BRIEF  ON  IRAN, No. 273
        Representative Office of
        The National Council of Resistance of Iran
        Monday, October 16, 1995



        3421 M Street NW #1032, Washington, DC 20007



85 New Members Added to National Council of
Resistance, from a statement issued by the Secretariat
of NCR - Paris, October 12

        Mrs. Mahvash Sepehri, the NCR's Senior Secretary,
today announced the names of 85 new members for the
NCR. This is the first group whose applications for
membership have been ratified with the legal and
administrative procedures completed according to the
constitution and internal regulations of the NCR and
voting of all members.
        46 of the new members are women and 39 are
men with an average of two decades of experience in
the movement. Eighteen of them were political
prisoners under the shah or Khomeini regimes.
        24 are officials of the Resistance's President-elect
and others are members of the NCR committees.
        Following the interim session of the National
Council of Resistance of Iran, it was announced on
September 27 that the new applications for
membership had been examined, the voting on them
started, and the results due to be announced after
ratification.


More Mismanagement by Mullahs, Reuters, October 15

        TEHRAN - Iranian traffic police, unhappy about
not being consulted over newly-erected parking meters,
have told motorists not to put coins in them, a Tehran
newspaper said on Sunday.
        "Tehrani citizens are requested to avoid putting
coins in the newly established parking meters in the
streets of Tehran," said the Iran Daily, quoting a police
statement.
        No one would be fined for not paying into parking
meters until further notice, the paper said.
        Tehran city officials have placed numerous
parking meters all over the Iranian capital....


Russian Defense Minister to Visit Iran - Newspaper,
Reuters, October 14

        TEHRAN - Russian Defense Minister Pavel
Grachev plans to visit Iran in the near future, Iran's
ambassador to Russia was quoted on Saturday as
saying.
        Etelaat newspaper reported Grachev conveyed his
intention to Iranian ambassador Mehdi Safari in a
meeting in Moscow on Thursday....
        "Russia will allow no country to decide partners
for Russia," the minister was quoted as saying in an
apparent reference to the United States.
        In recent weeks, Russia has had to defend its two
contracts to build three reactors at Iran's Bushehr
nuclear power plant against criticism from the United
States and others who argue Tehran might use the
technology to build a nuclear arsenal....


>From Cultural Icon to Freedom Fighter, The Washington
Report on Middle East Affairs, Oct./Nov. 1995

        ... So long as Khomeini ruled, only military or
revolutionary music could be played. Because he
decreed that "women's voices should not be heard by
men other than members of their own families," there
was no role at all for women singers.
        Marzieh, a charismatic and vivacious woman
whose singing voice is as strong today as when she
began her career more than 50 years ago, grows
indignant as she describes this interpretation of her
religion. "In Islam it is not prohibited for women to sing
and in fact the Prophet Mohammad very much enjoyed
great voices," she explains. "His granddaughter, Zeinab,
was a great orator and there were many prominent
women in the early years of Islam.
        "There was no prohibition on others hearing the
voices of women. The Prophet was the messenger of the
emancipation of women. The point is that these mullahs
by no means represent true Islam. They misuse and
harm Islam. True Islam is represented by the
Mojahedin."...
        Although she traveled abroad frequently, she also
spent about eight months of every year in a house on
her family's land in Lalun, a village outside of Tehran.
There, she said, her voice remained strong because
daily "I went into the desert and sang for the birds, the
trees, the river, the passing clouds and the stars."
        In 1994, en route to an engagement with the BBC
in London and then a trip to the United States, she
stooped in Paris for a conversation with Maryam Rajavi,
whose brother and sister had been executed in Iran and
who had been elected by the National Council of
Resistance of Iran as the president-elect of a future
multi-part democratic government. It was then that
Marzieh decided to remain in Paris where she was
appointed adviser for cultural and artistic affairs to
Mrs. Rajavi, and a member of the National Council of
Resistance of Iran, of which the People's Mojahedin is
the major constituent party.
        "The situation of women in my country was
constantly deteriorating. I therefore decided in France
to echo the cry of the women in Iran  ...       (To Be
Continued)