After an Iranian daily published a report about the harrowing ordeal of dozens of kids in a state orphanage run by clerics, the authorities have pressured the newspaper to redact its article.
Iranian journalist Mohammad Bagherzadeh said in a tweet on Monday that sources of the report, one of whom was a former employee of the state charity organization, were contacted and threatened.
Without saying who contacted the sources, Bagherzadeh said they told them either they rescind their statements or would be charged with insulting the clergy. He added that one of the sources was called in by the judiciary earlier in the day.
The original report was published by Etemad newspaper on June 11, revealing cases of child abuse at an orphanage operating under the supervision of the State Welfare Organization of Iran.
The operations of the center,whose employees were reportedly clerics, were suspended after the report published by the daily was also confirmed by several other sources.
In one of the cases, the clerics who were working as social workers put burning-hot clothing-iron on the hands and feet of a seven-year-old child as a punishment for bedwetting. Then they imprisoned him in an old bathroom infested with cockroaches and he was fed with dry bread and water for about a week.
According to one of the sources, who blew the whistle after he was fired from the center, the situation of all the 24 children kept at the orphanage for the past eight years were suffering from somewhat similar abuse.
For example, the clerics had devised a scoring system to evaluate the behavior of the children, subjecting them to serious psychological torture.
The accounts of these abuses and their validity were also confirmed by other sources, who also used to work there.
One of the sources was cited by Etemad as saying that "The children of the center were strangely afraid of one of the managers, who himself explained the reason for this fear: Since the early days, I scared the hell out of the children, so they would know who’s the boss here. I told one of the kids that I would cut his tongue and hit him on the mouth repeatedly until it was full of blood; and now these children are afraid of me like death.”
Another source told the paper that in one of the cases, a child was so traumatized by the physical and psychological sufferings inflicted by one of the female managers of the center that wanted to commit suicide, but he was finally dissuaded from any high-risk behavior and was put to sleep with a pill.
Mohamamd-Javad Hosseini, one of the senior officials of the State Welfare Organization of Iran, said that the center was given a warning and was only suspended temporarily because there were no prior complaints against it. The guardianship of the children was terminated, and new staff took control of the center, he added.
Reports of such abuses are usually buried by authorities but even with all the coverups the number of cases that made headlines is very high. The most recent case took place less than a month ago, when the manager of a center was arrested for abuse of handicapped children in the city of Shiraz.
Rezaei, a former chief commander of the IRGC, was immediately appointed by President Ebrahim Raisi as the secretary to the coordination council of the heads of the three powers of the government, an extra-constitutional body created by Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei after the United States imposed sanctions in 2018.
He became yet another top IRGC figure to pocket a political post, in what some called the "pakistanization" of Iran, with the military faction running the show.
Khabar Online influential website reminded its readers of some of Rezaei’s strange views. He wanted to make Iran’s rial the region's strongest currency exactly when it was experiencing the worst devaluation in its history.
Rezaei, who was four times a candidate for presidency but never came close to winning, promised during his campaigns to increase the cash handout to Iranians by ten-fold. Another one of his big ideas was suggesting to take thousands of US soldiers hostage in the Persian Gulf and demand a million dollars for each one of them.
Given his previous career in the IRGC perhaps Rezaei’s silly idea of taking US troops hostage made sense to him.
Although Rezaei claimed to lead Raisi's economic team following his appointment as vice president for economic affairs, in fact, it was first vice president Mohammad Mokhber who led the economic team, a major humiliation for Rezaei. The tension even gave him a heart attack at one point. Nonetheless, he remained an outcast as a vice president and no one, not even the news-thirsty Iranian media took him seriously. The government never paid attention to any of his ideas about saving Iran's ailing economy.
In another report, Khabar Online wrote that what appears to be important for Rezaei is to elevate his profile and increase visibility perhaps for the next presidential election.
Khabar Online added that he might even run for the parliament in March from his hometown of Masjed Suleiman in the hope of winning the seat of the parliamentary speaker.
Following his resignation from the post of vice president, former Central Bank Governor and presidential candidate Abdolnaser Hemmati wrote ironically in a tweet: "The man who wanted to make the Iranian currency the strongest money after the US dollar and the euro has resigned as rial was facing a 50-percent devaluation. Congratulations to Mr. Raisi and his economic team!"
Meanwhile, Iran International's senior political analyst Morad Veisi pointed out that Rezaei was isolated in the government's economic team for a long time. His new appointment shows that the Islamic Republic is creating illegal institutions within the government. The coordination council of the heads of the three powers of the government is an illegal entity the regime has created" having no other recourse for trying to deal with the economic crisis triggered by US sanctions.
Veisi added that with Rezaei’s new appointment now an increasing number of IRGC generals are being appointed to mobilize the government to do its job in which it has had no success so far. He said: "Gradually, the Islamic Republic is moving from a joint government of the clerics and the IRGC, to an absolutely military government." Veisi further called this "The Pakistanization of the Islamic Republic of Iran."
The coordination council of the heads of the three powers of the government has had no success in solving some of the daunting economic problems. Now, the council is an institution with an official secretariat and a high-profile secretary such as Rezaei. While so far, the council has evaded responsibility for the economic mess, from now on it would be difficult to conceal the council.
It is highly likely that the new post will further damage ambitious Rezaei’s image and his unlikely chance of winning a higher position in the government.
In a show of unity with the regime allies who also share the anti-US animosity, a raft of so-called economic agreements were announced as a show of force as Iran rattles its saber.
IRNA, the Iranian government official news agency, published an article on the eve of Raisi’s visit, titled “Why Iran's president is welcomed with open arms in America's backyard?”, a celebration of what it hailed as a diplomatic coup de force.
“The political atmosphere and political attitude of the people of this geographical area can be defined in opposition to the US,” read the article, citing Raisi as saying: “The common position between us and these three countries is standing against the regime of domination and unilateralism."
Although Iran and Venezuela signed over two dozen memoranda of understanding during Raisi’s extravagant visit to his comrade Nicolas Maduro’s land and voiced willingness to increase bilateral trade to $20 billion, up from a self-proclaimed figure of $3 billion, both countries are so broke that can hardly keep themselves afloat.
“The level of economic cooperation was at a level of $600 million two years ago but today this has increased trade and economic cooperation to more than $3 billion,” Raisi said in Caracas.
During the signing ceremony, Maduro said the countries had signed a whopping 25 agreements “during this historic visit of President Raisi” stating there was more to come with investments in the pipeline across industries from oil and gas to gold and iron, though no details were provided regarding the agreements.
In a hopeful spirit, he said: “We are signing an agreement to establish a joint shipping company Iran-Venezuela that allows us to raise trade to the levels that President Raisi is pointing out.”
On a more serious note, there is concern over The Monroe Doctrine, a foreign policy position that states any intervention in the political affairs of the Americas by foreign powers is considered a potentially hostile act against the United States.
Raisi’s two-day visit to Venezuela this week along with a huge entourage and scheduled trips to Cuba and Nicaragua -- all sanctioned by Washington – seems like an effort to encroach on the region, especially following similar inroads by Tehran’s allies China and Russia.
Over almost two centuries, the Monroe doctrine has protected the US from unwanted foreign influence in the region. Most recently, it was invoked in the 1962 Cuban missile crisis when Kennedy gave an ultimatum to the Soviets to pull out their missiles. The last time the doctrine made headlines was in March, when two Islamic Republic’s warships docked in Brazil.
Experts wonder if such a historic foreign policy principle could be the answer to the threat of Iranian encroachment.
In an opinion piece for The Wall Street Journal this week, Walter Russell Mead, a fellow in Strategy and Statesmanship at Hudson Institute, said that Raisi’s visit is also a chance for Latin American politicians to gain solace from fellow opponents to the US, blaming capitalism and the US for the otherwise inexplicable failure of their policies, and roll out the red carpet for America’s opponents.
He pointed out that ties with Russia and China are booming, as Moscow has resumed its Cold War efforts to subsidize a Cuban economy and China is offering Cuba billions of dollars in exchange for the construction of a sophisticated intelligence facility to be used against the US.
“But Moscow’s efforts are dwarfed by Beijing’s. Chinese trade with Latin America and the Caribbean rocketed from $18 billion in 2002 to $450 billion 20 years later and is projected to reach $700 billion by 2035,” he said.
“The steady incursions of US rivals into the Western Hemisphere would have touched off a political firestorm at any time since James Monroe issued his famous doctrine,” Mead argued, adding: “But Latin America and the Caribbean are the last remaining places where the American foreign-policy establishment appears to cling to post-Cold War complacency about America’s rivals.”