What’s missing from the Iran deal
The message is that the regime can do whatever violence it likes to its own people, writes TERRY GLAVIN.
It was just the sort of story to put a spring in one’s step in these early winter doldrums: last weekend in Geneva, the world was guided back from nuclear brinksmanship and the certain prospect of war by the coolly unexcitable President Barack Obama, the United States’ peacemaker-in-chief. In the camp of the incorrigibly warmongering Zionists there was much wailing and weeping, and in Iran, under the elegant and outward-looking new president, Hassan Fereydoon Rouhani, a bright day dawned.
A lovely story this would surely be if any of it were true, but it would remain a fable even if there was much to be cheery about in the content of last weekend’s interim agreement between Tehran and the P5+1 — the UN Security Council’s five permanent members (the U.S., Britain, Russia, China and France) and Germany.
While the arrangement’s provisions are still contested, what can be said with certainty by now is that Iran has pledged to slow the pace of its illegal uranium enrichment program (which now becomes legal) and to allow UN inspectors to closely monitor certain of its nuclear facilities. The regime will further begin, more or less, to comply with the terms of the 1968 Non-Proliferation Treaty. In return, Tehran wins relief from about $7 billion in UN sanctions, which is not spare change, and for the next six months we all watch and wait to see how things work out.
Tehran’s nuclear program was built by stealth and deception over a decade, in defiance of several UN Security Council resolutions, and last weekend’s agreement is the consequence of seven years of P5+1 failure to bring Tehran to heel and several months of back-channel Washington-Tehran talks that were kept so secret that even Israel and Saudi Arabia, the United States’s closest allies in the region, were kept out of the loop.
Predictably, an absurdly partisan American donnybrook broke out over the arrangement’s content, with everybody choosing sides just as you might expect. Overlooked in the uproar is that neither the dignity nor the democratic rights of the long-oppressed Iranian people are served by so much as a single semicolon in the deal, and it should come as no great surprise that this would be so.
In a 2009 speech, Obama made it plain that Tehran’s cooperation on the nuclear file is all his administration would require to restore the regime to its “rightful place in the community of nations.” Obama was even more explicit two months ago in his speech to the opening of the UN General Assembly: “We are not seeking regime change and we respect the right of the Iranian people to access peaceful nuclear technology.”
It’s great fun to sneer at Foreign Minister John Baird’s contrary insistence that Canada will expect rather more of Iran’s ruling-class ayatollahs before our own sanctions are eased, but there is something to be said for Ottawa’s refusal to wholly decouple human rights from Canada’s Iran sanctions regime, which Baird has pledged to leave as is, despite last weekend’s events in Geneva.
But last June, with the unanimous consent of every MP in the House of Commons, Canada adopted a resolution that recognizes the Khomeinist regime’s mass murder of thousands of political prisoners in the late 1980s as a crime against humanity. In August, Rouhani appointed a key figure in those massacres, Moustafa PourMohammadi — Human Rights Watch calls him “minister of murder” — to head Iran’s justice ministry.
Rouhani’s inauguration follows “elections” that proceeded only after the regime’s ruling ayatollahs hand-picked him and a handful of others as suitable candidates. Since Rouhani’s election, more than 250 Iranians have been executed, among them 16 members of Iran’s Baloch minority, singled out for retaliation following a Baloch separatist attack on a regime border facility. Last month, at least 17 men were arrested on charges of homosexuality and “devil worship” at a birthday party in the Kurdish city of Kermanshah. They face sentences ranging from 100 lashes to the death penalty. On it goes.
Toronto lawyer Kaveh Shahrooz, a leading voice in Canada’s Iranian expatriate community and a key figure in last summer’s “Massacre88 Campaign” on Parliament Hill, told me the other day that last weekend’s agreement in Geneva may produce some slight benefit in the day-to-day lives of ordinary Iranians, if sanctions relief somehow trickles down to them. There is also some relief to be had in knowing that, in the short term at least, a war seems unlikely.
“But an agreement without a strong human rights component sends a very clear message to the Iranian government, and the message is: so long as you don’t develop a nuclear weapon you’re free to kill and imprison your citizens without any repercussions,” Shahrooz said.
This is more or less the same tack Obama took in August when he was confronted with inconvenient evidence that the Khomeinists’ satrap in Damascus, Bashar al Assad, was using poison gas to massacre Syrian civilians. “As long as we could dismantle chemical weapons, it was fine for Assad to continue doing what he was doing,” Shahrooz said.
“From a moral perspective, it makes no sense, and I’m worried that the same message is being delivered to the Iranian government: as long as you don’t threaten your neighbours and are not externally aggressive, you can be as aggressive as you want, internally, domestically, to your own population.”
And that, in the end, is the deal that went down last weekend in Geneva.