Iranians in the UK Should Call Out Khomeini’s Apologist

Iranians living in the UK have a duty to hold a London-based regime insider to account, says human rights lawyer Kaveh Moussavi.

I don’t know when he arrived.

I don’t know the visa he has obtained.

I don’t know if he has sought asylum here in the United Kingdom, but I doubt it. 

Ataollah Mohajerani is one of many Iranians from the political elite who left Iran to settle in the UK. A former Minister of Culture and Islamic Guidance under President Mohammad Khatami’s administration (1997-2005), he has written a number of books, including A Critique of the Satanic Verses Conspiracy, in 1989, a defense of Ayatollah Khomeini’s fatwa against Salman Rushdie — a book that undermines any claim that he is a “reformist” or that he is a proponent of liberal Islamism. In fact, the book is a direct incitement to murder. And it is up to Iranians living in the UK to make the case against him, and to alert the UK authorities of his views.

If he arrived in the aftermath of the election fraud of 2009, that was a time of much sympathy for the reformists. A lot of them came here. And he is not the only Iranian with an unsavory past to have been let in. Iranian writer Iraj Mesdaghi has done much work on the background of many of these people who now masquerade as reformists. A great many of them got in and then wanted to turn the BBC Persian Service into an Occupied Territory. Mohajerani was obviously not hiding away, and at that time was to be seen on the BBC, hardly a day passing when his fellow reformists at BBC Persian did not call on him to pontificate about matters relating to Iran. 

Mohejarani came in, I believe, at the time when some of his colleagues were arrested and appeared on Iranian TV in that infamous show trial where Seyyed Mohammad Abtahi, a former vice president, and many other once high-ranking officials were seen in prison uniform. They were seen as the victims of a coup d’etat, and very little attention was paid to the role that they had played in the emergence and the consolidation of the regime that had now turned on them. I have little doubt that the prevailing atmosphere provided the right circumstances for softer men of the regime to come to the UK at the time, masquerading as victims of the repression unleashed on the Iranian people following the theft of the 2009 presidential election and as advocates of reforms in Iran. Mohejarani is one of  those men. And given the efforts of the hardliners to impeach him as the Orwellian Minister of Islamic Guidance, he was able to gain more sympathy and credibility.

Seyed Hossein Mousavian is the most egregious that I know of, complicit as he was in the murders at the Mykonos restaurant in Berlin 26 years ago [when three Kurdish politicians and an interpreter were murdered by Iranian agents], almost to the day. Mousavian was the ambassador at the time and the murder weapons were supplied through the Iranian embassy. Look no further than his comments on YouTube regarding Kazem Darabi, the convicted murderer, for more than a hint of his culpability in those murders. Mousavian has been in and out of London and Germany and has been part of the lecture circuit, speaking at the think tank Chatham House and the London School of Economics about the nuclear deal.

I do not know whether there was a deliberate policy of admitting these people to the UK. What I do know is that the Home Office was a dysfunctional, overworked institution and other egregious violators of human rights had been able to slip in. There were several Rwandan génocidaires who had arrived and were eventually identified and deported. There was the Afghan torturer Sarwar Zardad, who was eventually identified and prosecuted by none other than the Attorney General himself and convicted of the universal crime of torture. 

It is worth noting that in each and every one of these cases, the police investigation and the eventual prosecution was instigated by the active diligence of the victims. There is a lesson here for Iranians living in the UK. It is up to us to identify these people, bring the evidence together and file complaints to the police about them. I would be pleased to advise on this to any Iranians who may have information on the likes of Mohajerani and his background. 

The Satanic Verses

Regarding the position Mohajerani took on The Satanic Verses and Salman Rushdie, what he has written is nothing short of incitement to murder. Leaving aside the antediluvian nature of his thinking on the matter — he cites chapter and verse from the Koran, hadith and other utterances of obscure mullahs of times long gone and believes those to be the sources of guidance on the question of free speech in a modern society — his explicit exhortation to the faithful to commit murder is crystal clear in the book. He does not pull his punches and repeatedly states that it is the duty of all Muslims to murder Rushdie. I invite the reader who doubts what I say to randomly delve into his book on the Rushdie matter. 

He was lucky that at the time of his arrival in the UK, the attention of the Iranian opposition was on the electoral coup d’etat and the theft of the election that was taking place before their eyes. No one paid too much attention to Mohajerani, what he had written, his obscurantist understanding of free speech, or what this said about who he was. 

Today, we know better. He maybe a reformist of the Islamic system in Iran. But he is certainly no bearer of any panaceas for the present ills of the country to whose current predicament he has made no small contribution. 

His incitement to murder is in the book he wrote on the Rushdie affair in late 1989. The book was written in Iran. The crime was therefore not committed in the UK. Incitement to murder by speech or writing was not at the time and, sadly, is not as yet a universal crime and thus not subject to universal jurisdiction. As such it cannot be prosecuted here in the UK (as yet).

However, that need not be the end of the matter. Should Mohajerani be asked about what he wrote while he is in the UK, and should he repeat the position he had adopted in his book while within this jurisdiction, a prima facie case could certainly made that the Crown Prosecution Service open an investigation into his past. And who knows what such an investigation might reveal. We know that Mohajerani was a minister in a government under whose writ the serial murders against writers and activists known as the “Chain Murders” took place in the late 1980s and throughout the 1990s. We know that unlawful judicial murders were a daily occurrence.  We know that the use of torture was prevalent at the time. We also know that the doctrine of collective responsibility is recognized and, in law at least, Iran pays lip service to it. Today, some 75 years after the Nuremberg Tribunal, International Criminal Law has moved sufficiently to place Mohajerani in considerable jeopardy when this doctrine of collective responsibility is combined with command responsibility, the legal doctrine applying to war crimes and crimes against humanity. Was Mohajerani in a position to know about the egregious crimes that were taking place in Iran while he was in a position of responsibility? Undoubtedly. What did he do to stop those outrages? Did he do anything? If he did, we need to know. If he did not, he is perilously close to criminal liability. 

Again, it is up to the Iranians here and elsewhere to gather and provide the evidence. The prosecution of Mohejerani won’t happen on account of what he wrote about Salman Rushdie and the incitement to murder that he engaged in at the time in Iran. It is time to challenge him to repeat those odious utterances here within the UK jurisdiction. That will open the door to all sorts of possibilities. 

The day will come when these men will have to answer for the outrages that they have perpetrated against the people of Iran. That day could be much sooner if Iranian opposition activists mobilized to gather the evidence against him in the UK.

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