Iran-Russia ‘Relationship Of Convenience’ May Redraw Regional Alliances

Nikol Pashinyan and Ebrahim Raisi held a joint press conference following their meeting, reiterating their goal to improve bilateral relations and sign documents for strengthening cooperation.

Raisi said he was sure the visit by the Armenian official will be a turning point in enhancement of bilateral relations, claiming that their trade exchanges have grown by 43 percent over the past few months. 

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In October, the Islamic Republic opened a consulate in Armenia's Syunik province, which includes Armenia’s narrow southern strip called Zangezur where it has a land border with Iran. 

Azerbaijan, backed by Turkey, demands a transit corridor through Syunik province to have access to its Nakhichevan Autonomous region without Armenian checkpoints.

However, Yerevan objects to the concept saying that it is a breach of the ceasefire signed after the 2020 Nagorno-Karabakh war, that Azerbaijan won, taking back vast territories that Armenia had conquered in the Nagorno Karabakh conflict in the early 1990s.

Iran supports Yerevan in this dispute as it might lose its only joint border with its de facto ally Armenia and Caucasus. In mid-September, Iran warned that it would not tolerate any seizure of territory from Armenia by Azerbaijan. 

Armenia accuses Azerbaijan of attacking its towns to avoid negotiations over the status of the mainly Armenian-populated enclave of Nagorno-Karabakh in Azerbaijan, an enclave which is inside Azerbaijan but populated mainly by ethnic Armenians.

Tehran in the past has also expressed alarm at alleged Israeli military presence in Azerbaijan.

In a letter released on Monday, Tehran accused Washington of “politicizing” human rights issues, as Tehran has been cracking down on antigovernment protests, ignited by the death in custody of a 22-year-old woman.

Calling on UN member states to skip an informal meeting the US plans to hold among Security Council members, the Islamic Republic’s Ambassador and Permanent Representative to the United Nations Amir Saeed Iravani said, “The US has no true and genuine concern about the human rights situation in Iran or elsewhere.”

He called the ongoing protests an internal issue, warning that it would be “counterproductive to the promotion of human rights” if the UN Security Council discussed it. “The United States lacks the political, moral, and legal qualifications to hold such a meeting, distorting the very basic principles of human rights,” Iravani added.

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The United States and Albania plan to hold an informal Security Council meeting on Iran on Wednesday, aimed at highlighting “the ongoing repression of women and girls and members of religious and ethnic minority groups,” and would “identify opportunities to promote credible, independent investigations into the Iranian government's human rights violations and abuses.”

The informal UN Security Council gathering was called by the US and Albania, which currently sits on the council. Iranian Nobel Peace Prize laureate Shirin Ebadi, actress Nazanin Boniadi, and Javaid Rehman, the UN Special Rapporteur on human rights in Iran, are due to address the gathering, which will be open to state representatives and human rights organizations.

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The format of the meeting is called the “Arria formula”, after its originator, Diego Arria, a Venezuelan ambassador who in 1992 initiated the first informal meeting of the Council to discuss the crisis in former Yugoslavia. The meetings take place in a non-rigid setup where member states can hear comments by individuals and non-state actors.

Iran’s foreign ministry spokesman Monday dismissed the significance of the meeting and claimed that the aim of the meeting is to put “political pressure on the Islamic Republic,” and is the continuation of a clear policy of interference by the American government in Iran’s internal developments.”

Expulsion of Iran from UN Women Commission 

Following weeks-long efforts by several countries as well as numerous calls by activists for the immediate expulsion of the Islamic Republic from the UN Commission on the Status of Women (CSW), the Canadian Parliament unanimously adopted a motion on Monday that calls for Iran’s removal.

Introduced by Conservative Party Deputy Leader Melissa Lantsman, the motion was adopted following a similar call made by New Zealand’s prime minister, and Canada’s deputy prime minister and foreign minister.

“Given the brutal death of Masha Amini at the hands of Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), the subsequent crackdown in Iran on women’s rights, civil liberties, and fundamental freedom, and the long history of grave human rights abuses and violence against women perpetuated by the Iranian state, that this House declares its support for the removal of Iran from the UN Commission on the Status of Women,” read the motion.

A second motion put forward by Bloc Quebecois member of parliament Andreanne Larouche called on fellow MPs to declare support for Iranians protesting for their rights, and that the House of Commons “condemns the intimidation and bullying and violence against the protesters, who are supporting the movement to free women in Iran.”

In an open letter published in The New York Times on Sunday, Deputy Prime Minister Chrystia Freeland and Foreign Affairs Minister Melanie Joly joined other female world leaders in business, politics, and the arts from over 14 countries urging the UN to oust the Islamic Republic from the CSW.

The UN commission on the status of women is a global intergovernmental body “exclusively dedicated to the promotion of gender equality and the empowerment of women” through “promoting women’s rights, documenting the reality of women’s lives around the world, and shaping global standards on gender equality and the empowerment of women,” its website says.

Their call came in a statement published by the Iranian Etemad and other newspapers on Sunday.

Iranian journalists and social media activists have also condemned a joint statement issued by the country's top intelligence organizations that accused the two female journalists of instigating "riots" in Iran by covering Amini’s death.

Iran's Ministry of information that operates under President Ebrahim Raisi's administration and the IRGC Intelligence Organization which operates directly under Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei and reports to him had in a joint statement on October 28 accusing Niloufar Hamedi and Elahe Mohammadi, two women journalists arrested days after protests began in September, of spying for several foreign agencies including the CIA, MI-6 and Mossad.

Many Iranian journalists, including Hassan Namakdoust Tehrani have pointed out that "what Hamedi and Mohammadi did was simply fulfilling their responsibility as journalists."

Reformist daily Sharq, for which Niluofar Hamid worked wrote: "Niloufar has been in jail for more than a month. Saturday, October 29 is her birthday, and we hope that she and all other journalist in jail return to their newspapers soon."

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Meanwhile, Washington Post’s Jason Rezaian, an Iranian American journalist who was a hostage in Iran in mid-2010s and was released as part of a prisoner swap after the 2015 nuclear deal with the West, wrote on Saturday, "In a rare moment of agreement the Islamic Republic’s Ministry of Intelligence & the Intelligence unit of the IRGC issued a ridiculous statement claiming journalists Niloofar Hamedi & Elahe Mohammadi are agents of the CIA, MI6, Mossad, Saudi intelligence & several other countries."

Reformist commentator Abbas Abdi referred to the Iran intelligence agencies accusation that the two journalists were trained by foreigners to report on Mahsa Amini's death, wrote: "Sending a prominent journalist such as Elaheh Mohammadi to a training session to learn to report is like sending a person with a Ph.D. in mathematics to a class to learn the rules of multiplication."

The managing editor of Ham Mihan, the newspaper where Elaheh Mohammadi's report about Mahsa Amini's death was published wrote that her coverage was similar the the IRGC-linked Fars news agency's account of the event and what other agencies had reported at the time with even more details. Gholamhossein Karbaschi pointed out that it is not easy for a reporter to work in a security atmosphere.

He said the authorities have told him that the accusations against the journalist had nothing to do with her job as a journalist. Nonetheless, the statement by the intelligence organizations is about Ms. Mohammadi's role as a reporter, Karbaschi said, adding that this attitude toward journalism is not in the interest of Iran's media environment. Referring to the point the agencies made about the reporters' trying to be the first to break the news, Karbaschi said this is what every good journalist does, and the authorities had better change their attitude.

He added: "No news will remain concealed forever and it will reach the whole world soon." Kartbaschi pointed out that "It is in the interest of the country to have the right news disseminated by domestic press rather than creating a situation in which Iranians get the news first from foreign-based media," referring to Persian broadcasters abroad.

Prominent Iranian journalist Niloufar Ghadirian, the former editor of Hamshahri daily wrote: "Niloufar Hamedi and Elaheh Mohammadi will be always remembered as honest, brave and dedicated journalists. Their names will be remembered in journalism courses for many years."

Foreign ministry spokesman Naser Kanaani in his weekly media briefing likened Iran International’s coverage of recent protests to “a war room” and an “operations room against the nation of the Islamic Republic of Iran.” This is the first time that an Iranian official uses the term “Islamic Republic nation”, instead of the Iranian people or the Iranian nation.

The Islamic Republic regards broadcasting in Persian from abroad as hostile because media outlets such as the BBC Persian, Voice of America, Iran International, Radio Farda (RFE/RL) and others break the monopoly over news and information the government in Iran has imposed since 1979.

Since the ongoing antigovernment protests began in mid-September, all media in Iran that are either owned or controlled by the state have largely ignored or misrepresented the popular movement, calling it lawlessness and riots. The Islamic Republic wants to suppress the news about protests and has all but shut down access to the Internet.

The accusation against Iran International comes while earlier Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei called the protests "unimportant".

Kanaani insinuated that Iran International belongs to Saudi Arabia and that Tehran has complained to Riyadh about the network in the past.

Iran International and its sister channel, Afghanistan International, are “editorially independent television channels owned by Volant Media,” a company based in London and owned by a Saudi Arabian/British citizen; it has no state backing or affiliation.

Yashar Soltani, who has spent some time in jail in 2016 for disclosing financial corruption at Tehran Municipality under current parliament speaker Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf, added in an interview with Etemad Online that the way government treats financial corruption is woefully disappointing.

The multi-billion dollar case involving the former mayor, a figure close to Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, ended in the arrest of Isa Sharifi, one of Ghalibaf's deputies and was finally pushed under the carpet although Khamenei in 2018 called for investigation into the case. Sharifi's name came up once again in February 2022 along with Ghalibaf's in a major corruption case at the IRGC, which also remained inconclusive after a few weeks of controversy stirred by rival political factions in Iran.

The controversy about the IRGC corruption case was silenced soon possibly because even former IRGC Qods Force Commander Qasem Soleimani was also involved, as revealed in an audio tape that was leaked in the public domain presumably by those who benefitted from the revelations.

As a whistleblower who has been exposing financial corruption in Iran since the 1990s, Soltani says that corrupt individuals have never left the system even after their performance was exposed, and corruption is constantly on the rise. He added that the Iranian justice system discriminates in favor of corrupt individuals when they are close to the core of the regime, namely Khamenei's household.

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He said: "Fighting corruption is part of the people's demands as the magnitude of government corruption is so high that the regime has no way but to try to control it through introducing reforms in the system." However, he acknowledged that most of the rhetoric about fighting government corruption is just a show, often with the intention of winning the people's attention at election times or to calm the situation when there are major protests.

Soltani pointed out that while corruption trials were held openly and the people could watch hearings on live TV in the 1990s, corruption cases are now shrouded in an aura of secrecy. Soltani reiterated that as long as talk about corruption is aimed at beatifying the political system or garnering support for a group of candidates, there will be no hope in controlling it.

Nonetheless, there seems to be some progress in the process. "When I disclosed the astronomical real estate case [in Tehran municipality] in 2016, I was jailed immediately, but five years later I was called for consultation for writing a new law to prevent that kind of corruption as part of which the Municipality gave land and buildings to influential individuals to garner their support," Soltani recalled.He added that regardless of his help, the Iranian Judiciary has been summoning him during the past 11 years to subtly warn him about his whistleblowing activity.

"They ask why me and not the intelligence agencies investigate a case. Well, the intelligence agencies did their own research but what they got nowhere because there are flaws in the structure of the government," he said, adding that, "There are only four or five people who continue as whistleblowers, and all of them like me work single-handedly without any support from anyone in the system."

Referring to the problems in the system, he said the corruption case at the Petrochemical Complex (PCC) was a major case. But there were a few stage-managed court sessions and nothing more happened.

He was referring to a case of hundreds of million of dollars embezzled by officials who were tasked to sell Iran’s petrochemical products through obscure channels and return the money to the treasury during international sanction in 2010-2013.

Soltani concluded: "There are so many inconclusive cases about financial corruption in Iran. In a corrupt structure you cannot claim to be dealing with corruption."