Saturday, May 28, 2005

Masih Alinejad is a slight woman of 28 who instantly shows the nervous energy that has helped make her such a controversial figure in Iranian politics.

For a journalist to be called "rude" by politicians is hardly new. But for Ms Alinejad to be called "flirtatious" was deeply injurious in such a conservative Islamic country, and the accusation she stole deputies' pay slips for a story led to her expulsion last month from Iran's parliamentary lobby.

Ms Alinejad has no regrets. And she has now hit back with a political novel, Taj-e Khaar (Crown of Thorns), in reference to her first name, the Farsi equivalent of Jesus.

"I wanted to write a book that would interest people disillusioned with politics, so they know what's going on in the parliament," Ms Alinejad explains, during a break in the offices of ILNA, the semi-official Iranian Labour News Agency.

The book is inspired both by her personal life and the story of how the parliament, or Majlis, was elected in February 2004 with a conservative landslide, and how it has behaved since.

It came into being after the Guardian Council, the constitutional watchdog, disqualified more than 2,000 mainly reformist candidates.

From a generation empowered by an Islamic Revolution that increased literacy from one in 10 young women to nearly all, Ms Alinejad believes the parliamentary reporter should test the relationship between politicians' promises and reality.

"It's my job to ask questions," says Ms Alinejad. "So when Mr (Gholam-Ali) Haddad-Adel began as parliamentary speaker by shouting 'Death to America', I asked him what kind of international impact this would have."

In the old Majlis, Ms Alinejad harried the re-formist majority over their talk of political freedoms, notably angering President Mohammad Khatami by pressing him to welcome the award of the Nobel Peace prize to the Iranian lawyer, Shirin Ebadi.

Likewise, she refuses to take the parliamentarians of the conservative new Majlis at face value.

As the new deputies championed social justice, she investigated their pay. Her disclosures included a year-end bonus of 11m rials (Pounds 765),35m rials for "religious duties" and 10m rials for "parliamentary expenses".

"These aren't huge amounts of money," she says. "My point was to ask whether the MPs' slogans were compatible with their actions."

Her reports, for both ILNA and the Hambastegi newspaper, blew up a storm, with deputies alleging she had stolen their pay-slips - a charge she denies.

Illustrating the new parliament's uneasy relationship with Iran's often lively press, Mehdi Kouchak-Zadeh, a prominent deputy, recently grabbed a reporter from Shargh newspaper by the chin, and shouted that "corrupt" editors were employing "a bunch of young people with financial problems to tell lies".

But in conservative Iran, attacks on her character such as the "flirtatious" allegation, carried greater potential for hurt. Her brother even turned up at the office concerned for the family reputation.

Rather than cower in a corner, Ms Alinejad took the charges head-on in 'Crown of Thorns', also revealing that she was a divorcee with an eight-year-old son.

"Even many of my friends didn't know this," she says, with a smile of catharsis. "It seemed the cleanest way to cope with character assassination."

Ms Alinejad's baiting of the Majlis is just one part of a cat and mouse game in Iran between media and state. In December, police arrested and detained for several weeks around 10 web-bloggers for "threatening national security".

But the media has won some recent victories. Abbas Abdi, a reformist journalist, was acquitted last week on charges of "selling information to the US" after he carried out an opinion poll that found most Iranians wanted better relations with Washington.

In her book, Ms Alinejad - now promoted to ILNA parliamentary editor - writes of a "little angel" on her right shoulder telling her to be "sensible" and keep out of trouble, and a "little devil" on her left shoulder driving her on.

This week ILNA, on Ms Alinejad's decision, ran a transcript of a taped exchange in which a deputy screams at a reporter: "Write as much as you want - until you die, you orphans!"

It's clear the little devil is winning.

By NAJMEH BOZORGMEHR and GARETH SMYTH

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