Sugar Cubes

Reporters Without Borders / Internet Freedom desk
20.01.06

Journalist and blogger Ahmad Reza Shiri will have a permanent threat hanging over him as a result of the suspended sentence of three years in prison handed down by a court in the northern city of Mashad on 8 January, Reporters Without Borders said today. He was reportedly accused of writing articles in his blog calling for a boycott of last February’s legislative elections.

“Suspended sentences are often used to silence journalists who bother the authorities,” the press freedom organisation said. “The fact that this type of sentence has now been applied to a blogger shows the importance that weblogs have assumed in Iranian society.”

Shiri said he was arrested in February 2004 and spent 21 days in detention because of what he had written in his previous blog, Iran Azad (Free Iran). In June 2004, a Mashad court gave him a suspended sentence of a year in prison. The authorities also closed down his blog and confiscated his computer. But he started up another blog a few months later: www.roozname.blogfa.com .

He told Reporters Without Borders that this month’s conviction is directly linked to the first one. He said the intelligence ministry asked for his case to be retried on the basis of new charges, including the fact that he gave interview to foreign radio stations. So the case was retried by another Mashad judge and this time he got a three-year suspended sentence. He will have to serve the sentence in prison if he gets into any kind of trouble with the authorities during the next five years.

Wow…For the first time, I feel how democratic our Arab countries are!

Although this kind of weather suits me very well often, it just matches with my inner-self all-time feelings and unlike other people it used to truely cheers me up, but this year something might have changed because it makes me so depressed and inexplicably sick. Probably work pressure or maybe lack of sugar in my blood, for I’m not even close to a quarter-life crisis.

Today is Friday, and my Fridays have all become short days during which I do nothing but sleep and sleep and sleep until I can not lay in bed any longer (or on my mattress, which I place on the floor).

Well, for few weeks now I’m unable to recover from whatever has got to me, I was beginning to worry about my health after I spent days not eating well and not sleeping until my eyes blurred and for two days a horrible headache affected me badly. I guess I can’t blame anyone for this, unfortunately.

The other day my brother stopped by a petrol station and I went in the supermarket to buy a sandwich, a cat sneaked in, and God knows how much I hate cats!! not to mention that they scare me. The cat once saw me opening the fridge’s door dared to come closer…and…I managed a small cry (I hate it when I do that too), the supermarket man came quickly and opened the door for her to leave. I must tell you that a dream with a cat trying to to touch me in it is a nightmare in my perception.

It’s so good to find a place where you can talk about silly things (like the ones I’ve just told you about) when you have no one to annoy with your irrelevant boring stories of your life.