When Iran’s clerical regime announced that it had carried out the execution of a resident of France, Ruhollah Zam, several European nations responded by pulling out of a Europe-Iran Business Forum that was scheduled to begin on Monday. Meanwhile, the European Union released a statement condemning the execution “in the strongest terms” and reiterating its opposition to the death penalty as well as its concern over the systematic denial of due process and “human dignity” in the Iranian criminal justice system.
These actions were undoubtedly appropriate first steps toward a broader reckoning with Iran’s contempt for human rights. But they must be understood in precisely those terms, as the first of many steps designed to hold the regime and its leading officials accountable for the unlawful killing of dissidents and political prisoners, as well as for a host of other malign activities. Furthermore, the EU’s statement and the cancellation of Monday’s economic diplomacy panel should raise serious questions as to why European policy was amendable to such events in the first place.
With their simultaneous decisions to pull out of the forum, the French, German, Austrian, and Italian foreign ministries seemed to imply that they believe they can have more of an effect by reducing relations with the Iranian regime than by maintaining or increasing them. Yet each of those foreign ministries has accepted, and supported a set of EU policies that run in exactly the opposite direction.
Those policies are outright appeasement. A lack of serious consequences for malign activity has left Tehran with an abiding sense of impunity, thereby encouraging more of the same behavior and leaving Western policymakers to decide between admitting fault in order to break the cycle, or doubling and tripling down on the status quo in hopes that Tehran would eventually come to appreciate friendly relations with its “enemies” and change its own foreign policies accordingly.
The latter preference has been predominant for the better part of four decades, and the consequences arguably include a laundry list of fatalities much like that of Ruhollah Zam. In fact, such individual instances of the regime’s political retaliation pale in comparison to certain crimes against humanity that have gone largely ignored and entirely unpunished ever since the founding of the Islamist dictatorship.
The worst of these crimes made a return to international headlines just days before Zam’s execution, when a group of United Nations human rights experts published an open letter to the Iranian government which demanded information pertaining to the systematic execution and secret burial of political prisoners during the summer of 1988. The letter was originally delivered to its recipients in September, but was held back from the public to allow for a formal response, which never came.
The regime’s casual dismissal of that letter served as another reminder of its perceived impunity, insofar as it demonstrated that Iranian officials believe they don’t even have to defend themselves against accounts of a massacre that have claimed 30,000 victims. Further details of that massacre emerged in the form of leaked audio recording in 2016, on which Ruhollah Khomeini’s would-be successor could be heard decrying it as the “worst crime of the Islamic Republic” and confirming that the “death commissions” in charge of it had been utterly indiscriminate in their application of the death penalty, refusing to spare young teenagers or pregnant women.
The resulting public discussion of the killings yielded some of the most shameless commentary to date, with at least one perpetrator saying he was “proud” to have carried out “God’s command” of death for members of the People’s Mojahedin Organization of Iran – the main target of the massacre. The relevant quotation was offered to state media by Mostafa Pourmohammadi, who was then serving as Minister of Justice. The current occupant of that office was also a direct participant in the 1988 massacre, as was the current head of Iran’s judiciary, Ebrahim Raisi.
These facts underscore an observation that was present in the UN experts’ letter: that the lack of accountability has led to a number of unrepentant human rights abusers maintaining positions of tremendous and power and influence in Iranian regime and society to this very day. The letter also seemed to acknowledge that this is a direct consequence of Western policies that were already wholly lacking in assertiveness at a time when the massacre was still ongoing.
“In December 1988, the UN General Assembly passed resolution A/RES/43/137 on the situation of human rights in Iran, which expressed ‘grave concern’ about ‘a renewed wave of executions in the period July-September 1988,’ targeting prisoners ‘because of their political convictions’,” the letter stated before noting that no major UN body made this topic the target of concrete action.
“The failure of these bodies to act,” the letter continued, “had a devastating impact on the survivors and families as well as on the general situation of human rights in Iran and emboldened Iran to continue to conceal the fate of the victims and to maintain a strategy of deflection and denial that continue to date.”
That strategy applies not just to the 1988 massacre itself, but also to a wide range of more recent human rights abuses and crimes against humanity, of which Ruhollah Zam’s execution is one example that also happens to be particularly visible to the international community. Of course, that visibility robs Tehran of the option to deny the situation, especially given that the likely purpose of the killing was to intimidate the public at a time of recurring unrest inside Iran.
But the international visibility of Zam’s case only gives the regime more incentive to deflect criticism in various creative if cynical ways. This it tried to do on Sunday with summons for the French and German ambassadors, who were subjected to questioning and protest over the EU’s statement condemning the execution. In typical fashion, the Iranian Foreign Ministry insisted that such matters were of no concern to Western nations, regardless of the fact that Zam had successfully applied for refugee status in France and had been residing there until the time of an operation by the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps which kidnapped him back to Iran.
The Foreign Ministry’s director for Europe called the EU statement an “unacceptable interference in Iranian domestic affairs.” And in particular twist of irony, he also saw fit to accuse European governments of permitting “terrorism” against Iran, while failing to acknowledge that roughly two weeks before Zam’s execution, an Iranian diplomat-terrorist and three co-conspirators went on trial in Belgium for attempting to bomb an Iranian Resistance’s gathering in the heart of Europe during the summer of 2018.
That terror trial, the first of its kind for an Iranian diplomat, has been a source of numerous calls to action by the Iranian Resistance. As the Iranian Resistance has long emphasized, a language of strength is all the clerical regime understands, and that firm Western policies are needed in order to hold that regime accountable for crimes as indiscriminate as mass executions or bomb plots aimed at eliminating the dissidents.
