PARIS: Acclaimed Iranian filmmaker Jafar Panahi has been released on bail after starting a hunger strike to protest against his almost seven-month detention, supporters said on Friday.
The director had been arrested months before the current anti-regime protests erupted, but his imprisonment became a symbol of the plight of artists speaking out against the authorities.
Panahi has been released from Tehran’s Evin prison “two days after starting his hunger strike for freedom,” the US-based Center for Human Rights in Iran (CHRI) said on Twitter, while Iran’s reformist Shargh newspaper posted an image of Panahi jubilantly embracing a supporter.
His wife Tahereh Saeedi posted a picture on Instagram of Panahi being driven from prison in a vehicle.
The prize-winning director was arrested in July and went on a dry hunger strike on Wednesday to protest his continued detention.
“Mr Panahi was temporarily released from Evin prison with the efforts of his family, respected lawyers, and representatives of the cinema,” Iran’s House of Cinema, which groups together industry professionals, said in a statement.
The announcement that Panahi was going on a dry hunger strike sparked a wave of concern across the world about the director, who has won prizes at all of Europe’s top three film festivals.
“Today, like many people trapped in Iran, I have no choice but to protest against this inhumane behavior with my dearest possession — my life,” Panahi had said in the statement published by his wife.
“I will remain in this state until perhaps my lifeless body is freed from prison,” he said.
Panahi, 62, was arrested on July 11 and had been due to serve a six-year sentence handed down in 2010 after his conviction for “propaganda against the system.”
On October 15, the Supreme Court quashed the conviction and ordered a retrial, raising hopes among his legal team that he could be released, but he remained in prison.
Panahi won a Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival in 2000 for his film “The Circle.” In 2015, he won the Golden Bear in Berlin for “Taxi Tehran,” and in 2018, he won the best screenplay prize at Cannes for “Three Faces.”
Panahi’s latest film, “No Bears,” which like much of his recent work stars the director himself, was screened at the 2022 Venice Film Festival when the director was already behind bars. It won the Special Jury Prize.
“It is extraordinary, a relief, a total joy. We express our gratitude to all those who mobilized yesterday,” his French distributor, producer Michele Halberstadt, told AFP.
“His next fight is to have the cancelation of his sentence officially recognized. He’s outside, he’s free, and this is already great.”
Panahi’s July arrest came after he attended a court hearing for fellow film director Mohammad Rasoulof, who had been detained a few days earlier.
Rasoulof was released from prison on January 7 after being granted a two-week furlough for health reasons and is still believed to be outside of jail.
Cinema figures have been among the thousands of people arrested by Iran in its crackdown on the protests sparked by the September 16 death in custody of Mahsa Amini, 22, who had been arrested for allegedly violating its strict dress code for women.
Star actor Taraneh Alidoosti, who had published images of herself without wearing the Islamic headscarf, was among those detained, although she was released in early January after being held for almost three weeks.
Iranian director Jafar Panahi released after hunger strike
https://arab.news/yu8n4
Iranian director Jafar Panahi released after hunger strike
- The director had been arrested months before the current anti-regime protests erupted
- His wife Tahereh Saeedi posted a picture on Instagram of Panahi being driven from prison in a vehicle
Palestinian PM blasts ‘racism’ of Israeli minister
- Israeli finance minister Bezalel Smotrich: ‘There are no Palestinians, because there are no Palestinian people’
“There are no Palestinians, because there are no Palestinian people,” Smotrich said Sunday, quoting French-Israeli Zionist activist Jacques Kupfer, speaking at an event in Paris according to a video circulating on social media.
“After 2,000 years of exile, the prophecies of Jeremiah, Ezekiel and Isaiah are beginning to come true and God is gathering his people, the people of Israel are returning home,” Smotrich said.
“There are Arabs around who don’t like it, so what do they do? They invent a fictitious people and claim fictitious rights to the land of Israel, only to fight the Zionist movement,” he added.
Smotrich last year became a minister in the cabinet of Israel’s veteran leader Benjamin Netanyahu, which analysts have called the most right-wing government in the country’s history.
“It is the historical truth, it is the biblical truth... the Arabs in Israel must hear it, as well as certain Jews who are confused in Israel, this truth must be heard here at the Elysee Palace (in Paris), and at the White House in Washington, and everyone must hear this truth,” Smotrich continued.
Shtayyeh, speaking before a cabinet meeting of the Palestinian Authority on Monday, said the “inflammatory statements are consistent with the first Zionist sayings of ‘a land without a people for a people without a land’.”
He said the comments were “conclusive evidence of the extremist, racist Zionist ideology... of the current Israeli government.”
Smotrich and his Religious Zionism group have a history of making incendiary remarks about Palestinians.
In February, Smotrich called for the Palestinian town of Hawara in the occupied West Bank to be “wiped out” after two Israelis were shot dead by an alleged Hamas militant.
Hundreds of rampaging Israeli settlers later torched Palestinian homes and cars in the West Bank town.
Iraq to hold provincial elections on November 6
- Elections for the councils, the first in a decade, will take place in 15 of 18 Iraqi provinces
BAGHDAD: Iraq’s parliament has set November 6 as the date for elections for provincial councils, powerful bodies that were dissolved amid anti-government protests in 2019.
“Provincial elections will take place on November 6, 2023,” a statement from parliament said Monday, after lawmakers agreed on the date overnight.
The elections for the councils, the first in a decade, will take place in 15 of 18 Iraqi provinces, excluding the three provinces in the autonomous Kurdistan region of northern Iraq.
The provincial councils, created by the 2005 constitution following the fall of Saddam Hussein’s regime, carry relatively significant power in federal Iraq, including allocating the budgets for health, transport and education.
The last provincial elections took place in 2013, when loyalists of then prime minister Nuri Al-Maliki came out on top.
The next provincial elections should have taken place in 2018, but were postponed.
A year later, amid vast anti-government rallies, protesters demanded and obtained the dissolution of the provincial councils, in part because critics accused them of being rife with corruption.
Alaa Al-Rikabi, an independent MP who emerged in the aftermath of the October 2019 protest movement, condemned the return of the councils.
“We refuse to allow them to be reinstated,” he said, adding that they “open the door wide to corruption.”
Iraq PM to hold Turkiye talks on water, Kurdish rebels
- Shia Al-Sudani to meet Turkiye’s president Recep Tayyip Erdogan on his first visit to Iraq’s northern neighbor since he came to power in October
Sudani is set to meet Turkiye’s President Recep Tayyip Erdogan on his first visit to Iraq’s northern neighbor since he came to power in October, an adviser to the head of the Iraqi government said, speaking anonymously.
“The two main issues are water and the presence of the PKK in northern Iraq,” he added, referring to the rebel group that has been fighting the Turkish army for decades.
War-scarred Iraq is now digging ever deeper for water as a frenzy of dam-building, mainly in Turkiye, sucks water out of the region’s two great rivers, the Tigris and Euphrates.
The Tigris and the Euphrates both have their sources in Turkiye, and Baghdad has long accused Ankara of withholding water in dams that choke the rivers, dramatically reducing flows into Iraq.
According to official Iraqi statistics from last year, the level of the Tigris entering Iraq has dropped to just 35 percent of its average over the past century.
Declining river flows have been made worse by a dire lack of rainfall in recent years, coupled with poor irrigation practices in Iraq that see excessive exploitation of water from the rivers.
Amid criticism, Turkiye’s ambassador to Iraq, Ali Riza Guney, ruffled feathers last July when he said, “water is largely wasted in Iraq” and called on people to “use the available water more efficiently.”
Sudani will also discuss with Erdogan the presence of rear bases of Kurdish fighters from the Turkish PKK rebels in northern Iraq, which Ankara has repeatedly sought to root out in air and ground operations.
The rebels have kept up a deadly insurgency for Kurdish self-rule in southeastern Turkiye since 1984.
Turkiye has dozens of military facilities in northern Iraq for use in its war against the PKK, which Ankara and its Western allies blacklist as a “terrorist” group.
In July 2022, Iraq blamed Turkiye for artillery strikes on a park in Iraqi Kurdistan that killed nine civilians, including women and children.
Turkiye denied its troops were responsible and accused the PKK.
Sudan factions agree to form transitional government April 11: Spokesperson
- The parties have agreed on a committee for drafting a new constitution that will include 9 members of the civilian groups, one from army and another from RSF
CAIRO: Sudan’s political factions have agreed to form a new transitional government on April 11, Khalid Omar Yousif, the spokesperson for the signatories to the political settlement, said on Sunday.
Sudan’s military leaders who took over in a coup in late 2021 have been negotiating a deal with the civilian political parties previously in power aimed at restoring a civilian government.
The parties have agreed on a committee for drafting a new constitution that will include nine members of the civilian groups, one from the army and another from the powerful paramilitary Rapid Support Forces, Yousif said.
They will sign the transitional framework for the agreement early next month and a constitutional declaration on April 6.
The formation of a new government following the October 2021 coup is a result of Western, Gulf, and UN-sponsored talks, and it could revive flows of badly needed economic assistance to Sudan.
As economy worsens, Lebanese juggle dizzying rates for devalued pound
- Country moving toward a cash-based, dollarized economy given spiralling inflation and restrictions by banks on transactions
BEIRUT: When Caroline Sadaka buys groceries in the Lebanese capital Beirut, she keeps her phone in hand – not to check her shopping list but to calculate the spiralling costs of goods now priced at volatile exchange rates that vary by store and sector.
As Lebanon’s economy continues to collapse, an array of exchange rates for the local pound has emerged, complicating personal accounting and dimming hopes of fulfilling a reform requirement set out by the International Monetary Fund.
The government’s official exchange rate was set at 15,000 pounds to the US dollar in February, a nearly 90 percent devaluation from the longtime peg of 1507.5.
But the Central Bank is selling dollars at a rate of 79,000 to the greenback while the finance minister intends to calculate tariffs for imported goods at 45,000 pounds.
The parallel market rate is meanwhile hovering around 107,000 pounds and changing daily. Supermarkets and fuel stations are required to post signs with the value they’ve adopted for the day, but the rate is changing so fast that many are pricing in the relatively stable USdollar instead.
Examining a can of tuna, Sadaka illustrated the daily quandary faced by shoppers. “This doesn’t have a (logical) price. If you look, it’s in Lebanese pounds, so is this the price? Or is this an old price, and there’s now a price in dollars?,” she wondered.
She quit her job as a school teacher which paid her in local currency, the value of which has decreased by more than 98 percent against the dollar on the parallel market since 2019.
That’s when the economy began unraveling after decades of unsound financial policies and alleged corruption.
To solve the exchange rate confusion, the government needs to implement one unified rate. This is among pre-conditions set by the International Monetary Fund nearly a year ago for Lebanon to get a $3 billion bailout.
But the lender of last resort says reforms have been too slow. They have met resistance from politicians who are shielding vested interests and dodging accountability.
In the meantime, the country has been moving toward a cash-based and dollarized economy given spiralling inflation and restrictions by banks on transactions.
Shop owner Mahmoud Chaar told Reuters the exchange rate was changing so fast that his business was losing money overnight.
Like many business owners, Chaar has to pay in US dollars to import goods but sells in Lebanese pounds. One day, he had sold all his goods based on one rate but woke up the next to find it had jumped nearly 10,000 pounds per US dollar.
“Basically, we lost in the exchange rate difference what we had made in profit,” Chaar told Reuters.
Economist Samir Nasr said the varying rates across sectors were making personal accounting “messy” for Lebanese and unifying them was more urgent than ever.
“What is required is a full group of reforms and steps that will allow for the economic situation to stabilize in general — and would then allow the exchange rate to be unified,” he said.
