A Daily Briefing on Iran: Iranian Opposition Figure Akbar Ganji At Long Last Is Scheduled To Be Freed

Eli Lake, The New York Sun:

Iranian dissident and opposition leader Akbar Ganji is scheduled to be released from Evin Prison next month, according to his wife, who visited him over the weekend.

In an open letter published on Iranian pro-democracy Web sites this weekend, Massoumeh Shafieh said she was still concerned about her husband's physical condition, but that his release date technically was scheduled for March 17. At the end of August some of Mr. Ganji's allies believed they had struck a deal for his release after a hunger strike that nearly killed him.

The pending release date for Mr. Ganji presents America with a new opportunity to make good on the policy announcement made earlier this month by Secretary of State Rice. READ MORE

In her February 15 testimony before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Ms. Rice asked for $75 million in emergency funding for Iranian opposition activities ranging from exile radio broadcasts to money for the country's labor unions. Mr. Ganji has been an architect of Iran's movement to hold a referendum on the Islamic Republic's constitution. He was also a key figure among the disillusioned reformists who called for a boycott of the disputed election that resulted in the ascendancy of Iran's president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

"Mr. Ganji is one of the key figures in the internal opposition movement who is attempting to reform the regime without violence. His release would be a welcome event considering the recent dismal record of the Iranian regime on human rights," a Los Angeles-based spokesman for the referendum movement, Pooya Dayanim, said yesterday. But Mr. Dayanim warned, "There have been discussions of his release before, we are hoping this time the parole commitment will be honored and he will be permanently released."

While President Bush publicly called for Mr. Ganji's release from prison in July when he was on hunger strike, American support for Iran's indigenous democrats has been spotty. Some dissidents privately complain that the State Department has been slow to act on their request to pressure Iran's neighbors to grant them asylum. Meanwhile prior smaller sums of funding for Iran's democracy movement have gone toward America-based research projects instead of opposition organizations.

Mr. Ganji has been in and out of jail since 2000, when he was first arrested, ostensibly for attending a reformist conference in Berlin and for his journalism. His lawyer, a Nobel Peace Prize winner, Shirin Ebadi, has called into question nearly every aspect of his trial. In 2001 he was sentenced to six years in prison for publishing a book that accused, among others, a former president, Hashemi Rafsanjani, of orchestrating the killing of intellectuals in the late 1990s known as the "chain murders." He was released to receive medical attention last May, but quickly granted an interview to Rooz online, urging his fellow citizens not to vote in the presidential elections.

In prison and on hunger strike Mr. Ganji was most prolific. He managed to write at least four open letters urging the "free world" to support democracy in Iran. While in prison, Mr. Ganji's second manifesto was published, calling for nonviolent tactics to achieve regime change. The publicity of Mr. Ganji's case inside and outside Iran has likely proved the death knell to the country's reform movement, vanquished by Iran's unelected clerics and unable to assert authority when they controlled the parliament, or Majlis, between 1997 and 2004.

In interviews and letters, Mr. Ganji's wife has said her husband has been threatened and beaten inside Evin Prison and kept in isolation cells. Last summer Mr. Ganji's case was taken up by Iran's student organizations as well.