Crackdown seeks to quell critical voices in Iran

Executions on a scale not seen in years. Mass arrests of regime critics, including top filmmakers. Legal proceedings against foreigners who are denounced by their families as a sham.

Activists argue that Iran is in the midst of an intensified crackdown affecting all sectors of society, from union activists to activists against forced headscarves for women to religious minorities.

The repression comes a year after the rule of President Ebrahim Raisi, the ultra-conservative former judiciary chief who succeeded the more moderate Hassan Rouhani in August 2021.

Raisi and Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, who remains Iran’s number one, are grappling with an economic crisis and a spate of disasters, including a deadly building collapse in Abadan in May, that have sparked unusual protests.

The economic problems are caused in part by sanctions over Iran’s nuclear program. But there is no sign so far that world powers and the Iranian leadership are close to the breakthrough needed to revive the 2015 nuclear deal.

“The current actions are closely linked to the increase in protests in Iran,” said Ali Fathollah-Nejad, Iran expert at the Issam Fares Institute for Public Policy and International Affairs and the American University of Beirut.

He said the nationwide protests in December 2017 and November 2019 had left their mark on Iran’s leadership, and while the protests were socio-economically driven, they “quickly turned political and have targeted the entire establishment.”

“Street protests continue to be a threat to the stability of the regime,” he told AFP.

The spike in executions has been startling, with Iran executing twice as many people in the first half of 2022 as it did in the same period a year earlier, according to Iran Human Rights, a Norway-based NGO, which now counts at least 318 executions this year Year.

Amnesty International said Iran was on an “execution frenzy” with executions now proceeding at an “appalling pace”. IHR said those executed included 10 women, three of whom were hanged in a single day on July 27, all for murdering their husbands.

Meanwhile, Iran has also resumed amputating the fingers of prisoners convicted of theft, with at least two people suffering the sentence this year, imposed by a specially installed guillotine in Tehran’s Evin prison, Amnesty said.

Meanwhile, on July 23, Iran carried out its first public execution in two years.

“The widespread executions are being used by the authorities to instill fear in society and prevent further anti-government protests,” said IHR director Mahmood Amiry Moghaddam.

There is a growing movement inside and outside Iran – based on the hashtag “#edam_nakon” (Do not execute) – to stop the use of the death penalty in the Islamic Republic, which executes more people annually than any nation other than China.

A prominent voice was director Mohammad Rasoulof, whose chilling anti-death penalty film There is No Evil won the 2020 Golden Bear at the Berlin Film Festival.

But Rasoulof was arrested in early July after he launched a petition by directors and actors in May calling on security forces to lay down arms amid the protests.

Award-winning director Jafar Panahi, who has been unable to leave Iran for years, was then arrested when he went two days later to inquire about Rasoulof’s whereabouts, and told him he was serving a previously imposed six-year sentence.

Behind bars, they join other famous dissidents, including rights activist Narges Mohammadi, whose life rights groups fear is at risk due to health problems that prison authorities are failing to address.

As part of the crackdown, a number of relatives of victims of the violent crackdown on protests by the authorities in November 2019, who were demanding justice for their loved ones, were also arrested.

“There is no reason to believe that these latest arrests are anything but cynical moves to deter popular outrage at widespread government failures,” said Tara Sepehri Far, senior Iran researcher at Human Rights Watch the government to resort to “its repressive reflex arrest of popular critics”.

The past two months have also seen arrests of Baha’i in what the Baha’i International Community (BIC) calls an “escalating crisis in the Iranian government’s systematic campaign” against the country’s largest non-Muslim religious minority.

According to the New York-based Center for Human Rights in Iran (CHRI), at least 20 dual or foreign nationals remain detained, under house arrest or trapped in what their families describe as a hostage-taking policy aimed at extorting concessions from the West .

In July, Iran released German-Iranian Nahid Taghavi from prison on medical treatment and released Iranian-British-American citizen Morad Tahbaz with an ankle bracelet. However, both remain unable to leave Iran, while a Polish national, a Belgian, a Swede and two Frenchmen have joined the prison inmates.

Among those behind bars is German national Jamshid Sharmahd, who his family says was kidnapped in the Gulf in July 2020 and now risks the death penalty in a trial expected to conclude in the next few weeks.

“This is framed work against him aimed at prosecuting dissidents and journalists who use their freedom of expression in the free world,” his daughter Gazelle Sharmahd told AFP. “It’s outrageous that we allowed this to happen,” she said.