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Empathy is the bridge that opens up to the other side
PETROFILM.COM EUROPE
Information and Interpretation
from a European Perspective
Información e Interpretación
desde una perspectiva Europea
EUROPE-USA
A TRANS-ATLANTIC PARTNERSHIP
UNA COLABORACIÓN TRANSATLÁNTICA
EMPATHY RESPECT DIGNITY
EMPATÍA RESPETO DIGNIDAD
Harald Dahle-Sladek
Founder and Editor-in-chief
Fundador y editor en jefe
To contact the Editor-in-chief with questions, comments and inquiries about lectures or consultations, please e-mail us at haroldsworld@petrofilm.com
Oslo, Norway
歐洲分析與解釋
אמפתיה כבוד כבוד
ניתוח, מידע עם פרספקטיבה אירופית
تجزیه و تحلیل ، اطلاعات از یک چشم انداز اروپایی
АНАЛИЗ ИНФОРМАЦИИ С ПЕРСПЕКТИВЫ
ИЗ ЕВРОПЫ
דיאלוג עכשיו ДИАЛОГСЕЙЧАС
DIALOGUENOW
Institute for Empathetic Dialogue formation
and Conflict Resolution, Oslo Norway.
Instituto para la formación del Diálogo Empático y Resolución de Conflictos, Oslo Noruega
عزت احترام به همدلی یکپارچه سازی
The Foreign Ministry Tehran
Creating dialogue and common ground
with the Islamic republic of Iran 1998-2022.
ایجاد گفت و گو و زمینه مشترک با ایران 1998-2022
Updates from
Washington, D.C.
Denmark
Danske Bank Pleads Guilty to Fraud on U.S. Banks in a Multi-Billion Dollar Scheme to Access the U.S. Financial System.
Largest Bank in Denmark Agrees to Forfeit $2 Billion.
Danske Bank A/S (Danske Bank), a global financial institution headquartered in Denmark, pleaded guilty today and agreed to forfeit $2 billion to resolve the United States’ investigation into Danske Bank’s fraud on U.S. banks.
According to court documents, Danske Bank defrauded U.S. banks regarding Danske Bank Estonia’s customers and anti-money laundering controls to facilitate access to the U.S. financial system for Danske Bank Estonia’s high-risk customers, who resided outside of Estonia – including in Russia. The Justice Department will credit nearly $850 million in payments that Danske Bank makes to resolve related parallel investigations by other domestic and foreign authorities. Continues further down.
Switzerland
Glencore International AG
Entered Guilty Pleas to Foreign Bribery and Market Manipulation Schemes. Swiss-Based Firm Agrees to Pay Over $1.1 Billion
Glencore International A.G. (Glencore) and Glencore Ltd., both part of a multi-national commodity trading and mining firm headquartered in Switzerland, each pleaded guilty today and agreed to pay over $1.1 billion to resolve the government’s investigations into violations of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act (FCPA) and a commodity price manipulation scheme.
Luxembourg
haroldsw
CLICK PLAY VISION OF IRAN VIDEO
President Khatami
VICE PRESIDENT LEGAL AND PARLIAMENTARIAN AFFAIRS
Mohammad Ali Abtahi the relgious scolar
Vice President of Iran
for Legal and Parliamentary Affairs
In Office
2001-2004
President Mohammad Khatami
Proceeded by Abdolvahed Mousavi Lari
Succeeded by Majid Ansari
Chief of Staff of the President of Iran
In Office
1997-2001
President Mohammad Khatami
Succeeded by Ali Khatami
THE INSTITUTE FOR Interreligious Dialogue, Tehran
Harald Dahle-Sladek
Editor-in-Chief
Mohammad Ali Abtahi was interviewed in April 2002 in Tehran By the Editor-in-Chief
Dahle: -Your Excellency, you are now the leader for the Institute for Interreligious Dialogue. We have the main religions like Christianity and Muslims now working together in a new dialogue. How many Gods are there?
Abtahi: -My work is foremost in the cultural and religious fields. I believe that the Christian God and the Muslim God is one and the same!
Dahle: -How do you see, Mr. Abtahi, the relation between the Leader Khamenei and President Khatami?
Abtahi: -I believe there is a legal framework which designates these relations. And as you know, in the Islamic Republic Constitution, the power is divided, and the three powers are working separately from each other. However, it is natural that there exist some differences; and it seriously exist. But, the personal relation between His Excellency the Leader and the President is a good relation.
Dahle: -I am glad to hear this. I would like to ask you a second question. How do you see the possibility to ease up some laws to make investments in the Islamic republic more attractive?
Abtahi: -One of the main pillars to save the economic situation in the country is the foreign investment, but we have not had overall success in this field. One reason is the cultural aspect, another is the historical record of the country and legal problems. In the recent years, in the Sixth Parliament we have seen more reformists in the Parliament, and they work to remove these obstacles, and this is one of several programs that was promised by President Khatami himself. But, sadly, we have until now had little success, because of the obstacles which exists in legislation and lawmaking. However, we are hopeful that we can do our best to solve the problems and be successful in this field.
Dahle: -The Islamic Republic sits on enormous resources of oil and gas; do you have some thought how to develop these resources?
Abtahi: -The past five years have proved to be the biggest success we have had so far in this field. Now we have very serious investment to explore new oil and gas projects. It is natural that the management is Iranian. Many foreign companies are now involved in Iran in the energy field, and I am glad.
Dahle: -Technological companies, investment companies?
Abtahi: -Yes!
Abtahi, Dahle: Bowing ones head towards something of a higher nature
THE NEW YORKER
The Iran Show
By Laura Secor
August 24, 2009
Abtahi left, defending himself in court
Mohammad Ali Abtahi: illustration by Tom Bachtell
In the grotesque pageant of Iran’s show trials, former high officials—hollow-eyed, dressed in prison pajamas, and flanked by guards in uniform—sit in rows, listening to one another’s self-denunciations. Since the disputed Presidential elections of June 12th, about a hundred reformist politicians, journalists, student activists, and other dissidents have been accused of colluding with Western powers to overthrow the Islamic Republic.
Abtahi before and after arrest and possibly torture
This month, a number of the accused have made videotaped confessions. But the spectacle has found a subversive afterlife on the Internet. One image that has gone viral is a split frame showing two photographs of former Vice-President Mohammad Ali Abtahi. Before his arrest, on June 16th, he is a rotund, smiling cleric; in court on August 1st, he is drawn and sweat-soaked, his face a mask of apprehension. The juxtaposition belies the courtroom video, making the point that the only genuine thing about Abtahi’s confession is that it was coerced through torture.
Show trials have been staged before, most notably in Moscow in the nineteen-thirties. Typically, such rituals purge élites and scare the populace. They are the prelude to submission. Iran’s show trials, so far, have failed to accrue this fearsome power. In part, this is because the accused are connected to a mass movement: Iranians whose democratic aspirations have evolved organically within the culture of the Islamic Republic. It is one thing to persuade citizens that a narrow band of apparatchiks are enemies of the state. It is quite another to claim that a political agenda with broad support—for popular sovereignty, human rights, due process, freedom of speech—has been covertly planted by foreigners.
Abtahi's blog from the Evin prison, Tehran
The indictments prepared by the public prosecutor are almost surreally obtuse. Before the election, one indictment claims, Western governments, foundations, and individuals joined forces with corrupt Iranians in an attempt to overthrow the Islamic Republic and institute a regime compliant with American designs. The nefarious plotters engaged in “exposing cases of violations of human rights,” training reporters in “gathering information,” and “presenting full information on the 2009 electoral candidates.” Apparently, the Iranian citizen is meant to consider it self-evident that the country’s national interest depends on concealing human-rights abuses, censoring the news, and obfuscating the electoral process.
Forced confessions have been part of Iran’s penal system since the mid-nineteen-seventies. But it was the Islamic Republic that turned the auditorium of Evin Prison, in Tehran, into a macabre theatre. In 1982, after a fierce fight between the extremist theocrats in the government and the radical Muslim guerrillas outside it, the revolutionary regime began broadcasting confessions from Evin. The prisoners—mainly secular leftists and Muslim guerrillas—recanted their views and apologized for betraying Islam.
Ervand Abrahamian, the author of “Tortured Confessions: Prisons and Public Recantations in Modern Iran,” quotes a witness who said of the night a major leftist recanted, “Something snapped inside all of us. We never expected someone of his reputation to get down on his knees. Some commented it was as revolting as watching a human being cannibalize himself.”
Revulsion was, in many ways, the point. Those who confessed not only implicated themselves; they implicated others. They persuaded the public either of the existence of malevolent plots against the state or—more likely—of the state’s ruthlessness in crushing opponents. A few Iranians who confessed even became agents of the state, betraying former colleagues. These repenters became hated figures, and the word for them, tavab, a term of abuse. In an era of warring ideologies, the only meaningful contest was for domination, and the repenters were clearly the losers. In 1988, Iran’s inquisition came to a climax with the systematic execution of thousands of political prisoners.
For more than a decade afterward, forced confessions all but disappeared from the airwaves, not because the regime had softened but because it no longer needed them. When the hard-liners again felt threatened, earlier this decade, bogus confessions reappeared on state television. But by then the tactic was badly matched to the threat, which came from former members of the ruling clique who had mellowed as the revolution entered middle age. Such are today’s defendants. They are not ideological warriors but, rather, reformists who have called for incremental, democratic change.
President Khatami, Leader Kamenei
And so a spectacle that was meant to produce compliance and terror has instead stoked fury and derision. The regime has lost control of the political discussion within Iran, which is focussing on the abuse of prisoners rather than on the perfidy of foreigners or the futility of resistance. On July 31st, Mehdi Karroubi, a reformist cleric and former Presidential candidate, shattered a taboo by airing allegations of rape and sexual abuse inside Iran’s prisons. The authorities responded by shutting down a newspaper that Karroubi published. But the burden of shame had shifted squarely from the prisoners to their wardens. A senior ayatollah praised Karroubi, quoting Muhammad: “A realm will survive without believing in God, but will not survive with oppression.”
Meanwhile, Iranians are turning the show trials into a kind of black comedy, by mocking the predictability of their ugliness. Last month, Mohsen Armin, a prominent reformist, issued a preëmptive statement declaring that, no matter what he might say should he be taken to prison, he is not the agent of foreign powers. Perhaps no one has done more to undermine the effect of forced confessions than Ebrahim Nabavi, an exiled Iranian satirist who has released a parody confession video. Dressed in striped pajamas and wearing bandages, he confesses to meeting with a C.I.A. agent, importing green velvet, and having affairs with Carla Bruni and Angelina Jolie (“She had a very ugly and terrible husband”). He apologizes to the Supreme Leader and to the paramilitaries who “kindly” beat him.
In today’s Iran, the interrogator, not the repenter, has become the object of rage and ridicule. Recanting under pressure, Abrahamian told me, is now seen as a sign not of weakness or treachery but, rather, of “being human.” The display of systemic cruelty is not chilling but galvanizing.
Iran was a radical place in the eighties. Both the regime and much of its opposition were absolutist, utopian, messianic, apocalyptic. Forced confessions, so effective in that climate, convey little more than illegitimacy when they are used against an opposition that is asking for the counting of votes and the rule of law. Today’s show trials are a sign of how much Iran has changed in the past thirty years, and how poorly its regime has kept pace.
Wikipedia facts
Mohammad-Ali Abtahi (Persian: محمدعلی ابطحی; born January 27, 1958) is an Iranian theologian, scholar, pro-democracy activist and chairman of the Institute for Interreligious Dialogue. He is a former Vice President of Iran and a close associate of former President Mohammad Khatami. Abtahi is a member of the central council of Association of Combatant Clerics (Majma'e Rowhaniyoon-e Mobarez), the political grouping to which both Khatami and the 2009 presidential candidate Mehdi Karroubi (the previous Speaker of Majlis of Iran) belong.
Political career
Early careers
Abtahi served in various governmental posts, including the President of Iranian Radio, Vice Minister of International Affairs in the Ministry of Culture and Islamic Guidance, and IRIB's representative in Lebanon.
Khatami's Government
In 1997, President of Iran Mohammad Khatami chose Abtahi as his first chief of staff. Abtahi held the position from July 10, 1997 to September 1, 2001.
On September 2, 2001, Abtahi was elevated to the post of the Iranian Vice President for Legal and Parliamentary Affairs. He was the first cabinet member in Iran to write a weblog or have an Orkut account during his membership in the cabinet. He resigned from his post three times after the Iranian Majlis election of 2004, because of "differences in political viewpoints with the parliament's majority", and finally, on October 12, 2004, his resignation was accepted by President Khatami. He was followed by Majid Ansari, a previous representative of Tehran to the Parliament and a fellow member of the Combatant Clerics Society party
The Daily Show appearance
Seyyed Abtahi appeared on The Daily Show with John Stewart in 2009, interviewed by Jason Jones. Abtahi is often called the "blogging mullah" along with Mehdi Karroubi who is referred to as the iron "shaykh of reforms" Seyyed Abtahi is active in the blogosphere and is the first member of an Iranian cabinet to keep a personal blog.
Arrests and confession
Abtahi's father, Ayatollah Hassan Abtahi is the author of several controversial books about Imam Mahdi. Seyyed Hassan's ultra-conservative religious and political views are very different from Mohammad Ali's, who is a liberal cleric. Seyyed Hassan was arrested recently for "suspicious organised activities". Mohammad Ali discussed this in a post to his blog titled Why don't I write about my father and brother's arrest?.
Mohammad Ali Abtahi was arrested on June 16, 2009 during the aftermath of the 2009 presidential elections and subsequent protests. He reportedly made a videotaped confession following his arrest, in which he stated that the opposition's claims of a stolen election were false, and that opposition leaders had conspired in advance to misrepresent the vote. According to the statement, former presidents, Mohammad Khatami and Rafsanjani had taken an oath not to abandon each other in their support for former prime minister Mir-Hossein Mousavi as they prepared to stage a Velvet Revolution in order to avenge their defeat in 2005 Iranian presidential election. According to human rights groups, similar confessions by Iranian political prisoners are almost always obtained under duress.
In response members of his and other arrested reformists gathered at his home issued a statement denouncing his confession, saying “not only do we not accept the confession, we also know that Abtahi said these things due to a long period of imprisonment for the purpose of obtaining a confession.” In a court hearing, his wife Fahimeh Mousavinejad, dismissed her husband’s confession as false and "not at all in Mr. Abtahi’s style. ... As his family, we know the way he expresses himself. Many people have read his blog. The sentences he was using were not his own”.
Abtahi's photos from the trial show signs of probable use of torture during his imprisonment. Following Abtahi's record as the first Iranian cabinet member to blog while in office, on August 26, 2009, he also became the first known Iranian prisoner to blog while still at prison. A few days after that prison blog entry, however, his website was suddenly taken offline.
In November 2009, he was sentenced to six years in jail for the alleged intention to topple the government. He has since been freed.
Personal life
Mohammad Ali Abtahi was born in Mashhad. He is married to Fahimeh Mousavinezhad (daughter of one of his professors) and has three daughters, named Faezeh, Fatemeh, and Farideh. He is also the nephew of Abdolkarim Hasheminezhad.
Health issues
On 14 October 2013, Abtahi was hospitalized in Milad Hospital after he suffered a brain attack. Hours later, Abtahi's personal doctor confirmed that Abtahi's health was good.
Abtahi, Khatami: Amigos para siempre
Luxembourg
haroldsw