KAZEMI AFFAIR A PRIMA FACIE CASE OF YELLOW JOURNALISM
By Fred Moreau

United for Peace of Pierce County
April 3, 2005

Canadian government officials have reacted aggressively to an asylum-seeking Iranian doctor’s claims that he encountered in a Tehran hospital emergency room Zahra Kazemi, the Canadian-Iranian photojournalist. Kazemi’s death in Iran in July 2003 has become an international cause célèbre.

Canadian Foreign Affairs Minister Pierre Pettigrew endorsed the Iranian doctor’s account Thursday, saying it “only strengthens our positions and confirms our resolve on the case.” On Friday, Paul Martin, Canada’s prime minister, said, “I would certainly think the details of what happened to her now in the testimony that has been brought has got to make the world aware of just what Iran is all about and that they have got to be held to account.”[1]

Iranian officials have dismissed the new account, denying that the doctor had ever even worked in the hospital in question.[2]

Reuters summarized the history of the case: “Iran's judiciary initially announced Kazemi had died of a stroke. But a government inquiry revealed she received a heavy blow during questioning, which split her skull and caused a brain haemorrhage. Last year Iran's judiciary acquitted an intelligence agent charged with killing Kazemi and now says she died after fainting and striking her head on the floor. Ottawa says Iran's hardline courts covered up the real circumstances of Kazemi's death in order to protect senior judiciary officials implicated in her murder.”[3]

An article in Saturday’s Winnipeg Sun showed that Canadian officials were also under pressure from the opposition Tory Party, whose leader accused the Canadian government of being complicit in a whitewash of the case.[4]

Rupert Murdoch’s The Australian led its account of the story with this sentence: “A female photographer who died in Iranian custody after taking pictures of a demonstration outside Tehran's notorious Evin prison was beaten, tortured and raped, an Iranian doctor who fled to Canada has claimed.”[5]

And on Friday, the Toronto Star, which is owned by the Torstar Corporation, publisher of Harlequin romance novels, published a fiery editorial saying that “What Canadians want is action,” (emphasis in the original) and using the case as an opportunity to demonize the Iranian government: “Martin has already rightly labelled Iran an ‘emerging threat’ because of its attempts to develop technology that can be used to make nuclear weapons, and because of its support for terror. He should push other countries to adopt the same view. Finally, Canada must sponsor more embarrassing U.N. resolutions censuring Iran for rights abuses. Martin must be relentless in this. That's because until justice is delivered for Zahra Kazemi, the whole world must know that Iran is run by a brutal regime that lies and turns a blind eye to torture and murder.”[6]

What’s going on here?

Prima facie, this would appear to be an example of a phenomenon to which Richard Heinberg has called attention: the demonization of countries that try to keep their resources to themselves (Iran, Iraq, Libya, Venezuela) (The Party’s Over: Oil, War, and the Fate of Industrial Societies [New Society Publishers, 2003], p. 198).

As William Norman Grigg wrote recently: “There’s nothing new about a government demonizing a potential enemy in order to rally the public to a war. What is relatively new is the state’s ability to inundate the public in war propaganda. As historian Walter Karp pointed out in his 1979 study The Politics of War, that approach was pioneered during Washington’s campaign to wage war against Spain in the 1890s. Lurid accounts of Spanish atrocities in Cuba were retailed to the public by newspaper mogul William Randolph Hearst and kindred practitioners of ‘yellow journalism.’ But the wholesalers were a group of U.S.-supported Cuban rebels whose leaders had headquarters in New York City. The so-called ‘Army of Liberation of the Republic of Cuba’ worked in tandem with key figures in the press and Congress to barrage the public with a ceaseless stream of stories depicting the Spanish authorities in Cuba as incomprehensibly inhumane. ‘How long are we to listen to the cries of outraged humanity that every southern breeze wafts across the straits that separate Cuba from Florida?’ exclaimed Democrat Senator George Grey of Delaware in a typical pro-intervention speech. Republican Senator John Sherman of Ohio was in agreement: ‘The intervention of the United States must sooner or later be given to put an end to crimes that are almost beyond description.’ ‘I contemplate war at the end of any resolution that we pass,’ declared Senator John Morgan, an Alabama Democrat. He added the remarkable claim that ‘Spain has no legitimate right to hold the province of Cuba,’ but that the U.S. government had ‘a very peculiar relation . . . to the government and people of Cuba.’ That ‘peculiar relation’ was supposedly rooted in Washington’s humanitarian duty to end Spanish atrocities in Cuba. In fact, that relationship was actually manifest in the tidal wave of bogus atrocity stories flooding the American press. After being immersed in anti-Spanish propaganda, the public was eager for war after the U.S.S. Maine exploded in Havana harbor (an incident regarded as a terrorist attack at the time, but now known to be an accident).”

The irony of the Western demand for action is clear when one remembers, as everyone in Iran remembers, that state torture was endemic in Iran in the years that the U.S. was the dominant influence there. It is estimated that the notorious Third Division of SAVAK, the state security apparatus founded as part of the first American aid package to the shah’s regime, tortured between 10,000 and 100,000 Iranians in the 25 years preceding the 1979 revolution.

Among the methods used by SAVAK: “Pulling out suspects’ fingernails, dangling heavy weights from suspects’ testicles, dipping suspects in hot oil, attaching electrodes to suspects’ genitals and administering electric shock treatments, suspending suspects upside down, beating suspects on their soles until their feet were reduced to bloody stumps, raping wives in front of husbands, raping husbands in front of wives, penetrating suspects with bottles (both broken and unbroken), penetrating suspects with electric cattle prods, disfigurement of suspects, and forcing water down suspects’ throats” (David Harris, The Crisis: The President, the Prophet, and the Shah -- 1979 and the Coming of Militant Islam [Little, Brown, 2004], p. 28).

Western media complaints about “a brutal regime that lies and turns a blind eye to torture and murder” are likely to sound different to Iranian ears than to Western ones. It may be useful to keep this in mind when the stories about Zahra Kazemi begin to be published in the U.S. media.

1.

Canada

KAZEMI LAWYERS ‘OPTIMISTIC’ OF PM’S RESPONSE
By CTV.ca news staff

CTV.ca
April 3, 2005

http://www.ctv.ca/servlet/ArticleNews/story/CTVNews/1112454724747_22/?hub=Canada

A lawyer for the family of slain Canadian photojournalist Zahra Kazemi says they are "very optimistic" that Prime Minister Paul Martin is listening to demands for renewed action against Iran.

Marlys Edwardh told the Globe and Mail that they now believe the government is open to new measures, although diplomatic action may not be taken.

"We have a number of things we want to talk about, and they don't all relate to diplomatic initiatives from Foreign Affairs at all," she said.

This comes after testimony from a former Iranian army doctor which reinforces claims Kazemi was brutally beaten after taking photographs of a demonstration outside a prison in Tehran.

Responding to emergency-room doctor Sharam Azam's detailed account of his encounter with Kazemi in 2003, Foreign Affairs Minister Pierre Pettigrew said Thursday that it is now more clear than ever that her death was not an accident, as Iran claims.

Condemning what he suggested was a systemic failure in the Iranian justice system, Pettigrew said: "This new evidence only strengthens our positions and confirms our resolve on the case."

At the same time, he dismissed calls from NDP and Conservative critics to take tougher diplomatic measures such as recalling the ambassador in Iran or imposing economic sanctions.

But on Friday, Martin said the new testimony may cast a different light on the case and he suggested it may open the door to new legal battles.

"I think there's no doubt whether you are talking about international courts or whether you are talking about the U.N. Commission on Human Rights," he said.

"I would certainly think the details of what happened to her now in the testimony that has been brought has got to make the world aware of just what Iran is all about and that they have got to be held to account."

Edwardh said she and Hachemi are hopeful because the Prime Minister's Office has agreed to their request for a meeting with senior officials.

"We are very optimistic," she said.

"The government knows the kinds of issues we want to put on the table. And I think there is no stomach from Canadians to do nothing."

Hachemi wants the government to amend the State Immunity Act so that families of torture victims can take legal action against foreign countries in Canadian courts.

He is also calling for Canada to negotiate a financial settlement from Iran.

Jonathan Fried, Martin's foreign-policy advisor, will attend the meeting with Hachemi and his lawyers, a PMO spokesman told the newspaper. Other senior official may also attend.

Hachemi and his lawyers requested the meeting after a public news conference during which the doctor detailed his findings upon examining Kazemi a few days after her arrest.

"Being a doctor, I could see that this has been caused by torture," Azam said, recalling the physical trauma he observed in the 54-year-old Iranian-born dual citizen's body back in June 2003.

This testimony -- the first by a medical official -- contradicts what Iranian officials initially said were injuries incurred from fainting and hitting her head.

Since Kazemi's death, senior Iranian officials have at times acknowledged that she died in the hands of state security officers.

But the official position is that she fainted, weak from a hunger strike, and hit her head when she fell.

Despite continuing international and Canadian pressure, the case has not been re-opened.

The Canadian ambassador to Iran was withdrawn in July 2004 in protest of the regime's lack of action but a new envoy was named four months later.

--With files from The Canadian Press

2.

IRAN REJECTS ASYLUM SEEKERS CLAIM ON DEATH OF JOURNALIST

Xinhuanet
April 2, 2005

http://news.xinhuanet.com/english/2005-04/02/content_2778581.htm

TEHRAN -- Iran has rejected a recent claim made by an Iranian asylum seeker that the late Iranian-Canadian photographer Zahra Kazemi was tortured to death during her imprisonment, the official IRNA news agency reported on Saturday.

"Such unfounded claims are the product of adverse publicity by the Canadian press," Foreign Ministry spokesman Hamid-Reza Asefi was quoted as saying.

Zahra Kazemi used to work as a freelance photographer for a Canadian media. She was arrested in July 2003 on the accusation of illegally taking pictures at a prison in Tehran.

Kazemi died of brain hemorrhage several days later while under detention. But Kazemi's mother and some other people believed that she had been tortured to death and then took legal actions.

In July 2004, the defendant of Kazemi's case was acquitted due to insufficient proof after Tehran prohibited the Western diplomats and correspondents from entering the court, which was sharply criticized by the West.

Recently, an Iranian asylum seeker in Ottawa claimed that Kazemi was indeed tortured to death.

Asefi, dismissing the claim, stressed that officials of the hospital, where the man introduced himself a related physician, had denied he was on their medical team.

"The man's bogus claims were made for personal gain. There is a history of such people using the same tactic, but all their malicious intentions were soon brought to light," Asefi added.

3.

IRAN REJECTS FRESH TESTIMONY ABOUT DEAD REPORTER

Reuters
April 2, 2005

http://www.swissinfo.org/sen/swissinfo.html?siteSect=143&sid=5649525&cKey=1112437238000

TEHRAN -- Iranian officials have rejected the testimony of a defector who says Canadian photojournalist Zahra Kazemi was tortured and possibly raped before her death in Tehran in July 2003.

They said on Saturday they had no record of Shahram Azam working as doctor in the hospital where he said he saw evidence of flogging in addition to battered feet, extracted nails and a broken nose. A nurse saw possible evidence of rape, Azam said.

Azam's account of Kazemi's injuries, given in Ottawa on Thursday, differed sharply from that of the Iranian authorities who insist Kazemi fainted and struck her head.

"These allegations made by an Iranian refugee are baseless and false," Foreign Ministry spokesman Hamid Reza Asefi told the official IRNA news agency.

"Hospital officials have denied this person's name was on the medical staff team," he added.

IRNA also quoted Mostafa Naderi, head of the Baghiyatollah hospital where Azam says he examined 54-year-old Kazemi, saying Azam had never worked there.

Kazemi was arrested in June 2003 for taking photographs of Tehran's notorious Evin prison where dissidents are held.

Her death has soured diplomatic relations with Canada and drawn attention to the practices of Iran's shadowy security apparatus.

Iran's judiciary initially announced Kazemi had died of a stroke. But a government inquiry revealed she received a heavy blow during questioning, which split her skull and caused a brain haemorrhage.

Last year Iran's judiciary acquitted an intelligence agent charged with killing Kazemi and now says she died after fainting and striking her head on the floor.

Ottawa says Iran's hardline courts covered up the real circumstances of Kazemi's death in order to protect senior judiciary officials implicated in her murder.

Canadian Foreign Minister Pierre Pettigrew said Azam's testimony proved Ottawa's assertion that Kazemi was murdered and did not die in an accident.

4.

News

HARPER BLASTS FEDS OVER KAZEMI COVER-UP
By Kathleen Harris

Winnipeg Sun
April 2, 2005

The federal government was complicit in the systematic cover-up of the "barbaric" treatment of Zahra Kazemi, Tory Leader Stephen Harper suggested yesterday.

Blasting the "weak" Liberal reaction to gruesome details Canadian officials received months ago, Harper accused the government of being part of Iran's whitewashing of the case.

"Here's a Canadian citizen abused, tortured, killed by a foreign government, and our government just essentially goes along with it," he said in Surrey, B.C.

"I hope Canadians will make their voices heard and demand this government stand up and be held to account."

Kazemi, a 54-year-old Iranian-born dual citizen, was arrested after taking pictures outside a Tehran prison in June 2003. A treating physician met with Foreign Affairs officials in November to describe the extent of the brutal injuries that led to the photojournalist's death.

Dr. Shahram Azam made the medical details public this week.

Speaking at the end of a two-day trip to B.C., Prime Minister Paul Martin said he hoped the new information would have an impact on Canada's attempts to enlist international support in pressuring Iran to answer for Kazemi's death.

5.

CANADIAN ‘TORTURED AND RAPED’

Australian
April 2, 2005

http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/common/story_page/0,5744,12725142%255E2703,00.html

A female photographer who died in Iranian custody after taking pictures of a demonstration outside Tehran's notorious Evin prison was beaten, tortured and raped, an Iranian doctor who fled to Canada has claimed.

Zahra Kazemi, 54, a Canadian citizen born in Iran, was arrested by secret police in June 2003. Shahram Azam said he examined her at a hospital in the capital four days later. She was in a coma and died several days later without regaining consciousness.

Kazemi was the victim of "a very brutal rape", her skull was fractured and her nose broken and there were strange markings all over her body, Dr. Azam said. "The backs of both legs, where the skin had come off, indicated a flogging," he said.

The doctor's account is the first by a medical official from Iran. It contradicts Iranian officials who said Kazemi had fainted while in custody, hitting her head on the ground and failing to regain consciousness.

"Everything I saw indicated it was organised torture and not an injury that caused her death," Dr. Azam said. Deep scratches behind her neck "looked like the result of nails digging into the flesh".

Her right shoulder was bruised, she had two broken fingers, a broken nose, three missing fingernails, a skull fracture, crushed left toe and a burst ear membrane, the doctor said.

Because male doctors in Iran are not permitted to conduct vaginal examinations, he brought in a nurse who found severe abdominal and genital bruising and concluded that this was the result of a savage rape. Kazemi had bruises from her abdominal area down to her thighs.

Dr. Azam fled Iran last August after pretending to seek medical treatment in Finland. From there he went to Sweden, where he contacted Kazemi's son, Stephan Hachemi.

The doctor applied for political asylum in Canada, with the help of Canadian lawyers, and it was recently granted.

He landed in Canada this week, as a refugee sponsored by the Canadian Government, with his wife and 12-year-old daughter. He refused to say where the family would live in Canada. Dr. Azam said he wanted to refocus attention on Kazemi's death and on the Iranian regime. Senior Iranian officials have at times acknowledged that she died in the hands of state security officers.

Soon after her death, the Iranian judiciary said that she had died of a stroke but, after an inquiry, a fractured skull and brain haemorrhage were found to be the cause of death.

After sustained Canadian diplomatic pressure, Iranian officials changed their story that Kazemi had fainted and a prison official, Mohammed Reza Aghdam Ahmadi, was charged in Tehran last year with her "semi-premeditated murder."

He was tried and acquitted in a Tehran court last August. Canadian critics said the trial was a sham to cover up a murder.

Kazemi's son is adamant the case should be heard by the International Court of Justice in The Hague. He has expressed his frustration with the Canadian Government's progress in bringing his mother's killers to justice.

The Canadian ambassador to Iran was recalled in July last year in protest over the regime's lack of action. A new envoy was named four months later, after the trial in Tehran, and relations with Iran began to improve.

6.

Editorial

STEP UP PRESSURE ON IRAN TORTURERS

Toronto Star
April 1, 2005

http://www.thestar.com/NASApp/cs/ContentServer?pagename=thestar/Layout/Article_Type1&c=Article&cid=1112309411458&call_pageid=968256290204&col=968350116795

Zahra Kazemi did not die in "an accident" at Tehran's notorious Evin prison, whatever Iran's discredited courts may claim. She was savagely beaten, tortured and raped, according to a physician who treated her as she lay dying from a brain injury.

Kazemi, an Iranian-born Canadian photojournalist, was arrested June 23, 2003, outside Evin prison while taking pictures at a pro-democracy rally. Three days later she was carried unconscious on a stretcher into Baghiatollah military hospital, reports Maj. Shahram Azam, a physician in the Iranian security forces who treated her. She never recovered.

What Dr. Azam saw at the hospital that night shocked him and will outrage Canadians, including the 250,000 of Iranian origin in this country.

Kazemi's skull was badly bruised and her nose was crushed. Her eardrum was ruptured. Fingers were broken. Fingernails and toenails were ripped out. Her ribs were bruised, possibly broken. She had been flogged. A nurse reported Kazemi had been violently raped. "I could see this was torture," Azam said yesterday in Ottawa, after arriving this week with his family seeking asylum. And he said the torture went on for some time.

Azam's horrific account of Kazemi's last hours makes a mockery of the Iranian court's claim that her death resulted from "a drop in blood pressure resulting from a hunger strike" and a fall to the ground.

While Canadians have just learned of Azam's findings, Prime Minister Paul Martin's government has known for months. Why wasn't the information made public? And why did Foreign Affairs Minister Pierre Pettigrew suggest lamely yesterday that "Canadians want answers"?

What Canadians want is action.

That action should start today with Martin recalling our ambassador to Iran and demanding Tehran immediately reopen the probe into Kazemi's death, with full Canadian and international participation. He should push for a statement by the United Nations endorsing that approach.

Martin should also insist Iran surrender Kazemi's remains to her family for burial here. That would allow the family to seek an autopsy to verify Azam's account. If Tehran balks, Martin should expel Iran's ambassador, bar officials from visiting here, and downgrade ties with the regime.

He should then petition the International Criminal Court to hold Ayatollah Ali Khameini and Iran's rulers to account. Article 8 of the Rome Statute that created the court gives it jurisdiction over crimes "committed as part of a plan or policy" that violate the Geneva Conventions, including "wilful killing" and "torture or inhumane treatment." Kazemi was subjected to both under a policy to crush dissidence. We have a case.

Martin has already rightly labelled Iran an "emerging threat" because of its attempts to develop technology that can be used to make nuclear weapons, and because of its support for terror. He should push other countries to adopt the same view. Finally, Canada must sponsor more embarrassing U.N. resolutions censuring Iran for rights abuses.

Martin must be relentless in this. That's because until justice is delivered for Zahra Kazemi, the whole world must know that Iran is run by a brutal regime that lies and turns a blind eye to torture and murder.