Regime Turns on Itself

Not content about suppressing the Iranian people, the regime continues to turn on itself as the conflict between the Ahmadineajd and Khamenei blocs continue. Ahmadinejad advisor Ali Akbar Javanfekr humiliated at his own press conference. Here is the full story:


Judicial authorities in Iran have attempted to arrest a close ally of the president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, in what is widely being viewed as the latest twist in the struggle for power at the top of the Iranian regime.

A group of officials raided the offices of the daily government newspaper Iran on Monday in order to arrest Ali Akbar Javanfekr, the president's media adviser. Javanfekr is also the head of the state news agency, Irna.

At the weekend, a court in Tehran had sentenced him to one year in jail and a three-year ban on working for the press after "publishing materials contrary to Islamic norms".

According to the semi-official Mehr news agency, Javanfekr was handcuffed but his arrest was "temporarily halted" after government officials intervened. Mehr did not specify who had stepped into the dispute, but some accounts attributed the intervention to Ahmadinejad.

Javanfekr was reportedly conducting a press conference when the judiciary officials tried to detain him. The conservative website Tabnak said the newspaper's staff gathered in his office and tried to prevent the president's top media aide being led away in handcuffs. The officials used teargas to disperse the staff and arrested about 30 of them.

"The judicial authorities threw teargas and tried to force their way into the [newspaper's] building," Javanfekr told Isna news agency following the incident. "They arrested some of our reporters and took them away and hit one of my colleagues with an electric baton.

"My colleagues were traumatised, some of them were hurt … I'm a representative of the government and the president's adviser … If they had summoned me, I would have gone to them. They did not need to do these kind of actions."

Ahmadinejad fell foul of conservatives with Iran after a series of public confrontations with the country's supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, who has the ultimate power in Iran.

Since then, the president has lost a degree of influence in Iranian politics, particularly in the parliament and the judiciary which are both under influence of Khamenei.

In the wake of the power struggle, many of Ahmadinejad's supporters have distanced themselves from him, but a handful, including Javanfekr, have stood firm.

Javanfekr was put on trial after the publication of a series of articles about the chador, a garment that Iranian women wear to cover them from head to toe.

In one article, Ahmadinejad's former media adviser, Mehdi Kalhor, criticised the black colour of Iranian chadors, saying they did not originate from the Persian culture but were rather imported from the west.

Javanfekr also gave an interview to an Iranian reformist newspaper, Etemaad, on Saturday which led to its temporary closure for two months.

In the interview, he criticised opponents of the president and supported Ahmadinejad's chief of staff, Esfandiar Rahim Mashaei, whom the conservatives have accused of revolutionary deviancy and corruption.

In response to one of Etemaad's questions about the recent power struggle, Javanfekr said the president has come "to serve the people" and "will stay till the end, till martyrdom".

He also criticised the judiciary for arresting Ahmadinejad's allies in recent months and shed light on some of the unseen dimensions of Iran's internal power struggle.

The parliamentary elections in March 2012 and presidential vote in 2013 have escalated the rift between Ahmadinejad and his supporters on one side and the conservatives close to Khamenei on the other side, fighting with each other for more influence over Iranian politics.