Iran lifts ban on leading moderate daily
March 12, 2007
TEHRAN -- The Iranian authorities have lifted a ban on Shargh newspaper, the country's best-selling moderate daily until it was shut down by the press watchdog in September, one of its directors said Sunday.
"Shargh will appear again after the Nowruz holiday," said Mohammad Atrianfar, referring to celebrations marking the Iranian new year March 21.
"The judge ordered the chief executive of the paper to pay a fine of 9 million [Iranian] riyals [$970]," in the trial that followed its closure, he said.
The return of Shargh will see the reappearance of a newspaper with a 100,000 daily circulation that was critical of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's government and carried a broad range of cultural and international news.
After a series of warnings, it was shut down for printing a cartoon depicting a donkey, its head surrounded by an aura, facing a knight on a chessboard.
The cartoon was deemed insulting to the president who said that he had felt surrounded by an aura of light during his speech to the UN General Assembly in 2005.
Shargh journalists denied that there was any such political implication, saying that the cartoonist had simply colored in the black squares around the donkey to improve the color contrast of the black drawing of the animal.
Iran's press flourished in the early years of the rule of reformist president Mohammad Khatami although it was then hit by a string of closures ordered by the hardline judiciary.
The stringent regulation has continued under Ahmadinejad, although, even without Shargh, the press still has a surprisingly diverse range of titles including the unashamedly reformist Etemad Melli and Ayandeh-No.
Closures have also hit conservative titles over the past year, with the ultra-conservative Siasat Ruz and the government newspaper Iran both undergoing temporary suspensions for insulting Iran's ethnic and religious minorities.
http://www.metimes.com/storyview.php?StoryID=20070312-072449-6953r
