After a fierce state crackdown, in which many protesters were killed and tens of thousands arrested, public outrage subsided, at least momentarily. The protests had their roots in more than 4 decades of repressive policies such as organized resistance against the regime.
With the one-year anniversary of Iran’s largest anti-government uprising fast approaching, the regime is aware of the option of additional unrest. Several officials, adding the head of the brutally repressive Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, Hossein Salami, have publicly warned about this in recent years. Former IRGC commander and current speaker of parliament, Mohammad Baqer Qalibaf, went so far as to acknowledge the leading role played by the main opposition Mujahedin-e Khalq (MEK) party in the recent uprisings.
Videos have been shared on social media showing repressive forces and members of the IRGC-led Basij militia beating protesters in the streets and firing indiscriminately into crowds. Since 2022, the regime has been under investigation through the UN Human Rights Council for, among other things, an upsurge in executions that left around 400 dead in the first part of 2023, with the very likely aim of terrorizing the population to avoid further calls for insurrection.
The danger is most evident when one looks back at the regime’s catalogue of human rights violations and crimes against humanity, which includes a bloodbath of political prisoners in the summer of 1988.
Last month, dozens of members of the U. S. House of Representatives were elected to the U. S. House of Representatives. The U. S. government presented a bipartisan solution that highlighted the regime’s abuses and suggested to the Human Rights Council that it include the 1988 bloodbath in the timeline of its commission of inquiry.
The Iranian regime is also the leading state sponsor of terrorism in the world. In 2018, while the regime was still recovering from the first nationwide protests organized through MEK resistance units, Assadollah Assadi, an Iranian diplomat who at the time was serving at the regime’s embassy in Vienna, oversaw an operation that may have been one of the worst terrorist attacks on European soil. Assadi personally smuggled an explosive device into Europe and handed it over to co-conspirators with orders to detonate it at a primary world summit organized through Iran’s National Council of Resistance (NCRI).
The plot was foiled through European security agencies, but the plot served as a vital reminder of the regime’s determination to attack the democratic opposition anywhere it can, even as it threatens the lives of senior Western lawmakers and luminaries who witnessed an Iran on the loose. World Summit .
Last month, a Tehran court announced indictments against 104 MEK officials and sympathizers, none of whom live in Iran. In view of Tehran’s well-known practices, this bizarre measure raises the specter of imaginable killings, abductions of dissidents or coercive threats against their families.
Apparently at Tehran’s request, on June 20, Albanian police carried out a dubious raid on Ashraf 3, a network that has housed some 3,000 MEK members in years.
The incident drew lawmakers’ attention to the solution introduced in the U. S. House of Representatives, as well as at a Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearing on July 26, in which President Robert Menendez lamented the Democratic activists’ safe haven option.
Menendez asked incoming Assistant Secretary of State for European and Eurasian Affairs James O’Brien to “commit to protecting the rights and freedoms of the residents of Camp Ashraf,” to which Obrien responded that he would do so “absolutely. “
Such commitments are vital in all circumstances, all the more so when it is so transparent that the repressive rule of rogue states is actively threatening the ascendant democratic opposition, both at home and abroad. The threats in question can hardly be more transparent, and while it would possibly be difficult for the foreign network to interfere well on behalf of protesters inside the Islamic Republic, it is easy to fend off the regime’s attempts to expand its malign influence in Albania and elsewhere. The House’s recent solution “calls on the U. S. government. “”We are working with the United States, in cooperation with our Albanian ally, to ensure full coverage of Iranian political refugees at Ashraf 3 in Albania and to enable them to enjoy all the rights stipulated in the 1951 Geneva Convention and the European Convention on Human Rights. “
All other allies of the United States, and indeed all other governments that embrace the concepts of democracy and universal rights, deserve to solemnly dedicate themselves to doing the same at all times and wherever the network of Iranian expatriates is threatened by the ruling theocracy.