The following article appeared in The Washington Post under the headline below in last Saturday's edition, 28 August 2010. Some 20,000 Australian Baha'is were pleased to see this report in this prestigious international paper.-Ron Price, Tasmania
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In Iran: Shackling The Bahai Torchbearers by Roxana Saberi
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For several weeks last year, I shared a cell in Tehran's notorious Evin prison with Mahvash Sabet and Fariba Kamalabadi, two leaders of Iran's minority Bahai faith. I came to see them as my sisters, women whose only crimes were to peacefully practice their religion and resist pressure from their captors to compromise their principles. For this, apparently, they and five male colleagues were sentenced this month to 20 years in prison.

I had heard about Mahvash and Fariba before I met them. Other prisoners spoke of the two middle-aged mothers whose high spirits lifted the morale of fellow inmates. The Bahai faith, thought to be the largest non-Muslim minority religion in Iran, originated in 19th-century Persia. It is based on the belief that the world will one day attain peace and unity. Iranian authorities consider it a heretical offshoot of Islam.

After I was transferred to their cell, I learned that Mahvash had been incarcerated for one year and Fariba for eight months. Each had spent half her detention in solitary confinement, during which time they were allowed almost no contact with their families and only the Koran to read. Recently the two had been permitted to have a pen. Oh, how they cherished it! But they were allowed to use it only to do Sudoku and crossword puzzles in the conservative newspapers the prison guards occasionally gave them.

Mahvash, Fariba and their five colleagues faced accusations that included spying for Israel, insulting religious sanctities and, later, "spreading corruption on earth." All three could have resulted in the death penalty. The Bahais denied these charges. Far from posing a threat to the Islamic regime, Mahvash and Fariba told me, Iran's estimated 300,000 Bahais are non-violent and politically impartial.

Despite the gravity of the accusations against them, Mahvash and Fariba had not once been allowed to see attorneys. Yet my cellmates' spirits would not be broken, and they boosted mine. They taught me to, as they put it, turn challenges into opportunities -- to make the most of difficult situations and to grow from adversity. We kept a daily routine, reading the books we were eventually allowed and discussing them; exercising in our small cell; and praying -- they in their way, I in mine. They asked me to teach them English and were eager to learn vocabulary for shopping, cooking and travelling. They would use the new words one day, they told me, when they journeyed abroad. But the two women also said they never wanted to live overseas. They felt it their duty to serve not only Bahais but all Iranians.

Later, when I went on a hunger strike, Mahvash and Fariba washed my clothes by hand after I lost my energy and told me stories to keep my mind off my stomach. Their kindness and love gave me sustenance. It pained me to leave them behind when I was freed in May 2009. I later heard that Mahvash, Fariba and their colleagues refused to make false confessions, as many political prisoners in Iran are pressured to do.

It was January when the Bahais' trial began. This month, the same Iranian judge who had sentenced me to eight years in prison on a false charge of spying for the United States sentenced the Bahais to 20 years. The charges they were convicted of have not yet been reported.
-------------for more information go to: bahai.org....the official international Baha'i site............

Human rights advocates have said the trial was riddled with irregularities. The defendants were eventually allowed to see attorneys but only briefly. The lawyers were given only a few hours to examine the thousands of pages in the prosecution's files. Early in the trial, state-run TV crews were present at what were supposed to be closed hearings. After the Bahais' attorneys objected, family members were allowed to attend the hearings, but foreign diplomats were barred, and the only journalists permitted were with state-run media. It appears that no evidence was presented against the defendants.

As their lawyers appeal, Mahvash and Fariba sit in Rajai Shahr prison outside Tehran. Even Evin prison, cellmates told me last year, is preferable to Rajai Shahr. The facility is known for torture, unsanitary conditions and inadequate medical care for inmates, who include murderers, drug addicts and thieves.

While Iranian authorities deny that the regime discriminates against citizens for religious beliefs, the Bahai faith is not recognized under the Iranian constitution. The known persecution of many Bahais includes being fired from jobs and denied access to higher education, as well as cemetery desecration. The Bahais created their own unofficial university, which Mahvash used to direct; Fariba earned a degree in psychology there. In addition to the seven leaders, 44 other Bahais are in prisons in Iran, the Baha'i International Community reports.

Thanks, abu_rashid. Yes, how right you are!  Our world is possessed of so many problems and tragedies that the average person is swamped by the deluge of difficulties besetting humankind--and hardly knows where to begin to attempt to find solutions.-Ron Price, Australia

Yes, chicken_lipsforme. I'll add a few more comments on the topic of Iran before returning to spring here in Tasmania.-Ron
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Taking advantage of the chaos that followed in the wake of the first world war, an ambitious army officer was able to seize power and establish a personal dictatorship. To him--as to his son after him-- deliverance from Persia's ills was assumed to lie in a systematic programme of "Westernization". Schools, public works, a trained bureaucracy and a well-equipped military served the needs of the new national government. Foreign investment was encouraged as a means of developing the country's impressive national resources. Women were freed from the worst of the restrictions that had prevented their development and were given opportunities for education and useful careers. Although the Majlis remained little more than a facade, hope rose that, in time, it might emerge as a genuine institution of democratic government.

What emerged, instead, through the single-minded exploitation of Iran's petroleum resources, was wealth on an almost unimaginable scale. In the absence of anything resembling a system of social justice, the chief effect was to vastly enrich a privileged and self-serving minority, while leaving the mass of the population little better off than they had been before. Treasured cultural symbols and the heroic episodes of a glorious past were resurrected merely to decorate the monumental vulgarity of a society whose moral foundations were built on the shifting sands of ambition and appetite. Protest, even the mildest and most reasonable, was smothered by a secret police unconstrained by any constitutional oversight.

In 1979 the Iranian people threw off this despotism and swept its counterfeit claims to modernity into history's dustbin. Their revolution was the achievement of the combined forces of many groups, but its driving force was the ideals of Islam. In place of wanton self-indulgence, people were promised lives of dignity and decency. Gross inequities of class and wealth would be overcome by the spirit of brotherhood enjoined by God. The natural resources with which providence has endowed so fortunate a land were declared to be the patrimony of the entire Iranian people, to be used to provide universal employment and education. A new "Islamic Constitution" ostensibly enshrined solemn guarantees of equality before the law for all citizens of the republic. Government would endeavour conscientiously to combine spiritual values with the principles of democratic choice.

How do such promises relate to the experience being described 30 years later by the great majority of Iran's population? From all sides today one hears cries of protest against endemic corruption, political manipulation, the mistreatment of women, a shameless violation of human rights and the suppression of thought. What is the effect on public consciousness, one must further ask, of appeals to the authority of the Holy Qur'an to justify policies that lead to such conditions?

I leave these rhetorical questions here to add to this thread on the topic of Iran and the Baha'is.-Ron Price, Tasmania