UPDATE: Iran's Deadly
Anti-Gay Crackdown--With Two More Executions Scheduled,
The Pace Of Repression Steps Up
by Doug Ireland
The latest dismal news about the Islamic Republic
of Iran’s campaign of repression against homosexuality
comes from the city of Arak, where two 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 -- some 150 miles southwest of Tehran -- is a city under the strictest
possible conservative religious, political, and military rule because it is
the site of Iran’s heavy water plant -- heavy water is used in the Iran_nukes
production of fissionable nuclear material and is crucial to Iran’s attempts
to develop a deliverable nuclear weapon.
The
two 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.
All this is according to 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 refer to the two men as “gays,” and add that that most of their
information comes from a gay man within Arak. This source says 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 this same source,
Ali told his father of the assault -- and the father then took Ali to a physician
to be examined for evidence of the rape and, subsequently, lodged a complaint
against Mostar and Choka with the police. The two men were unable to pay the
lawyer they had hired, and this same source asserts their legal defense suffered
greatly from this fact.
Doug Ireland
Visit Doug Ireland on the web at his site, Direland
Doug
Ireland is PageOneQ's Senior Contributing Edtior.
He is a longtime radical political journalist and media critic and
a former columnist for the Village
Voice, the New
York Observer, New
York magazine, the Parisian daily Libération
and other papers, and writes for a variety of publications on both
sides of the Atlantic, as well as being a contributing editor of
Poz magazine
and In These Times.
Farshad Hoseini of the Netherlands secretariat of the International
Federation of Iranian Refugees (IFIR) told me by telephone that the IFIR this
week hired a prominent Tehran attorney, Khoram Shati, to represent the two 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 what the position
is of the two men regarding 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 publication’s 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 me,
“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 third man ‘rape.’”
Multiple sources, including this scholar and other Iranians, both in exile and
in Iran, say 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.
For more photographs and a longer version of this story, please visit Doug
Ireland's blog, DIRELAND.
|
Originally published on Wednesday August 17, 2005.
The
two 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.
