Back to Brief on Iran
One day in late September, Iranian security officials fanned out across their country and raided some 500 homes and several office buildings owned or rented by members of the Bahai faith, confiscating material and arresting dozens of people.
This was hardly the first time that Bahais, Iran's largest religious minority, felt the sting of attention from the Shiite Muslim government. As in the past, the United States condemned the action.
But what happened Sept. 29 was remarkable because it brought to an abrupt end an elaborate act of communal self-preservation. The materials confiscated were neither political nor religious, and the people arrested were not fighters or organizers. They were lecturers in subjects like accounting and dentistry; the materials seized were textbooks and laboratory equipment…
Started in 1987 in reaction to the virtual banning of Bahais from Iranian universities after the Islamic revolution of 1979, the Bahai Institute of Higher Education operated so quietly over the years that many Bahai officials abroad and many Iranian intellectuals within were unaware of it…
One possible explanation for the university's closing is that Khamenei and his followers want to discredit or defy Khatami.
A second theory is that Khatami is permitting the crackdown as a gesture to the traditionalists as he tries to improve relations with the West. A third possibility is that Khatami, who comes from a clerical background, has no disagreement with tightening up on the Bahais.…
In 1993 the Bahais revealed a 1991 Iranian government document signed by Ayatollah Khamenei on containing the community by barring adherents from universities and treating them so "that their progress and development shall be blocked."
Paraguay Arrests Suspected Link with Mullahs' Regime, Reuters, October 28
ASUNCION, Paraguay - Paraguayan police said on Wednesday they had arrested a Lebanese man they suspected was a member of the pro-Iranian guerrilla group Hizbollah.
Sobhi Mahmoud Fayad, 33, a naturalized Paraguayan citizen, was arrested in Asuncion but was living in Brazil just over the border from the Paraguayan city of Ciudad del Este, police spokesman Pablo Marin told Reuters.
"We think he was the main link between the Iranian Embassy in Brasilia and the Hizbollah structure in Ciudad del Este," he said.
Argentine investigators and the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation say Iranian-backed extremists were behind the bombing of a Jewish centre in Buenos Aires in 1994 and the Israeli Embassy in 1992, which together killed 115 people.
Rial at Near-Historic Low on Inflation Fears, Reuters, October 28
TEHRAN - The Iranian rial fell to near-historic lows on Wednesday, losing 5.5 percent against the dollar since Monday on inflation fears and talk that the currency might be floated.
Street dealers charged as much as 6,850 rials for each dollar in frenzied trade on Tehran's illegal but active black market, compared to 6,470 rials on Monday.
Wednesday's exchange rate is near the historic low of 7,000 rials to the dollar, to which the currency plunged in 1995 after the U.S. announced sanctions against Iran.
The surge of dollar buying came after newspapers criticized as inflationary a rescue package passed by parliament to deal with an 18 trillion rial budget deficit due to a slump in oil prices.
A Deal In Making? Agence France Presse, October 29
TEHRAN - Tehran and Bonn are in contact over the fates of a German condemned to death here and an Iranian jailed in Germany, an Iranian MP said Thursday.
"The two countries are having contacts over the these issues. It is natural for each country to be interested in the problems of its citizens, although we must not forget that Hofer's case is not political," said Mohammad Alavi, a member of the parliament's foreign policy commission.
German businessman Helmut Hofer was sentenced to death for having an affair with a Moslem woman and is awaiting a final verdict on his appeal from Iran's supreme cour.
The death sentence, which once again tainted relations between Tehran and Bonn, came just as the two governments were recovering from the German verdict in the case of Iranian Kazem Darabi.
Darabi was sentenced to life in prison by a Berlin court in April 1997 for the 1992 murder of four Kurd dissidents. During the trial the Iranian regime was implicated in the assassinations.
Alavi is the first Iranian official to link the fates of Darabi and Hofer, although some newspapers have done so.