Word: iran
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...Read "The Next Round of the U.S.-Iran Nuclear Face...
...That tacit policy has now changed. As part of an intensifying campaign to silence Iran's opposition, authorities in Tehran last week confiscated Ebadi's Nobel medal from a safety deposit box and froze her bank account, according to Ebadi and the Norwegian Foreign Ministry, which protested on behalf of the Nobel Committee in Oslo. A spokesman for the Iranian government denied that the medal was seized and said Ebadi's assets were frozen due to her failure to pay taxes. (See the top 10 players in Iran's power struggle...
...lines people believed the regime would never cross, but no red lines really exist anymore," says Karim Sadjadpour, an analyst at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. "What is to be gained from confiscating Shirin Ebadi's Nobel Prize or assaulting her husband? It's almost as if Iran is trying to parody a gratuitously cruel, dictatorial regime...
Ebadi left Iran shortly before June's contested election and has yet to return. Though she demanded that the results be annulled, her comments in the immediate aftermath of mass protest rallies were measured. She has not aligned herself with the opposition movement's leaders and has been careful not to insert herself into the most significant schism in the regime since the 1979 revolution. Many Iranians eager for a respected leader to head a broad-based opposition have faulted Ebadi's reticence. (See pictures of Iran's presidential election and its turbulent aftermath...
...Which is why the government's recent crackdown on Ebadi has many Iran experts so perplexed. Most believe that Ebadi's role in Iran's domestic scene doesn't warrant Tehran's making a spectacle. The government of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has effectively sidelined Ebadi from public life since 2005. By censoring newspapers that once carried her articles, blocking news websites that reported on her work and creating a climate of intimidation in which Ebadi would scarcely risk making a public address in Iran, the government had succeeded in reducing her voice to a rare whisper most often heard from...