Australian FM Slams Crackdown On Iranian Protesters

After the recent statements of Javad Shahrestani, Ayatollah Sistani’s son-in-law, who claimed the nationwide protests in Iran “are not popular at all,” in a short statement on Wednesday the Grand Ayatollah stated that “any political stance” by him will be communicated through his office.

Javad Shahrestani, who introduces himself as the representative of Sistani, had called the Iranian protesters “a bunch of rioters,” saying “it is not clear where they came from and what kind of enemy they are guided by.”

These statements are made in a situation that the Iranian state media and insiders repeatedly call the protesters "garbage", "lewd", "jaunty", "flies", "thugs" and "ISIS" in their speeches against the great movement of Iranian people.

In its latest, the commander of the Army's Ground Forces called the demonstrators "flies" in his speech on Wednesday.

In the past four decades, Iran's government has always called popular protests "riots" and by using the term "enemy", it has accused the West, especially the United States and Britain of leading these protests.

Ayatollah Sistani rarely comments on current political issues. However, Moqtada al-Sadr, another influential Shia figure in Iraq, has expressed concern that opposition to the mandatory hijab in Iran may spread to other countries in the region.

The German parliament – the Bundestag -- passed a comprehensive package of measuresagainst the Islamic Republic following a session on the current situation in Iran on Wednesday. The ratified motion, submitted by a coalition of factions, calls on the government to support the protest movement in Iran and increase pressure on the regime in Tehran.

Describing the current wave of unrest as “the greatest challenge to the inhuman Iranian regime,” the lawmakers said Mahsa Amini’s death, which ignited the current uprising, is just part of “the systematic violation of human and civil rights in Iran for more than four decades, where women and minorities are particularly discriminated against and oppressed.”

“On an unprecedented scale, the Iranian society is protesting against the authoritarian regime, which has completely lost its basis of legitimacy and only wants to secure power with sheer violence,” read the motion, adding that all social classes throughout the country are expressing their frustration against “arbitrary harassment, oppression, a lack of transparency, bad governance, corruption...”

The German MPs also urged the government “to maintain the already increased political and diplomatic pressure on the regime in Tehran” particularly through a resolution over Islamic Republic’s Human Rights situation in the Third Committee of the UN General Assembly and in the UN Human Rights Council. The government should ensure a special session on the human rights situation in Iran and an extension of the mandate of the UN special rapporteur on Iran, they added. 

They also voiced their support for further sanctions at the EU level on those responsible for the violent crackdown, including asset freezes and travel bans. Some of their other demands were aimed at supporting NGOs that document evidence of Iran’s state violence and arbitrary arrests, as well as dissident Iranians from the areas of culture, science, media and civil society.

The lawmakers also called for further examination on whether and how the Islamic Center in Hamburg (IZH) can be closed for good, calling it "the hub of the operations of the Iranian regime in Germany.” Germany has already expelled Iranian cleric Soleiman Mousavifar, who was the deputy head of the IZH, from the country for his support for Shiite extremist and terrorist organizations.

Earlier on Wednesday, German Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock said, "We're not letting up. We stand with the men and women in Iran, and not only today, but as long as it is necessary. We bring their voices to the world. Their names are Mahsa, Nika, Abdolfazl, Mohammad, Omid or Minu. You are not alone."

Announcing that the European Union will seek to adopt new sanctions against the Islamic Republic next week, Baerbock said, "Four weeks after the death of Mahsa Amini, we've imposed EU sanctions against those responsible for the brutal crackdown on the protests in Iran. We are working flat out on the next package of sanctions. Next week we want to adopt it."

Iranian Foreign Minister Hossein Amir-Abdollahian reacted to her marks in a tweet on Thursday, describing them as meddling in the country’s domestic affairs, and warning that Tehran will give a “proportionate and firm” response to such positions. “Undermining old ties has long-term consequences. Germany can choose engagement to address shared challenges or confrontation,” he said.

The European Union already imposed sanctions in mid-October against Iran’s “morality police” and three other organizations as well as 11 officials, including the telecommunications minister, for their role in the death of Mahsa Amini and the crackdown on protests. The new punitive measures have a good chance of being approved by EU foreign ministers at their upcoming meeting slated for November 14.

European Parliament President Roberta Metsola also called on Europe to take a firm stance against the clerical regime, noting that an international investigation and further targeted sanctions will keep the regime accountable.

The Telegram channel of Student Councils Union announced that students at Bojnord University of Medical Sciences staged a sit-in Thursday to protest the illegal suspension of their peers and threats by the authorities.

A group of students at the Faculty of Fine Arts at Tehran University also staged a sit-in to show anger at the killing of Baluch citizens and the suppression of students.

Some others at the University of Welfare and Rehabilitation Sciences in Tehran also announced in a statement that they will boycott all classes.

This week, students in various universities including Sharif, Amir Kabir, Tehran, Esfahan, and Azad University's branches of Central Tehran as well as Science and Research also called for protest sit-ins.

On Wednesday, the Telegram channel reported that 138 students at Gilan University in northern Iran have been suspended for one semester and some 34 others for two semesters.

In an appalling move, Tehran University of Arts announced on Sunday that all drama graduate students will be suspended and cannot take the final exams.

Many students have been arrested since the beginning of anti-regime protests in September following the death of Mahsa Amini at the hand of regime forces. Some are kidnapped by security forces, and often nobody knows their whereabout for days.

In a tweet late on Wednesday the Iranian top diplomat said, “in a friendly meeting I hosted the former foreign ministers of the Islamic Republic of Iran Kamal Kharazi, Manuchehr Mottaki, Ali Akbar Salehi and Mohammad Javad Zarif.”

Further he added that “We are determined to accomplish the objectives of the diplomacy in realizing the greatest interests of the nation by relying on collective wisdom.”

However, Amir-Abdollahian did not mention anything about the agenda of the meeting and the issues raised.

Some Iranian dailies, however, called the meeting “an urgent” one not giving any other details.

The meeting comes as negotiations to revive 2015 nuclear deal are in a deadlock, with the United States openly stating that the talks are not its focus at the moment.

The recent protests that have swept the country are having an undisputable impact on the chances of the revival of the JCPOA as it is getting more difficult for Washington and the West to negotiate with the Islamic Republic when anti-regime demonstrators are subjected to a brutal cracked down in the streets.

The United States and its European allies have warned Tehran to respect fundamental human and civil rights of the protesters and are threatening more sanctions.

It seems that the incumbent minister is seeking help from his predecessors to get the regime out of the impasse, but major policies in Iran are set by Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei.

Several Iranian officials including government spokesman Ali Bahadori Jahromi and Iranian Army's Ground Force Commander Kiumars Haydari have made extremely annoying comments against protesters in recent days, and 227 Iranian lawmakers have called on the government to issue death sentence for detained protesters. Meanwhile, a newspaper under Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei's direct supervision called on the police and Revolutionary Guard to use live combat ammunition against protesters.

Former reformist lawmaker Mohammad Javad Haghshenas said in an interview with Rouydad24 website on Wednesday, November 9 that lawmakers demanding death sentence for demonstrators aim to escalate violence in Iran. He warned that the government has lost all opportunities for a rapprochement with the nation and currently the government and the people face each other “in extra time,” using a sports allegory.

Hardliner lawmakers are beating on the drums of violence, the politician said. His comment was backed on social media where several people charged that "Those who believe to be representing the people, have been calling for execution of those who have voted for them.”

Haghshenas said, "These lawmakers were not even brave enough to put their names on the statement. These are individuals who have entered parliament in a non-competitive election engineered by the Guardian Council and its so-called discretionary supervision. They are even ignorant of their own status as the people's representatives."

In early 2020, the constitutional watchdog, the Guardian Council in charge of vetting candidates before elections, disqualified hundreds of people ready to compete and engineered a near-total domination of parliament by hardliners in February of that year.

Haghshenas added that the statement by the hardliners will further enrage the protesters who are already angry about and tired of corruption, discrimination and humiliation that prevails in the Iranian society because of the government's hard-line policies.

"They even do not know that the government cannot issue death sentences, or any other sentences and any such decision should be made by the Judiciary that is supposed to be independent of the executive and legislative bodies," Haghshenas added.

Meanwhile, in an article on the Etemad Online website, reformist commentator Abbas Abdi wrote: "The message the government is sending is: We do not to listen to you and do not understand you, and even if we do understand your demands, we do not believe we should give a positive response."

He accused the government of not even understanding plain Persian.

"The government believes in a paranoid way that reality does not exist and it is the government who can create a reality by coming up with its own narrative about what is going on in the society," Abdi observed.

Instead of doing that, the government should tackle the shortage of medicine, control the forex market and inflation and try to sell some oil and reduce the 40-percent inflation to the single-digit figure it promised last year, the pundit argued.

Meanwhile, Iran's reform front, an umbrella organization of several reformist parties and political organizations, issued a statement on Wednesday, saying that the current wave of protests that are led by women and young Iranians is "a movement to take back life."

The statement said the protests are the outcome of many years of denial of the people's concerns that the regime has refused to recognize. The popular anger is the product of accrued and unsolved problems, such as humiliation and oppression people have felt for years, a long-running economic crisis, corruption and discrimination.