August 18
SOUTH AFRICA:
Extention on sentence conversion granted
The Constitutional Court has granted an extension to the government to
allow it time to convert the sentences of death row prisoners. The
government was ordered in May to take all the steps that were necessary to
replace the sentences of people still on death row and to report back to
the Constitutional Court on August 15.
The government has said the reason for asking the extension is that some
files for the death row prisoners are missing and that some officials are
not willing to co-operate. The Constitutional Court has extended the
deadline until September 15 to commute the sentences of death row
prisoners to appropriate prison terms.
In March, 4 prisoners on death row appealed to the court that they and
other prisoners sentenced to death should be given a fresh trial and
sentence. The death penalty was declared unconstitutional, cruel and
inhuman in June 1995 and since then the fate of sentenced prisoners fell
under a cloud of confusion.
(source: SABC News)
IRAN:
2 More Executions Planned in Iran----2 gay men in Arak charged in rape of
22-year-man reported to be a bisexual
The latest dismal news about the Islamic Republic of Irans campaign of
repression against same-sex conduct comes from the city of Arak, where 2
homosexual men are scheduled to be executed at the end of the month,
probably on August 27, although some sources claim the executions are set
for the following day.
Arak is a city under the strictest possible conservative religious,
political, and military rule because it is the site of Irans heavy water
plant - heavy water is used in the production of fissionable nuclear
material and is crucial to Irans attempts to develop a deliverable nuclear
weapon.
The 2 condemned men, both 27 - whose names may be transliterated as Farad
Mostar and Ahmed Choka - were sentenced by an Arak court for sexual
assault with homosexual acts, or, in other words, rape. Mostar and Choka,
who are said to be intimate friends and business partners in a music
store, were accused of having sequestered and sexually violated a
22-year-old man.
This information came from the editors of an underground publication for
Iranian gays who, out of fear, asked that their names and that of their
publication not be used - as did all sources within Iran. They referred to
the 2 men as "gays," and added that that most of their information comes
from a gay man within Arak. This source said that the man Mostar and Choka
were accused of assaulting - known as Ali, an attractive student at Arak
University - was known to be bisexual, and had been having difficulties
with his family over his manner of dressing and his hairstyle, which did
not conform to conservative religious standards.
Ali's father is said to be a high-ranking army officer with the title of
sarhang, or colonel. According to the same source, Ali told his father of
the assault - and the father then took him to a physician to be examined
for evidence of the rape and, subsequently, lodged a complaint against
Mostar and Choka with the police.
The 2 men were unable to pay the lawyer they had hired, and this same
source asserted their legal defense suffered greatly as a result. Farshad
Hoseini of the Netherlands secretariat of the International Federation of
Iranian Refugees (IFIR) told this reporter by telephone that his group
this week hired a prominent Tehran attorney, Khoram Shati, to represent
the 2 condemned men and file an appeal of their death sentence to the
Iranian Supreme Court.
At press time, Shati was said to be traveling to Arak to ascertain what
grounds there are for appeal.
It is not known with certainty at this time whether the two men are guilty
of the crime with which they were charged, as the families of the two men
have refused to speak with anyone outside the country. While the gay
source in Arak cited above claimed the charge "seems to be true," the
Iranian gay publications editors who cited this source also warned that
"the courts [in the Islamic Republic] always add to gays' so-called
crimes."
An Iranian scholar who has spent considerable time studying sexuality in
Iran told this reporter, "In Iranian society, where even dating between
men and women is not allowed under the Islamic Republic, rape is a daily
occurrence, so great is the level of male sexual frustration. It is quite
likely that the two men from Arak under death sentence did not even
consider whatever they did to the 3rd man 'rape.'"
Multiple sources, including this scholar and other Iranians, both in exile
and in Iran, said that prosecution of men for raping women is relatively
rare compared to the number of actual rapes of women which take place.
Moreover, rape is quite frequently used as a form of punishment and
humiliation against males in prison by prison authorities, guards, and
even clerics, particularly when the prisoners have been charged with or
convicted of sexual crimes. According to multiple Iranian gay sources -
both exiles in France, Sweden, and the Netherlands who have been in touch
with their friends in Iran, and some in Iran who have communicated with
this reporter directly by e-mail - there is an enormously heightened
climate of repression and surveillance of homosexual activity in the wake
of the hangings of 2 gay Iranian teens in the city of Mashad on July 19,
previously reported in Gay City News. Even gay Iranians outside Iran are
afraid of having their names used for fear of reprisals against their
families and friends.
As someone who made frequent reporting trips to Eastern Europe before the
fall of Communism, this reporter can attest that the fear encountered
reporting the Iran story these last several weeks surpasses by far
anything encountered covering dissident movements behind the Iron Curtain.
As worldwide protests against the hangings of the two Mashad youths grew
in both intensity and number, these Iranian sources suggested, the Islamic
Republic - under its new, recently-elected, ultra-nationalist president,
Mahmoud Ahmadinejad - has decided to show that it will not bend or knuckle
under to foreign pressure on behalf of Iranian gays by stepping up its
legal actions, including more executions, against gay men. Iranian
scholars who followed the presidential campaign told this reporter that
the Western press failed to grasp the degree to which Ahmadinejad's
"morality" crusade - which included denunciations of imported Western
'decadences," like homosexuality - was just as crucial to his electoral
victory as his populist economic appeals.
In related developments, the Netherlands has now joined Sweden in freezing
all deportations of gay Iranians whove been refused asylum as a result of
the hangings of the Mashad youths. Canadas Minister of Foreign Affairs,
Pierre Pettigrew, has issued a statement condemning the "deterioration" of
the human rights situation in Iran, in which he specifically referred to
the hangings of the Mashad gay youths, saying, "We condemn the recent
hanging of two teenagers and encourage Iran to respect its obligations as
a signatory to the U.N. Convention on the Rights of the Child," and
criticized the "persecution of minorities in Iran."
On August 16, the San Francisco Board of Supervisors passed a resolution
entitled "Resolution urging the United States Department of State to
condemn the Islamic Republic of Iran's execution of 2 teenagers [Mahmoud
Asgari, Ayaz Marhoni], and the impending execution of 2 young men [Farid
Mostaar, Ahmad Chooka], for conducting homosexual acts allegedly charged
as 'rape.'" The resolution - spearheaded by openly gay Supervisor Bevan
Duffy, and one of whose prime movers, Supervisor Ross Mirkarimi, is of
Iranian descent - also "deplores the persecution and execution of all
Iranians who are denied the due process of the law and are, or are
perceived to be, of the LGBT community;" and "urges the U.S. State
Department and its European partners to issue a strong condemnation
against the Islamic Republic of Iran for their national practice of civil
rights abuses and executions of homosexuals, and demand the cessation of
further executions and denial of due process of law."
Scott Long, director of gay and lesbian affairs for Human Rights Watch,
told this reporter that his group has referred the case of the 2 men under
death sentence in Arak to the Special Rapporteur for Extra-Judicial
Executions of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, but
that HRW had also been encountering difficulties in obtaining information
from inside Iran, and does not feel it possesses sufficient hard
information to take stronger action. Long confirmed this reporters
impression that gay Iranians "are really scared" by the new
hardline-conservative Ahmadinejad government and what it may do.
"It's absolute fear, no question," Long added.
As this story unfolds, it is worth re-emphasizing that there is always a
problem of terminology when dealing with same-sex relations in Iran. As
the noted gay historian Jonathan Katz remarked in his 2003 book, "Love
Stories. Sex Between Men Before Homosexuality," referring "to early
19th-century men's acts or desires as gay or straight, homosexual,
heterosexual, or bisexual" places "their behaviors and lusts within our
sexual system, not theirs." That is precisely the case with Iran today,
where "gay identity" in the Western sense exists only among a tiny,
well-educated element largely located in Tehran and a few other urban
centers, despite a centuries-old literary and cultural tradition of
same-sex love that has been entirely erased from consciousness in modern
Iran.
The extensive crackdown on domestic gay websites and the blocking of
foreign ones by the Islamic Republic is designed to stop the spread of
this Western sense of gay identity.
(source: GayCityNews)
