
together, tie your hands, put your wrists over your ankles, pass a thick metal
bar between the elbows and the back of the knees, lift the bar, rest the two
ends on something and hang you upside down in an almost fetal position. Then
they begin to strike. Merry-Go-Round is a method where they tie you up
to a Y-shaped bed, facing up. This bed, however, is a rotating bed. They begin
spinning you and striking you with lashes from all sides, not caring where the
blows land. They used to sing a song while doing this. It was something like,
“Go round and round, faster and faster, Merry-Go-Round, spin faster and faster,”
and they increased the speed of the rotations as they sang. Because of all that
spinning, sometimes I had to taste that disgusting prison food again. Choking
on my own vomit was not the way I wanted to die. . . . Another method is to
pull one arm from the front, above your shoulder and the other arm from the
back, above the waist, tie them together and hang in that position. I think it
was during this method that my left shoulder blade broke and the muscles in my
shoulder tore. . . .
The Marze Por Gohar web site is mandatory reading for anyone
interested in the intricacies of the Iranian political and cultural scene past
or present. In the maze of comprehensive information it presents, the Western
and American reader will be well advised to consult and browse all of the
Internet links offered which present a moving overview of the rich history of
political, religious, and cultural minorities in Iran; the fascinating material
on pre-Islamic Iran generally unknown today in the West outside scholarly
circles; and the poignant testimonies of Iranian activists interested in a
legitimate Constitutional Republic, while avoiding the tragic excesses of both
Monarchial regimes past and Islamic theocratic ideologies present. These
struggles and personal sacrifices, often conducted in the past outside the
awareness and understanding of the West, may be about to take center stage in
the midst of larger Middle Eastern conflicts and competitions yet to come in
determining the future of that region and the rest of the world in what remains
of linear history. Marze Por Gohar, as an organization and a
movement dedicated to the reestablishment of human rights in Iran, the revival
of the best contributions of pre-Islamic Iran, and the implementation of a
foreign policy rooted in both Iranian national sovereignty and friendship with
the outside world, may find its hour and time on the stage of world history fast
approaching.
(Mark Dankof is a correspondent for the Internet news service News
and Views at GoOff.com. An ordained Lutheran pastor and past United
States Senate candidate in Delaware with the Constitution Party in 2000, his web
site Mark Dankof’s America may be accessed at
http://www.MarkDankof.com.)
Contact Information for Marze Por Gohar:
Marze Por Gohar Party
P. O. Box 111
1351 Westwood Boulevard
Los Angeles, CA 90024, U. S. A.
Telephone: (510) 217-3982
FAX: (510) 217-3982
E-mail: info@marzeporgohar.org
Web Site: http://www.marzeporgohar.org