Since the dying of Zina Mahsa Amini, a younger Kurdish lady in police custody in 2022 for carrying the hijab inappropriately, protesters in Iran have been calling out the repressive regime and its ethnic and non secular politics. have been protesting towards the speedy enhance in executions of dissidents.
In the primary 11 months of 2023, Iran has executed 746 individuals, and UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres mentioned Iran was executing at an “alarming price”.
So far in 2024, Iran has executed not less than eight Kurdish political prisoners, 4 of whom had been sentenced on January 29, 2024, for doubtful crimes comparable to struggle towards God and corruption on earth. I acquired it.
As a Kurdish-born scholar and professor of Middle East research on the University of Central Florida, I beforehand labored with the Women, Life, Freedom motion and Kurdish feminine fighters who centered on ladies’s rights safety and protest. I wrote about it. Iranian individuals oppose the federal government.
These demonstrations embrace protests towards Iran’s dying penalty system, which “disproportionately impacts spiritual and ethnic minorities,” in accordance with a 2022 U.S. State Department report.
Even after the elections held on March 1, 2024, hard-liners keep management of parliament, and the plight of ethnic and non secular minorities continues to be a tragedy endlessly. Due to a nationwide election boycott, turnout was estimated at lower than 41%, the bottom for the reason that 1979 Islamic Revolution.
separation and inequality
On September 19, 2022, hundreds of demonstrators in Iran stopped visitors to protest the dying of Zina Mahsa Amini in police custody.Getty Images
This Kurdish area of Iran has been the epicenter of nationwide protests that erupted in September 2022 after Amini’s dying.
In this 1979 picture, an Iranian authorities firing squad executes 11 Kurdish males.Jahangir Razmi/Bettman Archive/Getty Images
Most dying sentences towards regime opponents are carried out in these courts. Executions are sometimes primarily based on obscure expenses or compelled confessions, and lots of are broadcast on state tv. An investigation by the International Federation for Human Rights revealed that between 2009 and 2019, Iranian media broadcast such compelled confessions 355 occasions.
ethnic and non secular persecution
Unfortunately, discrimination towards Kurds and different ethnic minorities in Iran continues to be missed and is enshrined within the structure.
As a consequence, ethnic minorities comparable to Kurds are prohibited from studying or instructing their languages.
Laws will probably be strictly enforced. For instance, in 2020, Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Court sentenced Zara Mohammadi to 10 years in jail for instructing him Kurdish, his native language.
Ten years in the past, Kurdish elementary faculty trainer Farzad Kamangar was executed for advocating higher cultural and political self-determination for the Kurds.
The Islamic Republic’s structure additionally acknowledges crimes dedicated by spiritual minorities.
Iran’s structure stipulates the Twelver Jafari sect of Shiite Islam because the state faith. This would exclude Sunni Kurds, Baha’is and different spiritual minorities from the minimal protections afforded by Iran’s structure. Not surprisingly, Bahais and Sunnis stay essentially the most persecuted spiritual minorities in Iran.
The finish of “hell on earth”
Zina Mahsa Amini’s dying sparked a wave of protests throughout Iran, particularly in Sunni- and Kurdish-majority cities, calling out the nation’s gender apartheid and systemic ethnic, racial and non secular known as for the elimination of discrimination.
Human rights teams have accused Iran of utilizing the present worldwide deal with Gaza to precise revenge towards the rebels.
Mahmoud Amily Moghaddam, director of Iran’s Human Rights Bureau, mentioned, “Since the beginning of the struggle, there was little worldwide consideration to the human rights scenario in Iran, and no substantive response has been taken to the numerous enhance in executions.” Non-profit human rights group.
Amily Moghaddam mentioned the group had compiled knowledge displaying that the Iranian regime’s brutal repression disproportionately targets ethnic and non secular minorities.
In my view, the present “serial killings” are a results of the Iranian individuals and the Kurdish individuals calling for a halt to executions underneath Chapter 2, Article 6 of the United Nations Charter for continued violations of human rights ideas by the Iranian regime, and for expelling Iran from the United Nations. It goes towards individuals’s wants. Since the Islamic Revolution of 1979.
As former United Nations Secretary-General Dag Hammarskjold as soon as mentioned, the United Nations was “based to not lead mankind to heaven, however to save lots of mankind from hell.”
The United Nations has up to now been unable to rescue the stateless Kurdish individuals, who’ve been struggling for years, from this hell on earth.