Iranian activists fled for freedom but were found by regime

Iranian dissident Massi Kamari felt helpless when she discovered that her elderly parents were being harassed by authorities in Iran at home. She called her mother’s phone in late December, but the person on the other end of the line was a man whose voice she didn’t recognize.

His parents were inside the offices of Iran’s intelligence service in Tehran. And she was in the French capital, Paris, where she lives.

Kamari knew that the government agents who had been bullying her family for months wanted only one thing: to speak directly with her about her activism abroad.

“I was thinking: What can I do about this? So I decided to try to record this phone call,” she recalled.

In the recording of the phone call at the end of December, obtained by CNN Kamari can be heard arguing for nearly 20 minutes with a man she believes is a member of Iran’s shady intelligence service.

“Any action you take against the Islamic Republic, there in France, is a crime,” the man is heard to say. “And your family will answer for it.”

“Sir, my family is only responsible for its own actions,” she replies.

“Listen,” he says. “Your mother will be taken to Evin Prison, at her age. Your sister and father will also be taken to Evin Prison. They will be questioned.”

“Okay,” she replies calmly. “Take them in for questioning. They didn’t do anything wrong.”

The 42-year-old is among many Iranians living in the West who say Tehran’s appalling crackdown is reaching beyond its borders, to faraway places once considered safe, to crush dissent.

The response request from CNN to the authorities of Iran was without return.

Last year, the country was rocked by a popular uprising that broke out in September over the death of Mahsa Amini, a 22-year-old woman who died in custody after being detained by the country’s morality police for allegedly wearing a headscarf inappropriately.

Months later, the demonstrations collapsed amid a growing wave of repression.

By the end of January, hundreds of protesters had been killed, including at least 52 children, according to the Human Rights Watch. At least four youths were executed by order of Iranian courts that the New York-based Center for Human Rights in Iran called “lynching committees”.

Dissidents abroad have played a key role in Iran’s protest movement, taking stories of abuse and oppression from the streets of Iran to international news outlets and the corridors of foreign governments.

That bridge to the outside world was crucial for protesters amid the near-total shutdown of internet services in the country and the regime’s tight control over local media.

Successful lobbying campaigns are credited, in part, to increased sanctions against the Tehran regime by Western governments and international organizations. In an unprecedented move, for example, member states of the United Nations removed Iran from a leading UN women’s rights group in December – which was condemned by Iran.

“Our efforts to promote and protect women’s rights are driven by our rich culture and well-established constitution,” reads a statement from the Iranian government.

“Iranian women and girls are the most informed, dynamic, educated and capable in our region and the world, they have always strived for their progress and will continue to strive in the same direction despite the continued chronic hypocrisy of the US.”

The organizing power and political influence of the diaspora is exactly why Tehran is expanding repression beyond its own borders, said Nazila Golestan, a three-decade activist and co-founder of the opposition organization HamAva.

“They are the government. But we are the opposition and we are numerous,” she explained. “We are everywhere, and with the internet we have a bridge between people inside and outside”.

transnational repression

Massi Kamari fled Iran for France about four years ago, fearing for his life due to his activism at home.

“When I arrived here, I thought that now I can freely express my feelings. I tried to be the voice of my (suffering) people in Iran,” she explained. “I tried to participate as much as I could in the protests.”

But when the protests started to gather momentum late last year, she started to get bullied again. Her parents in Iran, she said, received repeated calls from the intelligence service for a summons to the local headquarters.

“I told them please don’t take those calls and please don’t go over there,” she said of the conversation with her parents at the time. “But unfortunately, because these threats kept getting worse and because my parents are older, I couldn’t expect them to hear me and not go. I understood that they are under pressure and this could happen.”

And it happened. On Dec. 31, Kamari said she received the call from a man she believed to be a member of Iran’s intelligence service, who used her mother’s confiscated phone to reach her. He declined to be identified, but made his orders and threats clear.

“It was really hard because I didn’t know how far these people would go,” she said of the call. “I felt because they were putting pressure on my family and I wasn’t there, I had to respond strongly.”

For now, Kamari says her parents are safe, but she barely speaks to them just in case.

Other Iranian exiles with loved ones still in their home country tell similar stories of their families being used as pawns by the Islamic Republic to silence them.

According to a 2021 report by Freedom Housean advocacy group in Washington, Iran engages in transnational repression using tactics that include assassinations, arrests, digital intimidation, spyware, coercion by proxy, and mobility controls, among others.

The report’s authors noted that these tools have been used against Iranians in at least nine countries across Europe, the Middle East and North America.

Sahar Nasseri, 40, left Iran as a teenager to study in Sweden, where he now lives and remains a staunch critic of the Islamic Republic. She says her family is also constantly harassed by Iran’s intelligence service.

“They (the intelligence service) created this distance between me and my family, which is mental torture,” she said through tears. “For every thing I do, every time I appear on TV, every political act my friends and I do, every time we talk to a government or political representative, they call my parents.”

“I could have been killed”

Exiled Iranian dissidents say Western sanctions have not ended the campaign of repression and harassment they face for speaking out.

Despite leaving their homeland for distant countries, many say that nowhere is beyond the regime’s reach. In January, the US Department of Justice said it uncovered a plot to assassinate prominent Iranian dissident Masih Alinejad near his home in Brooklyn, New York. It was not the first time that US authorities had thwarted an alleged conspiracy against Alinejad.

“This is the second time in the past two years that this office and our FBI partners have stopped plans originating in Iran to kidnap or kill this victim for the ‘crime’ of exercising the right to free speech,” the department said in a 27-year note. of January.

At least three men who authorities believe are part of an eastern European criminal organization linked to Iran have been indicted. One was accused of possessing a loaded AK-47-style rifle found in a trunk in his vehicle.

US prosecutors say a 2021 kidnapping plot was organized by an Iranian intelligence officer, an alleged charge, but Iran’s foreign ministry has denied any involvement, calling the charge “baseless and ridiculous”, according to the semi-official ISNA news agency.

appearing on “CNN This Morning” in January, Alinejad pledged to continue her activism.

“I won’t give up,” she said. “What scares me (is) that this is happening now in Iran. I mean, these criminals were hired by the Islamic Republic. They were part of an Eastern European criminal organization. So, you see that the Islamic Republic itself is a criminal organization. And killing innocent protesters inside Iran, killing teenagers every day.”

Nasseri and Kamari echo Alinejad’s determination. There are three women in three different countries who have challenged the Islamic Republic. Threats for sharing their ordeal and efforts to silence them only made their voices louder and more prominent.

They say they are inspired by anti-government demonstrations within their country and the courage of protesters in the face of brutal government repression.

“There is nowhere you can be safe,” Kamari said at the site of an anti-Iranian regime protest overlooking the Eiffel Tower in Paris. “But even a week after I got the call (from Iranian intelligence officials), I was doing my political work. I will not stop my activism because of threats.”