Yet more intolerance

Nazila Fathi has an article in The New York Times about problems in Iran:

An Iranian parliamentary panel said Sunday that Tehran’s prosecutor, an ally of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, was responsible for the beating deaths of three imprisoned protesters last summer, state news agencies reported.
The panel’s investigative report said the prosecutor, Saeed Mortazavi, who has since been promoted, was responsible for the violence against protesters in the notorious Kahrizak detention center, where at least three young men, including the son of a former Revolutionary Guards commander, were killed.
The allegation was a rare criticism of a senior official involved in the government’s crackdown on the protest movement that erupted in June over disputed election results. It also exposed the internal rift between Mr. Ahmadinejad’s faction, which favors a severe response to the protesters, and his conservative opponents, led by the speaker of Parliament, Ali Larijani, who favor compromise.
The report said Mr. Mortazavi insisted on sending 147 detainees to the prison in Kahrizak, south of Tehran, and “keeping them for four days in a space of 750 square feet, without ventilation in the heat of summer, lack of hygienic standards, food, and water, in addition to beating and intimidation by prison guards.”
While the report did not accuse Mr. Mortazavi of personal involvement in prisoner abuse, it said he was aware of the conditions at the prison and as prosecutor was responsible for them.
The report identified the dead prisoners as Mohsen Ruholamini, Amir Javadifar, and Mohammad Kamrani. Mr. Ruholamini was the son of a senior member of the Revolutionary Guards and close aide to Mohsen Rezai, a candidate in the June presidential election.
The report said that “the judiciary needs to deal with those behind the incident with no sympathy or regard to their position in order to restore the reputation of the Islamic Republic.” Any prosecution of Mr. Mortazavi will be up to the judiciary.
In December, the authorities acknowledged for the first time that at least three protesters had been beaten to death in the prison, and a military court said that twelve prison officials had been charged with murder and other crimes. The court did not identify the officials.
The parliamentary panel rejected allegations by detainees at the prison that they had been raped by guards, saying they were nothing more than “illusions of a mother”. Opposition members have accused the authorities of having detainees raped, and at least three former detainees have made the accusations publicly since their release in recent months.
After accounts of abuse emerged in July, outraging many Iranians, including several prominent conservatives, the supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, ordered the prison closed.
A summary of the report appeared on a member of Parliament’s website last week, but the full report was read on the floor of Parliament on Sunday. The report was posted on the official ISNA website and read on state radio.
Mr. Mortazavi, who issued the arrest warrants for more than one hundred former officials, activists, and journalists in June, served as the Tehran prosecutor until August. He was then promoted to deputy state prosecutor and later to a government position overseeing efforts to combat smuggling. He was already well known by the opposition for having shut down more than one hundred pro-reform newspapers and having jailed dozens of journalists in the 1990s.
But one analyst, a former senior official who spoke on condition of anonymity, said that in pinning the blame on Mr. Mortazavi, the government was trying to pacify the opposition. “They might go as far as sacrificing Mortazavi, but I don’t think this is going to fool the opposition,” he said. “This does not mean a major compromise. It is just a tactic, and they are willing to sacrifice him because he crossed the lines.”
The opposition had one of its largest and bloodiest confrontations with the authorities on 27 December, which left at least eight protesters dead, according to official figures. The opposition Jaras Web site reported last week that more than 180 people, including seventeen journalists, ten advisers to the opposition leader Mir Hussein Moussavi, and twelve members of the Baha'i faith, were arrested afterward.
Ayatollah Khamenei, who has the final word on state matters and has supported Mr. Ahmadinejad, said Saturday the authorities should deal with the protesters “cautiously but firmly.”
The authorities in Tehran arrested 33 women on Saturday, part of a group known as Mourning Mothers, who have lost children in the protests, the International Campaign for Human Rights in Iran reported. Nine of the mothers arrested on Saturday were taken to hospitals, but it was not immediately clear why, said Hadi Ghaemi, the rights group’s director.