Article
Comment
Freedom of Belief
Islam
5 min read

Iran: defender of minorities?

Making such claims is part of a carefully managed facade.

Steve is news director of Article 18, a human rights organisation documenting Christian persecution in Iran.

A toddler is held by her father while he stands next to her mother.
Lydia and her adoptive family.

It might surprise you to learn that the Islamic Republic of Iran likes to present itself as a defender of minorities. 

It’s certainly not the sort of title you might associate with a country with such a grim human-rights record, amounting to “crimes against humanity” according to the findings of an independent fact-finding mission. 

But akin to the template of the Russians and other rogue regimes, Iran knows well that when it comes to the international arena, appearances can often take the spotlight away from ghastly realities. 

And so, when the fact-finding mission releases a report, as it did last week, outlining violations against minorities with the title They have dehumanised us, while it may achieve little in terms of change on the ground, it has the potential to at least damage the Islamic Republic’s carefully managed facade on the international stage. 

In the five years I’ve been working for Iranian Christian charity Article18, I've grown extremely familiar with the way in which the Islamic Republic brings representatives of its recognised religious minorities - Jews, Christians, and Zoroastrians - to the United Nations in an attempt to prove its inter-religious tolerance.  

The latest example of this was in October, when the Armenian MP - one of five minority representatives in the Iranian parliament (as the Islamic Republic likes to remind us) - was rolled out before the UN Human Rights Committee to list the number of churches, synagogues and temples in Iran. 

The point? That if there are so many places where minorities can worship - for the record, he referenced 380 churches, 16 synagogues and 78 temples - then how can anyone claim minorities are persecuted? 

What the MP failed to mention was that those 380 churches, for example, are only open to those considered to have been born as Christians, which in Iran means Armenians or Assyrians.  

Meanwhile, the door remains firmly closed to anyone who may wish to convert to Christianity or even simply visit a church to find out more. 

Article 18 enshrines the freedoms to change one's faith and to share it with others. Both are denied to Iranians of all faiths and none. 

This hasn’t always been the case. There were once a large and growing number of churches that welcomed converts, but over the past 15 years they were either forced to close or to change the language in which they operate. These days, churches can only preach in Assyrian or Armenian.  

Last year marked the 10th anniversary of the forced closure of the largest Persian-speaking church in Iran, the Central Assemblies of God Church in Tehran, whose popularity ended up being its death knell. 

Just four Persian-speaking churches remain in the whole of Iran, all Anglican, and these can only welcome those who can prove they were Christian before the establishment of the Islamic Republic in 1979. They are not allowed to admit new members, and even these have not been permitted to reopen since their forced closure during the Covid-19 pandemic. 

So, while churches in the West are often derided for their ageing populations, for Iran’s last remaining Persian-language churches, that future is entirely inevitable. 

And while the Armenian MP talks about Iran’s hundreds of churches, he fails to mention that converts have nowhere to worship, as was highlighted in our #Place2Worship campaign, which was inspired by an open letter written by three converts serving long prison sentences for their membership of house-churches.  

The three wanted to know where they might worship, free from the fear of being re-arrested. 

Because that is why Christians are imprisoned in Iran - simply for meeting together in what we in the West call “house groups”, and what in Iran are known as “house-churches”, or, in the words of the Iranian authorities, “enemy groups”

But it isn't only the converts who suffer. Armenians and Assyrians have themselves received long prison sentences for their decision to share their faith, a right that is enshrined in international covenants that Iran has signed, including Article 18 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, from which my organisation derives its name.  

Article 18 enshrines the freedoms to change one's faith and to share it with others. Both are denied to Iranians of all faiths and none. 

But they aren't quite so fond of scrutiny, such as a 17,000-word report by a credible international team of experts. 

In this context, I find it both baffling and even slightly amusing whenever I see the Islamic Republic of Iran presenting itself as the defender of minorities.  

Iran’s new president, Masoud Pezeshkian, littered his "election" campaign with references to the “dignity” of Iran’s minorities; it’s common to see propaganda highlighting Iran's alleged defence of Christians in the region against ISIS, for example; and they love to talk about the number of churches and minority MPs that they have. 

But they aren't quite so fond of scrutiny, such as a 17,000-word report by a credible international team of experts.  

According to the experts, minorities in Iran face “ongoing institutionalised discrimination and marginalisation”, the “root causes” or “enablers” of which are the “gross human-rights violations against them”. 

The fact-finding mission highlight the example of a couple whose adopted daughter was ruled should be taken away from them because they had become Christians and she was considered to have been born a Muslim. 

I remember the story of little Lydia very well - certainly one of the most heart-wrenching of my time working with Article18.  

It also produced one of the strongest reactions, with 120 lawyers and activists signing a joint letter to the head of the judiciary at the time - one Ebrahim Raisi - calling for the decision to be overturned. 

It wasn’t. 

And while the Islamic Republic will no doubt seek to laugh or shrug off the “politically motivated” report, as they have countless others, it is to be hoped that at least some who may have been taken in by the regime's propaganda in the past will see reason to think twice the next time around. 

 

Article
Comment
Film & TV
Politics
Purpose
4 min read

BBC scandals turn the spotlight on its lost mission

When it's good it's great but when it's bad it’s Babylonian

George is a visiting fellow at the London School of Economics and an Anglican priest.

Tim Davie in a blue suite smiles
Tim Davie, BBC boss.

I’m a great fan of the BBC. Generally speaking, I like and admire its journalists and its output and, occasionally, I take its and the licence-payer’s shilling. 

I may be increasingly unusual in choosing to be woken by Radio 4’s Today, but love it because of, rather than despite of, its presenters’ impertinent and interruptive style with politicians. Its radio drama is seductive. I admit to having assiduously followed The Archers, until (literally) I lost the plot at Covid. Short radio drama series can be compulsive listening, such as Al Smith’s first-class Life Lines, featuring Sarah Ridgeway as an ambulance call handler. 

As for TV, I’m showing my age – The Repair Shop, Antiques Roadshow and Professor Alice Roberts’ archaeology in Digging for Britain. Ancient Top of the Pops repeats accompany Friday evening drinks. 

But back to the journalism. Say what you like, the BBC’s news output is the world’s benchmark. It has consistently hired best-of-breed reporters, particularly on the foreign stage. Whatever politicians of both the left or right claim, depending on their circumstance, it is even-handed in its analysis.  

Newsnight under Victoria Derbyshire is immeasurably improved by its slick, half-hour, after-dinner sofa format. It disassembles the pompous and hypocritical, from Trump apparatchiks to Jeremy Clarkson at a farmers’ demo, his stammering and panicky “classic BBC” attempted dismissal now cheekily deployed in its own advertising. 

But – and you’ll know the “but” was coming – there’s the dark side. There has recently been a litany of managerial let-downs, any of which could have put a more commercial enterprise out of business. Conservative governments have customarily been most prone to traducing the BBC, possibly because they think it should know its place, which is not so much below the salt as serving at their table. 

So it’s quite the new thing for a Labour culture secretary, Lisa Nandy, further to undermine the credibility of its Director-General, Tim Davie, by listing its “catastrophic” failures on his watch. The BBC has just had to apologise (an occurrence now as regular as Gary Lineker’s controversial tweets) for failing to discover, let alone disclose, that the 13-year-old narrator of documentary Gaza: How to survive a Warzone was the son of a Hamas high-up. 

A separate external review has also found that BBC bosses failed adequately to protect staff on MasterChef from presenter Gregg Wallace’s invasive behaviours. And the corporation has had to apologise this month for broadcasting antisemitic chants by the vile act Bob Vylan at Glastonbury. 

It’s not all about Davie’s alleged shortcomings. As the BBC itself might put it, other director-generals are available. George Entwhistle resigned over a Newsnight crackpot report on a child-abuse scandal; Greg Dyke over Lord Hutton’s report into how the BBC reported the David Kelly suicide affair under the Blair government. Then there was the Jonathan Ross and Russell Brand “prank”. Let’s not, please, lift the coffin lid on Jimmy Savile again. And so, one is forced to say, it goes on. 

Is the BBC uniquely wicked and/or mismanaged? No. But it’s huge and visible. I have a theory that it’s a British institution which, like others, is a victim of its imperial past. It was nurtured in a post-Reith period, when being of the BBC was like carrying a British passport (“His/Her Britannic Majesty requests and requires…”). It not only believes in, it was a child of, its own propaganda. The derring-do of its great foreign correspondents was founded on the unquestioned might of empire. 

That leads, inevitably in a post-imperial age, to hubris. It’s like Babylon, the metaphor rather than the great Mesopotamian city. Once indestructible under emperors such as Nebuchadnezzar, sacker of Jerusalem, it was destroyed by its own vulnerabilities. The scriptural allegory from Genesis is that Babylon raised the great tower of Babel to reach the sky and oversee a world that spoke its one, true language. In his wrath at their pride, God scattered its people, now unable to understand each other, for they’d come to form their own languages. 

See how that works? The BBC has come to believe in itself, rather than its mission. And consequently, it has lost the ability to communicate, both internally and externally.  

It’s not alone. The Church of England has the same post-imperial problem. So does any elected government after about a decade. It’s the jobs of Archbishop of Canterbury and Prime Minister, as well as Director-General of the BBC, that can only end in tears. 

They should get together, these people. Work out accountable corporate structures that can work in the 21st century. Create top leadership jobs that are possible to do, rather than appoint emperors who turn out to have no wardrobes. 

The point surely is not that they are humiliated, but that they have to be humbled. They need to demolish their towers, stop babbling at each other and learn to speak a common language again.  

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