TWO NEW GAY EXECUTIONS SCHEDULED IN IRAN, SAYS IRANIAN EXILE GROUP by Doug Ireland
Doug Ireland Doug Ireland, a longtime radical political journalist and media critic, is a former columnist for the Village Voice, the New York Observer, New York magazine, the Parisian daily Libération and other papers, and writes for a variety of publications on both sides of the Atlantic, as well as being a contributing editor of Poz magazine and In These Times. Among those he writes for regularly these days is the L.A. Weekly, where his articles on politics frequently appear. Doug has been proudly out of the closet as a gay man since 1973, and has written extensively about gay political issues. He lives and writes in New York City, but considers Paris his second home. In the last 24 hours I've been in torch with Farhad Hoseini of the International Federation of Iranian Refugees (IFIR), who reports that two gay men -- Farbod Mostaar and Ahmad Chooka -- have been tried and sentenced to be executed for homosexuality on August 28, in the Iranian city of Arak. As soon as i got the first e-mail alerting me to this new set of scheduled executions, I placed a call its sender, the IFTR's Hoseini, who is part of the IFTR secretariat in The Netherlands. He told me that he and the IFTR had received the information about these scheduled new gay executions from members of the families of the two men whose death at the hands of the Islamic Republic of Iran has been programmed. Hoseini asserted that the men were to be killed for consensual homosexual acts with each other -- such acts are punishable by death in the Islamic Republic. But he had very little other information -- he promised to get me more. As I noted in my latest article for New York City's Gay City News on the hangings of the two gay Iranian teens in the city of Mashad on July 19, the climate of repression and surveillance of gays in in Iran the wake of those hangings has increased tremendously since the news of these barbaric executions went global and elicited world- wide protests. Hoseini confirmed that the IFTR's contacts inside Iran also are reporting this crackdown -- and he said everyone is afraid to talk about State anti-gay repression, including the families of the two men now reportedly set to be executed at the end of this month in Arak, which is central Iran. The IFTR is a left-wing organization that has existed since 1990, and is opposed to both the Islamist regime and to the Pahlevi monarchy -- but Iranian scholarly sources I contacted told me that, whatever differences they may have had over strategy and tactics with the IFTR (which urged a boycott of the last presidential election), they would be reliable on this issue. As soon as I heard from Hoseini, I immediately informed Scott Long, head of the gay and lesbian department at Human Rights Watch -- which had not yet heard of these new scheduled executions -- of what I had learned. HRW has yet to react officially to this report. This story will be updated by PageOneQ as soon as more information becomes available. ------------------------ Yahoo! Groups Sponsor --------------------~--> <font face=arial size=-1><a href="http://us.ard.yahoo.com/SIG=12hikhd1o/M=362343.6886681.7839642.3022212/D=groups/S=1705064406:TM/Y=YAHOO/EXP=1124054341/A=2894350/R=0/SIG=10tj5mr8v/*http://www.globalgiving.com";>Make a difference. Find and fund world-changing projects at GlobalGiving</a>.</font> --------------------------------------------------------------------~-> Group Site: http://www.gaybombay.info ========================== This message was posted to the gay_bombay Yahoo! Group. Responses to messages (by clicking "Reply") will also be posted on the eGroup and sent to all members. If you'd like to respond privately to the author of any message then please compose and send a new email message to the author's email address. Post:- gay_bombay@yahoogroups.com Subscribe:- [EMAIL PROTECTED] Digest Mode:- [EMAIL PROTECTED] No Mail Mode:- [EMAIL PROTECTED] Individual Mail Mode:- [EMAIL PROTECTED] Contact Us:- [EMAIL PROTECTED] Archives are at http://www.mail-archive.com/gay_bombay%40yahoogroups.com/maillist.html Yahoo! Groups Links <*> To visit your group on the web, go to: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/gay_bombay/ <*> To unsubscribe from this group, send an email to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] <*> Your use of Yahoo! Groups is subject to: http://docs.yahoo.com/info/terms/
