by : Mohsen Sardary 

At a quick glance, in Iran under Rouhani’s watch an individual is executed every 8 hours, and this makes one think why does this regime carry out such crimes in public?

Recently a shocking video clip showing four youths and juveniles being beaten by repressive police forces in the back of a pick-up truck went viral on social media.

These footages show inhumane scenes of humiliation, with the youth being forced to even eat leaves and feedstuff, and also impelled to insult them and make animal sounds. After such an ordeal, these youths are so humiliated they cannot go on with their ordinary lives.

To create a climate of fear and terror, the regime ruling Iran is conducting public executions. In some cases they even broadcast such footages on state TV news. Of course, barbaric tortures, insults and other methods of degrading treatment have been ongoing from the first day of the mullahs’ rule in Iran in all prisons and detention centers across the country. However, torture doesn’t end in the dungeons and prison. In fact, they are even carried out in public, taped and published, raising the level of the mullahs’ barbarity to new heights.

However, the mullahs’ regime in Iran boldly and without any worries hangs people in public because it sees the international community’s bowing and pursuing their appeasement policies.

Of course, executions and hangings in public depict the regime’s fear of a change storm enraging in Iran; terrified of the reaction from the society, and worried of another uprising against the ‘supreme leader’ and his extremist dictatorship that has maintained the mullahs’ in power in the past three decades by resorting to vicious crackdown. It is obvious that incentives under any pretext and any deal with terrorist and their godfathers – being in Tehran – only encourages and emboldens it more than ever before in blackmailing the international community.

The question is that why is the Iranian regime carrying out such measures in public at a time when its apparently busy negotiating to resolve its controversial “peaceful” nuclear program, knowing very well that alongside its nuclear project it must respond to flagrant human rights violations and meddling in regional countries?

Don’t the mullahs realize that it is actually in their interest to at least stop these vicious measures – even for just a few months –to portray a good image in the international scene and during the nuclear talks?

Of course, Iranian regime officials know quite well their savagery in executions and acid attacks on women’s faces raise extreme hatred and anger amongst Iranians and the international community. However, in an impasse of internal and international crises, they desperately need to reign in popular uprisings and maintain their rule. To do so they have no choice but to carry out such inhumane steps, meaning repression under any pretext and exporting fundamentalism by any means possible are amongst the dire necessities of their fascist government to remain in power.

The Tehran regime is a medieval system empowered through conflicts with the civilized world and internal crackdown. That is why the mullahs can never forgo these vital elements, because if it shortens the rope for even a small period, without a doubt it will automatically lead to its downfall and accelerate its crumbling.

The increasing trend of executions and human rights violations in Iran, and the continuing crackdown of religious and ethnic minorities, bloggers, reporters and activists, with increasing prices and people becoming fed up with the economic crisis, all these elements add up to this regime’s instability and the necessity for change in Iran. Even at a quick glance to the Iranian regime’s status in the international arena, one can clearly come to realize that today’s regime is weaker and more fragile than ever before.

Losing Nouri Maliki, Tehran’s main man as the prime minister of Iraq, and a series of setbacks forced onto the mullahs in the nuclear project, failure in nuclear talks in from Masqat to Vienna, the formation of an international coalition against ISIS that will in the end target the heart of religious fundamentalism in Tehran and … has made the status quo very dangerous for the mullahs. That is why one can say with the utmost certainty that today it is more difficult for the Iranian regime to forgo nuclear weapons than any other period in the past 11 years of negotiations because it has learned from the experience of other countries that the only guarantee to maintain their dictatorship is obtaining nuclear weapons.

The Iranian regime is under siege by waves of internal and external problems. Rouhani’s cabinet has increased the price of bread, being the main meal of the majority of Iranians, by 30 to 40 percent. This leaves workers and Iran’s low income families – consisting of 90% of the population – even poorer.

Rouhani in his speech on Tuesday, November 26 in the northern city of Gorgan described the recent sudden drop in oil prices that has shaken the regime’s economy as a “conspiracy” and said, “Hands of conspiracy in the region and the world have lowered oil prices.”

Shameful appeasement and incentives to this regime, sending letters to the godfather of ISIS in Tehran, partnering it in the fight against its own elements in Iraq, or remaining silent regarding the role of this regime and its terrorist militias in the massacre of the peoples of Iraq, Syria, Lebanon and Yemen will actually encourage this regime to continue its crimes inside Iran and expanding terrorism throughout the region. Without a doubt, the result of such a policy by the West, and especially President Obama is gravely endangering international peace and security.

Nuclear negotiations must not be a pretext to turn our back to human rights violations and tortures in the streets of Iran.

Mohsen Sardary is a human rights activist and former political prisoner in Iran