Shirin Ebadi: Don't Attack Iran

By Robert Dreyfuss The Nation

At least 400 dissidents, activists and intellectuals--a number far larger than previously reported--were murdered in Iran during a wave of officially sanctioned, government death-squad activity that ended in 1999, according to Shirin Ebadi, Nobel Prize-winning human rights lawyer who is currently on a speaking tour in the United States. But Ebadi insists that US threats against Iran and rhetoric about regime change could make things worse, giving Iran's leaders an excuse to intensify repression.

In an interview with The Nation, Ebadi said that she has documentation for one-third of those killings, and that information about the rest comes from the personal testimony of a man who admitted his role in the November 1998 murders of Darioush and Parvaneh Forouhar, who were hacked to pieces in their Tehran home. The Forouhars, critics of the Iranian regime, were part of the coalition that supported Prime Minister Mohammad Mossadegh, the nationalist leader who was toppled by a CIA-backed coup d'état in 1953.

Ebadi, a Tehran-based attorney and former judge who has battled the government over human-rights abuses for years, says that what she calls the pattern of "chain murders" has halted since then. But she warns that the human-rights situation in Iran remains grave. On April 2, Ebadi herself received an anonymous threat in a letter delivered to her office that read: "Your death is near."

Continued . . .