With the Iranian regime’s president in New York, talking to the United Nations simply days after the anniversary of an rebellion sparked by a brutal regime homicide, it’s important the worldwide neighborhood mirror on the far-reaching implications of this vital chapter in my nation’s historical past.
Over the previous 12 months, Iran’s political terrain has undergone profound transformation.
The regime is gripped by extreme panic over impending protests, whereas the organized opposition continues to garner momentum.
The world must recalibrate its strategy towards this unstable regime — as a substitute of constant to appease and assist the murderers of the Iranian people.
The tragic death of Mahsa Amini, a 22-year-old sufferer of the regime’s “morality police,” triggered the September 2022 rebellion.
The embers of anger swiftly reworked right into a sweeping blaze of protest against the entire theocracy that engulfed greater than 220 cities, spanning all 31 provinces.
The world bore witness to the eruption of the Iranian folks’s deep-seated yearnings for freedom, with ladies rising because the rebellion’s undaunted leaders.
The unequivocal rejection of each monarchy and theocracy reverberated throughout the protests with the resounding cry, “Down with the oppressor, be it the shah or the supreme chief.”
The main opposition motion, Mujahedin-e Khalq, has revealed the identities of not less than 750 protesters the regime has killed.
The demonstrators’ dedication and braveness have been the end result of a tireless battle, spanning the final 4 many years, towards a regime outlined by its brutality and oppression — a battle wherein ladies have constantly led the best way.
The reverberations of this rebellion have intensified inside schisms on the highest ranges and stoked a palpable worry of the long run, together with a hemorrhaging of the regime’s ranks.
The resurgence of mass protests, which by all logic could be stronger and highly effective, is Tehran’s most dreaded nightmare.
Supreme Chief Ali Khamenei orchestrated Ebrahim Raisi’s ascent to the presidency with the intention of forging a extra unified regime to forestall a recurrence of mass protests in 2018 and 2019.
The 2022 rebellion shattered even this semblance of regime cohesion, prompting a reevaluation of its technique.
A current so-called “purification wave,” spearheaded by Raisi, has seen the expulsion of dozens of college professors.
It’s additional proof of the regime’s profound anxieties, notably concerning universities, which have traditionally served as bastions of spirited resistance towards dictators.
Now the regime has launched into yet one more sweeping purge.
This inside cleaning has even reached the doorstep of Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps Brig. Gen. Mohammad Baqer Qalibaf, parliamentary speaker and a former shut confidant of Khamenei himself.
The waves of standard discontent are irrefutable proof of the regime’s failure to fortify its inside cohesion and of its inexorable incapacity to forestall the recurring emergence of uprisings.
So Khamenei has intensified repression.
There have been greater than 500 executions since January 2023, based on worldwide human-rights organizations.
Whereas these ways might ratchet up intimidation within the fast time period, they are going to finally inflame dissent over the lengthy haul.
Resistance Items inside Iran are the driving power for organizing and galvanizing an impassioned inhabitants.
At the very least 3,600 members of those items have disappeared or been apprehended or killed.
However, Resistance Items proceed to proliferate throughout Iran.
These courageous youth function covertly, enduring the fixed specter of imprisonment, torture and even demise, cementing their position because the very spine of the Iranian protest motion.
The Iranian folks’s craving extends far past beauty alterations to decorate codes.
Their final aim is nothing lower than toppling the oppressive regime and establishing a real democratic republic, doing away with the shackles of each the shah’s dictatorship and the mullahs’ theocratic rule.
Democratic change in Iran has ceased to be a matter of conjecture; it has developed into an inescapable actuality.
The unyielding resolve of the folks, coupled with the rising unrest throughout the regime, renders the established order untenable.
A decisive and steadfast Western coverage towards the Iranian regime can now not be a mere train in prudence; it has turn out to be an crucial.
Tehran’s theocracy is at its weakest. It’s by no means been extra in want of appeasement and diplomatic maneuvering — which, sadly, it’s getting.
Unfreezing billions of {dollars} of Iranian folks’s cash and handing it over to the regime is a present to Khamenei and his Revolutionary Guards for suppression, war and terrorism.
The worldwide neighborhood bears an ethical obligation to face with the Iranian folks, who’ve made monumental sacrifices of their unrelenting quest for freedom.
We don’t ask for assist overthrowing the regime. We merely ask Western governments to cease offering these murderers assist.
Then we will construct a peaceable future based mostly on the beliefs of a secular, democratic and non-nuclear republic.
Maryam Rajavi is the president-elect of the Paris-based Nationwide Council of Resistance of Iran.
