On Thursday, Ebrahim Raisi was officially inaugurated as the new president of the Iranian regime, prompting a predictable outpouring of condemnation from various corners of the international community. The regime and its supreme leader, Ali Khamenei, must have known this was coming. In recent years, there has been rapid growth in awareness of the crime against humanity in which Raisi took a leading role during the summer of 1988. Yet this did not stop Khamenei from making it clear at an early stage that Raisi was his choice to succeed the regime’s outgoing president Hassan Rouhani. Indeed, Raisi’s role in the 1988 massacre of political prisoners was presumably a major factor in that decision.
Tehran is currently facing unprecedented challenges from the civilian population. The regime barely survived a nationwide uprising in January 2018, and another in November 2019. In the latter instance, that survival was made possible by one of the worst crackdowns on dissent in recent years in Iran. Within days of the protests beginning, 1,500 peaceful protesters were shot dead by security forces and the Revolutionary Guards. At least 12,000 activists were arrested soon thereafter, and many of them were subjected to torture over a period of several months.
It is no mere coincidence that that torture was largely overseen by a judiciary that was then under the control of Ebrahim Raisi, whom Khamenei had appointed to the position the prior year. That appointment was widely viewed as a stepping stone toward his guaranteed ascension to higher positions in the regime. It was also recognized as part of a long pattern of the regime’s officials being rewarded for prior participation in human rights abuses, including the 1988 massacre. Handing over the regime’s highest law enforcement body to such an individual was a clear sign of Khamenei’s ongoing commitment to violent repression at a time of escalating dissent.
Khamenei’s subsequent endorsement of Raisi’s presidential campaign sent the same message and also signaled that the regime’s worst criminals would have even more power to implement crackdowns in the year ahead. Since being confirmed as the regime’s next president, Raisi has been replaced by his deputy as head of the judiciary. The new occupant of that office, Gholamhossein Mohseni Ejei, has a similar record of abuses, including participation in the 1988 massacre as the judiciary’s representative to the Ministry of Intelligence. Both he and Raisi are subject to American and European sanctions on account of different human rights violations, but this does not appear to have caused Khamenei to hesitate at all in giving them joint control over the country’s executive and judicial branches.
This is not to say that Khamenei is not at all concerned about the international effect of those appointments. It is just that any such concerns are naturally outweighed by his concerns over a fast-growing opposition movement with a fully articulated plan for establishing a democratic system of government in the wake of the clerical regime’s ouster.
For many years, the regime attempted to deny the existence of such a movement and was aided in that endeavor by the fact that its activities had largely been driven underground by the 1988 massacre. Of over 30,000 victims of that crime against humanity, the vast majority were members and supporters of the leading opposition group, the People’s Mojahedin Organization of Iran (PMOI/MEK). Yet in January 2018, with slogans like “death to the dictator” being chanted across more than 100 Iranian cities, Khamenei acknowledged that the MEK had “planned for months” to facilitate the uprising and had developed a vast following among the civilian population and the youth.
Warnings about that influence have continued to proliferate within the regime ever since and were substantiated by various other outpourings of dissent, not limited to the second, even larger uprising in November 2019. By that time, it had become clear that the regime had no strategy for containing this unrest other than a direct assault on protests, the mass arrest of political activists, and harassment of their families and friends. In June 2018, the regime even attempted to undermine the democratic opposition’s foreign base of support by attempting to infiltrate and set off explosives at the rally of Iranian expatriates and political supporters which had been organized near Paris by the National Council of Resistance of Iran.
The mastermind of that plot, a high-ranking Iranian diplomat-terrorist named Assadollah Assadi, was put on trial earlier this year and sentenced to prison in Belgium alongside three known co-conspirators.
The Belgian court confirmed that orders for the Paris bomb plot had come from high within the Iranian regime. In spite of this, neither Brussels nor any other Western capital has formally demanded accountability from the regime itself or from relevant officials or institutions. This, unfortunately, echoes the international response to the 1988 massacre, which involves occasional resolutions from certain legislative bodies but virtually no recognizable effort to formally investigate the incident or to pursue the prosecution of its leading perpetrators.
Relative inaction in the face of the regime’s terrorism and human rights abuses has provided the mullahs with a sense of impunity regarding most of its malign activities. This was no doubt reinforced on Thursday when Enrique Mora, the deputy political director for the European External Action Service, attended Raisi’s inauguration and implicitly recognized his legitimacy on the world stage.
This raises serious questions about the European Union’s willingness to live up to its own principles as a defender of human rights by imposing Magnitsky sanctions on the regime’s new president or even by exposing his history of abuses to the world in a way that might make world powers more likely to demand his prosecution, or at least to isolate him on the world stage. As long as those questions linger, Khamenei has little incentive to focus his attention on the international community’s attitudes and policies toward his regime. That in turn leaves him free to focus entirely on promoting his most brutal subordinates and directing them to crack down on the only real challenge to the regime’s hold on power.
With this in mind, every democratic nation in the world should understand that if they remain silent on Tehran’s long catalog of human rights abuses, the Iranian people will likely suffer the consequences in the form of further shooting incidents, more mass arrests, and a pattern of killings that may dwarf the 2019 crackdown and approach the shocking scale of the 1988 massacre. If recent history is any indication, though, none of this is likely to stop the anti-government protests that have been taking place across a growing number of localities and provinces since mid-July. Thus, the international community faces a choice between sitting on the sidelines while the Iranian people fight against their own brutalization, or else taking steps to defend those people by telling regime authorities that there will be consequences for their abuses at long last.
