[BRIEF NOTE] Mehrnoushe Solouki

[rfmcdonald]

While listening to the CBC Radio program Q yesterday afternoon, I learned about the case of Mehrnoushe Solouki. Ms. Soulouki, as it turns out, is a permanent resident of Canada, a dual citizen of France and Iran, a filmmaker student at the Université de Québec, and a detainee in Tehran who is in pre-trial detention on charges of making anti-regime propaganda. The story that she told Q's host Jian Ghomeshi on yesterday's broadcast dovetails completely with Radio Free Europe's report.

It all began in December 2006. Solouki arrived in Iran to film a documentary about the burial traditions of Iran's religious minority communities, such as Armenian Christians, Jews, and Zoroastrians.

Solouki says the Iranian Ministry of Islamic Culture and Guidance granted her a research license. She says the authorities were told in advance of the locations where she wanted to film, and that they were aware that the subject dealt with the cemeteries of Iranian minorities.

The authorities therefore had prior knowledge of her planned activities -- they were not taken by surprise. "The bureau in charge of minorities affairs at the Culture Ministry coordinated all this," Solouki said. "[By that] I mean coordination between the ministry's press office and its minorities bureau."

But while filming, Solouki says she stumbled on an area at the Khavaran Cemetery on Tehran's outskirts that caught her attention. She described it as "totally different" from the other parts she had filmed. Asked whether she was referring to a mass grave of people summarily executed in 1988, she said, "Yes."

How many people were buried there has never been established. However, estimates by Iranians and outsiders generally point to more than 2,800 killed, with their bodies buried in different areas around the country, not just the Khavaran Cemetery. Most were opposition leftists and mujahedin members taken from jail and summarily executed. Solouki says the authorities may believe that she intended to make a film critical of the mass executions, which took place in the summer and fall of 1988.

On February 17, police stormed Solouki's residence in Tehran and arrested her, saying they had learned that she had filmed the mass graves. Solouki says her documentary at the time had yet to be filmed, and that none of the equipment seized from her gave any indication of the film's content. So she is accused, she says, of harboring "presumed intentions" to produce antiestablishment propaganda.

Her interview left me with the decided impression that she was quite brave in wanting to reveal this past atrocity of the Iranian regime. While I mostly agree with imomus's opinion in his 2005 essay "You will not invade Iran" that a foreign invasion of Iran would be both a crime and a mistake, wrecking a relatively functioning society and imposing a worse tyranny on Iranians than the one they currently suffer, the Islamic Republic is still a polity marked by oppressions petty and great. It should be made to fall, certainly peacefully and by Iranians themselves.

The interview also left me with the impression that she was quite terribly naïve, both about the willingness of the Iranian regime to have this past atrocity exposed and the ability of her French citizenship to protect her from reprisals. How could she imagine that the Iranian regime would let her film and ask questions about a mass grave containing the bodies of thousands of victims without doing something to her? Earlier in her ordeal Solouki did receive some good news, in that prison officials told her that they didn't want a repeat of the situation of Zahra Kazemi, a Canadian-Iranian who was tortured to death while in custody, but that has to be counterbalanced against the news, posted on the Free Solouki weblog, that she's currently suffering from infections secondary to wounds inflicted by a motorcyclist who ran her down.

The Islamic Republic needs living Iranians to challenge it. Iran doesn't need more martyrs. Here's to hoping that, despite her best efforts, Solouki won't become one of the latter.