For the past few years human rights abuses in Iran have been pushed into the shadow by the proliferation of its nuclear weapons program, threats to wipe "Israel off the map," and the state's sponsorship of terrorism in Iraq, Syria, and Lebanon. What a shame that the focus has shifted away from the rogue regime's brutal, three-decade-old treatment of its citizens since the fall of the Shah in 1979.
On Saturday Dec. 1, world leaders met in Paris in a final step to levy more punitive sanctions against Iran. This punishment, however, is for the regime's continuing to enrich uranium in its growing cascade farm of centrifuges in the race to develop nuclear weapons, not for the republic's abysmal record on human rights.
While this vote made the news, it has obscured the Nov. 21 referendum put forth by Canada to the U.N. General Assembly for a resolution that condemns Iran's "ongoing systematic violations of human rights" (CBS News). The sponsorship of this resolution, which has passed the vote in each of the years Canada has brought it to the table, was born out of the 2003 death of the Iranian-Canadian photojournalist, Zahra Kazemi, while kept in the regime's custody.
France had lobbied the European Union separately to further tighten the sanction noose. But as before, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad will scoff at such threats. He has been adept at allowing the brunt of those sanctions to trickle down to affect the population, while not impeding the nuclear program or the arming of terrorist groups, such as Hezbollah and the Iran Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC). He will undoubtedly let his poor countrymen suffer the consequences of the new economic penalties, the world and Iranian people be damned.
In Iran, human rights violations have covered the entire spectrum of abuses, from the passive infringement of barring women from attending soccer matches, to the more deplorable abuses, like coerced confessions, amputations, and multiple executions by stoning, hanging, and shooting.
Many of the less reported crimes against individual freedom fall under the umbrella of Iran implementing its austere form of Islam nationwide. That gender-ethnic-religious bias has emasculated the rights and ambitions of secular-leaning women and lead to the cultural cleansing of the Kurds.
Women used to make up 25 percent of the engineers and scientists of Iran's nuclear program—that was in the 1960s and 70s during the pre-revolutionary days. I doubt women make up a fraction of that group today as they have been relegated to third class citizens with little to no rights.
Kurds, who populate Kurdistan and other provinces in the northwest parts of Iran, have been forced not to speak or teach the Kurdish language in their schools, to assimilate to the doctrine of Islamic law, and have had their own journalists murdered at the hands of the IRGC in its annual crackdown on the Kurds. The first wave of economic sanctions that followed the Iranian Revolution at the hands of the militant Ayatollah Khomeini and the Islamic clerics, coupled with the fatigue of the eight year Iraq-Iran War in the 1980s, worked so well that it made Iran a pariah on the world stage. The sanctions and the war almost bankrupted the country, while the isolation became unbearable.
In 1990, Iran changed tack. It invited the U.N.'s Human Rights Team into the country to show progress, such as releasing a couple of American prisoners, while opening diplomatic channels with Europe, the United Nations, and the World Bank. But just as Iran makes token changes to manipulate the U.N.'s International Atomic Energy Agency, the symbolic acts of "progress" and the opening up to the world are a sham.
While Iran's propaganda machine has worked overtime ever since to get back some of the goodwill it had lost, two seismic events this decade—the 9/11 terrorist attacks and the Iraqi War—have overshadowed the regime's massive human rights violations. And the release of the recent National Intelligence Report, downplaying Iran's nuclear ambitions, doesn't help. These human rights abuses occur inside and outside of Iran's borders. They would include Iran's ramping up of war in Lebanon against Israel, the sponsorship of insurgency in Iraq, and the sponsoring, arming, and training of terrorists. More opaque abuses include political assassinations of Kurds and other enemies of the mullahs in Iraq, Turkey, and beyond.
Inside the republic, the list is long and horrifying. Writers, activists, and critics of the government "disappear" or are imprisoned on trumped up charges, like spying. The revolutionary courts, whose trials are closed to the world, wield absolute and unlimited power. They can overturn any previous decision made by any other court, do so in secrecy, and sentence as they see fit, often invoking the death penalty, which has been the political tool of choice to silence detractors.
The world can and must do more to condemn and punish the regime for its human rights abuses. It must start with the United States in the Bush Administration and carry on through, like a torch, during the presidential elections next year. It must coincide with the European countries' vocal outcries and actions against Iran and become a unified wave with the UN, tying into the sanctions the world has imposed on Iran for its nuclear program. Without such a hard stance, then the abuses and miscarriages of justice, freedom, and rights will continue unabated. That is something the world can't be passive about.
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