and tried to arrest its publisher, Ali-Akbar Javanfekr, who is also the chief of the state news agency and the communications director for President Ahmadi-nejad.
Javanfekr and the Iran staff reportedly resisted forcibly the arrest effort by the police, prompting the officers to fire tear gas canisters inside the newspaper’s offices. Tear gas should only be used in the open air and can asphyxiate people if used in confined quarters.
News reports said stun guns were also used as the police “stormed” the newspaper offices. The reports said 33 staffers of the newspaper were arrested for resisting the police. One editor on reporter were said to have been injured in the melee.
The violent resistance reportedly ended only when Ahmadi-nejad himself called the barricaded Javanfekr and told him to surrender.
Javanfekr was hauled off to jail, but remained there only a few hours before Ahmadi-nejad arranged his release.
The clash was but the latest example of the frictions between the Ahmadi-nejad faction and mainline conservatives who wish to throttle Ahmadi-nejad and his band of followers who are deemed “deviants” by mainline conservatives.
Javanfekr was ordered arrested Monday, the day after a Tehran court sentenced him to one year in jail and banned him from any role in journalism for three years, which stretches beyond the end of Ahmadi-nejad’s final term in August 2013.
At the same time, the Judiciary banned publication for two months of the reformist daily Etemad, which published an interview with Javanfekr in its Saturday edition. In the interview, Javanfekr hit back at critics who accuse Ahmadi-nejad of being in the thrall of a “deviant” circle seeking to undermine the Islamic clergy. Javanfekr said those critics had “poisoned” politics and implied that many of them were corrupt.
“What have we ‘deviated’ from? Yes, we have deviated from those ‘friends,’ from their beliefs, behavior and interpretations,” Javanfekr said.
“If they meant the deviant current is a deviation from their beliefs, we confirm it.”
The counter-attack, published verbatim over three pages, appeared to signal the determination of Ahmadi-nejad’s camp to fight back as Iran gears up for parliamentary elections in March.
Javanfekr was convicted and sentenced Sunday over another article published earlier this year in his newspaper, Iran, on the historical origins of women’s Islamic dress.
That article, in a supplement published in August, contained an interview suggesting that chadors had their origins in 19th Century Paris, rather than being prescribed by Islam.
The suggestion outraged traditional hardliners who had already accused Ahmadi-nejad’s faction of putting secular nationalist values ahead of its Islamic identity.
Javanfekr’s lawyer, Ab-dollah Nakhaie, said he would appeal the sentence. In Iran, most people convicted of non-violent crimes are allowed to stay out of jail while they appeal. Therefore, the effort to arrest Javanfekr Monday was not normal.
The day after the melee, Tehran Prosecutor Abbas Jafar Dolatabadi insisted nothing of any seriousness had happened. He said no tear gas or stun guns were used, denying reports from several Iran employees.
Dolatabadi said he learned that Javanfekr was planning a news conference Monday morning and sent two of his staff members to the news conference to serve Javanfekr with a judicial order forbidding him to “express statements that foment further discord with an aim to disturb public perceptions.”
In his news conference, Javanfekr said, “We should all be allowed to utter our criticisms. There should not be an atmosphere of strangulation in this country.”
An Iran journalist told the International Campaign for Human Rights in Iran what he heard. He said he works on the third floor while Javanfekr’s office is on the fourth floor. He said reporters on the fourth floor told him they saw plainclothes police in Javanfekr’s office pushing him to the floor. As the Iran staff mobilized in support of Javanfekr, the reporter said uniformed police suddenly poured into the building and ran to every floor, beating newspaper staff with their batons as they came across them. He said staff members sprayed the air with fire extinguishers to try to counter the tear gas.
The next day, Tehran province Governor General Morteza Tamaddon visited the newspaper offices and expressed disgust at what he saw. “This cannot be justified in any way,” he said. “There is no reason for launching an ambush against an entire cultural center and its staff.”
With the opposition reformist movement repressed after protesting Ahmadi-nejad’s 2009 re-election, the battle for power in Iran is now chiefly between traditional conservatives and the more populist Ahmadi-nejad camp. The traditional conservatives themselves are having trouble coming together and backing a single slate in the Majlis elections next March.
That rift between the populists and traditionalists became more open and nasty after Supreme Leader Ali Khamenehi forced Ahmadi-nejad to reinstate the intelligence minister the president sacked in April.
Since then, many in the Majlis and Judiciary have moved against the president they see as weakened and rejected by Khamenehi, with lawmakers threatening impeachment and prosecutors arresting people on the fringes of his faction. The strike at Javanfekr is the first move against someone at the very center of Ahmadi-nejad’s power circle.
In the interview in Etemad, Javanfekr rebutted accusations that Ahmadi-nejad’s faction sought to undermine Iran’s clerical ruling system. Javanfekr insisted that the president had been endorsed by Khamenehi. That is true, but Javanfekr avoided the fact that Ahmadi-nejad had also been disciplined and reversed by the Supreme Leader several times.
Javanfekr said, “The great leader of the revolution called Ahmadi-nejad’s government the government of work and effort. If they believe the government is not serving people, it is better that they say they have a problem with the Supreme Leader.”
Many analysts say Kha-menehi prefers to keep Ahmadi-nejad in place to the end of his term rather that allow his rivals to unseat him and jeopardize stability at a time of economic difficulties and the risk of popular unrest spilling over from the nearby Arab world.
Javanfekr said Ahmadi-nejad was no lame duck or spent force and retained public support that meant he did not need the support of conservatives who backed him in 2009 as the best bet against the reformists.
“It was not us who were ungrateful, they [mainline conservatives] were the ones that did not acknowledge Ahmadi-nejad and his government…. Ahmadi-nejad has popularity and does not owe them anything,” he said.
Javanfekr also criticized the Judiciary’s treatment of Mohammad Sharif Malekzadeh, an ally of Ahmadi-nejad’s chief of staff, Esfandiar Rahim-Mashai, who was arrested in June, saying Malekzadeh had been held in solitary confinement and suffered mental and physical consequences.
The two-month ban on Ete-mad said only that it was being shuttered for “spreading lies.”