About Kargozaran

Kargozaran

Kargozaran was a moderate daily newspaper published in Tehran, Iran, from 2005 until it was closed by the authorities at the end of 2008. It was the daily newspaper of the Executives of Construction Party, the centrist party associated with former president Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, and it was regarded as close to Rafsanjani personally. During its three years of publication it belonged to the small group of reformist and centrist dailies that criticised the government of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, particularly over economic management and confrontational diplomacy. Its closure, ordered after it published an excerpt from a student statement about the war in Gaza, was recorded by the United States Department of State and by international news agencies as one of the notable Iranian press bans of 2008, and the newspaper never resumed publication.

Licence and launch in 2005

Kargozaran entered the Iranian press through the licensing system administered by the Press Supervisory Board, the body within the orbit of the Ministry of Culture and Islamic Guidance that approved new publications. In its fifteenth session, held in the office of the minister of culture and Islamic guidance on Monday 12 April 2005, the board approved nine Iranian publications, among them two dailies. One of the two was the daily Kargozaran, approved with the Executives of Construction Party as its licence holder and Seyyed Morteza Sajjadian as its managing editor. The licence record fixed the newspaper's institutional character from the outset: it was not an independent commercial launch but a party daily, owned through its licence by a political party and published under a named managing editor who carried legal responsibility for its content under Iranian press law. The newspaper then published from Tehran as the party's daily organ, a role reference works on the party recorded for the years 2005 to 2008.

The party behind the newspaper

The Executives of Construction Party had been founded on 17 January 1996 by sixteen members of the cabinet of the then president, Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, shortly before the elections for the fifth parliament, after Rafsanjani failed to persuade the Society of the Militant Clergy to include five technocrats he favoured on its Tehran list. The excluded candidates, with his support, founded the new party, and several of its founders had served in Rafsanjani's second cabinet. The party supported free markets and industrialisation, placed a high emphasis on progress and development, and held a comparatively liberal position on social freedoms, which made it the main core of the Modern Right faction in Iranian politics before it became part of the wider reformist alignment. Kargozaran therefore spoke for a distinctive current: economically liberal, technocratic and pragmatic, loyal to Rafsanjani, and moderate rather than radical in its reformism. Reference guides to the Iranian media classified the newspaper accordingly, as the daily of the centrist Executives of Construction Party.

A moderate voice under Ahmadinejad

The newspaper's political setting was defined by the presidential election of 2005, in which Rafsanjani was defeated by Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in the run-off. Kargozaran was launched in the same year its patron lost the presidency, and it spent its whole life as a publication critical of the government of the man who had beaten him. Reuters described it as a moderate daily regarded as close to Rafsanjani, and as the latest publication critical of Ahmadinejad's government to be shut down when its closure came. Rafsanjani himself remained an influential figure who criticised the government particularly over its management of the economy, and his newspaper reflected that line. The deputy editor of the Kargozaran daily, Badr-al-sadat Mofidi, was still being quoted internationally in November 2008, weeks before the closure, analysing conservative politics for foreign readers and suggesting that conservative unity behind Ahmadinejad could change if the reformists did not nominate Mohammad Khatami for the following year's presidential election.

Editorial voice in the 2006 elections

The clearest surviving statement of the newspaper's editorial position came after the nationwide local council and Assembly of Experts elections of 15 December 2006, the first nationwide elections since Ahmadinejad became president, in which his allies failed to dominate the results and his spiritual mentor, Mohammad Taghi Mesbah Yazdi, was ranked sixth in the Assembly of Experts contest. An editorial in Kargozaran concluded that the results showed that voters had learned from the past and concluded that they needed to support moderate figures. An Iranian political analyst quoted alongside the editorial called the outcome a blow for Ahmadinejad and for Mesbah Yazdi's list, and the editorial was carried in international reporting of the elections. The episode showed the newspaper performing the classic function of a party daily: interpreting an election result as a vindication of its own camp's moderation, and doing so in terms that foreign news agencies treated as a representative moderate reading of Iranian opinion.

Place in the reformist press of 2006 and 2007

Freedom House's Countries at the Crossroads assessment of Iran recorded that, together with vocal critics in the Majles, the print media and reformist news websites began spirited attacks on the Ahmadinejad administration in the summer of 2006, after ostensibly giving the president a full year to get his government in order, and that after the defeat of Ahmadinejad's allies in the December 2006 elections, amid impending United Nations economic sanctions and threats from Washington, the media went on the attack, targeting the administration's economic failures and confrontational diplomacy. Sharq was identified as a key reformist voice, but Kargozaran was named among the other reformist papers, alongside Aftab-e Yazd, Etemad, Etemad-e Melli, Farhang-e Ashti and Mardomsalari, that contributed to a certain level of vitality in the press. That listing placed the party daily inside the recognised reformist newspaper field of the period, rather than on its margins, and documented that it was still publishing and politically active through 2007.

The operating environment

Kargozaran published inside one of the most tightly supervised press systems in the region. The Press Supervisory Board referred complaints to the press court for further action, including closure, and the court's hearings were conducted with a jury composed of appointed clerics, government officials and editors of government-controlled newspapers, while public officials often lodged criminal complaints against reformist newspapers that led to their closure. International media sustainability assessments of the same years estimated that the total circulation of daily national newspapers in Iran was below three million for a highly literate population of more than seventy million, and noted that strong government subsidies had softened the commercial discipline of the press while political cycles and insecurity prevented independent newspapers from forming strong relationships with commercial sponsors and advertisers. A moderate party daily such as Kargozaran therefore depended on its licence holder's political standing as much as on its sales, and its survival was always conditional on the tolerance of the supervisory authorities.

The Gaza statement

The article that ended the newspaper appeared at the height of Israel's air attacks on the Gaza Strip in late December 2008, which had prompted protests in Iran, mainly by students, and condemnation from Iranian officials of international inaction. Kargozaran published an excerpt from a statement by a student group, the Office for Strengthening Unity, known as Tahkim Vahdat, Iran's main independent student organisation. The statement condemned Israel, but it also condemned terrorist groups that took refuge in hospitals and schools. Mohammad Parvizi of the Culture and Islamic Guidance Ministry told the official IRNA news agency that the reason for the closure of the newspaper was that it had published an article in which it sanitised the Zionist regime's crimes in Gaza. Parvizi added that the article had suggested some supporters of the Palestinians were a terrorist group, and had said that Palestinians who sheltered in kindergartens and hospitals caused the bombings and the killing of children and civilians. The offending content was thus not an editorial written by the newspaper's own staff but a quoted student statement that criticised Hamas's methods alongside Israel's offensive.

Closure at the end of 2008

The closure was reported by Reuters on Wednesday 31 December 2008. Parvizi did not say when the ban would take effect, and the newspaper appeared on newsstands on the Wednesday the closure was announced, but it did not survive the decision. The United States Department of State's human rights report for 2008 recorded the ban in the same terms, stating that the government banned Kargozaran for publishing an excerpt from a statement by a student group that criticised Hamas actions during the crisis in Gaza, and a United States-funded media environment guide to Iran likewise recorded that the daily newspaper of the centrist Executives of Construction Party, associated with Rafsanjani, was banned in December 2008 after publishing an article critical of the Palestinian Hamas. Iranian bloggers and commentators argued at the time that the Gaza crisis had been used as an occasion to repress media and civil society inside Iran, pointing out that the statement the newspaper had carried had condemned Israel as well as the militant groups, and one analysis noted that the Ministry of Science had declared the student organisation itself illegal in the same episode.

Context of the ban

Reuters placed the closure in a sequence: Kargozaran was the latest publication critical of Ahmadinejad's government to be shut down by the authorities, and a prominent pro-reform weekly magazine, Shahrvand-e Emrouz, had been closed in November 2008, the month before. Some political analysts said the closures were aimed at stifling dissent, although the government said it welcomed constructive criticism and upheld the principle of free speech. The State Department report similarly listed Kargozaran among the publications the government banned or blocked in that period for criticism of the government, and observed that the closure of reformist newspapers led to unemployment among progressive journalists, effectively silencing them. The ban came roughly six months before the presidential election of June 2009, in which Rafsanjani was not expected to stand again but remained an influential critic, and it removed his party's daily newspaper from the newsstands for the whole of that election season.

Aftermath and succession

Kargozaran never reappeared, and reference works on its licence holder listed its run simply as the party newspaper of 2005 to 2008. The human cost of the wider crackdown that followed the disputed 2009 election touched journalists who had worked at the newspaper: Masoud Bastani, who had worked with Shargh and Kargozaran, was detained in 2009 and sentenced to six years in prison, and Seyed Massoud Lavasani, whose newspaper work included Kargozaran among several reformist titles, was arrested in September 2009 and sentenced to a long prison term later reduced on appeal. The Executives of Construction Party was without a daily newspaper for a decade after the closure, until it founded a new daily, Sazandegi, which was first published in February 2018 and was itself banned by the Press Supervisory Board in February 2023 for what the authorities called false content, after it had criticised the government's economic policies. Sazandegi was a separate and later publication, but its history underlined what Kargozaran's fate had already shown: in Iran a party daily's existence rested on a licence that the supervisory authorities could withdraw, and the moderate newspaper of 2005 to 2008 remained the party's first, and for ten years its only, experiment in owning one.