Ramin Jahanbegloo, a dissident Iranian intellectual, is supposed to have confessed in front of a television camera to being a spy of the United States government. As in the time of Galileo Galilei, Jahanbegloo, a Harvard graduate with a doctorate from the Sorbonne, was arrested last May 3 for “relations with foreign countries designed to undermine the security of the state” and, like the great scientist on June 22, 1633, has been constrained to abjure his ideas.

 

Video Abjuration. In the video-message, according to the conservative review Resalat, close to the Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Jahanbegloo explains that he entered into contact in Canada with some people who convinced him to collaborate in a “velvet revolution” orchestrated by the USA, to ruin the regime of the mullahs. In the video, that for the time being will be shown only in some cultural circles, Jahanbegloo explains that he infiltrated, in the vicinity of the European embassies in Teheran, antirevolutionary elements in order to sustain the changing of the guard of power in Iran. His confession, which is not the only one of conspicuous dissident elements, faithfully reproduces the comment of Mohseni Ejhei, the minister of Iranian Security, who, the day after the arrest of Jahanbegloo, commented that the intellectual was collaborating with the United States that “is preparing a series of velvet revolutions in some inconvenient countries, among them Iran.” Last July 10, the president of the Council of the European Union, in a note, stigmatized the behavior of Iran in respect to the protection of human rights, citing precisely the shadows on the case of Jahanbegloo. The message, then, at least in respect to internal public opinion, arrived at the right moment.

 

The lawyer in jail. In a few days the video confession of Abdolfattah Soltani, one of the best known Iranian lawyers, will also appear. Soltani defended Akbar Ganji, the dissident journalist, for whose cause the world of Western media was mobilized, and he protected the family of Zahra Kazemi, the photoreporter of Iranian origin and Canadian passport who, arrested in 2003 in Teheran, died July 10, 2003 after falling into a coma because of a cerebral hemorrhage caused by blows to the head received during more than three days of interrogation. The only person accused at the trial, come to Iran to ascertain the process of the death of Kazemi, was absolved for lack of evidence. Soltani was not, then, the favorite lawyer of the government in Teheran and, a year ago, was arrested “for sedition and for having spread information reserved to the government.”

 

The accusation refers to the fact that Soltani, defending two technicians of the Iranian nuclear program accused of espionage, had gotten privileged information that he had then resold to Western powers. Last July 18 Soltani was condemned to five years in prison. The well known Iranian lawyer has always worked with Shirin Ebadi, Nobel prize for peace in 2003, inside the Center for the defense of Human Rights, but his job has not made him secure from the mesh of Iranian justice.