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Commentary
by U.S. Alliance for Democratic Iran
Whitewashing Ayatollahs’ Atrocities in Iran
It is almost an impossible task to legitimately
and successfully defend and justify negotiations
and reconciliation with a regime that is
persistently killing, maiming, torturing, and
stoning its own citizens. So it should not come
as a surprise that Tehran’s apologists are
working double hard these days to hide the
ayatollahs’ bloody hands and deny the existence
of appalling human right crisis in Iran. They
blame everyone and everything but the regime -
from the “radical demands” of people and
“radical political organizations” to
Washington’s statements supporting democracy -
for the barbaric rights violations going on in
Iran.
Last December, in an editorial titled “The only
Iran war is within Iran,” the Christian Science
Monitor ridiculed the excuses made by “friends”
of ayatollahs. The Monitor wrote: “It would be
easy to say the regime simply fears alleged
American meddling, like the CIA kind that was
behind the infamous 1953 coup. And that's
certainly a convenient excuse used by Iran and
its friends to justify repression. But the hard
evidence is that Iran's 70 million people –
two-thirds of whom are younger than 33 years old
– are alienated from their government and tired
of nearly three decades of "revolution" with
little to show for it.”
The events of recent weeks in Iran again
indicate that the three-decade long failure of
pro-reconciliation line is not at all for lack
of efforts on their part and unwillingness of
Washington and other capitals. The failure has
first and foremost to do with the fact that the
ayatollahs’ regime lacks the ideological and
political capacity and willingness to engage in
a meaningful diplomatic reconciliation process.
On February 7, Amnesty International warned that
two sisters, Zohreh and Azar Kabiri-niat, are
facing execution by stoning for "adultery',
following a ruling by the Supreme Court in Iran.
The court had also upheld another
death-by-stoning ruling for Abdullah Farivar,
49, also for “adultery” as his offense. Local
authorities have informed his family last week
that the sentence would soon be carried out.
Meanwhile there are reports that two Kurdish
students have been arrested for unspecified
reasons, bringing the number of arrested Kurdish
students to 11 in recent weeks. The state-run
daily Etemad reported this week that a young
Iranian man has been sentenced to hang for
repeatedly consuming alcohol. This week, the
clerical regime also sentenced nine teenagers to
death who were all under 18 at the time of the
alleged crime.
Late last month, Mahmoud Hashemi Shahroudi, the
ayatollahs’ chief of judiciary, reacting to
mounting international condemnation and outrage
over a series of horrific public hangings,
issued a ban for public executions except in
cases approved by him. A week later, Sharoudi
announced a ban on detentions unless charges are
pressed against the detainee. These decrees
would have been significant news if the “rule of
law” really existed in Iran and what Shahroudi’s
orders really taken seriously. He had previously
banned the practice of issuing sentence of
death-by-stoning. That order has been ignored by
many “religious judges” in Iran.
Iran’s system of governance is structurally and
intrinsically incapable of meaningful reform. To
understand why Tehran will never halt its
nuclear weapons program - which includes
production of fissile material – one must first
understand why the ayatollahs’ rule can not
survive without an all out suppression of Iran’s
people.
In March 2006, the Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali
Khamenei, who in alliance with the Islamic
Revolutionary Guards’ top brass brought Mahmoud
Ahmadinejad to presidency, told an audience that
Iran's nuclear program was "irreversible" since
any retreat would endanger totality of the
regime. Khamenei said: “Any retreat will open
the way for a series of endless pressure and
never-ending backdowns.”
What Khamenei is really alluding to is the
domino effect of retreat in the nuclear case on
other elements of the mullahs’ survival
handbook, most notably human rights and domestic
terror. They know full well that any voluntary
retreat on the human rights front would bring
about an end to their rule.
In 2005, shortly after assuming his position as
the Secretary General of Iran’s Supreme National
Security Council, Ali Larijani told reporters
that Tehran viewed nuclear capability as
providing the sole guarantee for its survival.
Larijani, a protégé of Supreme Leader Khamenei,
said, “This is a war. If we take a step back
today, tomorrow they will bring up the issue of
human rights, and the day after they will bring
up the issue of Hezbollah, and then democracy,
and other matters.”
A close look at Iran’s internal dynamics - the
size and frequency of anti-government protests,
as well ayatollahs barbaric and growing
crackdown of social and political dissent – show
that these are all the tell-tell signs of a
tyranny in the existential fear of its own
people.
The people of Iran are at war with the ruling
religious fascism. They are in a patriotic
struggle for freedom, democracy, and rule of
law. We must join Iranians in this noble war,
not militarily, but by throwing our full
diplomatic and political weight behind them.
Iran’s ruling demagogues must be stopped and
they can only be stopped when they are gone. The
notion of reconciliation and possibility of a
behavioral change in Tehran is simply a policy
ruse promoted by the Trans-Atlantic advocates of
Tehran regime to cloak the real war within.
(USADI)
USADI
Commentary reflects the viewpoints of the US Alliance
for Democratic Iran in respect to issues and events
which directly or indirectly impact the US policy toward
Iran |