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As for Iran, since a coup restored Shah Mohammed Reza Pahlavi to his throne in 1953, says the Geneva-based International Commission of Jurists, human rights violations, including torture, "are alleged to have taken place on an unprecedented scale." Estimates of the number of political prisoners range from 25,000 to 100,000; it is widely believed most of them have been tortured by the SAVAK, secret police, which French lawyer Jean Michel Braunschweig, who investigated conditions in Iran last January, claims has 20,000 members and a network of some 180,000 paid informers. The country's repertory of tortures includes not only electric shock and beatings, but also the insertion of bottles in the rectum, hanging weights from testicles, rape, and such apparatus as a heK met that, worn over the head of the victim, magnifies his own screams.
Same Methods. Last week TIME Correspondent Christopher Ogden, in Iran with Secretary Kissinger, took up the torture allegations with the Shah. "We don't need to torture people any more," the Shah replied. "We use the same methods some of the very highly developed nations of the world are [using], psychological methods. We put them [prisoners] in front of confessions; when faced with a confession of their comrades, they tell us everything obviously." The Shah also rejected claims about the number of political prisoners in the country, saying that it was closer to 3,400 or 3,500. "But [these are] not political prisoners," he added. "These are Marxists, either terrorists, killers, or just people who have no allegiance to this country."
In fact, however, one group that SAVAK seems to have concentrated its attention on consists of writers, artists and intellectuals. Among those arrested and tortured in the past two or three years: Vida Hadjebi Tabrizi, a distinguished woman sociologist; Gholamhosseki Sa'edi, a renowned Iranian playwright, and Writer Fereydoun Tonokaboni.
Perhaps the most terrifying feature of torture in Chile and Iran is its institutionalization, the fact that it has become the almost private domain of huge, semiautonomous police agencies. Once embroiled in the torture monolith, the individual has no appeal, no recourse to the kind of legal authority provided by functioning courts. But whether to an equal or lesser degree, torture is very much a part of life in many other countries as well. Some recent instances:
> In Paraguay, the dictatorial regime of Alfredo Stroessner this year reportedly launched a new wave of political arrests involving several hundred people; it is the third such wave since late 1974. Witnesses to conditions in Paraguay's primitive jails claim that detainees are regularly tortured. One recent victim was internationally known Anthropologist Miguel Chase Sardi, who was released in June after seven months in prison. Chase Sardi says he was drugged, beaten and dipped upside down in water to the point where his hearing may have been permanently damaged. Other methods of torture include electric shock, the extraction of fingernails and forcing a prisoner to drink water until he faints.