2008 Woodie Awards
Zack Beauchamp '10: 'What if Iran persecuted a religious minority and nobody cared?'
Issue date: 11/15/07 Section: Columns
In February 1991, Seyyed Mohammed Golpaygani, then-secretary of Iran's Supreme Revolutionary Cultural Council, wrote a letter to Ayatollah Ali Khameini on what he called "the Baha'i question." The letter details a systematic means of crushing the Baha'i religious minority, including a prohibition on individuals who "identify as Baha'i" getting an education or holding a job, a ban on Baha'i holding any "position(s) of influence," a new government policy of "confront(ing) and destroy(ing) (Baha'i) cultural roots outside the country" and a general commitment to stopping the "progress and development" of the Baha'i.
Since this directive was approved by Khameini - making it official government policy - government persecution of Baha'i believers has intensified significantly, especially after Mahmoud Ahmedinejad brought his brand of fundamentalism to the Iranian presidency in August 2005.
Roughly two months after Ahmedinejad took power, Iran's Revolutionary Guard, Ministry of Information and Police Force were ordered to create a detailed information database on all of the country's Baha'i citizens. 2006 saw an expulsion of all Baha'i students from 81 Iranian universities, as well as an expansion of the surveillance inaugurated in 2005.
In April 2007, while incidents of school officials harassing Baha'i students were on the rise, another official Iranian government report ordered that all Baha'i business in an enormous number of sectors be shut down. Further, according to Iranian law, the Baha'i are "unprotected infidels," meaning that they can be attacked or even killed without any threat of punishment for the attacker. And this only hints at the sordid policies of the Iranian government towards its Baha'i minority - since the 1979 Iranian Revolution, hundreds of Baha'i have been killed, and thousands have been arrested.
However, official executions and arrests have declined significantly in recent years, resulting in a shift to the persecutions described above, which were explicitly designed to be implemented in ways less likely to attract international attention. But the Iranian government hasn't succeeded in covering this up, have they? Human rights organizations must be onto Iran's game.
Unfortunately, that is not really the case. Searching Amnesty International's Web site for "Iran Baha'i" gives only 16 results, many of which are repeats. Only one of those 16, a four paragraph letter asking the Iranian government for "clarification" about the 2005 surveillance memorandum, is exclusively devoted to the Baha'i situation. Human Rights Watch does somewhat better - the same search outputs 121 results, including a press release from September criticizing Iran's expulsion of Baha'i university students. However, it also has no dedicated report on the intensification of economic and social discrimination against the Baha'i, and neither Amnesty International nor Human Rights Watch has a word to say about the 2007 directive calling for the functional end of Baha'i participation in the Iranian economy.
So if I didn't hear about the increase in persecution from human rights organizations, where did I find out about it? I gathered some of it from dedicated Baha'i rights organizations, but most of the facts came from the column that alerted me to the issue, a recent piece by Paul Marshall in ... William Kristol's The Weekly Standard. That's right - the archconservative magazine owned by Rupert Murdoch and widely known for its insistence on a connection between Saddam Hussein and al-Qaeda has done more recent reporting on discrimination against a religious minority in a third world country than have two of the largest human rights organizations in the world.
So why is it, exactly, that a human rights issue is getting more press among conservatives than the predominantly left-wing human rights establishment? Marshall's piece gives us a clue - at the end of his article, he writes that "Iran's actions are reminiscent of the Nazis in another way: Even while under great internal and external pressure, the regime is still committed to diverting resources to pursue an ideological and religious campaign that conforms to no realist evaluation of any national interest. The mullahs' Iran is not a normal country." The arguments - that Iran is like Nazi Germany, that Iran takes actions against its national interest to pursue its ideological aims - are central theses of the argument for why Iran will use its nuclear weapons, which in turn is a key claim in the case for tough action by the United States against Iran. In short, it seems that Marshall's interest in the Baha'i situation is less about the actual persecution and more about the implications of this persecution for American policy about Iranian nuclear weapons.
When viewed in this light, the reason for the low levels of attention toward the Baha'i in Iran on the part of human rights organizations becomes clear: They don't want to be seen as helping the hated Bush administration's case against Iran. This aversion points to a greater problem in contemporary politics: Human rights have become political weapons, where one criticizes the abuses of one's political adversaries but remains silent or even commendatory (see conservatives on Guantanamo Bay) when it is politically inconvenient to do so.
This attitude is unacceptable. Human rights are universal rights and cannot be discarded on the basis of political expediency. What is needed is a political consciousness that refuses to play politics with human rights and insists on their universality, a view that fits naturally with liberal ideals but cannot fully be implemented until the left is willing to get past its current Bush-phobia. The left needs to realize that the enemy of my enemy can also be my enemy too and that the only people hurt by its silence on these issues are people like the Baha'i.
Zack Beauchamp '10 is annoyed that he had to imply something marginally positive about Rupert Murdoch.
Since this directive was approved by Khameini - making it official government policy - government persecution of Baha'i believers has intensified significantly, especially after Mahmoud Ahmedinejad brought his brand of fundamentalism to the Iranian presidency in August 2005.
Roughly two months after Ahmedinejad took power, Iran's Revolutionary Guard, Ministry of Information and Police Force were ordered to create a detailed information database on all of the country's Baha'i citizens. 2006 saw an expulsion of all Baha'i students from 81 Iranian universities, as well as an expansion of the surveillance inaugurated in 2005.
In April 2007, while incidents of school officials harassing Baha'i students were on the rise, another official Iranian government report ordered that all Baha'i business in an enormous number of sectors be shut down. Further, according to Iranian law, the Baha'i are "unprotected infidels," meaning that they can be attacked or even killed without any threat of punishment for the attacker. And this only hints at the sordid policies of the Iranian government towards its Baha'i minority - since the 1979 Iranian Revolution, hundreds of Baha'i have been killed, and thousands have been arrested.
However, official executions and arrests have declined significantly in recent years, resulting in a shift to the persecutions described above, which were explicitly designed to be implemented in ways less likely to attract international attention. But the Iranian government hasn't succeeded in covering this up, have they? Human rights organizations must be onto Iran's game.
Unfortunately, that is not really the case. Searching Amnesty International's Web site for "Iran Baha'i" gives only 16 results, many of which are repeats. Only one of those 16, a four paragraph letter asking the Iranian government for "clarification" about the 2005 surveillance memorandum, is exclusively devoted to the Baha'i situation. Human Rights Watch does somewhat better - the same search outputs 121 results, including a press release from September criticizing Iran's expulsion of Baha'i university students. However, it also has no dedicated report on the intensification of economic and social discrimination against the Baha'i, and neither Amnesty International nor Human Rights Watch has a word to say about the 2007 directive calling for the functional end of Baha'i participation in the Iranian economy.
So if I didn't hear about the increase in persecution from human rights organizations, where did I find out about it? I gathered some of it from dedicated Baha'i rights organizations, but most of the facts came from the column that alerted me to the issue, a recent piece by Paul Marshall in ... William Kristol's The Weekly Standard. That's right - the archconservative magazine owned by Rupert Murdoch and widely known for its insistence on a connection between Saddam Hussein and al-Qaeda has done more recent reporting on discrimination against a religious minority in a third world country than have two of the largest human rights organizations in the world.
So why is it, exactly, that a human rights issue is getting more press among conservatives than the predominantly left-wing human rights establishment? Marshall's piece gives us a clue - at the end of his article, he writes that "Iran's actions are reminiscent of the Nazis in another way: Even while under great internal and external pressure, the regime is still committed to diverting resources to pursue an ideological and religious campaign that conforms to no realist evaluation of any national interest. The mullahs' Iran is not a normal country." The arguments - that Iran is like Nazi Germany, that Iran takes actions against its national interest to pursue its ideological aims - are central theses of the argument for why Iran will use its nuclear weapons, which in turn is a key claim in the case for tough action by the United States against Iran. In short, it seems that Marshall's interest in the Baha'i situation is less about the actual persecution and more about the implications of this persecution for American policy about Iranian nuclear weapons.
When viewed in this light, the reason for the low levels of attention toward the Baha'i in Iran on the part of human rights organizations becomes clear: They don't want to be seen as helping the hated Bush administration's case against Iran. This aversion points to a greater problem in contemporary politics: Human rights have become political weapons, where one criticizes the abuses of one's political adversaries but remains silent or even commendatory (see conservatives on Guantanamo Bay) when it is politically inconvenient to do so.
This attitude is unacceptable. Human rights are universal rights and cannot be discarded on the basis of political expediency. What is needed is a political consciousness that refuses to play politics with human rights and insists on their universality, a view that fits naturally with liberal ideals but cannot fully be implemented until the left is willing to get past its current Bush-phobia. The left needs to realize that the enemy of my enemy can also be my enemy too and that the only people hurt by its silence on these issues are people like the Baha'i.
Zack Beauchamp '10 is annoyed that he had to imply something marginally positive about Rupert Murdoch.