Human-rights activists and Iranians abroad yesterday welcomed Washington's imposition of sanctions against eight senior Iranian officials deemed to have played key roles in crushing last year's post-election unrest. The move - apparently designed to ratchet up pressure against President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's government while reaching out to his opponents - was the first time the Obama administration has levied sanctions against Iran for human-rights abuses.
Analysts said it sends a conciliatory signal to ordinary Iranians that US sanctions are now being linked to what concerns them, rather than just something that Washington cares about, namely Iran's nuclear programme. Previously, the US was criticised for focusing too much on the nuclear issue while ignoring allegations of the Iranian regime's human-rights abuses. "We hope very much that other countries around the world will follow suit with similar blacklists that… affect the perpetrators of gross human-rights violations but which don't negatively impact on the population as a whole," Aaron Rhodes, a German-based spokesman for the International Campaign for Human Rights in Iran, said.
Hillary Clinton, the US secretary of state, used unusually blunt language in announcing the measures on Wednesday, which ban the eight from travelling to the US and freeze any assets they may have there. "On these officials' watch, or under their command, Iranian citizens have been arbitrarily arrested, beaten, tortured, raped, blackmailed and killed," she said. The US has adopted a twin-track policy on Iran that combines sanctions with appeals for Tehran to return to long-stalled international talks over its nuclear programme - that the Islamic republic insists is solely peaceful in nature.
The National Iranian American Council said the targeted new human-rights sanctions were "welcome news". But the Washington-based organisation said in a statement that it continues to oppose broader sanctions imposed over Iran's nuclear programme, which it says are hurting ordinary Iranians. Washington's new punitive measures received scant coverage in Iran's state-run media yesterday. The eight Iranians blacklisted by the US include Mohammed Ali Jafari, the commander of the Revolutionary Guard, which controls much of the Iranian economy, and one of his feared sidekicks, Hossein Taeb, a former head of the Basij militia that spearheaded last year's post-election crackdown.
Among the others sanctioned are Iran's chief prosecutor, Gholam Hossein Mohseni-Ejei, a former interior minister, and top police and military commanders. Mr Ahmadinejad was not on the list. Nor were his prominent conservative rivals, such as Ali Larijani, the influential parliamentary speaker and his brother, Sadegh, who heads the hardline judiciary. None of those blacklisted was likely to travel to the US or have assets there. But the US treasury secretary, Timothy Geithner, said when the US has targeted specific individuals, other countries have responded by cutting off economic ties and financial dealings with them.
Huge street protests followed Mr Ahmadinejad's disputed re-election in June last year, but the dissent was brutally crushed by the security forces. Iran's opposition says more than 70 died in the unrest. At least two people were executed and scores have been jailed, among them reformist politicians, journalists, students, human-rights activists and bloggers. On Wednesday the families of three opposition protestors who were tortured to death in detention last year granted a death-row reprieve to two jailers convicted of the killings, saying they were just "puppets in the hands of unruly law breakers".
But the families demanded that the man who jailed their loved ones in the first place should be brought to trial and punished. They were referring to Saeed Mortazavi, Tehran's feared former prosecutor, who is an ally of Mr Ahmadinejad and among the eight blacklisted this week.
