Iran’s Protest Crackdown and Khamenei’s Doctrine of Violence

As fragmentary reports of mass killings trickle out of Iran, it is difficult to absorb the alleged scale and speed of the violence being committed there. A crime of this magnitude—thousands killed, by most estimates—has unfolded in a matter of just two or three days. At a special session of the United Nations Human Rights Council in Geneva last week, Payam Akhavan, an Iranian-Canadian lawyer and former prosecutor for the Milošević trials at The Hague, compared the killings to those committed by the Serbian military at Srebrenica, with one chilling distinction. “It took the Serbs weeks to carry out massacres of that scale,” Akhavan observed. “In Iran, it has taken days.”

According to CBS, “at least 12,000, and possibly as many as 20,000 people have been killed” during the January protests. These figures may turn out to be too high or too low; the Islamic Republic’s near-total internet blackout makes verification impossible. But the uncertainty cannot mitigate the horror. Indeed, it should sharpen it. Every time the regime has cut off all means of communication while prisons overflow and hospitals are overwhelmed, the absence of information has been a prelude to even greater atrocities.

The question the world must confront now is not simply how many people have been killed, but more urgently, how to prevent further crimes from being committed. The threat to tens of thousands of detainees, children among them, has never been greater. This is because the Supreme Leader, who believes himself to be the guide to Shi’ites everywhere, has arrived at the apocalypse he has been preparing for all his life. That, in part, explains why the recent massacre that occurred did not come as a result of panic, miscalculation, or a sudden loss of control. The brutality the security forces are unleashing is not an improvisation, it is doctrine.