By Mohammad Sadat Khansari
Over the past week, a protest movement expanded to encompass much of the Iranian province of Sistan and Baluchistan, following a clash on Monday between the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) and fuel porters in that region. Demonstrations of solidarity were also recorded in several major cities throughout Iran, with many participants using the opportunity to condemn the entire clerical regime and call for a regime change.
This series of incidents signal that Iranian society remains in an explosive state more than three years after a nationwide uprising that brought the topic of regime change into mainstream public discourse.
The most recent protests are not only another reminder of the regime’s vulnerability; they serve to highlight the brutality and contempt for human rights that makes that regime so unworthy of the international legitimacy it has been afforded in recent interactions with most Western nations. Even as the protests and resulting crackdowns were ongoing, that offer of legitimacy was reiterated in the form of plans for the Europe-Iran Business Forum, which is scheduled to begin on Monday with participation from the European Union’s head of foreign policy, Josep Borrell, among others.
The new protests in Iran and the Business Forum
Borrell’s decision to participate in the event had already come under fire because of its proximity to the February 4 conviction in a Belgian court for a high-ranking Iranian diplomat who attempted to bomb an expatriate gathering near Paris in 2018, which the NCRI organized. The new protests have naturally helped to fuel broader criticism of the Business Forum as an example of Western policies of appeasement in the face of a wide range of malign activities perpetrated by the Iranian regime both at home and abroad.
The unrest in Sistan and Baluchistan started when fuel porters discovered that the IRGC had dug large trenches near the border with Pakistan to prevent people to cross with merchandise that the IRGC itself has been known to smuggle in much larger quantities. Some of the porters, who are almost exclusively members of the local Baluch ethnic minority, then gathered to protest the authorities’ obstruction of their only livelihood. The IRGC promptly responded with gunfire, killing several impoverished locals before also driving residents out of a border village in anticipation of an outraged response.
This, of course, only helped to fuel an even stronger response from other nearby localities. Monday’s clash sparked massive protests on Tuesday in the city of Saravan, which drew additional gunfire from the IRGC. Drawing upon eyewitness reports, the MEK estimated that the death toll on that day was at least 40, with upwards of 100 other unarmed civilians being wounded. Yet even this expansion in violent repression did not have the intended effect of containing the unrest. In fact, if reports from the surrounding region are any indication, the result was quite the opposite.
The killings in 2017 and 2019 uprisings
This should have come as little surprise to anyone who has been observing the trajectory of events in Iran since the end of 2017 when protests over economic conditions began spreading beyond Iran’s “second city” of Mashhad and taking on a much more expansive political tone. As those protests persisted into the middle of January 2018, regime authorities cracked down very violently, attacking and arresting not just direct participants but also a wide range of known and suspected political activists. Several dozen people were killed as a result, and thousands of arrests were registered, many of which led to lengthy prison sentences.
“Iran’s Year of Uprising”
In November 2019, in another nationwide uprising, which was even more extensive than its predecessor, people took to the streets.
In that case, familiar slogans like “death to the dictator” and “down with the rule of the mullahs” could be heard in nearly 200 cities and towns less than two years after they’d previously achieved national prominence. Obviously spooked by the failure of their own repressive measures, Iranian authorities immediately stepped up their brutality in response to this second uprising. The IRGC opened fire on crowds of protesters, killing approximately 1,500.
Naturally, the killings were accompanied once again by mass arrests, which the MEK estimated as sweeping up at least 12,000 individuals. Many of those arrestees were then subjected to torture, as detailed in a report issued last September by Amnesty International, titled “Trampling Humanity.” The human rights organization corroborated much of what the Iranian Resistance had previously warned about, albeit with a slightly different set of accompanying recommendations about how the international community should intervene.
Iran Protests: Nationwide Uprising in Iran- November 2019
The EU turns a blind eye to the killings
Regardless of the particular recommendations that Western policymakers consider, one thing is certain: the international community must intervene somehow, or else the cycle of violence that began in December 2017 will consider growing more and more severe. The fatal consequences of that trend may not even remain contained to Iran. In response to the first uprising, Tehran directed one of its diplomats to attack the 2018 Free Iran rally, disregarding the potential for the massive loss of life among Western dignitaries who were in attendance. Absent serious deterrence, the regime is sure to attempt this strategy again.
It shouldn’t be necessary, but if these personal stakes are what finally drive Western governments to take measures that will seriously undermine Tehran’s repressive institutions, then so be it. By expanding sanctions and diplomatic isolation for the regime, those Western governments will undoubtedly help safeguard their own personnel. Still, they will also provide Iran’s domestic population with better opportunities to challenge that regime’s hold on power in the wake of the next inevitable outrage.
This should be a conscious goal for any European or American policymaker who is seriously committed to universal human rights principles or to promoting democracy in regions where the people are crying out for self-rule. The Iranian people have been repeating that cry since the inception of the mullahs’ regime. And the failure of the regime’s repression makes it clear that they will continue to do so for as long as it takes.
Unfortunately, those crimes have fallen on deaf ears more often than not. Much of the Western world remains more committed to the status quo than to helping the Iranian people build a better future for themselves. Monday’s Europe-Iran Business Forum will stand as an unfortunate reminder of this – all the more unfortunate because of its proximity to the latest mass killing of Iranian civilians. The international community should condemn both these things in the same breath and demand an immediate change in the underlying Western policies.
This article was first published by ncr-iran
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