Appeasing Iran’s mullahs emboldens regime - Ken Blackwell

shahqayeq

A recent series of arrests of dissidents and a wave of executions in Iran show that the regime's President Hassan Rouhani is anything but a 'moderate,' said Amb. Ken Blackwell, a former Cincinnati mayor and U.S. ambassador to the UN human rights commission.

Amb. Blackwell writing on Monday in Townhall described the case of a young activist of the main opposition group People's Mojahedin Organization of Iran (PMOI, or Mujahedin-e Khalq, MEK) whose parents were arrested last week by the fundamentalist regime in Iran.

Shaqayeq Azimi is an aspiring, joyful girl of 22 with a full life ahead of her. She is also an Iranian dissident, committed to challenging the repressive theocracy that rules her home country.

Recently she learnt that both her father Mahmoud and her mother Fatemeh Ziae were arrested on October 11 by the Iranian secret police in a raid on their home in Tehran. The regime has been characteristically secretive about the arrests, so Shaqayeq has been unable to obtain any information about where her parents have been taken, or what their current condition is.

This is not the first time that her parents have been arrested, but given the nature of the regime, each such incident poses grave dangers.

Fatemeh endured five years’ imprisonment and torture in the 1980s for supporting the principal Iranian opposition movement, the People’s Mojahedin Organization of Iran (PMOI/MEK). She was arrested again in February 2009 for visiting her relatives in Camp Ashraf, then the place of residence for thousands of Iranian dissidents in Iraq. This so-called crime landed her in jail for two years, where poor conditions and mistreatment contributed to acute health afflictions. She was arrested for yet a third time in June 2013, again on political charges.

Shaqayeq’s father was a political prisoner during the Shah’s regime and has been arrested several times since the 1980s including in 2011 and 2013 for supporting the MEK.