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Paris, 13 Sept. (IPS) In one of its latest and most dramatic act of pressure against Iranian independent media, the authorities in the Islamic Republic closed down the country’s most influential and popular newspaper “Sharq” (Orient) on Monday.
The order was issued by the Government-controlled Press Supervisory Board, charging the pro-reform, mass circulation daily with a string of accusations, including “publication of blasphematory articles not in line with Islam, propagation of articles harmful to the Islamic Republic, prostitution, printing of pictures and photographs against public order, creating division among population by debates about ethnic and racial issues etc..”.
However, most Iranian political analysts, including some of the journalists at the paper said the most important thing that the Government did not like was a cartoon printed last week showing a chess board where a horse and a donkey, with a halo of light around its head are debating the regime’s handling of nuclear issue with the West.
Though cartoonists say the halo is not a halo, but an effect to separate the animals heads, it seems that the censors at the Iranian judiciary have made a rapprochement between the donkey of the cartoon with President Mahmoud Ahmadi Nezhad’s talks last year to a senior cleric telling him when he was addressing the (last) United Nations General Assembly in New York and telling the audience about Mehdi, the Shi’ates hidden imam, suddenly a light descended on the vast room.
[The donkey, an animal that in Iranian culture symbolises ignorance, naivety, stubbornness and craziness, has its mouth open and light around him, while the horse shows no emotion].
“The closure of Sharq has no legal ground and on behalf of the Iranian Professional Journalists Association, we say that the Government of Mr. Ahmadi Nezhad has no regard for laws and acts on personal motivations in closing Sharq and (the monthly) Nameh (Letter)”, said Mr. Masha’allah Shamsolva’ezin, the Association’s spokesman and a veteran journalist.
http://www.iran-press-service.com/ips/articles-2006/september-2006/sharq-closed-13906.shtml
The order was issued by the Government-controlled Press Supervisory Board, charging the pro-reform, mass circulation daily with a string of accusations, including “publication of blasphematory articles not in line with Islam, propagation of articles harmful to the Islamic Republic, prostitution, printing of pictures and photographs against public order, creating division among population by debates about ethnic and racial issues etc..”.
However, most Iranian political analysts, including some of the journalists at the paper said the most important thing that the Government did not like was a cartoon printed last week showing a chess board where a horse and a donkey, with a halo of light around its head are debating the regime’s handling of nuclear issue with the West.
Though cartoonists say the halo is not a halo, but an effect to separate the animals heads, it seems that the censors at the Iranian judiciary have made a rapprochement between the donkey of the cartoon with President Mahmoud Ahmadi Nezhad’s talks last year to a senior cleric telling him when he was addressing the (last) United Nations General Assembly in New York and telling the audience about Mehdi, the Shi’ates hidden imam, suddenly a light descended on the vast room.
[The donkey, an animal that in Iranian culture symbolises ignorance, naivety, stubbornness and craziness, has its mouth open and light around him, while the horse shows no emotion].
“The closure of Sharq has no legal ground and on behalf of the Iranian Professional Journalists Association, we say that the Government of Mr. Ahmadi Nezhad has no regard for laws and acts on personal motivations in closing Sharq and (the monthly) Nameh (Letter)”, said Mr. Masha’allah Shamsolva’ezin, the Association’s spokesman and a veteran journalist.
http://www.iran-press-service.com/ips/articles-2006/september-2006/sharq-closed-13906.shtml