An Iranian website fiercely critical of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has been shut down in an apparent fresh crackdown on anti-government dissent on the internet, according to the Guardian.
Baztab, a fundamentalist site that has previously accused Ahmadinejad of betraying the Islamic revolution by attending a female dance show, has been closed for acting against the constitution and undermining national unity.
A Reporters sans Frontières (RSF) report said the photo-sharing site Flickr.com is not also accessible in Iran, while several Internet service providers are still blocking YouTube.com. Access to the Farsi-language pages of RSF is also blocked.
"We condemned the November decree for various reasons," RSF reacted. "The first reason was the requirement for website editors to register with the authorities. Although impossible to implement, it provides grounds for arbitrarily closing online publications which the authorities do not like. The second reason was its creation of an ’Internet surveillance body’ under the control of the Ministry of Culture and Islamic Orientation that is supposed, inter alia, to combat the publication of ’false information’."
The organisation added: "The authorities are making open use of the decree for the first time, and we see that the target is a website that supports Ayatollah Khamenei, in what is a war within the conservative camp. The regulations are almost certainly also being used to block access to ’immoral’ sites such as Flickr or YouTube."
The Baztab.com site was banned on February 12 for violating last November’s rules, which forbid the publication of "false" information, "violating the constitution" and attacking "personal privacy" or "the country’s unity." The site recently published reports on Iran’s nuclear industry and on corruption in which Ahmadinejad was lambasted.
The site’s editors have protested against the ban, insisting that parliament is responsible for anything to do with control of the media and that the November decree is "illegal" and "unconstitutional." Baztab - which is linked to Mohsen Rezai, a former revolutionary guard commander - is one of Iran's most widely read political sites. It has been a staunch critic of the government's economic policies, which have produced surging inflation and high unemployment Baztab is one of several sites to criticise Ahmadinejad's policies recently, including blaming his approach to Iran's nuclear programme for bringing the country closer to confrontation with the west.
Aside from the partial or complete blocking of the Flickr, YouTube and www.rsf.org websites, RSF says that several news aggregators are also now banned in Iran. The blognews.1bn.eu site, which has a review of Farsi-language blogs, and balatarin.com, which allows visitors to vote on articles have both been blocked for several weeks.
