After the end of the holidays last week news agencies reported that an unknown group had entered the Baran Institute during the weekend holiday and taken away some items. The institute, created by Iran’s former president Mohammad Khatami, is considered one of the few active moderate organizations in Iran.
The official website of the institute reported that an “unlawful break in had taken place at the Baran Institute” and quoted its director Javad Imam to have said, “This robbery which had taken place with the full inspection of all the cabinets and items in the offices during the June 4 to 6th holidays and was uncovered on Saturday June 7th when a report on the incident was filed at the nearby police station.” The report wrote, “It is clear that the building had been entered without any damage to the door or the windows and had been done very professionally. There was only one broken window and it was not clear whether it had been broken in relation to this entry or not. Documents in the offices had been inspected very minutely page by page and the only missing items was an old and non-functional LED television while pricey items such as carpets, television sets, computers and others office items in the offices were not removed.”
This was not the first time that the offices of Baran had been the subject of a security-political break on. About eight years ago this very office had been broken in and items stolen from it. During that incident it was said that “All computer equipment and peripherals and also audio visual equipment had been stolen from the offices.” The PR office of the institute then reported, “When the staff of the institute showed up for work they noticed that the doors of the building had been force-opened and those on the first and second floors had been broken and documents had been stolen from the offices.” According to that report, intruders had broken opened the entry doors and filing cabinets by force and while messing up the documents and files inside them, had taken away a number of computers, video projectors, amplifiers and photocopying equipment, including all telephone devices and the official stamp of the institute. That theft had taken place on February 11 in 2006 while the staff of the international Baran Institute for Dialogue Among Civilizations was not at work.
The break-in that had taken place last week had caused less physical damage to the building and offices. This incident took place just weeks after the third internal elections for the supreme council of the institute. During a meeting for that occasion, seyed Mohammad Khatami had said, “We must properly understand the activities of Baran because it has repeatedly been said that Baran does not have a political aspect, meaning that it does not engage in activities to bring individuals into power, like political parties do, because it does not introduce candidates for elections and does not engage in campaigns for or against them, or engage in political activities. Its work is social, scientific and cultural.” He had also said that the center received many applicants for membership but that because of its limited resources and wide field of activities, they had not succeeded in absorbing all the applications.
The new members of the supreme council had already been elected for the next four years and they included Mohsen Armin, Javad Imam, Seyed Mohammad Beheshti, Habibollah Bitaraf, Jaafar Tofighi, Hamid-Reza Jalaipoor, Morteza Haji, seyed Safandar Hosseini, Hadi Khaniki, Ahmad Khoram, Fateme Rakei, seyed Hassan Rasooli, Abdollah Ramezanzadeh, Hesamedin Saraj, Zahra SHojayi, Ali SHakoorirad, seyed Mohammad Sadr, Mohsen Safai Farahani, Mohammad-Reza Aref, Fazel Meybodi, Elahi Koolai, Mohammad Kianooshrad, seyed Hossein Marashi, Mosafa Moin and Abdollah Nasseri.
A few days after the 2006 break in, hardline Kayhan newspaper had written a story titled, “What are all these open extremist policies doing at Baran Institute.” It wrote, “Contrary to the claims of Khatami in that the institute is not political, a group of extremists had been elected to its governing board.”
Theft from houses or offices of political groups or individuals is not an unheard off event in the Islamic republic of Iran. In 2010 too property had been stolen from the offices of Mehdi Karoubi, an opposition reformist personality who run for president in 2009 and was subsequently put under house arrest. Saham News at the time wrote, “The theft had occurred at the officially sealed offices of Mehdi Karoubi, despite the monitoring of the offices by state security apparatus.
In another incident, prominent lawyer Nasrin Sotudeh’s husband Reza Khandan disclosed that when he returned from a pilgrimage trip to his house in Tehran, his house had been broken into and messed up and some property had been missing. This incident took place after Sotudeh received the Sakharov prize from a visiting European Parliament team in Tehran.
Maryam Kashani
Rooz online