US sanctions five senior Iranians on eve of elections

WASHINGTON DC, (Kurdistan 24) The US announced on Thursday that it was sanctioning five more senior Iranian officials ahead of parliamentary elections on Friday.

At a press briefing, Brian Hook, US Special Representative for Iran and Senior Policy Advisor to the Secretary of State, affirmed that Iranian elections were fundamentally unfair, because the unelected Guardian Council decides who is allowed to run for office. For Friday’s elections, “the council denied more than 7,000 candidates the right to participate,” Hook said.

That number is over half of those who sought to compete in the vote. Even some sitting members of parliament were denied the right to run again for their seats in the 290 member assembly. Consequently, conservative hardliners are expected to dominate the next parliament.

Ahmed Jannati, the 92 year old cleric who heads the Guardian Council, is prominent among those sanctioned on Thursday. Jannati has been a member of the Guardian Council since 1980, when the political institutions of Iran’s new revolutionary regime were first established, and he has headed the Guardian Council since 1988—for the past 32 years.

Protests followed Iran’s 2009 elections, in which Mahmoud Ahmadinejad won a second term. “Jannati praised the regime for executing protestors” then, Hook stated, and he “urged more executions until the protests stopped.”

Another elderly cleric, Mohammed Yazdi, 88 years old, was also sanctioned on Thursday. Yazdi, too, is a member of the Guardian Council. From 1989 to 1999, he also headed the Iranian judiciary.

As Iran’s Judiciary Chief, Yazdi “abolished the Office of the Prosecutor, effectively rendering all judges prosecutors and leading to the widespread violation of basic human rights,” the US Treasury Department stated.

Yazdi is also “well known for wishing death to America and death to Israel, whenever the occasion presents itself,” Hook added.

Abbas Ali Kadkhodae, spokesman for the Guardian Council and its deputy head, was also sanctioned. On Monday, in what was almost the mirror image of the remarks that Hook would make three days later, Kadkhodae denounced the upcoming US elections in November as a facade of democracy, claiming, “60 percent of Americans do not trust the elections in their country.”

Mohammad Hasan Sadeghi Moghadam was also sanctioned. He sits on the Guardian Council’s Central Committee for Election Supervision, as does Siamak Rahpeyk, the fifth Iranian official sanctioned on Thursday.

The measures will freeze whatever assets the five men may have in the US. However, it is unlikely that any of them have substantial wealth in the country, and it would seem that the effect will be largely symbolic.

Rather, the latest measures appear to be part of a US campaign to discredit the regime at home and abroad by focusing attention on what Washington regards as its true nature.

Iran “is a republic in name only,” Hook affirmed. The US-educated Foreign Minister, Javad Zarif, is the “face of the regime” which it likes to present to the West, Hook said, “but the beating heart of the regime are men like Ahmad Jannati.”

The results of Friday’s vote are not in real doubt: conservative hard-liners will, almost certainly, prevail. There are serious questions about the turn-out, however. As the British paper, The Guardian, reported on Thursday, even the regime appears apprehensive of a low turn-out that would discredit the results.

Editing by John J. Catherine