Iranian regime rounds on clean-air activists
Revolutionary Guard’s disastrous programme of dam-building ends in protests and clampdowns
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DESPITE being a man of the outdoors, Kavous Seyed Emami’s last moments were spent in a tiny cell in Iran.
The 63-year-old environmental studies professor lived in the crowded metropolis of Tehran but spent weekends organising camping trips away from the city. His Persian Wildlife Heritage Centre was dedicated to protecting the 50 surviving Asiatic cheetahs.
But he died in Tehran’s Evin prison, with Iranian officials saying he hanged himself while being questioned for spying. He was one of at least eight Iranian environmentalists arrested in recent weeks amid growing public anger over the state of the environment and the damage being caused to the natural world caused by the Revolutionary Guard’s sprawling commercial empire.
As Iranian citizens wheeze in dangerously polluted air and farmers in arid areas struggle to water their crops, Iran’s government is under increasing pressure and is cracking down on critics of its environmental policy.
Protests that broke out in Iran late last year were concentrated in parts of the country where environmental issues are dire. Around 26,000 Iranians die each year from polluted air, says the World Health Organisation.
Dr Namdar Baghaei-Yazdi, an Iranian scientist at the University of Westminster, said: “The environment in Iran has now gone far beyond scientific or technical issues and turned into a political and even a security issue in recent years and is very sensitive in today’s Iran, which is why sometimes the outspoken environmentalists become the targets of the authorities and even risk their lives by raising these issues.”
The arrests began in January, with authorities accusing environmentalists of spying on behalf of the US and Israel, a common allegation levelled by the regime against political opponents.
Abbas Jafari Dolatabadi, Tehran’s prosecutor general, said a network of cameras Mr Emami’s NGO set up to track the endangered cheetahs was actually “for monitoring the country’s missile activities and were sending images and information to foreigners”.
One Iranian military adviser even claimed that Western spies had used lizards to “attract atomic waves” and spy on Iran’s nuclear program.
Mr Emami was arrested on Jan 24 and spent two weeks under interrogation by the Revolutionary Guard. According to authorities, he died on Feb 9 and the Guard showed his family CCTV footage which they said proved he killed himself. Lawyers for Mr Emami’s family said the footage showed the academic looking dishevelled and agitated but it did not show conclusively that he took his own life.
Ramin Seyed Emami, his son, said: “We have a right to know why my father was arrested and the circumstances that led to his passing.”
Hassan Rouhani, Iran’s president, has promised an investigation into the death of Mr Emami and others who died suspiciously in Iranian custody.
Detainees include Morad Tahbaz, an Iranian-American businessman who is also believed to hold a British passport, and Kaveh Madani, 36, an engineer who last year gave up his post at Imperial College London to become the deputy head in the country’s environment ministry.
The promising academic is one of many young Iranians who have returned home from the West after the Iran nuclear deal, hopeful their country was on the verge of reform. He was released from prison and appeared at a meeting with the German ambassador on Monday but it remains unclear if he is actually at liberty.
Iran’s landscape is littered with what locals say are examples of govern-
‘We have a right to know why my father was arrested and the circumstances that led to his passing’
ment incompetence. The Revolutionary Guard built vast dams in the 1990s which diverted water and in some cases left rivers dry.
“These have led to irreversible damage to the country’s water resources and caused acute water shortages,” said Dr Baghaei-Yazdi. Among the ruined rivers is the Zayanderud, which ran through Isfahan city but is now dry.
Just 10 per cent of Urumia saltwater lake remains because of environmental mismanagement and the damming of rivers that fed into it.
Holly Dagres, curator of the Iranist newsletter, said: “When you look at where many of the protests were concentrated it was in western provinces like Khuzistan that were known to have terrible pollution levels and where many people actually die from pollution,” she said.
Mr Rouhani finds himself caught between a frustrated public and a regime whose instinct is to crush dissent in any form. If he is serious about getting to the truth of Mr Emami’s death or about trying to reverse the damage to the environment, he is going to have to contend with the might of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard.