Iran: Granting mullah impunity for nuclear violations grants him impunity in all other areas

Facebook
Twitter
LinkedIn
Pinterest
Reddit
E-mail
To press

Tehran admitted on Wednesday that it had removed several surveillance cameras installed by the United Nations. While Mohammad Eslami, the new nuclear chief of the Iranian regime, described the cameras as “damage”, he accused the signatories of the 2015 Iranian nuclear agreement with the world power of “not meeting their obligations, so there was no need for the cameras to exist” .
This action comes days after the recent trip by Rafael Grossi, head of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA). Despite growing concerns from all parties to the deal, Grossi assured world leaders that he had received some promises from the regime.
The growing concern of Western powers and the IAEA comes two years after Tehran officially abandoned all of its obligations under the 2015 nuclear deal and began to achieve much higher levels of uranium enrichment than it achieved prior to the seven-party negotiations on this one Deal, which shows how flawed this deal was. These steps were part of the regime’s nuclear blackmail plan.
Recent developments in the regime’s nuclear program include the acquisition of 10 kg fortified to 60 percent fissile uranium and a similar amount of uranium metal, a substance that serves no other purpose than being part of the core of a nuclear warhead. Such moves underscore a threat that the regime’s then intelligence minister, Mahmoud Alavi, almost made clear in February when he publicly stated that “if the regime has the ability, it will be the culprits who pushed Iran in this direction” to nuclear weapons.

This statement, while the regime is actually attempting to acquire an atomic bomb, demonstrated a sense of impunity the regime feels not only with regard to nuclear activities, but also with regard to human rights issues and the regime’s leading global support for international terrorism.
In 2018, four activists, including a senior diplomatic terrorist, were caught trying to bomb the annual meeting of the National Council of Resistance of Iran (NCRI) near Paris. Although all four were eventually sentenced to prison terms in Belgium, there is no evidence that Western powers are exercising greater accountability, although Belgian authorities have confirmed that the incident was ordered and planned by the regime’s top officials and its Supreme National Security Council.
Since these four terrorists were convicted in February, the incident has received little attention in mainstream media or political circles, and Tehran has undoubtedly experienced relatively little risk or reprisal if it attempted similar acts in the future. This was effectively confirmed last month when the regime’s new president, Ebrahim Raisi, appointed a number of criminal figures like himself to his cabinet, including several members of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps and at least one person who has actually been warranted for arrest his involvement in the 1994 bomb attack in Buenos Aires.
Ms. Maryam Rajavi, President-elect of the NCRI, described the entire cabinet as a group of “assassins, terrorists and thieves” and as “the embodiment of four decades of religious dictatorship and terrorism by the mullahs whose main mission is to promote popular uprising and pillage of the national wealth, intensification of terrorism and warmongering and expansion of unpatriotic programs for nuclear and ballistic missiles. “
In other words, Raisi’s choice of presidential aide reflects a sense of impunity with respect to each of the regime’s established malicious activities. This is exactly what would have been expected after the West’s inaction on various recent developments.

These developments include the previous two years of nuclear provocations, the escalation of domestic unrest in Iran, which dates back at least to the end of 2017, and the eventual establishment of Raisi as the person most likely to use the office of president to counter those unrest as they further accelerate the Tehran provocations
But Raisi’s commitment to repression was never really called into question, as he was known for four decades of ruthlessness at the time of his “selectionâ€. After serving as a public prosecutor and spiritual judge since the introduction of the mullah regime, Raisi became one of four members of the Tehran “Death Commission†in the summer of 1988 to oversee the implementation of Ruhollah Khomeini’s fatwa on organized resistance to the theocratic system. The fatwa condemned the Mujahedin-e Khalq (MEK) guilty of “enmity against God” and called on the regime authorities to have them executed mercilessly. As a result, over 30,000 inmates, mostly members of the MEK, were systematically murdered in prison over a period of about three months.
In September 2020, a group of UN human rights experts wrote a letter to the Iranian authorities urging transparency on this crime against humanity and an end to the harassment of the victims’ families and other lawyers. The letter noted that the international community had failed to meet its responsibility to deal with the killings immediately afterwards and that this failure “had a devastating effect on the survivors and their families, as well as on the general human rights situation in Iran, and encouraged Iran to further … a strategy of distraction and denial. “
While this comment may only be intended to refer to the 1988 massacre and related human rights violations, it is equally applicable to a wide range of malicious activists who have faced the same type of distraction and denial. This strategy became clear, for example, in Mahmoud Alavi or Mohammad Eslami’s statements, which reflect the regime’s longstanding practice of blackmailing the world by escalating its malicious activities.
Whenever the international community fails to take serious, assertive action against Tehran’s duplicity, the regime is encouraged to continue to pursue the same strategy.

Western signatories of the 2015 nuclear deal with Iran should keep this in mind and impose serious economic sanctions and other penalties for the regime’s deliberate threats to develop nuclear weapons. Furthermore, this should be understood not just as a deterrent to further threats in this one area, but rather as a challenge to Tehran’s impunity in relation to nuclear activities, foreign terrorist threats and human rights repression
This comprehensive deterrent approach reflects the recommendation by the NCRI in a recent report on Iran’s Military Nuclear Program that the international community should understand “the regime’s nuclear weapons ambitions and ballistic missile development, its domestic human rights violations and repression, its terrorism against dissidents” Link brings foreign countries and their destabilizing exports of terrorism and conflict, and recognize that these are all interdependent parts of a comprehensive strategy and behavior of the regime aimed at enforcing its intolerant and totalitarian ideology and rule everywhere. “