Top Dissident Refuses to Give in

The Economist:

Akbar Ganji, Iran's most outstanding dissident, is in renewed danger.

LAST March, during the Persian New Year holiday, Akbar Ganji, Iran's best-known political prisoner, was cracking jokes into his mobile phone at the edge of the Iranian desert. Chubby from festive dishes of polov (rice, often with lamb) and delighted to be surrounded by his family, he showered this correspondent's two-year-old son with kisses before speeding off to keep an appointment with a dissident ayatollah and return to Tehran's Evin prison by the end of his holiday probation.

Nine months on, he is a sick man, severely weakened by the intermittent hunger strike he staged, over the summer and autumn, in protest against the conditions of his detention. He has reportedly been severely beaten and needs urgent attention to injuries to his feet and shoulder; his wife, Massoumeh Shaffii, says his blood pressure has plummeted and he is denied medicines and regular meals. Since November 25th, when told at the prison gates that a planned visit had been cancelled, she has had no news of her husband. She is “desperately worried” for his life.

Iran would be sorely embarrassed if Mr Ganji, a former journalist who counts Kofi Annan among his supporters, were to die in jail just a few months before his six-year prison sentence ends. (He is then due for a stint of internal exile.) His allies have made behind-the-scenes attempts to get him out, but the judiciary seems to be resisting; there is no sign that Evin's corrective techniques have persuaded him to soften his attacks on the Islamic Republic and the men who run it. He has reportedly refused to retract calls for Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Iran's appointed supreme leader, to submit to direct elections.

Given the tendency of Iranian democracy-seekers to recant in jail, it is perhaps surprising how many people regard Mr Ganji, the exception, with mixed feelings. Iran's reformists thrilled to his articles in the late 1990s, which accused top officials of being behind the extra-judicial murder of dissidents. But they blamed him for the judiciary's backlash, which silenced the reformist press. Mr Ganji feels the effects. Iran's newspapers shy from reporting the details of his incarceration. Iran's dissident hero, as he admitted when he was briefly let out for medical treatment this summer, has slipped from most Iranians' view. READ MORE

Some old friends accuse him of “going it alone” and of disdaining the unity and discipline that the reformists must display if they are to threaten their conservative opponents, who have won control of parliament and the presidency in the past two years. Indeed, it is hard to see what Mr Ganji's hunger strike achieved. He is apparently still being prevented from talking to other prisoners, despite official denials that solitary confinement exists in Iranian jails. His lawyer is under arrest too, allegedly for an unrelated crime.

None of Iran's pro-democracy forces, whether moderate Islamists or secularists like Mr Ganji, has the programme or personalities to galvanise public opinion. The reformers are still reeling from the eclipse of their figurehead, the former president, Muhammad Khatami. In a system that works on compromise and backroom deals, Mr Ganji is an oddity: a courageous and obdurate man willing to lay down his life on a matter of principle.