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News & Views Killing of 3 Rebel Writers Turns Hope to Fear in Iran By DOUGLAS JEHL TEHERAN, Iran -- Three dissident Iranian writers have been reported missing in the last month, and now all three have turned up dead. An opposition leader and his wife have been killed, stabbed to death in their Tehran home. Not since the revolution nearly 20 years ago has Iran witnessed such eerie, unexplained violence. And more than at any time since the election of President Mohammad Khatami, hopes that Iran might be moving toward a more tolerant new day are giving way to fears of darker times ahead. "I, too, may disappear soon," said Firouz Gouran, whose magazine, The Healthy Society, has been banned by a government edict. More than 40 writers, poets and other secular intellectuals joined Gouran during the weekend for what was part protest and part wake, but the mood here is so unsettled that none dared to make the trip alone. In an open letter to Khatami that was drafted during the session, the intellectuals appealed for government protection. "We writers wish to call on the chief executive, who is in charge of ensuring the safety of all citizens, to end this horrible situation by any means," they said. The body of the latest victim, Mohammad Jafar Pouyandeh, a writer last seen on Dec. 9, was identified by his relatives on Saturday. Family members said his body showed signs of strangulation. The dissident poet Mohammad Mokhtari, whose body was found last week, was also reported to have been strangled. The body of another dissident writer, Javad Sharif, was found earlier this month in what friends have said were suspicious circumstances. The opposition figures, Dariush Forouhar and his wife, Parvaneh, had been killed in a gruesome fashion several hours before their bodies were discovered on Nov. 21. The attacks have outraged many people in Iran, and they have prompted calls from Western literary societies, human rights groups and the State Department for swift government action. Khatami has condemned the killings in strong terms and vowed to seek the arrest of those responsible. So far, though, the main effect of the killings has been to expose Khatami's relative impotence. Within Iran's fractious power structure, Khatami commands little authority over the security and intelligence forces. They are more closely aligned with the country's more conservative supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. From the two ends of Iran's political spectrum, competing theories have been offered as to who may be responsible for the killings. The conservative-led judiciary, in a statement Sunday, blamed a "mysterious and organized move inspired by foreign elements." But at the other end of the spectrum, some dissidents have alleged involvement by the Iranian Intelligence Ministry. Whoever was responsible, Khatami's admirers worry that undermining the president may be exactly what the killings are intended to do. In the struggle that has raged in Iran since Khatami's landslide 1997 election victory, they fear, the attacks may represent a new phase of a battle over the extent to which Iran should embrace political and cultural openness. "We are sure that they want to close the society as before," Gholam-Abbas Tavassoli, a leading member of the Freedom Movement, said of what he believed was the prime motive behind the killings. In an interview published in the Iranian newspaper Zan, one of Khatami's lieutenants, Deputy Interior Minister Mostafa Tajzadeh, described the potential threat to Khatami's agenda in even starker terms. "Anarchy will make society thirsty for security, and people will pay any price to get that security, even if they lose their legitimate rights and freedom," Tajzadeh said. Since Khatami took office, voices critical of Iran's ruling religious establishment have generally sought a higher profile, but as with the quest for greater openness as a whole, their efforts have met with no more than mixed success. In general, the path has zigzagged between advances and setbacks: New newspapers have flourished, censorship has been relaxed and voices of dissent have found greater tolerance. But each of these gains has been periodically eroded -- and sometimes sharply -- by the conservative-led judiciary. Long before the killings began last month, for example, clear warnings were sent to government critics -- including the detention of Ibrahim Yazdi, leader of a liberal Islamic group, for 11 days last December; the closing of several newspapers, most notably Jameah and its successor, Tous, the boldest of the new voices, and the jailing of editors, including Mahmoud Shamsvolazein of Tous, who spent 35 days in a prison outside Tehran this fall. Still, Khatami has generally been seen until now as doing all he can to promote freedom in the face of considerable obstacles. That perception has been reflected in a change of vocabulary; since Khatami's election, the word "government" has been used more narrowly, to refer specifically to the executive branch. To refer more broadly to the clerical establishment -- including the leadership headed by Ayatollah Khamenei, the judiciary and parliament, all seen as rivals to Khatami -- Iranians now use the words "system" or "regime." But if the killings continue, Khatami's supporters fear, the distinction could be eroded -- not only in the minds of ordinary Iranians but in the eyes of foreign governments, whose good will Iran needs to overcome its financial troubles. On Saturday, the National Security Council, over which Khatami presides, held an emergency meeting to discuss the killings. And in a statement published in Iranian newspapers Sunday, the Ministry of Culture and Islamic Guidance denounced the killings as "inhuman acts, whatever the intentions or aims of the perpetrators may have been." The ministry said of those responsible, "Their only objective was to disappoint the people, undermine the system and strike a blow at the fresh and positive atmosphere that has until recently prevailed in the Islamic Republic of Iran." * Iran News
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