The Ministry of Intelligence, one of the most serious violators of citizen rights
This time, the Ministry of Intelligence began with open populism. Its minister was a former representative of the regime's leadership in the army, a four-term member of the Islamic Consultative Assembly, and, according to him, a cultural activist. He himself says that Hassan Rouhani told him that despite knowing his background, he had chosen him because he was a force that was accepted by the regime's leadership and trusted by the president-elect of June 2013, Hassan Rouhani.
In a meeting where Hassan Rouhani informed Mahmoud Alavi of his appointment as Minister of Information, he told him to ask God for help. Alavi replied, "What brought me to be Minister of Information?" Then Hassan Rouhani told Alavi that you are the son of Fatima Zahra (Mahmoud Alavi is a Sayyid). If you ask your mother Zahra for help, will they leave their child alone?" Then Alavi, who was shaken by this, his throat tightened, and tears welled up in his eyes, told Hassan Rouhani, "Now that you have mentioned my mother's name, I am sorry." (1)
And in this way, Seyyed Mahmoud Alavi becomes the confidant of the regime's leadership and Hassan Rouhani becomes the Minister of Intelligence of the Islamic Republic of Iran, without any intelligence background and solely relying on his status as a Seyyed.
The Ministry of Intelligence has been one of the main institutions of repression in the Islamic Republic since its establishment. This ministry was established in August 1984, after five years of a proliferation of security institutions in the newly established system. The revolutionaries of 1979 did not have happy memories of SAVAK. After the revolution, however, they came to the conclusion that the new system needed a security institution. Therefore, each revolutionary institution pursued its own security work. From the Prime Minister’s Intelligence to the Revolutionary Committees or the intelligence units of some revolutionary and judicial institutions, all were engaged in intelligence work. (2) So it was decided that all of these would be consolidated into a specific institution under the government so that, like the government and its president, it would be accountable at least to the representatives of the Islamic Consultative Assembly. The president would also appoint his minister so that whoever casts a vote in this legal structure would have his opinion and that same vote would govern the country’s intelligence and security apparatus. But what happened was that the founder of the system and then the current leader of the system exerted influence on the ministers of intelligence, in their appointment and performance. As the late Ayatollah Montazeri said in his famous speech on the 13th of Rajab, the minister was turned into a signature machine, and the Ministry of Intelligence, which has created tragedies such as the political murders of the 1970s for at least the last three decades, continued to violate human rights with its own head and body. However, whatever the case, the direct responsibility for what is done by the Ministry of Intelligence lies with its minister and the head of the ministry, i.e. the president, who is in charge of affairs.
But a ministry whose minister was chosen solely for being a leader left a disastrous record in its first year. Although during the election campaign for the next term in 2017, Rouhani, whose intelligence ministry had a record full of human rights violations, criticized his rivals for having known executions and imprisonment for years! (3) Hassan Rouhani, of course, was talking nonsense.
From searching the homes of opponents and critics to arresting them, pressuring religious minorities such as Baha'is and Sunnis, dealing with ethnic civil society activists to attacking prisoners in Ward 350 of Evin Prison in April 2014 along with prison guards and other security forces(4), and arresting and dealing with critics and journalists such as Saba Azarpeik(5), these are just some of the achievements of the Ministry of Intelligence in the first year of Hassan Rouhani's first term as president. The same person who came later and became a creditor himself, while others only knew execution and prison, and he is supposed to open the doors with his key.
In the second year of the Rouhani administration, this trend continued with the Ministry of Intelligence. Bektash Abtin, a poet and member of the board of secretaries of the Iranian Writers’ Association, had to be interrogated by the Ministry of Intelligence for his poems. (6) Ethnic, religious, civil, and political activists were also harassed, arrested, interrogated, and so on by the Ministry of Intelligence. Now they wanted to be Christian converts, Baha’is, or Sunnis. Prisoners were even punished for the Ministry of Intelligence’s vendetta against their activist fathers. In August 2015, Zanyar Moradi wrote: “I never thought I would spend my youth in prison because of the Ministry of Intelligence’s vendetta against my father.” (7) He, Loghman Moradi, and Ramin Hossein Panahi were executed in September 2018. In the government of Tadbir, Omid, and Kilid, and with the vendetta of the Ministry of Intelligence, the government of Hassan Rouhani, who was five years old in 2018.
This trend continued in the third and fourth years of Rouhani’s first administration. From lawyers like Javid Hotan Kian (8) to political and civil activists from various fields, they were arrested and harassed by the Rouhani government’s Ministry of Intelligence. But the tragedy of Hassan Rouhani’s third year of government was the execution of a large number of Sunni prisoners imprisoned in Rajai Shahr prison, after whose executions the Ministry of Intelligence had asked their families to refer to the Kahrizak forensic medicine. For the first time since the summer massacre of 1988, the Islamic Republic and their Ministry of Intelligence and Security apparatus, in the early hours of Mordad 1395, hanged and executed more than twenty Sunni prisoners in this prison at the same time. (9)
When the Rouhani government reached its fourth year, the volume of the Ministry of Intelligence’s actions increased from previous years. The government that was supposed to heal the memory of the repression of the Green Movement, itself and its Ministry of Intelligence turned into a full-fledged repression. A repression that, of course, the president used to sarcastically tell his rivals during his second-term election campaign that they have known executions and prisons for 38 years and that “the nation does not want confinement.” Eight years of the Rouhani government are coming to an end. The confinement is still in place. And Iran is the second-most executing country in the world, and the Ministry of Intelligence of the Hassan Rouhani government is one of the main agencies for compiling cases and suppressing.
Rouhani's second four years coincided with the major events of January 2017 and November 2019. And the Ministry of Intelligence, along with the Revolutionary Guards, the police, and other institutions responsible for repression, became, in its own line, the same Ministry of Intelligence that had known about executions and imprisonment since its establishment. Although, regarding the detainees of November 2019, it was also behind their release, telling the members of the Islamic Republic's parliament that "most of those arrested were unemployed or had low-income jobs and were poorly educated." (10)
In general, the Ministry of Intelligence of the Hassan Rouhani government has violated the rights of Iranian citizens in many areas during these eight years.(11)
In the area of freedom of expression, it dealt with journalists, writers, and the media, and a notable example was the filing of cases against three members of the Iranian Writers' Association, Reza Khandan Mahabadi, Bektash Abtin, and Keyvan Bajan. The Ministry of Intelligence filed a complaint against these three writers and poets, accusing them of propaganda against the system and acting against national security.
In the area of guilds, in the summer of 2014, “it took steps to arrest and threaten a number of civil and political activists and to exert severe pressure on them with the aim of extracting confessions.”(11) Also, throughout these years, the main complainant and file maker for Narges Mohammadi, the Deputy Head of the Center for Human Rights Defenders, has been the Ministry of Intelligence of the Islamic Republic, which went as far as to apply pressure and restrictions, given her illnesses in prison, which could have led to her death in prison.(12)
Many lawyers have also been arrested and imprisoned by the Ministry of Intelligence and have faced long sentences, such as Nasrin Sotoudeh’s sentence of more than three decades in prison. The Ministry of Intelligence has exclusive control over the files of lawyers, and under the government of the lawyer Hassan Rouhani, this ministry has considered it its duty to deal with independent lawyers in Iran. An example of this is the arrest of many lawyers, such as Ali Sakeni and Payam Darafshan, who were arrested in July and June 2020. (11)
The Ministry of Intelligence has always had a long-standing hand in dealing with Iranian civil and ethnic activists. The Rouhani government did not neglect this work either. Although the Rouhani government initially appointed Ali Younesi, a former security official, as its special assistant for ethnic and religious minority affairs, it did not take long for that gesture of trying to get closer to the different ethnic groups, religions, and sects in Iran to give way to the same previous approach and repression. Civil activists of Iranian ethnic groups were arrested, and believers in religious and religious minorities, from Baha'is to Christian converts, Gonabadi dervishes, and Sunnis, were threatened and harassed. Also, in April 2019, a Kurdish religious teacher was prevented from traveling to Zahedan and participating in the graduation ceremony of religious students in Zahedan, and priests and Christian converts were arrested in all parts of the country. The situation of the Baha'is of Iran and their repression has been and continues to be part of the Ministry of Intelligence's ongoing activities from the beginning.
The Ministry of Intelligence, in the area of violating citizens' rights to protest and social freedoms, created the disasters of repression in January 2017 and November 2019, and also, as mentioned, became a pioneer in the execution of political, ethnic, and religious activists. From Kurds like Zanyar, Loghman, and Ramin to the traditional youth who were executed in Rajai Shahr prison.
In the area of women, the Ministry of Intelligence continued to be one of the main factors and elements of repression. An example of this is the arrest of women's rights activist Asrin Derkale in August 2019. Before that, Maryam Mohammadi and Narges Khorami, other women's activists, had also been arrested.
During Rouhani’s reign, the situation of prisoners in prison became even more disastrous. The Ministry of Intelligence fully cooperated in the attack on political prisoners on 18 April 2014, which resulted in the beatings, disruption of life, and looting of property of political prisoners in Ward 350. Also, many prisoners in Ward 209 of Evin Prison, which is a special ward of the Ministry of Intelligence, suffer for days and months in solitary confinement, and are still imprisoned in the special ward of the Ministry of Intelligence in Evin after more than a year. Ali Younesi and Amir Hossein Moradi are prominent examples. (13)
Workers and laborers were another group of victims of the Ministry of Intelligence under Hassan Rouhani. Esmail Bakhshi and Sepideh Qolyan were beaten and arrested by Khuzestan Intelligence Agency agents on November 17, 2018. When Sepideh was in detention, her family confirmed that she had been tortured. According to one of her relatives at the Intelligence Agency, “They beat her on the soles of her feet and hands with a cable and beat her with a baton on her back; they blindfolded her, kicked her, and slammed her against doors and walls. The interrogators told her, ‘We will spread rumors against you and make up stories so that you will be killed by your relatives or workers.’” (11)
The above is only a very small part of the thousands of incidents, disasters, and human rights violations committed by the Ministry of Intelligence of the Hassan Rouhani government in the eight years of this government. A ministry that, instead of fulfilling its inherent duty, engages in kidnapping from abroad and abducts political opponents like Ruhollah Zam from abroad, brings them to Iran, and executes them. A Ministry of Intelligence whose minister did not have the slightest security record when he began his work, and the president and his all-security cabinet claimed that others had spent 38 years in prison and executed. While Hassan Rouhani and his Ministry of Intelligence in these eight years have become pioneers of imprisonment and execution in the history of torture and human rights violations in Iran. In fact, Mahmoud Alavi and his head Hassan Rouhani and the Ministry of Intelligence in these eight years can be called one of the disaster-makers in the field of human rights, even in the history full of human rights violations of the Islamic Republic. A government that was supposed to bring a charter of citizens' rights has itself become a complete violator of citizens' rights. It seems true that they say: A scorpion's sting is not a result of malice, it is the dictates of its nature.
Resources:
1 – Alavi's interesting explanations about becoming a minister, Young Journalists Club, April 26, 2017
2 – Lesser-Heard Stories about the Formation of the Ministry of Intelligence, ISNA, October 11, 2019
3 – Hassan Rouhani also criticized the human rights record of his rivals: “For 38 years, they only knew executions and prisons,” Voice of America, May 8, 2017.
4 – Transfer of 31 political prisoners to solitary confinement and destruction of their belongings, HRANA, April 10, 2014
5 – No news about Saba Azarpeik after 11 days, HRANA, June 8, 2014
6 – Bektash Abtin: I still have one more session to be interrogated by the Ministry of Intelligence for my poems, HRANA, May 3, 2015
7 – Zanyar Moradi's letter from prison; Six years have passed, HRANA, August 6, 2015
8 – Javid Hotan Kian; still deprived of a lawyer and undergoing treatment, HRANA, October 16, 2015
9 – Death sentences were carried out on a large number of Sunni prisoners in Rajai Shahr Prison, Karaj, HRANA, August 3, 2016
10 – Summary of the bloody protests of November 2019, second edition, HRANA, December 3, 2019
11 – Ministry of Intelligence of the Islamic Republic of Iran, Justice Department. Database of Human Rights Violators in Iran
12 – Shirin Ebadi: The Ministry of Intelligence intends to kill Narges Mohammadi, Douchhole, March 10, 2020
13 – Failure to hold a court session; a report on the latest situation of Ali Younesi and Amir Hossein Moradi, HRANA, 13 Farvardin 1402
Source: HRANA
