Images showing exiled Iranian chess grandmasters competing against one another has sparked strong reactions in the Persian-speaking online community as top players continue to flee the regime.
Atousa Pourkashiyan's game against fellow exiled Iranian Mitra Hejazipour at the FIDE World Women's Team Championship 2023 in Bydgoszcz, Poland, was a sad day for Iranians who see the game's best competing for different countries.
Last year, Pourkashiyan was among the several female athletes across Iranian sport, who over recent years have chosen to shun the hijab on the world stage. The seven time Iranian women's champion, now competing for the US, played against Hejazipour Wednesday, who now represents France. She was expelled from the national team back in 2020 for refusal to wear the hijab.
Hejazipour, now known as the French chess queen, said: "While playing against Atousa, I wondered what has led us to a point where we are not even members of the same continent today?"
Also at the match was Sara Khadem al-Sharieh, who emigrated to Spain following a controversial game last year in which she competed for Iran without her headscarf, knowing she and her family could never return home after the bold statement in support of the protests in the wake of Mahsa Amini's murder in morality police custody.
In a statement released on the occasion of the first death anniversary of Mahsa Amini that catalyzed a revolt later known as the Women, Life, Freedom movement, the human rights organization said the world must pursue pathways for justice at the international level to address systemic impunity for Iranian officials responsible for hundreds of unlawful killings of protesters and widespread torture.
Exacerbated by years of economic and social suffocation and subjugation under the rule of a corrupt autocratic regime, people took to streets across Iran last September. The uprising was dealt with by a bloody crackdown by police and Revolutionary Guard’s agents leaving about 600 protesters dead and tens of thousands detained.
Amnesty pointed out that Iranian authorities have committed a litany of crimes under international law to eradicate any challenge to their iron grip on power over the past year. “These include hundreds of unlawful killings; the arbitrary execution of seven protesters; tens of thousands of arbitrary arrests; widespread torture, including rape of detainees; widespread harassment of victims’ families who call for truth and justice; and reprisals against women and girls who defy discriminatory compulsory veiling laws.”
The group’s Deputy Regional Director for the Middle East and North Africa, Diana Eltahawy, slammed the regime’s authorities for “inflicting unspeakable cruelty on people in Iran for courageously challenging decades of repression and inequality,” noting that “not one official has been criminally investigated, let alone prosecuted and punished for crimes committed during, and in the aftermath of, the uprising.”
She also described the anniversary of the ‘Woman Life Freedom’ protests as “a stark reminder for countries around the world of the need to initiate criminal investigations into the heinous crimes committed by the Iranian authorities under universal jurisdiction.”
Eltahawy also called on the world's leaders to issue statements explicitly calling on Tehran to halt the use of firearms against protesters, stop torturing detainees, and release all detained protesters. “These actions show victims they are not alone in their darkest hour.”
Amnesty decried the regime's raft of new measures against women and girls who defy compulsory hijab, including the confiscation of cars and denial of access to employment, education, healthcare, banking services and public transport as well as finesand degrading punishments, such as washing corpses.
“This assault on women’s rights is taking place amid a spate of hateful official statements referring to unveiling as a 'virus', 'social illness' or 'disorder' as well as equating the choice to appear without a headscarf to 'sexual depravity,’” the right group added.
Amnesty also raised alarm about the detention and summoning of human rights defenders and journalists, saying that “at least 90 journalists and other media workers and 60 lawyers, including those representing families of individuals unlawfully killed,” have been arrested. Scores of other lawyers were summoned for interrogations.
Describing it as “a tsunami of torture,” Amnesty said that to quash the protests security forces fired live ammunition and metal pellets, causing injuries amounting to torture or other ill-treatment to thousands, including blinding, loss of limbs and impaired mobility. “The authorities also oversaw the widespread commission of torture and other ill-treatment against thousands of detained protesters, including children.”
Amnesty International called the establishment of a Fact-Finding Mission on Iran by the UN Human Rights Council in November 2022 as a good measure but insisted that much more is needed “to deter further cycles of bloodshed.”
During the past several days, the international community has stepped up condemnation of Iran’s crackdown on dissent as Iranians are getting ready for more protests on the anniversary of the uprising, but none has so far resulted in tangible results for the people.
The US overwhelmingly passed the MAHSA Act on Tuesday to strengthen Washington’s sanctions on the regime over violation of human rights. Also on Tuesday, members of the European Parliament grilled EU’s foreign policy chief Josep Borrell over the bloc’s Iran policy.
In a note published Monday on his Instagram account ahead of last year’s nationwide protests anniversary on September 16, Esmaeilion accused the regime of simultaneously continuing its “hostage-taking policy” and “obeisance to China and Russia” to force the West into deals with the Islamic Republic.
Esmaeilion also said he would join other Iranians in Toronto, Canada, on September 16 “to chant “Woman, Life, Freedom”, the signature slogan of the movement that was sparked by the death of 22-year-old Mahsa Amini in the custody of morality police. “I know that sooner or later the Iranian people will topple the Islamic Republic.”
“We will neither forgive nor forget,” Esmaeilion, a dentist-writer who turned into a fierce activist when he lost his wife and young daughter in the downing of a commercial flight over Tehran in January 2020 by the Revolutionary Guards (IRGC), wrote.
Expatriate Iranian have been planning anniversary demonstrations in several major world cities on Saturday some of which, including in Montreal, Canada, will be held outside US embassies and consulates.
A small group of Iranians staged a rally Monday outside the US Consulate in Toronto to protest what they allege is US government and Canadian “appeasement of the Islamic Republic.”
They were referring to the Biden administration’s decision to unfreeze $6b of the Islamic Republic’s frozen assets in South Korea and “encouraging hostage diplomacy by paying ransom” as well as demanding the US to impose maximum pressure on the regime.
On Monday, the US Congress was informed that Secretary of State Antony Blinken has signed a waiver to allow international banks to transfer $6 billion of Iran’s frozen assets in a hostage release deal with Tehran. The State Department says Blinken determined that waiving the sanctions was in the national security interests of the United States.
Both Washington and Tehran since announcing the prisoner swap deal in August had claimed that the prisoner swap deal and the unblocking of the frozen funds were unrelated, but the waiver clearly links the two as one agreement.
"Allowing these funds to be transferred from restricted Iranian accounts held in the (Republic of Korea) to accounts in Qatar for humanitarian trade is necessary to facilitate the release of these US citizens," a US document seen by Reuters on Monday said.
The deal involves the release of five American citizens held in Iran and five Iranians held in the US. American lawmakers have been harshly criticizing the Biden administration for what they say is effective paying a huge ransom, which will only encourage the Iranian regime and endanger more Americans.
Other Iranian figures including exiled Prince Reza Pahlavi and activist Masih Alinejad have on many occasions in the past few years criticized the West for “appeasing the terrorist regime”.
In a Wall Street Journal opinion piece in August last year, the former crown prince said the way Western powers interacted with the Islamic Republic had emboldened it to continue its repressive measures against Iranians with greater immunity.
“Iranian people are not asking the Western countries to save them, they are asking the West to stop saving the Islamic Republic,” Alinejad said in a speech at Italy’s Senate in February.
“The West has always shown weakness against the Islamic Republic’s hostage-taking strategy and still wants to continue appeasing this government,” Canada-based data scientist and activist Ali Ashtari told Iran International TV in February, demanding that Western politicians and expatriate Iranians who “surrender to such humiliation be disgraced.”
