Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, denier of facts and history, was back at the United Nations this week. Like he did at the UN Conference on Racism, Ahmadinejad repeated his blistering attacks on Israel and the United States and posed as the Lion of Islam. If he expected applause this time, he was disappointed.
Early in his presidency in 2006, Ahmadinejad mounted his high horse and sent a letter to W extolling the values of peace, justice, and human rights. Riding a wave of Muslim outrage at the War on Terror, Ahmadinejad condemned the U. S. for the abuse of Muslim detainees. He wrote:
There are prisoners in Guantanamo Bay that have not been tried, have no legal representation… There is no international monitoring of their condition and fate. No one knows whether they are prisoners, POWs, accused or criminals.
None of the suspected terrorists were Iranians, but this didn’t stop Ahmadinejad. He justified his intervention on the highest moral grounds:
I could not correlate the abduction of a person, and him or her being kept in secret prisons, with the provisions of any judicial system. For that matter, I fail to understand how such actions correspond to the teachings of Jesus Christ (PBUH), human rights and liberal values.
This time, when Ahmadinejad addressed the UN General Assembly, the Iran hoodwink was off. Now, it’s Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ali Khamenei, who is denying Muslims what Ahmadinejad demanded for al-Qaeda operatives.
In the protest cyclone that hit Iran after the June 12 elections, Khamenei ordered a crackdown and detained more than 4,000 protesters. The opposition claims more than 69 fatalities, double the official figure. The deaths of Neda, Sohrab, and countless others have exposed the Islamic Republic’s lethal brutality, even to the Islamic world. Ranking Iranian Ayatollahs have called for the release of political prisoners and called their mass trials “Stalinesque.”
The grisly mutilation of Mohsen Ruholamini, the son of a high official who was tortured in the post-election crackdown, hit the light of day, so even Khamenei was shamed into closing the Kahrizak detention center for “failing to preserve detainee rights.”
The cruelty is staggering, but the self-styled lion of Islam is now silent as a church mouse about detainee abuse in Iran’s Guantanamo: Evin prison. Defeated presidential candidate, Mehdi Karroubi, has called for a truth commission to investigate rumors about the rape of minors:
Some of the detainees have reported that certain individuals have so severely raped some of the girls in custody that the attacks have caused excruciating damage and injury to their reproductive organs. At the same time, they report that others have raped the young boys so violently that upon their release, they have had to endure great physical and mental pain and have been lying in a corner of their homes since.
Karroubi, who did his own research on the rape allegations, ought to know what is brutal. He was a political prisoner under the Shah. About these rapes, he insisted:
If only one case is true, it is a catastrophe for the Islamic Republic of Iran which has turned the bright, shining history of Shia clerics into an atrocious, shameful fate that has outdone many dictatorial regimes, including that of the tyrannical Shah.
Still, Ahmadinejad’s regime did not invent the torture and sexual violence in Iran’s prisons in June 2009. The stage for terror was set with the summary execution of monarchists by revolutionary tribunals set up in 1979. Two decades before Karroubi protested the abuses this year, Mehdi Bazargan, the prime minister at that time, asked:
What has the ruling elite done in nearly four years, besides bringing death and destruction, packing the prison and the cemeteries in every city.
That was way back in 1982 when we had the Ayatollah Khomenei. In 1988, Grand Ayatollah Montazeri denounced the judiciary’s mass murder of more than 3,000 leftist detainees, and condemned as un-Islamic prison guards raping virgins before their executions. The horror for those women can hardly be imagined.
Khomenei’s medieval and murderous system of justice remains etched in the Iranian constitution and is enshrined now in Khamenei’s Evin prison. Like their names, their brutalities are almost interchangeable.
Though self-serving, Ahmadinejad’s letter to W grounded detainee rights in universal principles of justice and compassion. Rape, torture, and murder of Iranians betrays the teachings of the prophets and imams whom Ahmadinejad claims to represent. Iran has a long, sophisticated culture thousands of years old that has roots in religious tolerance and values recognizable even today as liberal. The Lion of Islam’s dilemma is that though he wrote a high-minded letter espousing those values, he is nothing but a mouse trapped by Khomeini’s ghost.
After Ahmadinejad’s appearance at the United Nations, Muslim leaders should hold his feet to the fire and demand that he grant Iranians in Evin and other prisons the legal protections he urged W to grant Muslims in Guantanamo. Otherwise, without W as a foil, he would need to enlighten the rest of us with a disquisition on how the prophets granted Iran’s supreme leader the right to rape, torture, and murder Iranians in Evin prison. He’ll be spitting into a fierce wind of change, though, since the rest of the world spent weeks this summer cheering for the Iranian people’s struggle for human rights and democracy, and it looks like their Green Movement is not backing down.
My friend Amir Soltani Sheikholeslami, Operations Director for Omid for Iran, provided a lot of the information and wrote a draft of this piece. I take sole responsibility for errors. Thanks, Amir! This essay was also published in the Boston Globe.