You are in:
- Archives » 2006 » November 2006
Tehran Tightens Grip
Iran continues to horrify. The Observer runs a story on the execution of Alireza Gorji, 23 and Hossein Makesh, 22, in July this year. Officials say the men were killed, the newspaper reports, because of "immoral" behavior. This would be worrying enough: In recent years, Iran has executed people for homosexuality and 'crimes against chastity'. However, the executions of Gorji and Makesh suggest that the fundamentalist regime is taking ever harsher steps against those it sees as a threat: anti-government campaigners say that the two are "among increasing numbers of political activists being executed by Iran on trumped-up charges."
A video of the executions was obtained by the dissident group the National Council of Resistance of Iran and shown to the Observer. The same film, the newspaper reports, will be shown to MPs in London tomorrow as a warning against what the NCR-Iran describes as "appeasement" of the Iranian regime.
The groups says Tehran has claimed more than 20,000 political victims - and that president Mohammad Ahmadinejad has been involved in many of the deaths.
Human rights groups put the number of people executed in Iran last year at 94, though they admit that many more are believed to be killed secretly.
Still, the NCR-Iran has a mountain to climb in terms of persuading western governments to take a sterner line against the vile Ahmadinejad regime. Despite mounting evidence of Iran's role in formenting violence against Israel and in Lebanon and Iraq, the danger it poses to its own people and the threat from its nuclear weapons programme, post-Iraq, few governments are willing to be convinced by exiled opposition groups.
