By Isaac Schorr
Sunday, September 06, 2020
Upon being elected president of the Islamic Republic of
Iran in 2013, Hassan Rouhani was heralded by Western leaders and the media as a
harbinger of a new era. White House press secretary Jay Carney said that his
election “represented a call by the Iranian people for change.” The Washington
Post called Rouhani a “moderate cleric” whose ascension delivered “an
unmistakable rebuke” to Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei. The New York Times
described Rouhani as “mild-mannered” and took his advocacy of “greater personal
freedoms” at face value.
Others saw Rouhani’s less ostentatiously hostile
presentation for what it was: a smokescreen. Though he was far less bombastic
and prone to saber-rattling than his predecessor, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, his
track record should have made it obvious that Rouhani was not going to turn
Iran into a less troublesome actor in the region or a bastion of human rights.
He was the same man who had chaired the Supreme National Security Council — the
body responsible for setting Iranian nuclear policy and believed to be
responsible for the planning of terrorist attacks from Buenos Aires to Saudi
Arabia — from 1989 until 2005. To Rouhani, “Israel is the great Zionist Satan”
that “can never feel that it is in a safe place,” and “the beautiful cry of ‘Death
to America’ unites” his country. In a 2004 speech, Rouhani boasted that nuclear
negotiations he was holding with Britain, France, and Germany bought time that
allowed engineers to install “equipment in parts of the [nuclear conversion]
facility in Isfahan.” “By creating a calm environment, we were able to complete
the work there,” he explained.
Seeing through the Rouhani administration’s “charm
offensive” in November 2013, Senator Marco Rubio wrote to advocate harsher
sanctions, noting that, his “moderate” label aside, Rouhani was the president
of “a government that is a notorious abuser of its people and the leading
global sponsor of terrorism.” Rubio has been vindicated not only by Iran’s
flagrant violations of the nuclear deal it agreed to in 2015 but also by its
continued support of Hezbollah in Lebanon, Houthi rebels in Yemen, and the
destabilizing activity of the Quds Force — the terrorist arm of the Iranian
Revolutionary Guard Corps, previously led by General Qasem Soleimani —
throughout the region.
It should come as no surprise, then, that Rouhani has
failed to live up to his reputation as a reformer at home as well as abroad.
During his original campaign in 2013, Rouhani ran on a platform of freeing
political prisoners and curbing the power of the morality police. A horrifying
new Amnesty International report
on the Iranian government’s response to widespread protests in November 2019
shows that this was empty campaign rhetoric.
The report, appropriately titled “Trampling Humanity,”
was put together after Amnesty conducted interviews with 76 individuals, 60 of
whom were subjected to “arbitrary arrest, enforced disappearance, torture, and
other ill treatment.” During and in the aftermath of the protests, thousands of
Iranians were arrested by security forces — in the vast majority of cases, for
merely showing up to the protests. In Bebahan, a small city of fewer than
125,000 people, over 1,000 were arrested. Children as young as ten years old
were taken into custody. Moreover, the “heightened security atmosphere” was
used as a “pretext . . . to arbitrarily arrest and detain members of ethnic
minority groups” such as “Ahwazi Arabs, Azerbaijani Turks, and Kurds, even when
they had not taken part in the protests.” Iranian authorities have not released
exact figures on how many were arrested, nor the fate of those who were.
Instead, officials have tendentiously claimed that “some have been referred to
courts” while “a considerable number have been released.” Punishments doled out
to those tried for their roles in the protests included being forced to wash
corpses in morgues, “researching the topic of the Islamic hijab and writing by
hand a 90-page paper on it,” and being forcibly conscripted into the
paramilitary Basij force.
Many of those arrested disappeared for weeks and even
months. Family members who inquired as to their status were often “subjected to
harassment [and] intimidation.” Some who vanished were taken to jail, others to
unofficial secret detention facilities, where even the minimal protections
afforded to prisoners in regular facilities are ignored and various forms of
torture could be carried out more easily.
Torture was used not only to force the “confessions” of
individuals’ unlawful behavior, “but also about their alleged associations with
opposition groups outside Iran.” Among the methods used by authorities to
elicit such confessions were beatings, prolonged stays in solitary confinement,
stress positions and suspension, electric shocks, mock executions, and sexual
violence and humiliation, including “forced nakedness, invasive body searches
intended to humiliate the victims, sustained sexual verbal abuse, pepper
spraying the genital area, and administering electric shocks to the testicles.”
Allegations have also been made that interrogators raped some detainees, but it
is very difficult to get interviewees to talk about such experiences because of
the “psychological, social, legal, and institutional barriers to reporting rape
and serious concerns around reprisal.”
Trials held were rife with injustices, as defendants were
frequently denied legal counsel, a fair and public hearing, an independent and
impartial tribunal, or the right to a meaningful appeal. They were also tried
before both criminal courts and Revolutionary Courts, the latter of which
charged them with vague infractions such as “spreading propaganda against the
system” and “gathering and colluding to commit crimes against national
security.”
The story of Amirhossein Moradi paints a full, ugly
picture of the Iranian regime’s response to protests under Rouhani. Moradi was
arrested in November and was held in solitary confinement with only
intermittent interrogation and torture interrupting it. He eventually
“confessed” to being involved in the protests “after his interrogators promised
to provide him with medical treatment for the injuries he sustained under
torture, which they later denied him.” Since then, Moradi and two other young
men have been sentenced to death for arson, and their fate has been
rubber-stamped by Iran’s Supreme Court. Only one more review process is left,
and a decision is forthcoming.
Jay Carney was right that Hassan Rouhani’s election in
2013 reflected the will of the Iranian people for détente with the West and an
expansion of their own rights and freedoms. But the Obama administration, the Post,
and the Times were wrong to believe that Rouhani was well suited to
achieve those aims. Supreme Leader Khamenei effectively decides who is even
able to run for office by way of a Guardian Council run by hardline clerics. If
Rouhani were truly an “unmistakable rebuke” to Khamenei, he would never have
become president. If Rouhani was determined to act in the best interest of his
people, reading Amnesty International’s report would not have been so
heartbreaking.
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