It's my pleasure. Thank you very much.
Honourable members of this subcommittee, I am privileged to appear before you today to discuss the role of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, the IRGC, in a vast system of domestic repression, and to encourage the government of Iran to end these human rights atrocities and the Government of Canada to designate the IRGC, in its entirety, under the Special Economic Measures Act, for its human rights abuses, and to add the IRGC, in its entirety, to Canada's Criminal Code for its terrorist activities.
While democracies fear external enemies, undemocratic regimes fear their own people. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the Islamic Republic of Iran, where the enmity between state and society reached new heights in the aftermath of the fraudulent June 12, 2009, presidential election. As the Iranian public took to the streets chanting the slogan “where is my vote?” paranoid Islamic Republic authorities were looking for and finding—or so they thought—internal enemies, foreign agents, saboteurs, and so-called velvet revolutionaries.
In 2009, the Islamic Republic law enforcement forces were the visible first line of defence of the regime, but the IRGC and its Basij resistance force were the real agents of suppression of Iran’s pro-democracy green movement. There is little indication that the IRGC and the Basij are playing a less sinister role in this year’s presidential election. Indeed, there is every reason to believe that this presidential election will be as fraudulent as the last.
In the weeks prior to the coming June election, we've already heard from IRGC officials. Revolutionary Guard officers have openly declared they intend to manipulate the course of the election. As only one example, Mr. Hojjat al-Eslam Ali Saidi, representative of the supreme leader to the IRGC, infamously declared “engineering elections is the natural duty of the guards”. The Basij has intensified its much publicized war games not only to prepare for suppressing dissidents, but also to terrorize the dissidents into inaction and passivity.
The regime’s brutality comes in many forms. The United States government, the U.S. Treasury Department, has recently designated the IRGC for human rights abuses because of its cyber-repression. As we know, Individuals arrested by the IRGC have been subjected to severe mental and physical abuse in a ward of the notorious Evin prison controlled by the IRGC. As Canadians well know, Canadian photojournalist Zahra Kazemi was detained, tortured, and raped in Evin prison. She later died.
To better understand the role of the IRGC in this domestic repression, I turn to a brief analysis of how the IRGC has been transformed in recent years. Since the revolution of 1979, the IRGC has been the main pillar of defence for the regime, though it is not Iran’s conventional army; that's an important distinction. The IRGC is constitutionally mandated to “safeguard the revolution and its achievements”. The statute of the guards authorizes the IRGC to confront “counter-revolutionary” forces of all types with armed resistance, pursuit, and arrest.
The IRGC was originally conceived to counter both internal and external threats. It was forced to focus on external defence during the eight-year war with Iraq from 1980-1988. The external focus continued for almost two decades after that, but supreme leader Ali Khamenei in September 2007, appointed a man named Major-General Mohammad Ali Jafari as the seventh commander-in-chief in the history of the IRGC. This is a man who earned his stripes during the Iran-Iraq War; he served as commander of IRGC ground forces, but most importantly he was the founding father of the IRGC's strategic studies centre in 2005. Under Jafari's supervision, the centre, which really functions as the IRGC’s think tank, began to conduct research into velvet revolutions and alleged U.S. soft regime change policies.
Jafari argued that the IRGC should focus on future internal threats to the Islamic Republic’s stability rather than external threats. He has reorganized the IRGC in a way that is very important to understand. He's merged the Basij, the paramilitary force, into the IRGC, and he's restructured the IRGC to become less centralized, more focused on the provinces, and with enhanced capabilities as an anti-riot force.
We all saw Jafari's handiwork in the brutal suppression of the 2009 protests. All of you are very familiar with what happened; I won't go into the details. It's very important to understand there were human faces to the Iranians who were brutalized, murdered, raped, and tortured. One of those was a woman named Taraneh Mousavi. Last week, in fact, a member of the House Committee on Foreign Affairs in the U.S. Congress told the story of what happened to Taraneh. If I may, allow me to quickly recount what happened to this young woman.
She was described by her friends as a beautiful woman, very kind, with a warm voice. She played the piano with skill. She disappeared during the protest, arrested by security forces. Weeks later, her mother received an anonymous call from a government agent saying that her daughter had been hospitalized, listing injuries that could only have come about as a result of a brutal rape.
When her family went to the hospital, she was no longer there. According to one account, the family was told not to tell people when she had disappeared or any information about the kind of injuries she suffered. Her charred body was discovered a month after her arrest. Her family was told not to hold a funeral for her, and not to tell anyone the way she was killed.
The report of Taraneh's rape and murder is far from the only example of the torture and abuse we've seen in Iran's prisons. All of this has been evidenced by the UN special rapporteur's report and the State Department's Iran human rights report of 2012. All of this confirms the evidence we've seen of prisoners being held from weeks to months without charge or access to legal counsel, being subject to severe torture, beatings with batons, mock hangings, electrocution, rape, sleep deprivation, and denial of food or water.
So Jafari really had passed his test. He had killed over 70 unarmed protestors—opposition forces say the real number is several hundred. He had tortured and maimed and imprisoned many others, and he managed to persuade opposition leaders to urge their supporters to leave the streets. Unfortunately, but for Canada, the international community was silent, which may have contributed to the decision of the Iranian opposition to abandon their peaceful protests.
Canada has been a leader in defending the human rights of Iranians. Canada continued to lead the way in holding the IRGC responsible for violating the human rights of Iranians by taking additional steps.
Here, I want to talk through some policy recommendations for how Canada can continue to lead the way. In December, 2012 the Canadian government added the IRGC's Quds Force to the list of terrorist groups under Canada's Criminal Code. This was a critical step in recognizing the IRGC's threat to international peace and security, and I'm sure Matt will talk about that in further detail.
I would urge the Government of Canada to take the next logical step and sanction the IRGC in its entirety for both its terrorist operations and its role in abusing the human rights of the Iranian people. This echoes the call from Foreign Minister Baird, who only a few weeks ago told a group of Iranian pro-democracy advocates at a Toronto conference that I attended, that Canada needs to call attention to Iran's “regressive clerical military dictatorship” and “protect dissenting voices…and those who have the courage to tell the truth about the Basij and the IRGC.” Foreign Minister Baird said “The world must target the IRGC's assets, and expose the wealth they've been amassing at the expense of the people”.
Indeed, if Canada were to designate the IRGC, this would be a substantive and symbolic step. It would target the IRGC's assets in this country and would expose the wealth they've been amassing at the expense of the people. All IRGC profits ultimately end up funding the IRGC's nefarious activities—it's nuclear and ballistic missile programs, its overseas terrorist proxies, and its vast apparatus of domestic human rights repression.
Canada must shut down the IRGC's entire commercial enterprise. This in turn requires a blanket designation of the IRGC as a terrorist organization and would render it illegal to have any financial dealings with the entity, as well as a blanket designation of the IRGC as a human rights abuser under subsection 4(1) of SEMA. This would impose substantive penalties, undermine the legitimacy of the Iranian regime, and send a powerful message to Iran's people.
Human rights abuses by the Iranian regime fulfill the basic criteria under subsection 4(1) of SEMA for the imposition of economic sanctions. We've seen SEMA being used to target IRGC entities and persons for proliferation-related activities, but SEMA has also been used to sanction human rights abuses by Syria's Assad government and its supporters, by the Government of Zimbabwe, by the Government of Burma, and by the Government of Sudan, among others. So we've seen SEMA used in numerous cases by the Canadian government to target a regime and elements of it for massive human rights abuses.
I want to conclude by summarizing the three grounds on which the IRGC should be designated for its human rights abuses. First, the IRGC has a constitutional mandate to “safeguard the revolution and its achievements”. In practice, that means that the revolution of 1979 is not an historical event, an event of the past, but an ongoing process or a permanent revolution. This, in turn, keeps Iran in a permanent state of emergency in which the IRGC is authorized to interpret any opposition to the regime as a counter-revolutionary act.
Second, the IRGC's statute authorizes the IRGC to violate the basic rights of Iranian citizens on the mere suspicion of those citizens being so-called counter-revolutionaries.
Third, as I've outlined, the reorganization of the IRGC under Major General Jafari and the domestic focus of the IRGC resulted in the killing of protesters in the wake of the 2009 fraudulent presidential election, and murder, torture, and abuse that continues until today.
To the extent that individual members of the IRGC demonstrate that they want to separate themselves from the IRGC, they should be removed individually from the sanctions. Prohibit the IRGC, and individually remove those members who have distanced themselves from the organization. But IRGC members need to be put to a fundamental choice by Canada, between continued association with a repressive, clerical, military dictatorship and respect for the human rights of their citizens.
In conclusion, this hearing could not be timelier, as we meet merely two weeks before the upcoming Iranian election, which is sure to be fraudulent and involve intimidation and repression by the IRGC. I commend your committee's courageous stand in support of the Iranian people. I hope your actions this week will be heard in the streets of Iran from Abadan to Isfahan, and from Tabriz to Tehran.
Thank you very much.