In July, I reported on the grave situation of Hossein Bourojerdi, one of Iran’s
most courageous dissidents. Bourojerdi, who carries the honorific Shia Muslim
title of “ayatollah,” is a veteran opponent of Iran’s ruling system of velayat e faqih, whereby
Islamic jurists exercise total control over society and its institutions.
Bourojerdi was first incarcerated in 2006. At the time, hundreds
of the ayatollah’s supporters valiantly attemped to stop him from being dragged
out of his south Tehran home by the police. Since then, reports of Bourojerdi’s
failing health have regularly surfaced. Now, Iranian human-rights activists
have passed on the news that Bourojerdi, who is languishing in Tehran’s
notorious Evin Prison, began experiencing heart failure last Sunday.
Only after Bourojerdi coped with extreme pain and shortness of breath for a full day did the Evin guards finally escort him from his cell for what passes for medical attention, by which point the ayatollah had undergone a heart attack. “Not only was he not given any medication while at the infirmary,” noted the latest bulletin on Bourojerdi’s plight, “the prison authorities continued to refuse his family’s delivery of medication that he had been prescribed before.”
A few days before his heart attack, Bourojerdi sent a thunderous appeal to the United Nations General Assembly urging the international body to once and for all confront the issue of human-rights abuse by the Iranian regime:
I sit here, at the start of my eighth year of captivity; jailed by a religious dictatorship and charged with defending the freedom of thought, speech and expression and refusing to align with tyrants who forcibly lord over Iran… Has the time not come for your assembly to demand that these brutal totalitarians respond to how they dare to speak of Bahrain, Syria and Palestine, under the guise of sympathy, when they have plundered and stolen the wealth and national income of every Iranian, rendering them impoverished and putting them in the ultimate financial and economic crisis?
That time, of course, has not come. Bourojerdi’s missive passed unnoticed amidst all the cooing over the charm offensive launched by Hassan Rouhani, Iran’s new and–as we are endlessly informed–”moderate” president. While President Obama did, in his phone call with Rouhani, raise the continuing imprisonment of Saeed Abedini, a Christian pastor with American citizenship who has also been detained in Evin for the last year, the suffering of a Muslim cleric who has tirelessly advocated for the separation of mosque and state was deemed unworthy of even a mention.
I sit here, at the start of my eighth year of captivity; jailed by a religious dictatorship and charged with defending the freedom of thought, speech and expression and refusing to align with tyrants who forcibly lord over Iran… Has the time not come for your assembly to demand that these brutal totalitarians respond to how they dare to speak of Bahrain, Syria and Palestine, under the guise of sympathy, when they have plundered and stolen the wealth and national income of every Iranian, rendering them impoverished and putting them in the ultimate financial and economic crisis?
That time, of course, has not come. Bourojerdi’s missive passed unnoticed amidst all the cooing over the charm offensive launched by Hassan Rouhani, Iran’s new and–as we are endlessly informed–”moderate” president. While President Obama did, in his phone call with Rouhani, raise the continuing imprisonment of Saeed Abedini, a Christian pastor with American citizenship who has also been detained in Evin for the last year, the suffering of a Muslim cleric who has tirelessly advocated for the separation of mosque and state was deemed unworthy of even a mention.
But Bourojerdi’s case may yet
receive the attention it warrants from an unexpected source. Ahmad Shaheed, the
former foreign minister of the Maldives who presently serves as the UN’s
“Special Rapporteur on the situation of Human Rights in the Islamic Republic of
Iran,” has won plaudits from Iranian democracy activists for his forthright
reports on the mullah’s human-rights abuses. Shaheed is certainly aware of
Bourojerdi’s situation, having received a letter from
supporters and family members of the ayatollah in 2011, in which they asserted
that an “illegal ban” on prison visits was designed to compel Bourojerdi to
confess to fabricated crimes.
In his most recent report, Shaheed
carefully traced the regime’s repression of religious minorities, citing the
predicament of Christians and Bahais who are especially vulnerable to legal
charges of heresy and apostasy. Significantly, Shaheed concluded that:
There has been an apparent increase
in the degree of seriousness of human rights violations in the Islamic Republic
of Iran…alarming reports of retributive State action against individuals suspected of
communicating with UN Special Procedures raises
serious concern about the Government’s resolve to promote respect for human
rights in the country (my emphasis.)
In other words, as well as refusing cooperation with UN nuclear inspectors, the regime is also criminalizing those who talk to the international body’s human-rights investigators. So far, Rouhani has given no indication that he will curb this intimidation. Indeed, his appointment of a hardliner with strong ties to Iran’s security apparatus, Mostafa Pourmohammadi, as the country’s minister of justice, does not bode well for Ayatollah Boroujerdi or any of the other activists that have run afoul of the Tehran regime.
In other words, as well as refusing cooperation with UN nuclear inspectors, the regime is also criminalizing those who talk to the international body’s human-rights investigators. So far, Rouhani has given no indication that he will curb this intimidation. Indeed, his appointment of a hardliner with strong ties to Iran’s security apparatus, Mostafa Pourmohammadi, as the country’s minister of justice, does not bode well for Ayatollah Boroujerdi or any of the other activists that have run afoul of the Tehran regime.
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