Iran case shows pitfalls of 'lex Pinochet'

By Paul Taylor

LONDON (Reuters): An attempt to prosecute a former Iranian president in Belgium for alleged torture has sparked a nationalist backlash among Iran's reformers and highlighted the potential repercussions of the "Pinochet precedent".

A Belgian judge opened an investigation last week after an Iranian-born Belgian national filed a complaint alleging that ex- president Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani was responsible for torture committed between 1983 and 1989. He was president from 1989 to 1997.

The lawsuit, inspired by unsuccessful efforts to bring former Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet to justice in Europe for past repression in Chile, has united clerical conservatives and moderate reformers in Iran in outrage at "foreign interference" in the Islamic republic's affairs.

It has also landed the young Belgian government, which has taken an unusual activist line on human rights, in a diplomatic minefield, just when European partners Germany and Britain have extricated themselves from years of legal tensions with Tehran.

Iran's Supreme National Security Council, chaired by reformist President Mohammad Khatami, condemned the Belgian move and its foreign ministry summoned the Belgian ambassador to receive a formal protest.

A hardline Iranian cleric who set a million-dollar bounty on the head of British author Salman Rushdie was quoted on Monday as demanding an apology from Brussels and warning that "our reactions will not be only verbal".

The Belgian lawsuit is based on the same principle as the attempts to bring Pinochet to justice -- that people who commit the most heinous crimes, whether against other nationals or their own citizens, should be open to prosecution worldwide.

But the investigation into Rafsanjani, ordered by the same magistrate who led the effort to prosecute Pinochet in Belgium, could have unintended consequences in Iran, where reformers espousing the rule of law recently won most of the seats in the first round of voting in parliamentary elections.

In the past year, Iran's justice system, long dominated by clerical hardliners, has begun for the first time to probe some of the darker corners of past activities of the security forces, under pressure from an increasingly outspoken press.

Tehran's former police chief and several officers are on trial charged with brutality in raids on student dormitories last July. Several former intelligence agents accused of kidnapping and killing political dissidents and writers in 1998 are in prison awaiting trial.

The fact that such investigations have taken place at all, that the findings have been made public and that there are calls for more such probes shows how far Iran has changed since the early years after the 1979 Islamic revolution.

But Iranian analysts believe any intervention by foreign courts could complicate Iran's effort to come to terms with its past by making those demanding a farther-reaching probe appear in cahoots with foreigners.

Rafsanjani still has a key mediating role within the Iranian establishment as chairman of the Expediency Council. His bid to become speaker of parliament was apparently dashed last month when he only narrowly won election as the 30th and last member for the Tehran constituency.

Investigative journalist Akbar Ganji hounded Rafsanjani during the campaign, alleging that the key revolutionary figure bears responsibility for the disappearance and death of dozens of intellectuals while he was president from 1989 to 1997.

Ganji has called for the new parliament to establish an independent truth commission, or the kind used in South Africa and Argentina, to probe past human rights abuses.

Whether to probe further under the Persian carpet or draw a veil over the post-revolutionary period to avoid potentially divisive distractions from the task political and economic reform is a key issues facing the new parliament, said Nasser Hadian, a political science professor at Tehran University.

After a legal marathon lasting more than a year, Pinochet returned to Chile last week after being ruled by British Home Secretary Jack Straw to be medically unfit for extradition to Spain or the other European states which had sought to try him.

Rafsanjani rarely travels abroad and seems highly unlikely to risk Pinochet-style arrest and lengthy legal proceedings by traveling to the West.

But the Belgian case seems bound to create more bad blood between Iran and Brussels and, whatever the magistrate's intentions, may not help Iran's reformers in their efforts to clean up the country's human rights record.