Hanging is the popular technique of execution in Iran, though stoning and crucifixion supply different choices for an ever-vengeful theocracy. Demise by hanging will not be essentially fast. Strangulation and suffocation can take a number of minutes. The UN says greater than 600 individuals have been judicially murdered up to now this 12 months. Iran has extra executions per capita than any nation on the planet. Since June’s US and Israeli assaults, rising numbers of victims are political dissidents.
Fifty days on, nothing remotely optimistic has resulted from the unlawful bombing raids and missile strikes mounted by the US president, Donald Trump, and Israel’s chief, Benjamin Netanyahu, regardless of their boasts of world-changing success. Iran’s nuclear amenities weren’t obliterated, as Trump claimed. Tehran has not deserted uranium enrichment. The regime didn’t fall, regardless of Netanyahu’s name for an rebellion. If something, the supreme chief, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, is extra defiant. He has since launched a new crackdown on opponents, therefore the executions.
Deploring final weekend’s hanging of political prisoners Behrouz Ehsani and Mehdi Hassani, Amnesty Worldwide linked their destiny to the US-Israeli assaults. Arrested in 2022, the 2 males had been charged with rebel and “enmity against God”. They had been tortured, compelled to signal confessions and sentenced final 12 months after a five-minute trial. The choice to execute them now “highlights the authorities’ ruthless use of the death penalty as a tool of political repression in times of national crisis to crush dissent and spread fear”, Amnesty stated.
A whole bunch have been arrested since June in a regime drive to unmask spies and collaborators, actual or imagined. Obtrusive intelligence failures that, for instance, allowed Israel to find and bomb a nationwide safety council assembly, injuring Iran’s president, Masoud Pezeshkian, are formally blamed not on gross incompetence however supposed fifth columnists. Iran’s parliament desires to develop use of capital punishment. As much as 60 political prisoners face execution.
This sometimes harsh response by clerical hardliners round Khamenei, and inside the judiciary and Revolutionary Guards, comes regardless of a surge in patriotic sentiment after the assaults, which reportedly killed at the least 935 individuals, largely civilians, and injured greater than 5,000. By intensifying repression, the regime squandered an opportunity to harness public anger, not least in opposition to Britain and European governments that turned a blind eye.
US-Israeli actions have had different far-reaching, damaging penalties. The assaults breached the UN constitution and worldwide regulation, because the Brics group of “global south” nations famous. They led Tehran to droop UN nuclear inspections. They exacerbated US-Europe divisions. And, sarcastically, they elevated the probability of Iran constructing a bomb for self-defence.
Iran insists it doesn’t possess and doesn’t need nuclear weapons. For all Israel’s vaunted intelligence capabilities, neither Netanyahu nor anybody else has definitively proved in any other case. The choice to assault was based mostly on a guess, pushed by worry and hatred. It brought on severe bodily harm, however didn’t change mindsets. Iran is adamant it would proceed to complement uranium for civilian functions. The bombing was a bust. Trump’s offended menace to strike once more is affirmation of failure.
What this reckless act of aggression did do is encourage rogue states reminiscent of Russia to consider they, too, could assault different nations with impunity. It reinforces the idea in Iranian ruling circles, and never solely amongst rejectionist factions, that the west can’t be trusted and a nearer alliance with China is critical. It strengthens the hand of hardliners whose fondness for regional proxy warfare, and lately documented covert operations in opposition to Britain, has entrenched Iran’s pariah standing.
Traditionally talking, Iran was and is an avoidable tragedy – one of many west’s worst-ever geostrategic personal objectives. Unthinking help for the shah helped spur the 1979 revolution. The following, removed from inevitable ascendancy of conservative clerics plus abiding, irrational US animosity, feeding off recollections of the humiliating Tehran embassy siege, rendered the rift everlasting. Europe tried and didn’t chart a center path. In 2018, Trump reneged on the US-, UN- and EU-ratified nuclear take care of Tehran and reimposed sanctions. This final of many disastrous coverage errors led on to immediately’s deadlock. With wiser heads, it might have been very completely different.
All events to this battle ought to research the French Enlightenment thinker Charles de Secondat, baron de Montesquieu, a foe to tyranny in all its varieties. Writing in his 1721 bestseller Persian Letters greater than 300 years in the past, he points an impressively prescient warning about what had been then imaginary weapons of mass destruction. “You say that you are afraid of the discovery of some method of destruction that is crueller than those which are used now,” his fictitious Persian traveller Usbek writes to a good friend. “If such a fateful invention came to be discovered, it would soon be banned by international law. By the unanimous consent of every country the discovery would be buried.”
Within the sense that nuclear weapons are outlawed, Usbek’s optimistic prediction was appropriate. However not “every country” complies. If the US and Israel are honest about stopping Iran buying the bomb, they need to set an instance and cut back, and finally get rid of, their nuclear arsenals. They need to cease threatening renewed assaults. And they need to again talks on a regional nuclear pact, as proposed by Iran’s former international minister Mohammad Javad Zarif.
Solely then, maybe, will Tehran are available from the chilly. Solely then, maybe, will its paranoid leaders cease hanging harmless individuals.
