Iran’s dead are piling up in the streets – so why has the West been silent?

A month after Tehran erupted in protests, the regime’s deadly crackdown continues to claim victims. But, says Donald Macintyre, perhaps the world will finally take notice now that Donald Trump’s ‘massive armada’ has arrived in the Middle East

It’s hard not to wonder about the fate of the lively, astute, good-humoured young female students I interviewed as they left the Tehran University campus for the day all those years ago.

This was another era, of course. Roughly midway between Iran’s 1979 revolution and now, it was also during the so-called “Khatami spring”, when the most reformist of all of Iran’s presidents, Mohammad Khatami, had won a decisive election victory on a liberalising agenda, which these students had unequivocally backed.

Though happy – and fearless – in talking to two Western journalists about their hopes for the country, several also – accurately as it turned out – expressed their frustration that for all his benign intentions, Khatami was already proving unable to stand up to the ayatollahs.

Those brave women will be in their forties now, several no doubt wives and mothers. Assuming, that is, that they are still alive.

A month after the recent protests began, an internet blackout – itself a highly effective form of dictatorial suppression – has helped to make it impossible to establish reliably how many thousands of deaths were inflicted during their hideously brutal suppression by regime forces. Revolutionary Guards, supported by snipers and motorcycle-borne militiamen, ploughed into large crowds of peaceful demonstrators, shooting at their faces and genitals.

Credible medics have reported that patients attached to catheters and drips have been snatched from their hospital beds and shot in cold blood. Independent Persian’s chilling dispatch reports on widespread torture, and cover-ups in which bodies of those who have died in detention are being officially recorded as having been killed in a “car accident” or on the street. The dead are piled up outside morgues too full to accept more bodies, as families hunt desperately for their relatives. One person was beaten over the head with batons as they looked for their children, and told: “Move it. Go find your b*****d.”

It’s certain that many more have been killed than the 3,000 officially acknowledged by the government in Tehran. Medics both inside and outside the country fear that the number could substantially exceed 30,000. But while no one knows for certain how many have died, it matters, and not just to historians documenting this colossal mass atrocity.

As one woman told the BBC’s Today programme: “We need to know the numbers of those who have been killed. I believe, in these dark days, we need to know what has truly happened to our country and our people, and when the bodies will be returned to their families. Nothing else matters to me right now.”

But if silence prevails within the country – thanks to the internet blackout, only sporadically broken – there is a different kind of silence outside it.

Not for the first time, it looks as though the world’s leaders lack the bandwidth for more than one global crisis at a time. Amid the understandable preoccupation with the prospect of Donald Trump’s annexation of Greenland, there was – at least in public forums, including Davos – little or no debate on what to do about the gruesome events simultaneously unfolding in Iran, beyond the contradictory and enigmatic threats issued by Trump himself.

Trump’s statement today that “there is another beautiful armada floating beautifully toward Iran right now ... I hope they make a deal”, could have more than one interpretation. Would such a “deal” be aimed at halting Iran’s draconian internal repression, or at what is, at least in many Western minds, the inextricably linked issue of Iran’s nuclear ambitions?

Trump has still not ruled out taking military action to pursue the first goal. But his decision not to go ahead, after what he described as Iran’s promise to stop the killings, seems to have created confusion.

The woman interviewed by the BBC yesterday claimed that Trump’s failure to follow through had infuriated many of her fellow protesters because they had been encouraged to take to the streets by his earlier public exhortations to keep doing so. She may not reflect the majority dissident opinion in Iran, of course, but the charge is reminiscent of that made by Iraq’s marsh Arabs, who were rhetorically encouraged by George HW Bush to revolt during the 1990-91 Iraq war, but then denied US military support.

There are no easy answers. One of the many possible military targets envisaged in Washington, especially after the capture of Nicolas Maduro, may well be Ayatollah Khamenei himself. But it is far from clear that the rest of his regime would suddenly become as pliable as the one in Venezuela so far has.

An alternative is a more general war designed to dislodge the whole governing apparatus. But the idea that Middle East regimes can easily be displaced by military intervention without this resulting in more bloodshed and chaos has a hollow ring for those who lived through the aftermath of Saddam Hussein’s fall in 2003, or that of Muammar Gaddafi eight years later.

Another hope is that somehow, forces inside the country will topple the regime and usher in a government with the popular legitimacy for which so many Iranians yearn. The bleak lesson of the Arab spring is that this isn’t easy, either. Bashar al-Assad was brought down not by mass revolt, but by an organised and armed internal militia (with some Turkish help).

I can also remember well the enormous euphoria on Cairo’s streets on the night when Hosni Mubarak fell in 2011 – but the Egyptian deep state, and the military, helped to ensure that in the end he was replaced by the profoundly authoritarian Abdel Fattah el-Sisi.

Perhaps the best hope, forlorn as it seems at present given the “massive” US military assets assembled in the region, is that the US uses the diplomatic leverage it undoubtedly has to offer a “deal” whereby sanctions against Iran – whose economic hardship has driven so many of its citizens onto the streets – would be lifted in return for both a halt to uranium enrichment, and progress to be made internally, perhaps towards internationally monitored elections for a new constituent assembly.

If that seems too utopian, then it’s worth remembering that despite its still formidable military power, the regime is probably weaker than any time since 1979 – which is why it has hit out so brutally against its people. Sooner or later, it will fall. The question is not just when – but how.