Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps: Guardians of the Revolution and Violators of Human Rights

Honorable members of this subcommittee, I am privileged to appear before you today to discuss the role of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) in a vast system of domestic repression, and to encourage the government of Canada to designate the IRGC in its entirety for their human rights abuses of the Iranian people.

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 — internal enemies, foreign agents, saboteurs, and so called “velvet revolutionaries.”[1]

In 2009, the Islamic Republic Law Enforcement Forces[2] constituted the visible first line of defense of the regime, but the IRGC[3] and its subservient Basij Resistance Force[4] 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 election. Indeed, there is every reason to expect that the 2013 presidential election is likely to prove even more fraudulent than the 2009 election, which unfortunately means the regime is therefore more likely to give more freedom to the IRGC and the Basij to prevent public protests.

In the days and weeks prior to the coming June election, Revolutionary Guards officers have openly declared they intend to manipulate the course of the election: Hojjat al-Eslam Ali Saidi, representative of the Supreme Leader to the IRGC, infamously declared that “engineering elections is the natural duty of the Guards;”[5] Brigadier General Ramezan Sharif, the IRGC’s Public Relations deputy, openly declared that the IRGC intends to “explain enemy threats against the revolution” in the course of the election;[6] and Colonel Rasoul Sanaei-Rad, IRGC Political Directorate commander, openly expressed his concern that the 2013 presidential election could potentially unite those demanding political change in Iran with the unprivileged who may take to the streets because of harsh economic conditions.[7] Most importantly, 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.[8]  

The regime’s brutality comes in many forms. On April 23, 2013, the U.S. Treasury Department designated the IRGC for human rights abuses.[9] In its executive order, the U.S. administration singled out the IRGC’s Guard Cyber Defense Command (GCDC) and its special department called the Center for Inspecting Organized Crimes (CIOC). The IRGC’s CIOC has openly admitted that it would forcefully suppress anyone seeking to carry out “cultural operations” against the Islamic Republic via the Internet and that it monitors Persian-language sites for what it deems to be aberrations.

The CIOC has taken an active role in identifying and arresting protesters involved in the 2009 post-election unrest, particularly those individuals active in cyber space.

According to the U.S. Treasury Department, the IRGC’s CIOC uses extensive methods to identify Internet users, including through an identification of their Internet Protocol (IP) addresses. The Iranian regime has identified and arrested many bloggers and activists through the use of advanced monitoring systems, and the CIOC inspects forwarded emails to identify those critical of the regime. The IRGC’s cyber police focus on filtering websites in Iran, monitoring the email and online activity of individuals on a watch list, and observing the content of Internet traffic and information posted on web blogs. Individuals on the watch list included known political opponents and reformists, among others.

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.  For example, Canadian photojournalist Zahra Kazemi was detained, tortured and raped in Evin prison. Kazemi later died in hospital.

In the face of this oppression, I am urging the government of Canada to continue to side with the Iranian people, which apart from being politically expedient, also guarantees that Canada will remain on the right side of history.

The Role of the IRGC

Since the revolution of 1979, the IRGC has been the main pillar of defense for the Islamic Republic though it is not Iran’s conventional army. The IRGC is constitutionally mandated to “safeguard the revolution and its achievements.”[10] The Statute of the Guards, ratified by the Council of the Revolution on April 25, 1979,[11] and by the parliament on September 6, 1982, authorizes the IRGC to confront “counterrevolutionary” forces of all types with armed resistance, pursuit, and arrest. This is a function not confined to fighting against underground urban opposition groups, but also extending the writ of the IRGC to large territories such as Iranian Kurdistan and Sistan va Balouchestan provinces, where the central government’s negligence and mistreatment of the local population has provoked strong anti-central government sentiments.

Originally envisioned to counter both internal and external threats, the IRGC was forced to focus on external defense in the eight years long war with Iraq (1980-1988). The IRGC’s external focus continued for almost two decades after the end of the war with Iraq, but changed with Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei’s September 1, 2007 appointment of Major General Mohammad-Ali Jafari as the seventh commander-in-chief in the history of the IRGC.[12]

Jafari earned his stripes during the Iran-Iraq War (1980-1988), and served as commander of IRGC Ground Forces for more than a decade (1994-2005), but more importantly he was the founding father of the IRGC Strategic Studies Center in 2005.[13] Under his supervision, the center, functioning as the IRGC’s “think tank,” began to conduct research into “velvet revolutions,” and alleged U.S. “soft regime change policies,”[14] arguing that the IRGC should focus on future internal threats to the Islamic Republic’s stability.  Ever since Jafari was appointed IRGC commander in 2007, his ideas have dominated the IRGC.  Jafari has observed that: “For the time being the main responsibility of the Revolutionary Guards is to counter internal threats, and [only] aid the Army in case of external military threat.”[15]

Upon assuming the mantle of IRGC leadership, Jafari sought to implement the theories he had developed as head of the IRGC think tank. If the chief future threats were velvet revolutions and internal strife – perhaps supported by the hidden hands of outside powers – then the IRGC needed to readjust to meet the challenge. The structure that helped the Islamic Republic fight Iraq in eight years of war needed reform.

Jafari’s reorganization had two major components: merging the Basij into the IRGC, and restructuring the IRGC itself to become less centralized and more focused on the provinces. Jafari justified merging the paramilitary Basij with the elite IRGC because both organizations shared the same goal of “guarding achievements of the Revolution.”[16] The second major reform Jafari introduced was his “Mosaic Doctrine,” which involved dividing the IRGC into thirty-one commands – one for each province and two for Tehran. The provincial basis of IRGC units is meant to better local commanders’ control over recruitment,[17] but it also restructured IRGC capabilities as an anti-riot force.

Brutal Suppression of the 2009 Protests

Jafari’s reformed IRGC and Basij soon found themselves face to face with the Iranian public. As enraged Iranian voters took to the streets to protest against electoral fraud, the Law Enforcement Forces initially tried to contain the protests, but the regime soon realized that the police lacked both the necessary commitment to save the regime and the training to suppress the protesters. The IRGC and the Basij stood as the sole protectors of the regime.

On the morning of June 15, 2009, the universities in Tehran and Shiraz were attacked by the security forces killing seven students. The Office of Consolidaton of Unity student organization in a statement blamed the Revolutionary Guards and the Basij for the attacks.[18] As universities all over Iran experienced further unrest with students chanting ”death to the dictator” and ”death to the populist government,” the security forces also attacked the student dormitories at Tehran University. Similar attacks took place against the student dormitories in Isfahan, Mashhad, Kermanshah, Babol and Shahroud.[19] It was also on June 15, 2009 when presidential candidates Mir-Hossein Mousavi and Hojjat al-Eslam Mehdi Karrubi called upon their supporters to take their protests to the streets. In Tehran, three million people answered their call chanting ”Mousavi, take back our vote,” and ”don’t fear, we are all together.” Towards the late hours of the protests, the IRGC and the Basij opened fire on the protesters and killed protesters at Azadi Square.

One of those brave protestors in 2009 was a young girl named Taraneh Mousavi. Last week, a member of the United States House Foreign Affairs Committee[20] told the story of what happened to Taraneh:

One of her friends described her as very beautiful and very kind. She had “a beautiful warm voice and played the piano with skill.” Taraneh disappeared during the protests, 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 have only come 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 disappeared or any information about the kind of injuries she suffered.

When her charred body was discovered a month after her arrest, her family was told not to hold a funeral ceremony 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 torture and abuse in Iran’s prisons.

According to the UN special rapporteur’s September 13 report,[21] human rights defenders reported being arrested and held incommunicado for periods ranging from several weeks to 36 months without charge or access to legal counsel.  They also reported being subject to severe torture, including beatings with batons, mock hangings, electrocution, rape, sleep deprivation, and denial of food or water. The State Department’s Iran Human Rights Report of 2012[22] confirms this evidence.

Jafari’s reformed IRGC had passed the test of the 2009 unrest: By killing seventy-two unarmed protesters (other opposition sources argue that the real number is several hundred), the IRGC and the Basij managed to persuade the opposition leaders to urge their supporters to leave the streets and return home (See Appendix 1).[23] Most unfortunately, the world’s silence may have contributed to the decision of the Iranian opposition leaders to abandon their peaceful protests. The willingness of the president of the United States to engage in negotiations with the government of the Islamic Republic rather than support democratic developments in Iran is said to have contributed to the opposition’s decision to end its protests.

Canada has been a global leader in focusing attention on the Iranian regime’s human rights abuses.  I urge you to continue to lead the way in holding the IRGC responsible for violating the human rights of Iran’s citizens.

Policy Recommendation

In December 2012, the Canadian government added Iran’s Quds Force, the overseas terrorist arm of the IRGC, to the list of terrorist groups under Canada’s Criminal Code.  This was an important step in recognizing the IRGC’s threat to international peace and security.

I urge the government of Canada to take the next logical step and to sanction the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps in its entirety both for its terrorist operations and for its role in violating the human rights of the Iranian population. This echoes the call from Foreign Minister Baird who, just a few weeks ago, told a group of Iranian pro-democracy advocates at a conference in Toronto 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 designates the IRGC in its entirety, it would freeze those assets, including assets in Canada, and prohibit any financial interaction with these individuals and entities, putting additional pressure on the regime to comply with the will of its people, and to adhere to international law.

All IRGC profits ultimately end up funding the IRGC’s nefarious activities, such as the procurement of Iran’s nuclear and ballistic missile programs, the sponsorship of Iran’s terrorist proxy groups, and its vast apparatus of domestic human rights repression. Accordingly, Canada must shut down the IRGC’s entire commercial enterprise. This, in turn, requires a blanket designation of the IRGC as a terrorist organization, which would render it illegal to have any financial dealings with the entity, and a blanket designation of the IRGC as a human rights abuser, which would impose substantive penalties, undermine the legitimacy of the Iranian regime, and send a powerful message to Iran’s people.

In addition to a full designation of the IRGC as a terrorist entity, the Canadian government should sanction the IRGC under SEMA for its domestic human rights abuses.  Human rights abuses by the Iranian regime fulfill the basic criteria under section 4(1) of the Special Economic Measures Act (SEMA) for the imposition of economic sanctions, “…where the Governor in Council is of the opinion that a grave breach of international peace and security has occurred that has resulted or is likely to result in a serious international crisis.”  SEMA has already been used to impose economic sanctions against specific IRGC entities and individuals for terrorism and proliferation related activities.  SEMA has already been used to sanction human rights abuses by Syria’s Assad regime and its supporters (November 28, 2012), by the government of Zimbabwe (September 4, 2008), by the government of Burma (December 13, 2007), and by the government of Sudan (July 30, 2004), amongst others. 

In the case of the IRGC:

• The IRGC’s constitutional mandate to “safeguard the revolution and its achievements,” in practice means that the revolution of 1979 is not a historical 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 counterrevolutionary act. The constitutional mandate of the IRGC alone makes the IRGC a candidate for sanctions as a violator of human rights.
• The IRGC’s statue also authorizes the IRGC to violate the basic rights of Iranian citizens on the mere suspicion of the citizen being a so-called counter revolutionary. This too, makes the IRGC a candidate for sanctions as a violator of human rights.
• Reorganization of the IRGC under Major General Jafari and the domestic focus of the IRGC has since resulted in the tragedy of the killing of protesters in the wake of the 2009 fraudulent presidential election; this further serves as grounds to declare the IRGC as a violator of human rights.

To the extent that individual members of the IRGC part from it and visibly demonstrate their opposition to the IRGC, they should individually be removed from the sanctions of the government of Canada.  This will put individual IRGC members to a fundamental choice between continued association with a repressive clerical military dictatorship and respect for the human rights of their fellow citizens.  Canada can lead the way in making clear the consequences for wrongly choosing the path of repression.

I commend the subcommittee for the attention it is giving to the role of the IRGC in human rights abuses in Iran.  This hearing could not be timelier as we meet just two weeks before another fraudulent Iranian election that is sure to involve intimidation and repression carried out by the IRGC.  Canada’s courageous stand in support of the Iranian people will be heard in the streets from Abadan to Isfahan, and from Tabriz to Tehran. 

Appendix 1

Victims of Iranian Government Repression, June 2009 Presidential Election

Individuals killed by the various bodies of the Islamic Republic of Iran security forces in the aftermath of the June 9, 2009 presidential election

Source: Op.cit. “Fehrest-e Koshteshodegan-e Havades-e Pas Az Entekhabat-e Riasat-e Jomhouri.”