Iran: Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain...

I don't know how I missed hearing about this last week. Guardian's Tehran correspondent expelled without explanation.

The Guardian's Tehran correspondent, Robert Tait, has been expelled from Iran without explanation after nearly three years of reporting from the country. Tait was forced to leave the country after the Iranian authorities declined to renew his visa and residence permit, despite an appeal on his behalf from the Guardian's editor, Alan Rusbridger, to Iran's culture and Islamic guidance ministry, which supervises the activities of all foreign and domestic media. He is now back in the UK, along with his Iranian wife.

The ministry gave no reason for its decision but said the newspaper was free to propose another journalist as its correspondent in Iran.


You can read Mr. Tait's piece on the subject here: As the regime cracks down, life goes on behind closed curtains.

Here's a snippet:

The scenes of boisterous revelry would not have been out of place in a crowded nightclub. In time to a throbbing beat, men and women of varying ages danced with a sensuality and abandon at odds with their surroundings.

For this frivolity was taking place not on a dancefloor, but in the passageway of an Iranian bus on a seemingly humdrum cultural excursion from Tehran to the western city of Hamedan.

Denied a more appropriate venue by rigid Islamic regulations which forbid dancing in public, the passengers turned the coach into a travelling disco.

Drawing the curtains to keep their illicit activities hidden from onlookers, women discarded their obligatory overcoats and hijabs before letting their hair down for an uninhibited knees-up.

(Hmm. I hope that Mr. Tait's publication of this information about the disco bus doesn't mean the disco bus has taken it's last ride. You can see that the Iranians would be going looking for it now, can't you?)

Mr. Tait puts the lie to Ahmadinejad's claim of an Iranian free press with this:

This prohibitive atmosphere has spread to the rapidly dwindling foreign press corps and, in that context, my effective expulsion is hardly surprising. I was the last remaining British print journalist of an English-language newspaper. Other reporters had either been expelled or had left, their places vacant after visas were denied to their chosen replacements. With a tiny number of exceptions, most western outlets now rely on English-speaking local Iranian correspondents, a situation welcomed by the authorities who reason that their own citizens are more susceptible to pressure than journalists from outside.

Read it all.