Iranian President's Six-Month Record Marks Unfulfilled Promises

The 22-page litigation calls for the prosecution of Ali Khamenei and other officials, including former president Hassan Rouhani and member of the National Coronavirus Combat Taskforce, for "manslaughter of over 100,000 Iranians." Registered Sunday, it was filed by lawyers Mohammad-Reza Faghihi and Arash Kaykhosravi.

The two lawyers were among six people arrested last August, apparently after meeting to discuss their legal action over Covid. The detainees were freed later.

Khamenei ruled out importing United States- and British-made Covid-19 vaccines in January 2021, arguing that Iran was well placed to develop its own vaccines or should take them from more reliable sources. At the time, the US-German Pfizer, US-made Moderna and the British-made AstraZeneca were the only vaccines approved internationally, although Bahrain and the United Arab Emirates had already approved use of China’s Sinopharm.

The legal case apparently seeks to establish that decisions by Khamenei, Rouhani, and others led to over 100,000 extra deaths when a severe wave of infections hit Iran from June to August.

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While Khamenei banned the Western vaccines, hundreds of millions of dollars were distributed among government-run companies with no experience in vaccine development to produce a homegrown variant.

One vaccine that was introduced into the local market in June was Barakat, developed by an affiliate of the Execution of Imam Khomeini’s Order Foundation, a charitable-cum-business entity controlled by Khamenei’s office. As a result, Iran, which was receiving very few vaccines from Russia and China until August lost precious months to vaccinate the majority of its population.

The Barakat vaccine with delays in production has only been used for inoculating a fraction of the population.

Critics call these decisions and failures “Covid mismanagement”, which the lawsuit seems to pursue.

Vaccination suddenly jumped in August with Chinese and AstraZeneca vaccines, as the Khamenei ban was rescinded when Ebrahim Raisi, Khamenei’s candidate for president assumed office.

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Iran has now “fully vaccinated” 67 percent of the population, according to Johns Hopkins University. With over 7 million confirmed cases and 136,600 fatalities, the daily death toll with the Omicron variant spreading in recent weeks has doubled to over 200.

Politicized vaccines

It is not clear what will come out of the lawsuit, as Iran’s Judiciary is controlled by Khamenei and has a terrible record in persecuting critics of the regime. Rouhani might come out as the villain if legal procedures continue in the case.

Some principlist media have attributed any mismanagement of the pandemic to Rouhani, noting that vaccinations have jumped from round 3.4 percent of the population to nearly 70 percent under President Ebrahim Raisi. They have also pointed out that Khamenei, as is often alleged, did not ban all foreign vaccines.

"Regarding vaccine imports, enemy media want to cast the blame…although the leader of the revolution has always advised the authorities to import vaccines," Ramezan Sharif, spokesman for the Revolutionary Guards told journalists in Kermanshah in August, citing the saga as an example of “enemy psychological operations.”

Human Rights Watch called Khamenei’s ban “moves to politicize vaccine acquisition” but acknowledged that US ‘maximum pressure’ sanctions thwarted Iran’s access to vaccines, even though Covax.

This assessment is also questionable, because medicines are exempt from US sanctions and Iran regularly imports billions of dollars of drugs and raw material to produce medication from Europe, India and elsewhere.

Last August the chairman of Iran’s non-governmental licensing and regulatory Medical Council Mohammad-Reza Zafarghandi argued mortality had dropped “significantly” in countries “where they vaccinated the population without any limits and setting [political] borders.” Opponents of Raisi argue that expanded vaccination under his administration follows unspecified “centers of influence” impeding the Rouhani administration from procuring vaccines.

According to videos posted on social media, the Monday rallies were held in front of the governor's offices in cities across the country such as Mashhad, Shahrekord, and Kermanshah while protesters in Tehran gathered in front of the parliament.

The demonstrations took place following a call circulated on the internet by the personnel and retirees of the armed forces to protest their low salaries.

Some former and current personnel received text messages from security agencies warning them against participating in the planned protests.

People from different walks of life, including teachers, nurses, and firefighters, have been holding regular protest rallies or strikes to demand higher salaries but such protests by the personnel of the armed forces are unprecedented.

In some other rare moves, staff members of the hardliner judiciary department and prison guards took to the streets in several cities across the country to protest their low salaries.

Earlier in January, the spokesman for Iran's police said salaries of police officers have increased several times in the previous nine monts, describing their living conditions as a major concern. However, the government cannot afford to pay substantially higher salaries in par with the rising food prices on top of high inflation in the previous few years.

Fars news agency, affiliated with Iran’s Revolutionary Guard, published a statement on Sunday to reject reports about Catherine Perez Shakdam contributing to the English version of Khamenei’s website.

The statement added that Khamenei.ir doesn’t have any columnist and Shakdam has no direct connection with the website.

However, it confirmed that Shakdam sent articles and opinion pieces on issues related to Islam and the Islamic Revolution to the website from about 2015 to 2017 that were published on the site.

The website had no communication with the writer since then and removed its articles, the statement said.

The articles Shakdam wrote for Khamenei's website had been removed but many of them can be accessed via internet archive websites.

A scandal broke in major state-affiliated news outlet after supporters of former president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad claimed that she had been an Israeli “infiltrator”.

Over a period of several years, Iranian state-run media such as the English-language Press TV and the national broadcaster (IRIB) interviewed Shakdam, introduced as "political analyst and author based in London," while the Tasnim and Mehr news agencies published her articles.

Shakdam is a French-born Jew, a UK resident, and was a convert to Shiism. She boasted that her holding a French passport and former marriage to a Yemeni Muslim gave her "a free pass to many Islamic countries."

Addressing the hardliner lawmakers who are pushing for a bill to limit the internet in Iran, former communication minister Mohammad-Javad Azari-Jahromi said on Sunday that "The consequences of wrong policies are heavy. Wrong governance destroys the instruments of governance and regulation forever”.

He made the remarks in reaction to the activation of satellite internet constellation Starlink for the Ukrainians. Operated by Elon Musk’s company SpaceX, it provides internet access coverage to most of the Earth.

As Ukraine's internet service has been disrupted by Russia's invasion, Musk made the internet service available in Ukraine, saying that more terminals to use it are also on the way.

The SpaceX CEO made the move after being asked by a Ukrainian government official if SpaceX could provide more Starlink services to the country after Russian troops invaded Ukraine last week.

Azari-Jahromi added that “all the unusual limitations [by Iran] on Internet [access] are direct marketing for the next generation of satellite Internet”, quipping that “if you do not provide people with the right service, others will”.

Iranians were outraged after an ad hoc parliamentary committee approved the outlines of the controversial bill -- ironically entitled 'Legislation to Protect Cyberspace Users -- to restrict freedom of access to global Internet and popular social media platforms.

Pro-Moscow positions are abundant in hardliner media outlets close to the core of the regime, such as Kayhan and Iran newspapers, while reformist daily Arman on Saturday and Sunday reflected anti-Russia views that normally do not find their way into the media.

Many ordinary Iranians and opponents of the Islamic Republic invariably support Ukraine and condemn the government pro-Russia policies on social media.

Other reformist media such as Sharq and Etemad newspapers carve out a position in between the two extremes. They often harshly criticize Moscow for its violation of international law, but invariably remind that the United States is no better when you look at its track record in places such as Afghanistan and the Middle east.

Reformists criticize President Ebrahim Raisi’s administration for tacitly blaming NATO and the United States for Russia’s actions, while also criticizing the US to remain politically correct given the regimes animosity toward Washington.

A good example of a reformist approach to the issue was reflected in an article in the Etemad daily by commentator Abbas Abdi who tried to strike a balance by blaming both Russia and the United States for the crisis in Ukraine. He said: "In the agreement about the nuclear disarmament of Ukraine and guaranteeing its territorial integrity in the 1990s, Russia undertook not to invade Ukraine and the agreement was also guaranteed by the United States. How responsible should a guarantor be?"

Abdi wrote in another part of the article: "Iranian hardliners say we should learn a lesson from this crisis in which the United States has not stood by its commitment [to Ukraine]. That is right. But don't Iran's hardliners want to take a lesson from Russia's behavior? Russia had guaranteed that no country would be allowed to invade Ukraine. I wish you take this lesson and rely on the people's support rather than relying on foreigners."

Abdi further wrote that Iran's position about Russia's invasion of Ukraine leaves the impression that it is not an independent state. He argued that Iran behaved in a way as if it had no other choice but to support Moscow. He hinted that Raisi’s supportive phone call to Vladimir Putin did not portray Iran as an independent country.

Abdi asked, "Why are we in such a position? We are in this position because of the same reason that Ukraine's president counted on the West in his confrontation with Russia. In the same way, Iran should not count on Russia or China in its confrontation with the West as they follow their own interests. And interests will push ethics and international commitments to the margins."

On the pro-Moscow front, Hossein Abbaszadeh Meshkini, the spokesman for the Iranian parliament's National Security and Foreign Relations Committee opined in an interview with Didban Iran that "Russia's attack on Ukraine was a deterrent measure to prevent an extensive war in Europe at the same scale as World War II."

Abbaszadeh further claimed that Moscow's “preventative” measure has been taken within the frameworks of the UN Charter. He claimed that the West's occupation of Afghanistan and Syria as well as everyday developments in the Middle East follow the same logic. He stressed that Russia is concerned about the expansion of NATO toward the Russian borders, adding that no independent country would tolerate NATO's presence at its borders.

He said Russia has been repeatedly sanctioned by the EU and the United States and it cannot tolerate NATO's presence at its borders. Abbaszadeh reiterated the regime’s position by saying that "We believe Russia and Ukraine can solve their problems through diplomacy which offers a less costly solution."