IN MEMORIAM – AT 8:03 P.M. ET:  Regular readers know that I refer periodically to my good friend and Iranian rights activist Banafsheh Zand-Bonazzi, who has done fine work on behalf of Iran's democracy movement from her base in New York. 

Banafsheh comes from a distinguished Iranian family.  Last week her father, who had been under house arrest in Iran, committed suicide as a final protest against the regime.  He is remembered in this essay in London's Telegraph:

While Britons celebrated the royal wedding last Friday, one of Iran’s greatest intellectuals willingly fell to his death from the sixth-floor balcony of his Tehran apartment. Siamak Pourzand, aged 80, had held out long enough against the Islamic Republic, despite its best efforts to erase his outsize influence and, indeed, his existence. In the end, he died on his own terms.

Pourzand was an already prominent cultural commentator and foreign correspondent long before Ayatollah Khomeini boarded a plane from Paris, full of big ideas, in 1979. He reported on JFK’s funeral and interviewed Nixon while also finding time to write supple film criticism for the prestigious French journal Cahiers du Cinema.

Secular and cosmopolitan to the core, Pourzand had no time for the guardianship of the sadists and made a point of saying so, especially in the late 1990s when he began writing for various opposition newspapers (having been banned from the ones that were now mullah-controlled). He covered the funeral processions of Darius and Parvaneh Forouhar, a married couple who were assassinated in their Tehran apartment in 1998 as part of the “chain murders” of prominent Iranian dissidents.

Why didn’t Pourzand leave Iran when he had the chance?

One of his daughters, Banafsheh Zand-Bonazzi, a long-time human rights activist in New York, told me yesterday that her father always believed that a nation’s cultural identity was the first casualty of fanatical revolutions.

COMMENT:  It is worthwhile to read the rest of the essay, which will give you a very good idea of how that regime really functions. 

May 6, 2011