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NICOSIA - The main armed Iranian opposition movement, the People's Mujahedeen, called for an international inquiry Tuesday into recent killings of dissidents in Iran and accused the government of trying to cover up its own involvement.
The group charged that Tehran had sent nine senior intelligence ministry officials out of the country to avoid their being arrested and making embarrassing revelations about the regime's involvement in the killings.
In letter to UN chief Kofi Annan, the group's leader Massoud Rajavi called for an international fact-finding mission to be sent to Iran. "Only after pressure from domestic and international public opinion did the intelligence ministry state a small part of the truth" about the killings, he said.
Rajavi charged that Khatami's handling of the affair showed the fallacy of regarding him as a moderate.
"As far as human rights abuses ... are concerned, there is no difference between Khatami and other factions of this anti-human regime," Rajavi said.
"Khatami's rhetoric about civil society'
and the rule of law' is only a deception," he said.
Nine Senior Intelligence Officials to Leave Iran, Iran Zamin News Agency, January 12
The clerical regime's internal crises have intensified despite efforts by Khamenei and Khatami to control the situation and prevent any damage to the Intelligence Ministry, reports from Tehran say.
Enjoying Khatami's blessing, the Intelligence Ministry has decided to send abroad at least nine of its senior officials involved in the recent spate of killings as dissidents and political asylum seekers so that the Ministry would not be forced to arrest them.
Since the Ministry was eavesdropping on Darioush Forouhar's house, it has recorded the conversations between the murderers and Forouhar, reports from within the clerical regime say. The tape recordings were handed over to Khatami in the first days after Forouhar's murder. Khatami, however, has so far refrained from making these tapes public.
In another development last night,
mullah Ruhollah Hosseinian, the Director of the "Center of Documents of
the Islamic Revolution," and a member of the Judiciary, told the state-run
television that the murderers were among Khatami's supporters.
US Clears Iran in Drug Report, Angering Exile Groups, The Boston Globe, January 12
WASHINGTON - US officials who gathered last fall to review classified satellite photos of Iran's drug production found a surprise: nothing.
No poppy plants. No laboratories. No stashes of chemicals for converting the plants into heroin.
After discussions that they described as ''agonizing,'' the officials decided to take Iran off a list of major drug trafficking countries. Next month, when President Clinton sends Congress recommendations about which countries to penalize, Iran will not be blacklisted for drug trafficking for the first time since the annual reviews began in 1987.
The decision has infuriated Iranian exiles, who say the administration is subverting drug policy in a desperate attempt to give credibility to a new regime in Tehran.
''This is another step that the United States is taking to give some kind of green light to the so-called moderates in Iran,'' said Hedayat Mostowfi, a member of the foreign policy team of the National Council of Resistance of Iran, a leading exile group based in Paris. ''This is appeasement. ... What has the Iranian regime done in the last year? Absolutely nothing.'' …
In his report to Congress last year, as he had for several years, Clinton relied on intelligence that found Iran had cultivated about 8,750 acres of poppies, producing up to 70 tons of heroin each year.…
Administration officials who follow the region are bracing for angry reactions from Congress, where conservatives are suspicious of any change that seems to be soft on Iran. Already, Representative Jim Saxton, a New Jersey Republican, has said he has doubts about Iran's anti-drug programs…
Iran's government admits that there
are 1 million drug users within its borders. At the National Council of
Resistance, Mostowfi said the government consistently plays down the country's
drug problem. He said there are 4 million addicts in a country of 60 million
people…
Draft Budget Based on $10 Per Barrel Oil, Reuters, January 12
TEHRAN - Iran's 1999/2000 draft budget bill is based on an "optimistic" crude oil price forecast of $10 per barrel, the head of a parliament commission was on Tuesday quoted as saying.
The commission's forecast oil price figure was down from the $11.8 per barrel in the budget draft proposed to parliament by Khatami in November.