The Iranian leadership has revived the practices of Stalin, with the tragic-comic trials that we are now seeing in Iran. The arrest of the French-Iranian researcher Clotilde Reiss and her trial, along with French-Iranian Nazak Afshar, who worked for 18 years at the Cultural Section of the French Embassy in Iran, have provided additional proof of the behavior of a weak leadership that uses repression, terrorizes citizens and blackmails the outside world and western countries. After the recent presidential elections proved that a large segment of the Iranian people rejected their result because they were falsified, Iranian demonstrators went to the street to declare their rejection of such elections, which imposed Ahmadinejad upon the people. The Iranian leadership saw it best to resort to suppression as the solution, within a regime that suffers from deep divisions and clear weakness. Clotilde Reiss is French, and was born in Iran. She has always been interested in Iranian culture and became specialized in this domain. She is a researcher at a research institution in Iran and has an official office in Tehran, known by all. Visitors to Iran, including Bernard Orcad, the leading objective researcher on Iran, and his team have worked there. To accuse the young Frenchwoman of being a spy is natural for regimes that use suppression and falsification, and take hostages to use as leverage. The same policy is being followed with the trial of former Iranian vice president, Mohammad Ali Abtahi, who has confessed to things certainly as a result of terrorist pressure, like in Stalinist regimes. Even Mehdi Karroubi, the reformist candidate in the presidential elections, sent a letter via the internet to former President Ali Akbar Rafsanjani, asking him to halt what was taking place in Iranian prisons with the detained demonstrators, which included rape and other barbaric acts. In his letter, Karroubi said, “even in the Shah's prisons, famous for their harshness, we didn't see such practices.” The current Iranian regime, which has a deep split in the ranks of officials who overthrew the Shah and those who succeeded Khomeini, is resorting to show trials and repression to confront the domestic opposition and the west, which is preparing to impose more sanctions on the country. The easiest thing to do is arrest innocent civilians and take them as hostages, like Clotilde Reiss and Nazak Afshar and other Iranian citizens, detained in Iranian prisons. Certainly, French President Nicholas Sarkozy tried to ask all of Iran's allies and friends in the region to pressure it to release Clothilde and Nazak. He met with the Qatari prime minister and foreign minister, Hamad bin Jassem Al Thani, in the south of France, and might have asked him to make efforts to secure Clotilde's release. The French foreign minister, Bernard Kouchner, had earlier asked this of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, France's new friend. However, the Iranian leadership does not want to allow its allies to gain such a gift; it wants to use them directly with France, the west and Britain. Sarkozy is a hard-liner toward Iran because he realizes that if Iran continues to develop nuclear weapons, an Israeli strike against it will be certain, sooner or later. The French president does not want to see the region slip into war that would be catastrophic; he is hurrying to convince Iran of the need to accept dialogue with the Group of Six and the US, over halting uranium enrichment. However, the request failed to produce results, and diplomats are agreed that the supreme leader of the Iranian Republic, Ali Khamenei, does not want dialogue with the US, just as his leadership does not want to halt uranium enrichment, because the regime wants to develop nuclear weapons, and this will not change, no matter what the enticements to dialogue are. The regime will not change its stance and innocent civilians will pay the price of Stalinist acts from a bygone era. The predicament for the west with this big country is that its leadership has resurrected a rejection front, against all offers. Dialogue with the US is unacceptable; dialogue with the Group of Six is unacceptable, and the same even goes for allied countries, like Syria, which has influence on the Persian state, with regard to the two French hostages, up to now. In traditional negotiating with the Iranians, they negotiate the price like carpet sellers; in fact, they are carpet merchants, and the person who is being accused of spying (i.e. the “good” in question) has a high price! The current Iranian leadership will continue its present policy, as long as it suffers from huge weakness and a loss of legitimacy that emerged after the presidential elections.
