The Islamic Republic News Agency announced today that the most prominent secular opposition leader still living in Iran, Mr. Darioush Forouhar, was brutally murdered on Sunday afternoon along with his wife in their Tehran apartment. Mr. Forouhar was the leader of the Iran Nation's Party, a conservative, nationalistic group that is banned but until now was tolerated by the regime authorities. Mrs. Parvaneh Forouhar was a prominent women's leader in her own right, and had visited the United States last year. The official version of their murder has it that angry bodyguards brutally hacked them to death with knives, cutting off Mr. Forouhar's head. If true, that is exactly how former Prime Minister Shahpour Bakhtiar was assassinated by regime agents in his home in the outskirts of Paris in August 1991. It is also how Bakhtiar's top aide, Abdelrahman Borouman, was killed in Paris four months earlier, and how several other Iranian dissidents have been killed. And just one month earlier, the 80-year old father of a Voice of America Farsi Service producer was killed in his Shiraz home in an identical manner. There is a pattern here.
The Foundation deplores the brutal execution of the Forouhars. Clearly, as President Khatami himself pointed out just hours before the murders were announced, the ruling clergy does not view secular political activists as legitimate members of their "civil society," which is reserved for well-heeled believers in clerical rule. Khatami's condemnation of opposition activities on Sunday - for that's what it was - was also a call to murder.
How many more opposition leaders will have to pay with their lives until the West understands that the Islamic Republic will never respect the rights of its opponents or tolerate civil dissent? As a signatory of the International Covenant of Civil and Political Rights, the Islamic Republic is legally bound to protect free speech and the right to political expression. Western governments in contact with the Tehran authorities should demand that the Islamic Republic respect international norms of human rights and political expression.
The Foundation believes that the world community should not tolerate this type of blatant human rights abuse, and should immediately convoke the appropriate bodies to consider international sanctions on the Tehran regime.
More FDI Human Rights Information
The Foundation for Democracy in Iran is a private, non-profit corporation registered in the State of Maryland. Contact: Kenneth R. Timmerman, Executive Director. Tel: (301) 946-2918. Fax: (301) 942-5341. FDI materials, including the FDI Newswire, are available free-of-charge via the Internet at http://www.iran.org