Iran’s Dissidents, Released But Not Freed

The New Yorker

In 1998, I visited the offices of Jame’eh (“Society”), the first independent newspaper in revolutionary Iran. Its staff had just published a story about a Revolutionary Guard commander’s secret proposal to behead emerging reformers. In its first three months, Jame’eh also exposed the misadventures of the secretive Ansar-e Hezbollah, or Helpers of the Party of God, and interviewed a former official who was released after being imprisoned for fifteen years, on charges of being an American spy. The paper ran acerbic satires, daring political cartoons, and unconventional news stories. It came out twice a day (three times if there was big news), and kiosks had a hard time keeping it in stock.

“Jame’eh has two functions,” Mashallah Shamsolvaezin, its young editor, told me then. “We are trying to build up the level of democratic discourse, and we are a good test case to see how much freedom the government can tolerate.”

Not much, it turns out, even a generation later.

Jame’eh was shut down just months after its launch. Shamsolvaezin quickly opened three other papers, including Asr-e Azadegan (“Age of Free People”). The regime closed them just as quickly. Over the past sixteen years, Shamsolvaezin has been jailed three times, in the infamous Evin Prison, on vague charges of challenging national security and weakening the theocratic system. He was last released in 2010. For his daring, Shamsolvaezin was named the World Press Freedom Hero earlier this year by the International Press Institute.

Today, Shamsolvaezin makes his living as a pistachio farmer outside Tehran. His goatee is graying; his crows’ nests are rutted. “I dream of newspapers,” he told me this spring. Since the election of President Hassan Rouhani, last June, he has tried again to open a newspaper, but on the eve of its first issue it, too, was thwarted. He now carries a toothbrush in his briefcase. He showed it to me. “At least this time, I’m prepared,” he said. “The prison gives us a toothbrush, but it’s not good quality.”

Rouhani’s victory, an upset, spawned great expectations of change. A pragmatic centrist, he campaigned on the promise of “hope and prudence.” After the election, in a series of speeches and tweets, he pledged new freedoms and challenged past practices, including censorship. His quasi-official account tweeted, “Web filtering unable to produce results. Which important piece of news has #filtering been able to black out in recent years.”