I am a former political prisoner in Iran. I worry the regime will execute female activists

Verbal condemnations of the regime must be reinforced by actions from the international community.

January 30, 2023 by Homeira Hesami; Dallas Morning News

It all sounded too familiar.

The Islamic Republic of Iran executed two more protesters in early January, despite persistent international outcry over two similar executions that were carried out in December. The latest killings sparked a fresh outpouring of public condemnation, as well as new threats of economic sanctions. Yet the following day, the regime’s judiciary proceeded to issue three more death sentences. To me, as a former political prisoner in Iran, this was like déjà vu.

 In reality, dozens of other detainees are already facing charges that could also carry the death penalty, reported the Norway-based Iran Human Rights, while the People’s Mojahedin Organization of Iran, or MEK, the leading voice for a democratic alternative to the clerical regime, reports that upward of 30,000 Iranians have been arrested since mid-September, most of whom are still awaiting charges or trial, according to the International Committee in Search of Justice.

Each of the four hanging victims was ultimately handed a death sentence based on the vague political charges of “enmity against God” or “spreading corruption on Earth.” The first victim, Mohsen Shekari, was accused only of injuring a Basij paramilitary militant and blocking a road, yet this was considered more than sufficient to justify using him as the marker for a new milestone in the regime’s crackdown on dissent.
It is very likely that Shekari’s case was deliberately chosen for that purpose. By forgoing any effort to establish a reasonable justification for his execution, the regime may have intended to convey the message that its use of capital punishment will not be constrained going forward. That message has been systematically reinforced by Tehran’s blatant disregard for international criticism over this issue. This goes to show that criticism has been inadequate thus far.
Verbal condemnations of the regime’s behavior must quickly be reinforced by concrete actions designed to hold its officials accountable and demonstrate that serious consequences will follow from any further escalation.
In absence of coordinated pressure on the regime, there is no telling how bad the current crackdown could get. Even before the executions started, the MEK’s network determined that over 750 people including 70 minors had been shot dead or fatally beaten in the streets or in Iranian detention facilities. These figures are certain to continue growing, and tragically there is a clear precedent for the rate of executions to match or even exceed the pace of that growth.
Since the inception of Iran’s theocratic dictatorship, the country has been the unquestioned world leader of executions per capita. Worse still, the pace of Tehran’s executions has been accelerating since 2021, when Ebrahim Raisi, the candidate favored by the supreme leader, was elected as president of the Islamic Republic in an election with low voter turnout. This trend is very much in keeping with his legacy as the “butcher of Tehran,” a label that he earned in 1988 as one of the main perpetrators of a nationwide massacre of political prisoners.
I personally lost my cousin who was serving his prison sentence at the time of that massacre. He was one of 30,000 political prisoners killed that bloody summer, as Raisi and other members of the 1988 “death commissions” were quick to issue summary death sentences for men and women, often after only a minute or two of interrogation.
In line with a fatwa issued that year by Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, around 90% of the massacre’s victims were members or supporters of the MEK who remained loyal to the cause of freedom, according to Iran1988, a group seeking justice for victims. Yet, all those killings failed to destroy the organization, and the regime has remained fruitlessly committed to doing so for the intervening 35 years. This can be seen in the current crackdown, which targets an uprising in which MEK’s “Resistance Units” have played a key role.
That fact fuels my confidence in the uprising but also increases my concern for the activists who are leading the movement, especially the women. While the uprising began in response to the death of 22-year-old Mahsa Amini at the hands of Tehran’s “morality police,” it has unmistakably come to express popular demand for regime change as the only viable solution.
If the regime is desperate enough to kill women in the streets over minor offenses, it is certainly desperate enough to order the execution of large numbers of female activists at a time when they and their supporters are posing one of the most dangerous challenges to the theocratic regime since its inception after the 1979 revolution. And with 30,000 people having already been arrested in connection with the uprising, it is not difficult to imagine such systematic killings reaching the scale I witnessed in the late 1980s.
The regime keeps on projecting its intentions to the world and keeps raising the bar when the latest crime is met only with a loud but toothless outcry. Tehran has already demonstrated that it will kill young men based on political charges, without due process, and for supposed offenses that do not rise to international standards for the most serious crimes. The first execution of a female detainee cannot be far behind, and the hanging of children cannot be far behind that.
The international community should take assertive action before those next escalations. Iranian embassies abroad should be closed, and the regime should be isolated to the greatest extent possible, pending a complete halt to the abuses and killings that have been continuous for the past four months.

Homeira Hesami is a former political prisoner in Iran and the chairwoman of the Iranian-American Community of North Texas, a member of the Organization of Iranian American Communities. She is a medical physicist who lives in Carrollton. She wrote this column for The Dallas Morning News.