Mourning the President of Iran

Every response by the United Nations and its subsidiary organisations to the deaths of the Iranian president and foreign minister has been deeply offensive to the memories of all those murdered and tortured by the current regime, both in Iran and abroad, including Israelis killed on October 7 and since.

According to a report by Amnesty International in 2009, marking the 30^th anniversary of the Islamic revolution, “the past 30 years have been characterised by persistent human rights violations”. The fifteen years since then have seen things get only worse. Ethnic minorities have continued to be persecuted, women remain oppressed, homosexuals have been killed, democracy is a sham, political prisoners have been tortured, raped and killed, in particular, in 1988 when thousands of political prisoners were killed. Non-governmental human rights groups such as Human Rights Watch, Amnesty and the Center for Human Rights in Iran, have expressed concern over issues such as the treatment of religious minorities, prison conditions, medical conditions of prisoners, deaths of prisoners, mass arrests of anti-government demonstrators and worse. Draconian punishments in the Islamic Republic have included stoning, flogging and amputation.

Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Iran’s Supreme Leader since 1989, said in 2014 that gender equality was “one of the biggest mistakes of Western thought”. Post-pubescent women in Iran are required to cover their hair and bodies and can be arrested for failing to do so leading to the recent protests by women. According to a US State Department Report on Iran in 2022, “Multiple nationwide protests began after the September 16 death of Mahsa (Jina) Amini in the custody of morality police after she allegedly violated mandatory veiling laws, and security forces used lethal force against protesters. Women and youth led the protests, chanting ‘Women, Life, Freedom’ and ‘Death to the Dictator.’ By the end of the year, security forces killed more than 500 persons, including at least 69 children, and arrested more than 19,000 protesters, including children, according to the nongovernmental organization Human Rights Activists News Agency.”

Ebrahim Raisi, the late President of Iran, was not a minor figure in this oppressive regime. Just three years ago, the Secretary-General of Amnesty, wrote, “That Ebrahim Raisi has risen to the presidency instead of being investigated for the crimes against humanity of murder, enforced disappearance and torture, is a grim reminder that impunity reigns supreme in Iran. In 2018, our organisation documented how Ebrahim Raisi had been a member of the ‘death commission’ which forcibly disappeared and extrajudicially executed in secret thousands of political dissidents in Evin and Gohardasht prisons near Tehran in 1988. The circumstances surrounding the fate of the victims and the whereabouts of their bodies are, to this day, systematically concealed by the Iranian authorities, amounting to ongoing crimes against humanity [sic].”

She continued, “As Head of the Iranian Judiciary, Ebrahim Raisi has presided over a spiralling crackdown on human rights which has seen hundreds of peaceful dissidents, human rights defenders and members of persecuted minority groups arbitrarily detained. Under his watch, the judiciary has also granted blanket impunity to government officials and security forces responsible for unlawfully killing hundreds of men, women and children and subjecting thousands of protesters to mass arrests and at least hundreds to enforced disappearance, and torture and other ill-treatment during and in the aftermath of the nationwide protests of November 2019.”

It is not for nothing, then, that Raisi, was known as the Butcher of Tehran. And yet his death was greeted by numerous statesmen and international organisations as a tragedy, with respectful responses from the UN Security Council, the director of WHO, NATO, the EU and others, as a tragedy. UN Security Council members, including the British and US representatives, stood for a minute’s silence as if Raisi had been Nelson Mandela, not a mass murderer. Farah Dakhlalla, a NATO press spokesperson, tweeted, “Our condolences to the people of Iran for the death of President Raisi, Foreign Minister Amir-Abdollahian, and others who perished in the helicopter crash.” The Director of the International Atomic Energy wrote, “I extend my condolences on the tragic passing of President Ebrahim Raisi, Foreign Minister Hossein Amir-Abdollahian, and other delegation members. Our thoughts are with their families and the people of Iran during this difficult time.”

He forgot to mention, of course, that the people of Iran might have very mixed responses. It was a perfect litmus test. If you wanted to know which head of state or which international organisation is beyond the pale see how they responded to the deaths of Raisi and Amir-Abdollahian. Putin, Orban, the Director-General from WHO, The US State Department, Joseph Borrell Fontelles from the EU and Charles Michel, President of the European Council, all sent their condolences. UN flags have been flown at half-mast.

A very different view came from the Right. The Republican Congressman Brian Mast tweeted, “My condolences to the people of Iran for losing the opportunity to bring the Butcher of Tehran to justice for his crimes.”  An Iranian-Canadian politician, Goldie Ghamari, also responded to NATO’s condolences: “Why is NATO offering condolences on the death of Islamofascist terrorists like Raisi, known as the Butcher of Theran? That’s the equivalent of offering condolences on the death of Hitler. Is NATO on the side of IRGC terrorists or on the side of freedom loving Iranians?” The Dutch politician Geert Wilders responded to the EU’s offer to help locate the helicopter, including the hashtag #EUSolidarity with this terse message: “EU solidarity with evil.” He followed this up with, “I hope Iran will soon become a secular state again, with freedom for the Iranian people and without an oppressive and barbaric Islamic mullah regime.” The former UN Ambassador and former Republican Governor of South Carolina, Nikki Haley, wrote, “Raisi was responsible for the deaths of thousands of innocent Iranians. The people of Iran and the world are better off without his and the foreign minister’s barbarism. Now is the time to follow up and put American sanctions back on the Iranian regime.” Tom Tugendhat, the British Security Minister, could not have been clearer: “President Raisi’s regime has murdered thousands at home, and targeted people here in Britain and across Europe. I will not mourn him.”

And, above all, there were Persian emigres. One tweeted, “President ‘Butcher of Tehran’ Raisi of the Islamic Regime did not simply die. This psychopath crashed in a helicopter, into a literal wilderness, with agonizing injuries, in extreme freezing weather, where feral wolves feasted on his flesh. Karma is real.” Another wrote, “Some Iranian women are sharing nude photos on social media in reaction to the death of Raisi, the president of the Islamic Republic.” (See below.) Perhaps most curiously, there was also footage of Gazans handing out sweets to celebrate Raisi’s death.

BBC News, sadly but predictably, did not cover itself with glory in its reporting. Lyse Doucet, a widely respected international reporter, writing for the BBC News website, described Raisi as “a middle-ranking cleric, a conservative, a hardliner.” This is just shocking. One by one,  leading BBC international reporters and TV and radio news presenters have lost their credibility over Israel, so perhaps we shouldn’t have expected too much from them over Iran. The tone on the BBC News Channel when the helicopter carrying President Raisi and the then Iranian Foreign Minister disappeared was respectful, even funereal. I half expected the presenter to wear a black armband. The only footage of ordinary Iranians was taken from Iranian state TV, showing images of men praying for their survival. It was only on social media that we could see and hear Iranian dissidents and refugees celebrating joyfully and see the fireworks. On Today, which used to be a flagship BBC news programme before October 7, Mishal Husain interviewed some academic stooge from Tehran University who defended Raisi and, predictably, accused Israel of “genocide” in Gaza and Britain of sheltering anti-Iranian terrorists. Husain introduced him as a Professor of English Literature and Orientalism without pointing out that to be a Professor at Tehran University means that you are necessarily a regime appointment. This was balanced, in the classic BBC tradition, by a former British ambassador to Iran, who was measured and interesting, but there were no Iranian critics of the regime on the programme just as there have rarely been Palestinian critics of Hamas allowed onto many BBC news programmes because, again, balance means having Israeli spokesmen balanced by pro-Hamas Palestinians.

The responses to the deaths of President Raisi and the Iranian foreign minister were entirely predictable. They reflected the new international fault-line between Left and Right, exposed by the conflict in Gaza. They showed that so many of our once-respected international organisations have no shame and should never be trusted in any international crisis whether a health pandemic or a terrible new war. Whether or not you respect right-wing European politicians like Wilders, US Republicans like Nikki Haley, or Conservatives like Tugendhat, their instincts on this issue were right. They knew that Raisi was a monster, with countless victims, and that the sooner Iran’s theocratic regime is overthrown the better for the people of Iran and of the whole region from Gaza to Syria. The most dignified responses of all came from the Iranian refugees and dissidents who have behaved so heroically over the past five decades.

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