Mr. Speaker, I am rising today to address this issue and to discuss some of the light that was shed on the issue of human rights in Iran for myself and other members of the human rights subcommittee when we held an series of hearings over the course of about a year and a half starting in early 2009.
We published an extensive report with over 30 recommendations dealing with how Canada could try to have some influence on Iran. We did not suffer from the illusion that Canada is the biggest player in that particular game. Iran is on the far side of the planet and Canada is, relatively speaking, a power with limited economic and military pull but with considerable moral powers at its disposal. Canada has a large Iranian Persian ethnic population and with a considerable amount of goodwill toward the Iranian and ethnic Persian community worldwide, if not perhaps with the regime that currently governs that country.
It is important to point out that the two are very distinct: the Iranian civilization and the Iranian regime are not the same thing, notwithstanding the desire of that regime to conflate itself with the country and with the nationality that it exploits. The favourite tactic of all dictatorial regimes is to conflate themselves with the country that they are exploiting.
We looked at a series of human rights abuses that exist within Iran. I remember telling my staff when I came back from these hearings that we listened to yet another form of human rights abuse going on within Iran.
The Iranian regime is the gift that keeps on giving when it comes to human rights abuses. It engages in abuses on the basis of persecution of religious minorities. It persecutes its national minorities. Women are persecuted and the advocates of women's rights are persecuted. Sexual minorities, that is homosexuals, gay men and lesbians are severely persecuted, especially gay men. Democracy advocates face persecution, that includes many people who are of the Persian majority.
The regime engages in the sponsorship of terrorism abroad, so it exports human rights abuses.
Finally, and perhaps most significant of all, there is the incitement to genocide and the overt stated goal of the Iranian regime, the Ahmadinejad regime, of wiping Israel off the face of the earth by killing as many Israeli citizens, as many Jews, as possible.
Let me go through some of these things now systematically.
I will start with religious persecution. With good reason we have heard about the terrible persecution of the Baha'i in Iran. The Baha'i religion began in Iran and has had its home there for a long time, although Baha'is exist worldwide. The Baha'i religion is a post-Koranic religion. On the basis of it being post-Koranic the minimal legal and constitutional protections that are offered to other religions, the so-called faiths of the book, Christianity and Judaism and also on a traditional basis Zoroastrianism, are not given to the Baha'i religion. Baha'is face what really amounts to a systematic effort to exterminate the religion by rounding up, imprisoning and where the regime dictates it to be necessary, executing their leadership and causing others to go underground for fear of a like treatment. What has gone on with Baha'is is one of the great tragedies of modern times.
Christians are also persecuted in Iran, especially those who are accused of proselytizing or of being guilty of converting from Islam, a crime under Iranian law that is punishable by death.
There is a small Jewish population. They have some nominal protections but that should be taken as being more in the letter of the law than in practice. Zoroastrians have some protection, but it is limited protection.
This is a Shia Muslim country. Sunni Muslims face discrimination. It is not as severe as the discrimination faced by the other religions of the book and certainly nothing as severe as what is faced by the Baha'is, but, for example, it is difficult to get permission to build or repair a Sunni mosque.
Finally, dissenting Shia clerics, those who disagree with where the regime wants to go, also face persecution and, in some cases, penalties up to and including things like house arrest.
In religion, really any point of view other than the very narrow point of view that is approved by the regime is persecuted at a variety of levels of severity, depending upon how determined the regime is to suppress that particular group.
National minorities also face very considerable persecution in Iran. This is a matter of no small significance. Iran is not an ethnically homogenous country. On the contrary, it is like the old Soviet Union, or like Austria and Hungary 100 years ago. It is a country that consists very much of minorities and depending upon how one measures the minorities, they may actually represent a majority of the total population. These include the Azeris, the Kurds and the Balochs, to name the three largest groups, also Arabs, and many other smaller groups, some of which exist only within the boundaries of Iran, others which overlap its boundaries. These groups face very significant persecution and there are, in some cases, armed responses from some members of those communities in response to the way in which they have been treated.
I mentioned that women and the advocates of women's rights are treated very badly. This includes a variety of forms of persecution and repression. In particular, being an advocate of women's rights is a very dangerous and, in some cases, a life-threatening occupation.
In Iran, homosexuals face some of the most grotesque abuses imaginable. Gay men face a choice between execution or forceable sex change operations. Naturally, many gay men have fled Iran. There is now a community of men who are effectively refugees, although they do not have formal refugee status, living in Turkey. One of the great and much forgotten human rights tragedies of our times is the treatment of the Iranian gay population.
There are also democracy protestors and those who are involved in the Green movement. Starting in the midst of our hearings three years ago, we watched, initially with enthusiasm and then with alarm, the way in which they were essentially destroyed through the excessive use of force by the regime, very effectively, to stop a movement that really was, in a sense, a precursor of the Arab Spring that we have seen elsewhere in the Muslim world.
I mentioned sponsorship of terrorism. Hamas is sponsored by the Iranian regime. Hezbollah, in particular, is very much sponsored by the Iranian regime. Indeed, the regime in Iran is the primary sponsor of Hezbollah's terrorist activities. It has, through arming the Hezbollah movement or the Hezbollah terrorist organization, turned it into a very effective military force, with disastrous consequences for Lebanon, where Hezbollah is headquartered, and with very negative consequences, obviously, for Israel, which faces Hezbollah across its borders.
Finally, incitement to genocide. It is difficult to state just how serious the efforts of the Iranian regime to advocate genocide and then to, potentially, at least, actualize it really are. The regime seeks to create nuclear weapons. It has been to some degree frustrated in those efforts, thank goodness. But, nonetheless, it seeks to create these weapons. It seeks to develop a delivery mechanism through missiles in order to destroy Israel.
To give a sense of just how absurd, but also how dangerous, this really is, let me just read a bit about what has been said by the Iranian regime. Israel is referred to as a “cancerous tumour”. We have heard that an Iranian attack on Israel would seek to kill as many as five million Jews. The estimate was that if Israel responded by dropping its own nuclear weapons, Iran might lose as many as 15 million people but that would be, as representatives of the regime put it, a small price to pay, a small sacrifice, because there are a billion Muslims in the world.
This kind of grotesque rhetoric obviously has no place in civilized nations. It is an indication of how profoundly the Iranian regime has abandoned its place among the family of nations.
It is a great tragedy for a culture that is one of the great homes of civilization in the world. The Iranians are the inheritors of the remarkable heritage of ancient Iran and Persia, which goes back thousands of years. We do hope it will be possible in the future for them to return to that marvellous heritage and to abandon this terrible and inhuman regime.