Address nuclear threat, rights abuses in Iran
Des Moines Register, December 1, 2008
Alireza Jafarzadeh (Foreign Affairs Analyst)
President-elect Barack
Obama spoke frequently during the campaign of the threat
posed by a nuclear Iran and a new U.S. policy to neutralize
it. The status quo is no longer tenable as it is now
believed that Iran may have enough nuclear material to make
a single bomb.
To be effective, however, this new approach must also deal
with the ayatollahs' appalling human-rights record. Here is
why:
Tehran's quest for nuclear weapons is intimately intertwined
with its multifaceted suppression of the citizenry at home.
They all serve to empower the ruling establishment. Without
an end to human-rights abuses, any promise of cooperation on
the nuclear front is a sham at best.
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Since coming to power in 1979, the ayatollahs have used
their unique blend of religious demagoguery and abundant
barbarity to sow fear, confusion and doubt in the minds of
ordinary people. For all their populist claims, the ruling
clerics are neither willing nor able to fulfill the Iranian
people's legitimate social, economic and political demands.
Well aware of this inherent weakness, they have built their
regime on suppression at home and crisis-making abroad.
In a shocking confession that provides a glimpse into the
ayatollahs' barbarity, Reza Malek, a former deputy at the
Ministry of Intelligence and Security recently admitted that
there are between 170 to 190 mass graves for political
prisoners murdered in 1988. Malek revealed that the "mass
graves included 11- to 12-year-old children and pregnant
women," and said that in Tehran alone, 100 secret prisons
and torture chambers are affiliated with the ministry.
There has been a dramatic rise in executions in recent
months, many of them juveniles. This latest spike is
apparently part of a wider effort to quell an increasingly
disenchanted citizenry and growing anti-government protests.
Dissident groups and international human-rights
organizations insist that Tehran regularly executes
political activists claiming they're armed robbers and drug
addicts. In late July, 29 individuals were executed on the
same day as "criminals," while several of them were in fact
arrested during anti-government riots the year before.
In March, the U.S. State Department reported that in 2007,
Iran's "poor human-rights record worsened, and it continued
to commit numerous, serious abuses... The law criminalized
dissent and applied the death penalty to offenses such as
apostasy."
The ayatollahs have failed to terrorize the opposition into
submission, however. Student activists, women, laborers,
journalists, bloggers, ethnic and religious minorities and
bus drivers risk arrest and mistreatment. They remain
undeterred, to the distraction of a regime already beset by
infighting and growing international isolation.
Although there is a groundswell of dissent and desire for
change, Iran's democracy movement has been hamstrung by the
blacklisting of the main opposition, the People's Mojahedin
Organization of Iran. A western journalist wrote from Tehran
last year, "The Iranian rulers are very concerned and
alarmed, not about an unfeasible foreign military attack,
but because of the people's support for the [PMOI]. Today,
[PMOI] is highly capable of attracting the young people born
and raised after the revolution." In late October, Abdolreza
Rajabi, a PMOI member, died in a notorious prison in Iraq as
a result of torture, according to United Press
International.
Until now, successive U.S. administrations have essentially
vacillated between outright appeasement and inconsistent
containment. But the ayatollahs' admitted fear of the enemy
within presents the incoming administration with a clearer
choice.
The Iranian people and their movement for democratic change
can provide the international community with the leverage
needed to bring about real change. Anything else would be
business as usual.
Alireza Jafarzadeh is a FOX News Channel Foreign Affairs
Analyst and the author of "The
Iran Threat: President Ahmadinejad and the Coming Nuclear
Crisis" (Palgrave Macmillan, 2007).
Jafarzadeh has revealed Iran's terrorist network in Iraq and
its terror training camps since 2003. He first disclosed the
existence of the Natanz uranium enrichment facility and the
Arak heavy water facility in August 2002.
