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April 20, 2016
Canada must continue to stand up for human rights in Iran
Glavin: April 20, 2016 4:31 pm
You’d have to go for a
very long walk to find a religious tradition as benign as the Baha’i
faith, which marks the holiest days of its calendar during the 12-day
Festival of Ridvan, which began at sunset on Tuesday this week.
The religion’s precepts respect scientific discovery and emphasize the
uplifting of the poor, the equality of men and women, and the unity of
the world’s peoples. There is no clergy. Deriving from a 19th-century
schism within Shia Islam, Baha’is are admonished to respect all other
faith traditions, not just the Abrahamic varieties. Their religious
duties involve quiet prayer, meditation, education and the service of
humanity.
You might think this would cut them at least a little bit of slack in
Iran, where the Baha’i faith emerged during a time of religious tumult
in the early 1800s. But it’s all unforgivable blasphemy to the
Khomeinist regime, which considers Baha’i people “unclean” and excludes
them from 25 separate employment categories. Because they are not
legally “persons” in Iran, Baha’i people are denied pensions and
government services, their marriages are illegal, their children are
“illegitimate,” they have no recourse to the courts and they are banned
from attending post-secondary institutions.
In 2008, all seven members of the Iranian Baha’i leadership council
were imprisoned on charges of heresy and conspiracy. In January, 24
more Baha’i people were sentenced to a total of 193 years in prison for
the crime of practicing their faith. Over the past three years, more
than 200 Baha’i-owned businesses have been boarded up, and the regime
is increasingly refusing to renew Baha’i business licences. It’s all
part of an explicit policy of closing off the last remaining survival
opportunities for Iran’s 350,000 Baha’i people, and since the election
to the presidency of “reformer” Hassan Rouhani in 2013, the persecution
of Iran’s minorities, and most especially the Baha’is, has only grown
worse.
With the lifting of United Nations’ sanctions following last year’s
American-led nuclear weapons agreement with the Khomeinists, the mania
for business deals with the regime and its state-owned enterprises
(which run most of Iran’s economy) has gone into hyperdrive. One of the
Iranian economy’s largest corporate landlords is the Islamic
Revolutionary Guards Corps, and Canada formally lists the IRGC’s Quds
Force, a key ally with Bashar Assad in the ongoing massacres of Syrian
civilians, as a terrorist entity.
It’s hard to say where all the post-sanctions excitement will leave the
Baha’i people. Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s new government has
expressed enthusiasm for renewed trade and diplomatic relations with
the regime, and the Liberals’ shutdown of the previous Conservative
government’s Office of Religious Freedom wasn’t exactly an encouraging
sign of continued human-rights diligence.
Canada has long shown leadership in shaming the regime about its
contempt for human rights. Iran Accountability Week, during which MPs
from all parties each “adopt” an Iranian political prisoner, is an
annual event on Parliament Hill. Carleton University, the University of
Ottawa and McGill University each extend an informal accreditation to
the “underground” Baha’i Institute for Higher Education in Iran. Canada
continues to lead in the United Nations’ annual scrutiny of Iran’s
human rights record. But with so many lucrative trade deals being
dangled in front of us, will Canadians persist in questioning the
regime and holding it accountable for its thuggish treatment of
religious and ethnic minorities, women, trade unionists, journalists
and secularists?
“Canada should raise these questions and keep raising these questions
in all its dealings with Iran,” Gerald Filson, public affairs director
of the Baha’i Community of Canada, told me the other day. Canadian
businesses doing deals in Iran should insist on raising the same sorts
of questions and should take every measure to guard against complicity
with the regime’s brutal practices, Filson said.
There are at least five million followers of the Baha’i faith
worldwide, with perhaps two million in India and a roughly equal
distribution of the rest in Africa, South America, Europe and North
America. About 175,000 Americans are adherents of the Baha’i faith,
along with around 35,000 Canadians, about 7,000 of whom are Iranian
immigrants who fled their homeland following the Khomeinist takeover in
1979.
While drawing adherents from a wide diversity of Canadians, the Baha’i
faith has put down particularly deep roots in this country’s aboriginal
communities. Among Canada’s most prominent Baha’is is renowned Northern
Tutchone storyteller Louise Profeit-LeBlanc. Former Yukon
Carcross-Tagish chief Mark Wedge and Deloria Bighorn, a Sioux-Chickasaw
college counsellor, are both long-serving members of the governing
council of the National Spiritual Assembly of the Baha’is of Canada.
Despite the Khomeinist proposition that Baha’is are blasphemers for
rejecting the idea that Mohammed was God’s final, ultimate prophet,
Canada’s Baha’is enjoy generally cordial relationships with this
country’s Muslim communities. This is perhaps particularly the case
with Ismaili Muslims, alongside whom Baha’i people suffered the same
persecution and dispossession in Uganda and Tanzania during the 1970s.
Canada’s Baha’is also find welcome among Canada’s Iranian diaspora,
which generally harbours a very dim view of the Khomeinist regime back
in the old country. It’s a bit of an irony, but for all the Iranian
regime’s bellyaching about degenerate Western influences, the regime
itself is Shia Islam’s worst enemy in Western countries. “The regime
has done more to kill religion in the hearts of people in the Iranian
diaspora than anything else,” Filson pointed out.
Baha’is also enjoy close associations with Canada’s Jewish communities.
The Baha’i have always accepted Israel as a Jewish state, and the
Baha’i World Centre is a pilgrimage site located in Israel, in Acre and
adjacent Haifa, owing to the imprisonment there of the religion’s
founder, Baha’u’llah, by the Ottoman Empire, in the late 19th century.
The Baha’i Universal House of Justice, the seat of the religion’s
governing body, is situated on Mount Carmel.
“Both the Liberals and the Conservative governments in Canada have been
consistently strong about human rights in Iran, and we hope that
continues,” Filson said.
The Baha’i case is not hopeless. The Khomeinist police state may be
irredeemably corrupt, but its persecution of the Baha’i’s people is not
necessarily popular even among the ruling elites. Two years ago, the
senior ayatollah Abdol-Hamid Masoumi Tehrani declared that Iran’s
Baha’i people were suffering from “blind religious prejudice.” His
pronouncement was not universally condemned.
“There is a sense of shame and honour in Iranian culture, so that’s
helpful,” Filson said. “The government doesn’t like attracting
attention to their treatment of the Baha’i, and the Iranian
government’s mission to the UN does a lot of lobbying against any human
rights focus. They put up a big fight at the UN Human Rights Council in
Geneva, too.”
So there’s hope. Not much, maybe, but some, and in a post-sanctions
context, Canadians should expect their government not just to remain
vigilant, but to step up the pressure and show some real spine.
Terry
Glavin is an author and journalist.
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