Iran Is Considering Pardon for Ganji

Eli Lake, The NY Sun:

Dissident Iranian journalist Akbar Ganji may be pardoned for the remaining six months of his jail sentence, Iran's judiciary chief, Ayatollah Mahmoud Hashemi Shahrudi, said.

A pardon for Mr. Ganji would prove the efficacy of an international campaign in recent weeks demanding his unconditional release from prison. President Bush, E.U. leaders, and an Israeli politician and a former Russian political prisoner, Natan Sharansky, have called for the hunger-striker's unconditional release, as have human rights organizations and Western intellectuals, who signed a petition circulated by www.opendemocracy.net and the International Society for Iranian Studies-Committee for Academic and Intellectual Freedom.

Iran's student news agency, ISNA, yesterday quoted Mr. Shahrudi as saying, "Maybe a pardon can be applied to him. We are considering the matter." The agency also quoted Mr. Shahrudi as saying, "We are considering legal terms to see if public amnesties can be applied to his case or not." READ MORE

The Iranian regime has scrambled in the face of mounting international pressure regarding Mr. Ganji. Initially, spokesmen from Evin Prison, where Mr. Ganji was held from June 11 until Sunday when he was rushed to Milad Hospital in Tehran, and other leaders in the Islamic Republic denied that Mr. Ganji was on a hunger strike. On Monday, the chief of Milad said Mr. Ganji had been admitted to receive routine knee surgery.

Yesterday, however, a conservative newspaper that often reflects the official line of the regime, the Daily Kahan, reported that Mr. Ganji's hunger strike was designed as a plot by his lawyer, Nobel Peace Prize-winner Shirin Ebadi, and America.

"Akbar Ganji was asked to go on hunger strike, and he had been given assurances that if his physical conditions deteriorated, they would intervene to prevent any serious damage to his health," the paper reported.

"The plotters had at the same time promised a foreign party that once Akbar Ganji died, they would turn the issue into a big fiasco against the Islamic Republic. They were to be rewarded handsomely for their services."

Since starting a hunger strike on June 11 after being rearrested for urging a boycott of his country's presidential election, Mr. Ganji has become a symbol of the democratic opposition in Iran. He was initially sentenced in January 2001 for writing a book and publishing articles that charged his country's former president and intelligence ministers with authorizing a string of murders of Iranian intellectuals in the late 1990s.

On Sunday evening, Mr. Ganji was brought to Milad Hospital after numerous reports from inside Iran suggested his health was failing from the hunger strike. On Monday, his daughter told reporters that her father was being sustained by feeding tubes, effectively ending his hunger strike. In an open letter smuggled from Evin Prison last month, Mr. Ganji vowed to refuse food, including any sustenance delivered by feeding tube, until he was released from prison. The Sun on Monday reported that other political prisoners saw him collapsed in the hospital ward of Evin Prison, where he was being held, suggesting that he may have been unconscious when the feeding tube was inserted.