The Iranian People Reject the Clerical Regime in Massive Election Boycott
Last week, the Iranian regime's rigged presidential election was resoundingly boycotted by the Iranian people in an unprecedented way.
The President-elect of the main opposition coalition National Council of Resistance of Iran (NCRI), Mrs. Maryam Rajavi, described the boycott as the greatest political and social blow to the mullahs' Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei and the ruling theocracy.
The boycott was so extensive that even the regime's propagandists, known for their zeal for exaggerating voter turnout, were unable to claim a turnout of over 49 percent. The principal opposition movement Mujahedin-e Khalq (MEK) said it believed the actual turnout was 10 percent. It based the estimate on well-documented reports from 1,200 witnesses in 400 Iranian cities and more than 3,500 video clips from polling stations.
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Khamenei and his protégé Ebrahim Raisi, as well as their rival factions, literally begged people to vote, but to no avail. The Iranian people rejected the entire regime and all its factions as illegitimate.
The NCRI-US Deputy Director Alireza Jafarzadeh said in an analysis on the regime's elections: "Raisi's fixed victory will make the regime even more vulnerable, given the resounding rejection of the regime by the vast majority of the Iranian people as they are vying for a free, democratic and secular republic in Iran."
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In an interview with Newsweek, NCRI Foreign Affairs Committee member Ali Safavi said: "The Biden administration should condemn the results—after all, they condemned the Syrian election. This is far worse than the Syrian election." He added: "One of the main planks of the Biden administration was respect for human rights. He said he would put human rights front and center. Well, here is a chance for him to show whether he is going to deliver on his promise."
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In this week's featured article, former US Congressman Patrick Kennedy says: "It is time for the world to join the Iranian people in condemning the theocracy’s lies and crimes. All serious advocates for democracy and all defenders of universal human rights should aspire to establish a commission of inquiry into the 1988 massacre before more people die. The time for accountability is now."
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Nationwide Boycott of Regime Elections
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Fox News (June 19) - Iranian dissidents on Saturday slammed what they described as a "sham" election, after the election of a notorious hardliner who was tied to mass executions was elected president of the theocratic regime. ... The NCRI's Rajavi on Saturday described a weakened regime and a final bid by Khamenei "to preserve his regime." "Installing a mass murderer and a criminal against humanity as the regime's president, is a sign of desperation that the regime has reached the end of the line and faces overthrow," she said. ... Rajavi, in her statement, said there is no longer any justification for the international community to engage or appease a regime whose president is one of the worst criminals against humanity in modern history." "The world must stand firmly against the ruling religious fascism, and in solidarity with the Iranian people and their demand for the overthrow of this regime and the establishment of a democratic republic," she said. Read more...
Newsweek (June 18) - There are serious concerns about the human rights record of Raisi. ... Ali Safavi, who is a member of the foreign affairs committee of the National Council of Resistance of Iran (NCRI), said the election was "totally illegitimate" and didn't reflect the will of the Iranian people. "The Biden administration should condemn the results—after all, they condemned the Syrian election. This is far worse than the Syrian election," he said. "One of the main planks of the Biden administration was respect for human rights. He said he would put human rights front and center. Well, here is a chance for him to show whether he is going to deliver on his promise," Safavi told Newsweek. Read more...
Amnesty International (June 19) - Responding to today’s announcement declaring Ebrahim Raisi as Iran’s next president, Amnesty International’s Secretary General Agnès Callamard said: “That Ebrahim Raisi has risen to the presidency instead of being investigated for the crimes against humanity of murder, enforced disappearance and torture, is a grim reminder that impunity reigns supreme in Iran. In 2018, our organization documented how Ebrahim Raisi had been a member of the ‘death commission’ which forcibly disappeared and extrajudicially executed in secret thousands of political dissidents in Evin and Gohardasht prisons near Tehran in 1988. The circumstances surrounding the fate of the victims and the whereabouts of their bodies are, to this day, systematically concealed by the Iranian authorities, amounting to ongoing crimes against humanity. ‘As Head of the Iranian Judiciary, Ebrahim Raisi has presided over a spiralling crackdown on human rights which has seen hundreds of peaceful dissidents, human rights defenders and members of persecuted minority groups arbitrarily detained. Under his watch, the judiciary has also granted blanket impunity to government officials and security forces responsible for unlawfully killing hundreds of men, women and children and subjecting thousands of protesters to mass arrests and at least hundreds to enforced disappearance, and torture and other ill-treatment during and in the aftermath of the nationwide protests of November 2019. ... “We continue to call for Ebrahim Raisi to be investigated for his involvement in past and ongoing crimes under international law, including by states that exercise universal jurisdiction." Read more...
Business Insider (June 20) - Iran's opposition group abroad said Ebrahim Raisi's election as president should be a turning point for how foreign governments, mainly the US and Europe, deal with the Iranian regime. Ali Safavi, a spokesperson for the National Council of Resistance of Iran, told Insider they believe it's more likely that only 10% of the country actually voted, a figure far lower than the official number. Safavi said the percentage was calculated after calls to boycott the election and footage and eyewitness accounts from inside Iran showed very few people at the polls. NCRI, an Iranian political coalition based in France and Albania that calls for replacing Iran's theocratic regime with a democratic one, said Raisi's election was a way for the country's Supreme Leader, Ali Khamenei, to hold on to power and prevent democratic reform. Read more...
Barron's (June 19) - Exiled opposition groups on Saturday hailed a "boycott" of Iran's presidential polls won by a hardliner accused of serial rights violations, claiming the authorities exaggerated even historically low official turnout numbers. ... Maryam Rajavi, the leader of the National Council of Resistance of Iran (NCRI), said the "unprecedented nationwide boycott" had signalled that Iranians had "voted for overthrow of the ruling theocracy". The NCRI, in accusations backed by leading human rights groups, says that Raisi was part of a commission that sent thousands of jailed opponents to their deaths within a few months in the summer of 1988. Most were supporters of the People's Mujahedin Organisation of Iran (MEK/PMOI). ... "There is no longer any justification for the international community to deal with, engage, or appease a regime whose president is a notorious criminal against humanity," said Rajavi. The MEK believed the actual turnout was 10 percent and the authorities would inflate it by a factor of five in an "astronomical fabrication", the NCRI said, based on reports from 1,200 witnesses in 400 Iranian cities and more than 3,500 video clips from polling stations. Read more...
Just the News (June 20) - The main Iranian dissident group is denouncing their country's election of hardline jurist Ebrahim Raisi as president, saying his record of human rights abuses should have disqualified him and the vote that brought him to power was rigged. "Installing a mass murderer and a criminal against humanity as the regime's president, is a sign of desperation that the regime has reached the end of the line and faces overthrow," National Council of Resistance of Iran’s President-elect Maryam Rajavi said Saturday after the vote was announced. ... "Despite astronomical rigging and falsifying the vote tally, the dimensions of the popular boycott were so extensive that the regime succumbed to announcing a lower than 49 percent turnout, plainly admitting that the majority of Iranian people boycotted the sham election and testified to its illegitimacy," Rajavi said. Read more...
The Daily Wire (June 19) - The Iranian people burned campaign posters and vandalized Tehran with pro-democracy messages as they organized an unprecedented public boycott of what citizens said is a sham presidential election this week. “Our vote is regime change and Yes to a democratic Iran,” was scrawled on walls in Tehran, along with other messages like, “we will not vote for murderers.” Posters of the regime’s favored candidate were vandalized and burned in the days leading up to the election, video footage provided to The Daily Wire showed. Video clips filmed on Friday by supporters of the resistance inside Iran and provided to The Daily Wire show scenes of dozens of deserted polling sites across the country, including in the country’s capital. Protesting elections in their country, which has been on the U.S. state terror sponsor list for decades, is nothing new to Iranians, but the movement has a different energy this time — they are no longer hiding their identities. Mothers and fathers of young Iranians killed by the regime for peacefully protesting posted video messages to social media of themselves calling for an election boycott. The bereaved parents held pictures of their dead children as they introduced themselves by name and condemned the election as rigged. ... Mrs. Maryam Rajavi, who leads the Iranian political resistance group the People’s Mujahedin Organization of Iran (MEK) along with her husband Massoud Rajavi, called the successful boycott “the greatest political and social blow” to Khamenei and the ruling theocracy. Read more...
The Associated Press (June 18) - As Iranian state TV showed people streaming to cast their ballots Friday and news anchors praised them for coming out to vote, very different scenes played out on Tehran’s streets, where many polling places appeared relatively empty. ... But this year, the streets were calm, traffic was light. ... Some polls remained virtually deserted throughout the day — a stark contrast to ice cream shops and restaurants nearby. Read more...
The Wall Street Journal (Editorial, June 19) - ... In 1988 Mr. Raisi facilitated the extrajudicial execution of thousands of dissidents. He later called the killings “one of the proud achievements of the system.” ... The folly of the Obama and now Biden administrations is believing that the leaders in Tehran want Iran to be a normal country. They don’t. They run a government that wants to spread its religious revolution to the rest of the world by whatever means possible. Mr. Raisi’s ascension shouts that reality from the minaret, not that the Biden Administration wants to hear it. Read more...
The Daily Mail (June 17) - Iranian political prisoners who were interrogated, tortured and sentenced to die by Ebrahim Raisi have told of their horrifying experiences as Iran prepares to make him the country's next president. Farideh Goudarzi, who was jailed for being part of a banned political group, told MailOnline how Raisi watched guards drop her baby on the floor as part of one brutal interrogation - after she was tortured while pregnant and forced to give birth in jail. Meanwhile Mahmoud Royaee, another political prisoner interrogated by Raisi during the execution of up to 30,000 opposition activists in a 1988 purge, said Raisi once handed down a death sentence to an inmate who was in the midst of an epileptic fit. Read more...
The Sun (June 16) - A notorious cleric poised to be named Iran’s next leader is a torturing killer who will spread terror and bloodshed across the world, claim those who say they suffered at his hands. The Sun Online can reveal the hardliner allegedly ordered the torture of pregnant women, had prisoners thrown off cliffs, had people flogged with electric cords, and has overseen countless other brutal acts of violence. The so-called “Butcher of 1988” is the favoured choice of the Islamic Republic's ruthless regime with the Iranian press now calling him the "unrivalled candidate". As head of Iran's judiciary, the traditionalist cleric is a close ally of the country's supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, whose confidence he has gained after holding key positions of power over four decades. Activists, however, hold a very different view of Raisi because of his alleged involvement in the mass execution and horrific torture of political prisoners in the 1980s. Read more...
AFP (June 15) - Ebrahim Raisi, the favourite in Iran's presidential election, has used his position at the heart of the judiciary for grave rights violations, including mass executions of political prisoners, activists say. They say Raisi -- who now has victory in his sights on Friday after even conservative rivals were disqualified in vetting -- should face international justice rather than lead his country. ... At just 20, he was appointed prosecutor for the district of Karaj and then for Hamadan province, before in 1985 being promoted to deputy Tehran prosecutor. It was in this role, campaigners allege, that Raisi played a key part in the executions of thousands of opposition prisoners -- mostly suspected members of the proscribed People's Mujahedin Organisation of Iran (MEK) -- when, activists say, he was part of a four-man "Death Committee" that sent convicts to their death without a shred of due process. Read more...
The Spectator (June 18) - ... It was the beginning of what turned out to be the biggest massacre of political prisoners since World War II. Charged with carrying out the executions was a 'four-man commission' later known as the 'death committee' – prominent among whom was Raisi. The executions went on for five months – thousands were killed (some estimates are as high as 30,000). Most of the victims were members of the Iranian opposition group the People's Mujahedin Organisation of Iran (PMOI), or the Mujahedin-e-Khalq. Read more...
The Washington Free Beacon (June 18) - Iran’s presidential frontrunner personally approved the secret mass murder of hundreds of regime critics in 1988—and can be heard defending and laughing about the gruesome massacre in a decades-old audio recording translated by the Washington Free Beacon. Ebrahim Raisi, a cleric who serves as chief justice of Iran, is reported to be Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei’s favored candidate to win Friday’s presidential election, which most international observers see as a sham given the regime’s decision to disqualify any candidate viewed as a moderate. Raisi, who served as deputy prosecutor of Tehran in 1988, sat on a four-man panel that oversaw the killings of nearly 1,000 political prisoners. In an August 1988 audio recording, members of the commission can be heard defending the executions, arguing in support of killing 200 additional prisoners, and even laughing about their efforts to expedite the murders. Read more...
The Telegraph (June 19) - The man who has won Iran’s rigged presidential election should be in prison, not power. Ebrahim Raisi was the youngest member of the 1988 Tehran death commission, accused of murdering 3,000 opposition prisoners. ... Mr Raisi, a foreign policy hardliner, might wish to put the Obama deal back into effect for its economic benefits, but cannot be trusted not to leverage the windfall to military advantage, readying his nation to become a nuclear player. He poses a danger to the region – and to his own people, for whom life gets tougher every day. Read more...
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Iran HRM (June 17) - Shaker Behrouz and Keyhan Mokarram, two political prisoners incarcerated in the Central Prison of Urmia, were taken to solitary confinement in the quarantine ward on Sunday night, June 13, 2021. The two political prisoners, Shaker Behrouz and Keyhan Mokarram were confined in solitary cells because they had started a hunger strike on that day. Both prisoners have been deprived of calling or visiting their families. They started their hunger strike demanding commutation of their sentences. Mr. Shaker Behrouz went on hunger strike to protest his long-time detention in solitary cell as well as the unfair death verdict issued for him. Read more...
Iran HRM (June 20) - The brother of executed wrestling champion Navid Afkari said his sister’s phone was confiscated by intelligence agents. Just hours later all of Elham Afkari’s Instagram posts were removed and videos of Navid’s forced confessions were posted. According to the Afkari family, following her arrest outside Shiraz Central Prison where her brothers Habib and Vahid have been held in solitary confinement since September 5, 2020, Elham Afkari’s phone was seized by regime officials and they have shared Navid Afkari’s forced confessions on her Instagram account. Relatives of Afkari family asked social media users to report the incident and ask Instagram to block this page. The Instagram account is currently unavailable. Read more...
Iran News Wire (June 21) - A Baluch prisoner was killed under torture on June 26 in a detention center in Suran, southeastern Iran. According to the report by the Baloch Campaign website, the man was identified as Masoud Kahanky-Gongi. Masoud was arrested with another person the day before on theft charges. He was taken to the police detention center, where he was beaten and tortured, and later passed away. This is not an isolated case. On May 18, 35-year-old Amir Rezai was killed under torture in Urmia, northwestern Iran. Amir was arrested 10 years ago on drug related charges and was sentenced to 20 years of prison. Read more...
Iran HRM (June 16) - Hossein Sepanta a critically ill prisoner of conscience in Adelabad prison in Shiraz, Fars province, has been denied medical access in Shiraz, Fars Province. Sepanta, who has been serving a 13.5-year prison sentence since 2013, suffers from a disorder in his spinal cord, causing him severe pain, numbness, loss of coordination, impaired movement, and bladder and bowl control issues. He requires constant specialized medical care and daily caregiving for a rare progressive disorder in his spinal cord, which he cannot receive in prison. Prison authorities have denied him access to medical treatment. Read more...
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Coronavirus Crisis in Iran
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NCRI (June 21) - The People’s Mojahedin Organization of Iran (PMOI/MEK) announced on June 21, 2021, that the COVID-19 death toll in 547 cities is more than 315,400. "26.5% increase in daily COVID-19 patients indicates that the virus is still active, and there is a possibility of a fifth outbreak." (Tasnim news agency, June 21, 2021). Read more...
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PMOI (June 15) - In a recent interview with the state-run ISNA news agency, Steve Hanke, professor of economics at the Johns Hopkins University, ranked the Iranian regime as eighth in the misery. "According to Hanke, high inflation is the main reason for the high economic misery index (sum of unemployment and inflation rate) in Iran, and currency depreciation, the most important factor in high inflation. Among 156 ranked countries, Iran ranks eighth. The highest rates of economic misery are in Venezuela, Lebanon, Zimbabwe, Sudan, Syria, Argentina and Turkey,” ISNA reported on June 7. Read more...
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Weapons, Cyber, Western Policy
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UPI (op-ed, June 21) - Despite clear evidence that the mullahs are continuing secretly to construct a nuclear device and ballistic missiles capable of carrying a primed nuclear warhead, the United States and EU remain ludicrously committed to reinstating the JCPOA without demanding an end to the clerical regime's destabilizing activities in Syria, Yemen, Lebanon, Gaza and Iraq and insisting on an end to repression, torture and executions in Iran. U.S. and EU attempts at appeasement have simply encouraged the mullahs to further aggressive behavior at home and abroad. ... Biden and Blinken must realize that the mullahs will always regard attempts at appeasement as a weakness by the West, which they will exploit mercilessly. The theocratic dictatorship only responds to firmness, and it is time for the United States and EU to show some muscle. Read more...
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