It’s been nearly a month since wildcat protests erupted across Iran and, while there are still some reports of sporadic demonstrations and anti-government actions, it appears that the Islamic Republic has successfully smothered the embers of revolution and change, at least for now.
The action of the regime and its security forces in the face of nonviolent protest should put to rest any notion advanced by lobbyists or diplomats who argue that Iran is democratic just because it elects a parliament or those who imagine that regime reformists are somehow progressive. William Miller, a former Senate staffer and Clinton-era ambassador who continues to advocate for rapprochement with Iran, for example, once described Khomeini as “a progressive force for human rights,” a statement he never retracted. It’s also a statement on par with the reporting of Walter Duranty, who famously sanitized Stalin for the Western audience.
As Iranian leaders lick their wounds, many of those whom Iranian security forces have identified as participating in protests (often crowdsourcing on Twitter to do it) will experience hell. There is much inefficiency inside the Islamic Republic of Iran but, when it comes to intimidation and repression, authorities in Iran are efficient.
Certainly, there has been no shortage of human rights abuses in Iran, both before and after the Islamic Revolution. For all historians and supporters of the Islamic Republic criticize the SAVAK, the shah’s intelligence and security service, few acknowledge that after a few symbolic executions of top brass, revolutionary leader Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini simply rehired SAVAK employees to reconstitute the service under a new name, the Vezarat-e Ettela’at va Amniyat-e Keshvar, or VEVAK. It is simply false to suggest that, in terms of human rights, the Islamic Republic is an improvement on what came before.
The first decade of the Islamic Republic was marked by an orgy of violence. Iranian newspapers published in the first months of the Islamic Republic show before and after photos of execution victims. Family members would have to listen to the radio every morning to see if their loved one arrested on the streets had gone to the gallows or firing squad the evening before. Khomeini dispatched Ayatollah Sadeq Khalkhali, Iran’s infamous “hanging judge” to Iranian Kurdistan to oversee thousands of executions. The late Grand Ayatollah Hossein Ali Montazeri documented in memoirs the extra-legal executions of 3,000 political prisoners. (Had Obama-era National Security Council aide Ben Rhodes been in office at the time, the echo chamber spin would have been, “Tehran alleviates prisons overcrowding!”).
The day Khomeini died in June 1989, a heat wave rolled over Iran. The quip on the street was “the old man was so senile, he forgot to close the door on the way down.”
While it’s traditional for visitors to Shi’ite shrines to donate by pushing money through the silver grills surrounding caskets, in the late 1990s, Iranian authorities had to glass off the grill surrounding Khomeini’s coffin because visitors to the shrine were pushing dog feces-smeared bills into Khomeini’s final resting place. While former Iranian President Mohammad Khatami is imagined as a liberal in some quarters of American academe and in European foreign ministries, while minister of culture and Islamic guidance, he ordered more than 600 books censored.
Trouble started anew in July 1999 when, the evening after a peaceful student protest against the closure of a newspaper, security force vigilantes attacked a University of Tehran dormitory, tossing some of the students from a fourth floor window onto the concrete below. The result was chaos. Outraged by such arrogance and abuse, protestors took to the streets across the country. Many placed their hopes in Khatami but, when he gave a televised address and sided with the Supreme Leader, they realized how impotent the so-called reformers really were.
The security forces cracked down, bashing heads and arresting protestors. After about a week, the regime restored quiet. The regime realized what a close call they had. They understood that if they beat up protestors on the street or sent riot police into crowds of demonstrators, it would be equivalent to pouring gasoline onto a fire. As a result, they refined their approach. They reached out to China, which got the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps’ security forces up to speed on facial recognition software. When protestors took to the streets—as they once again did in 2001 after rumors spread that the ayatollahs had ordered Iran’s soccer team to lose in a World Cup qualifier to Bahrain in order to prevent men and women from celebrating together in the street—rather than arrest people in the middle of crowds which might fight back, security officials simply snapped photos and then arrested agitators in the middle of the night over subsequent weeks, when they could drag them from their beds quietly off to prison.
Here, the Islamic Republic’s way of intimidation grows more evil. Certainly, few who go into Evin Prison come out the same person. Guards rape prisoners, torture is common place. Sanitation is horrendous. Even by Iranian standards, the abuses that occurred in detention centers like Kahrizak in southern Tehran were scandalous. But what has become standard practice in Iran is to condemn prisoners to extreme sentences, but then to offer them weekend furloughs. The purpose isn’t humanitarian. Rather, when a prisoner returns home for a weekend after several months in prison, he is hardly the man or woman who entered. Perhaps he or she has lost 20 or 30 pounds. Perhaps he or she has had a stroke. Perhaps he or she has post-traumatic stress. While home, family members, classmates, and neighbors will visit. They will see what the regime can do when someone challenges them politically. And then, at the end of the weekend, the police come to return the loved one to prison. The regime’s logic is that such public demonstrations of what transgressions mean will intimidate everyone else to stay in line.
The same is true with public executions. While apologists for the Iranian regime often point to Saudi Arabia’s notorious human rights record, the simple fact is that the rate of execution in Iran is about nine times as high. And while the public beheadings in which Saudi Arabia engages are barbaric, so too are the public hangings in Iran. Traditionally, in the United States and elsewhere, hangings were designed to kill almost instantly by breaking the neck. Iranian hangings, however, are different: victims have their hands bound and are then lifted slowly by the neck from cranes. The result is a very slow strangulation, often done in public. Again, this is meant to intimidate. Iranians see not simply an execution, but slow painful deaths. They also see the disdain with which the regime treats human life. When the Iranian media simultaneously broadcasts footage of European officials laughing with or high-fiving Iranian ambassadors, the result is demoralization.
Since German Foreign Minister Klaus Kinkel unveiled Europe’s “Critical Dialogue” program in 1993, a generation of European officials have said that outreach to Iran wouldn’t mean foregoing pressure on human rights. The same was true with the Obama administration, which insisted repeatedly that the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action was limited to Iran’s nuclear program and its embrace wouldn’t stop pressure for human rights violations.
While the Trump administration has spoken up for Iranians’ basic rights and freedoms, European leaders have been silent. So too have congressional Democrats. The Iranians should not be a political football. Marching to combat oppression in Iran is not like donning a pink pussy hat, meeting up with college friends, and marching in the United States. Iranians are now disappearing, and the worse is yet to come. It’s time to end the silence, learn the names of the missing, and treat Iran’s leadership with the disdain they deserve.
Michael Rubin (@Mrubin1971) is a contributor to the Washington Examiner’s Beltway Confidential blog. He is a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute and a former Pentagon official.
If you would like to write an op-ed for the Washington Examiner, please read our guidelines on submissions here.
