Saideh Fathi, a time-honored sport journalist, who was arrested in her own living place on Oct. 16, 2022, precisely one day after the tragic Evin Prison Arson [vastly believed to be orchestrated by the state itself] and its subsequent bloody crackdown of the prisoners and was temporarily released on bail on Dec. 9, 2022; in the new year of the Persian calendar [starting on Mar. 20, 2023], too, she was the subject of reports on Farsi mass-media based abroad since her critical journalistic piece, called “A Fragment of Sport Journalist Women’s Challenges in Iran; We Are Reporters, Not Criminals,” was removed from its originally publishing website, “Shahrara News;” a work placed among the best four final nominees in the area of sport journalism in AIPS, The International Sports Press Association, found no more now on its originally publishing website; a journalistic piece which also turned to be a subject in her interrogations before becoming a nominee there. On Mar. 14, 2023, too, another Farsi-speaking mass-media abroad, had reported that submitting this journalistic piece, which addresses the challenges of Iranian sport journalist women, had been among the reasons for her arrest. In the report mentioned above, it is mentioned that one of her charges had been this very act of submitting the piece in question to AIPS, hence her subsequent interrogations. Now, the same piece, is removed from Shahrara News Website, its first publisher, while the referees of AIPS festival were weighing in on nominating it into one of the final three pieces. Regarding the purpose behind this peculiar reaction of the security forces to this piece and their subsequent pressure to have it removed from the original website, one can throw a glance at the content of the piece and those certain sensitivities found among the security institutions of the Islamic Republic regime. A journalistic piece in which, this woman sport journalist, adopts a critical view to the persistently occurring challenges against women of such kind in Iran; challenges that in face of their frequency and normalizing endeavors, have been, and still are, nevertheless faced by the women journalists’ resistance and revealing struggle; yet the reaction mentioned earlier does not remain confined to a case singled out as such and offer other curious angels as well. First, the removal of the boundaries between suppression and censorship; a phenomenon deserving a higher place in today’s conversations. Suppression is more or less a visible reaction to muffle something already expressed and manifested, pronounced and revealed, enforcing and effective; yet, censorship is precisely a measure taken to prevent this very expression and manifestation, pronouncement and revelation, enforcement and effectiveness; suppression stands for, say, arresting and confronting an individual after having delivered a speech, deemed a sensitive topic in the eyes of the state and in political terms; and, on the other hand, censorship is dismantling any platform that enables the delivery of such speech; for instance, in Iran, such organizations as the Ministry of Islamic Guidance, is traditionally assigned to the task of official censorship and, in return, security organizations, would take up the task of suppression; even though, the ultimate goal of both these control methods was identical, that is, silencing citizens lest any voice contrary to the dominant logic be raised, yet in their mechanism and form and field of operation bear a fundamental difference, and the removal of boundaries forming this distinction, that is the spillover of either suppression or censorship into the other, imposes unprecedented dimensions of terror, absurdity, insecurity, and right-violation upon society’s corpus as a whole; and the security-minded and mandated removal of a journalistic piece right before getting globally acclaimed and recognized, is a perfect example of such fusion of the two territories in Iran’s political regime, which, day after day, adheres to a more suppressive procedure and along with more draconian measures taken, a development itself rooted in the ruling system becoming increasingly devoid of even some minimal political legitimacy in the eyes of a majority of its citizens, and which has shown an exponentially rising trend on a yearly basis, throughout these recent years, and especially since the bread riots in Nov. 2017 on, giving rise to more vehemently suppressive reactions and a wider scope of suppressiveness that is set to rule against society, and have thus ever more increasingly blurred the arbitrary line between these two types of quietening operations (in the content produced and in the streets both). This is why there are plenty of cases suggesting such a line having been blurred; another example would be Hossein Razzagh, a media activist who have been imprisoned and released at intervals; he was ones of the co-founders and moderators of a very popular sociopolitical Clubhouse room, called “Meydaneh Azadi,” and in the course of earlier interrogations by the security agents of the Ministry of Intelligence, he had been accused of theorizing and promoting street demonstrations through the discussions produced in this Clubhouse room. In addition, both Hussein Razzagh and, Vida Rabbani, another co-founder of the Clubhouse room in question were threatened to five years of imprisonment on condition of continuing the sessions held in this room and were ordered to remove the room from Clubhouse all together; the threat did not remain confined to those moderators of this room who reside in Iran, and Omid Memariyan, a journalist living abroad and co-moderating the same room, too, was threatened by the security agents that if the room did not stop its activities all together and continue holding sessions even under his moderation, Mr. Razzagh and Ms. Rabbani would be arrested in retribution anyway. Those absurd and terrorizing dimensions that the removal of the boundaries between suppression and censorship can create, in fact, results in such Kafkaesque ambiance, reminding us of a perfect miscarriage of justice in the sense that if someone somewhere else in the whole wide world operates a room on Clubhouse, here, in Iran, certain people are imprisoned, a hybrid of censorship and suppression with a confused division of labor; a procedure that fines another clear example to show up for itself in the forced confession that former detainees make against themselves on their own social media accounts. In this area, last Persian calendar year, the legal advising news agency on social media, Dadban, had noted the following: “in the course of the mass protests, the security organizations plotted a new type of forced confession with an all too familiar scenario, that is, confession on social networks, with the aim of causing fear, in other words, they dictate to political activists to repeat the same confession against themselves on their social media accounts, so that public opinion be convinced that people share the same views formerly expressed in their forced confessions, but this time without any pressure or torture looking about,” and it follows by adding that such new cases of enforced confessions have been recently taking a considerable rise in recent mass protests; one of the more recent examples of this security tactic has been what Naghmeh Moradabadi, tar-player, said in a video posted on her own social media account, in which she expresses solidarity with the collective dance performance of a group of young girls on 8th of Mar., the International Woman Day, which was recorded in Ekbatan [a pioneering neighborhood in the capital whenever it comes to civil protests] and quickly went viral; after posting that video, and at the apex voicing support for their performance, another video was posted by her in which she made a disclaimer by saying the previous video had not been out of solidarity with any act, and simply produced out of entertainment (the video in question is now removed); also, a similar kind of treatment of these performing girls themselves, forcing them all to reappear on a video, contrary to the previous one, in which they orchestrated a collective hip-hop dance, free of hijab, with perfectly covering hijab, with their heads bent down, and a self-accusing gaze shared, all lined up in the same arrangement of spots, expressing regret for their previous performance, a video posted on the same account, belonging to their dance trainer’s Instagram. Another curious example of it, in the previous Persian calendar year, and at the peak of the recent mass protests, was Dena Sheibani, a 33 year old graphic-designer, and high-ranking sport trainer, who was arrested by the security forces on Nov. 10, 2022, while residing on Qeshm Island, and then got transferred to the detention center of Shiraz intelligence office, called no. 100; she was arrested along with some other young sport elites of Shiraz, and pressure them to confess the made up charge of bomb planting and terrorist operation whose confessions are presented recorded on security-backed media such as Tasnim; in any case, on Dec. 21, 2022, inform about her temporary release on bail; yet, sometime after release, in a video in which she makes confessions against herself while taking a walk in the street and recording herself free of hijab, both by confessing to having been involved in planning this attack, and by denying having been under any sort of pressure while in detention, criticizing the media that released such reports and thus made her charges even heavier; words that any interrogator in this all too security-dependent regime could not wait to grasp out of a detainee, which yet this artist and sport elite was then expressing against herself, in “freedom,” and with such laxity. Yet, the removal of such boundaries between suppression and censorship do not remain confined to these cases and, especially, after mass protests of 2022-2023, has spread into the area of the direct intervention of the security and judicial forces in the content of individuals’ accounts on social networks, too, either in form of publishing mandated and threatening content on them, and, in fact, by turning these accounts own privately by individuals entrapped in a security cobweb into a platform for producing content against the account owner, or in form of obligatory blockage of the account, making inaccessible either part of content produced on them or deactivating the account all together. Just to have reviewed some cases, there was Sanam Kazerouni, a double-nationality holding author and environmentalist who was arrested in mid-Nov. 2022, in Isfahan along with a number of friends who are now all released except her whose detention conditions have still remained unknown; her social media accounts were reported to be immediately taken down upon her arrest; there is also Sarah Mottaghi, a 26 year old political science graduate, poet, and bookshop owner from Rasht, who was arrested for a while and frequently and simultaneously subpoenaed and persecuted by various judicial and security organizations over a content she had produced on her Instagram account in form of a story. However, through a content she posted on her temporary substitute Instagram account, she informed that since Jan. 14 to this date, my mobile phone has been under the confiscation of the Security Police. My Instagram page is taken out of my reach and even its backup email is changed until the time that mobile phone is returned to me by the order of the interrogator. All this said, there has been no sentence announced to me barring me from using Instagram. In addition, there is the case of Elaheh Mirmehdi, a tattoo-artist, painting instructor, and also an animal rights activist, who had been arrested and kept in detention for some time in the course of recent mass protests in Golpaygan; and it was reported at the time of her detention, her smart phone had been confiscated by the security forces in the intelligence division of IRGC in the same city with her Instagram account being used for fabricating a security case against her while directly threatening her followers via her own personal account; at the end of the previous Persian calendar year, too, and following the chain arrest of media activists and journalist reporting on the chain chemical attacks against all-girls schools all over the country, there was the case of Seyyed Ali Pour’Tabatabyi, a journalist and chief editor of “Qom News” news agency, media advisor and lecturer who was arrested in Qom on Sunday morning, Mar. 5, 2023, and according to the news published by social media, his Twitter account had been made unavailable since his arrest. Yet again, the removal of the boundaries between suppression and censorship, in the way mentioned above, can be historically dated back to a time prior to the outbreak of mass protests in the course of “Woman, Life, Freedom” Movement. For instance, Monireh Montazeri, a civil activist, photographer, and painting graduate, who was summoned by Fata Police (Iran’s cyber-security police organization) on Sept. 28, 2019; on the same day, however, she posted a note in which she informed about this development, and added that Fata Police forces have made an entrance into her Instagram account, and have deleted those photos in which young women’s hair is exposed, then changed the password to the page, and in its introductory section wrote: “Due to posting [religiously] illegitimate photos, this is page is temporarily made inaccessible by the order of the revered judicial authority.” In addition, they changed her page’s profile photo to their own organization’s logo and asked her to attend there again in ten days to retain her account; the page in question then had 20.000 followers. Yet, all these cases, together suggesting the unambiguous and blurred line between suppression and censorship, whose resulted monstrosity is today’s immensely security-infested conditions, have gone through a quantitative multiplication in the course of 2022-2023 mass protests, to the extent that, in truth, they have also now qualitatively transformed and, consequently, given rise to the existing impassable and terror-stricken atmosphere, in which, the mandatory removal of Saideh Fathi’s journalist piece from its originally publishing news website is a mere tip of the iceberg.
