TWO NEW GAY EXECUTIONS
SCHEDULED IN IRAN, SAYS IRANIAN EXILE GROUP
by Doug Ireland
Doug Ireland
Visit Doug Ireland on the web at his site,
Direland
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 IFIR's Hoseini, who is part of
the IFIR secretariat in The Netherlands. He told me
that he and the IFIR 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 IFIR'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
IFIR 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
IFIR (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.
