arch/ive/ief (2000 - 2005)

The Iranian foreign minister's visit to London for talks with Tony Blair and Jack Straw (Iranian minister in London, Guardian, Feb. 6) only reaffirms one thing: the hypocrisy, selective morality and inhuman political agenda of the government. Blair laments human rights' abuses by the Iraqi regime so as to justify a devastating war against the people of Iraq, while shaking hands with Iran's executioners, people responsible for one of the grimmest genocides of the 20th century, an Islamic Holocaust.

In its 24-year existence, the Islamic regime in Iran has executed over one hundred thousand people - most of them young men and women whose crime was the desire not to live under a regime of medieval darkness, bigotry, misogyny and barbaric repression. Terror and blood-letting, on a scale unrivalled by any other country in the world, are the means by which this regime has managed to survive this long. And today, these are the means by which it is hoping to hang on to its shaky rule - with the full blessing of the British government.

When Jack Straw and the Islamic Republic's foreign minister were holding hands and smiling to the cameras in Downing Street on Thursday, in Tehran motorized gallows - 'customized' cranes, which the Iranian regime must surely now have a patent for - were busy hoisting their victims to their deaths. Special cutting machines were amputating fingers of shoplifters. Hanging judges were handing down more death sentences on communists, labour activists, women's rights campaigners, students, writers, journalists, dissident lawyers, atheists, lovers, gays and lesbians.

In the past few months alone, while Jack Straw was visiting Iran, more than fifty people have been publicly hanged in Tehran and other major cities; a man and a woman have been stoned to death for extra-marital sex; and several people have had their fingers chopped off. Many more - including four young men in the city of Shiraz, who have been sentenced to 'cross amputation', i.e. amputation of left foot and right hand - are now in prison awaiting similar horrific fates. These are just the cases reported - with macabre pictures and all - in the state-run press in Iran. The real numbers could be much higher. The intention is to frighten a protesting people into submission.

The British government's support for the Islamic regime in Iran helps to prolong the life of this barbaric regime. It means condoning the appalling atrocities that are going on there. It means cosying up to hangmen - just when the people in Iran are about to rid themselves of these monsters. Just as in the case of Iraq and the preparations for bombing the people there, it only reaffirms the hypocrisy and inhuman political agenda of the Blair government.