Keyhan Kasravi

BERLIN—Widespread protests against the disputed June 12 presidential election are not limited to large cities in Iran. Many dissidents around the world use every tool available to cast doubt on the legitimacy of Iran’s government.

The Iranian government, fully aware of the effectiveness of these protests, tried to reduce the reach and the range of these demonstrations by making threats and terrorizing dissidents and protestors living outside Iran.

In mid-October, a documentary was aired on Panorama, a program on the German ARD channel, which showed the Iranian government identifying dissidents in major cities in Germany, including Hamburg and Berlin.

Manfred Muck, a senior security official in Hamburg, was featured in this documentary. Muck said the Iranian government was trying to take advantage of its security forces outside Iran to identify dissidents and pressure them. According to this security official, the Iranian government has repeatedly asked the German government to take measures limiting the scope of these protests. This obviously meant violating the right to free speech and assembly.

What is most important to these dissidents is the safety of their families inside Iran, who are often harassed by the government. In order to remain anonymous, many protestors covered their faces, even though doing so is against German law. The German government made an exception and allowed them to cover their faces. If identified, the government could prevent them from entering the country. Sometimes, the Iranian government forces some dissidents to cooperate with them by showing them pictures and proof of their anti-government activities abroad.

Tracking dissidents is not only limited to identifying them in protests. Iranian security forces monitor the activities of Iranians on social networking sites, such as Facebook and Twitter. After the election, these activities caused many problems for a number of Iranians trying to return to the country.

Sending threatening letters, disrupting Internet access, and eavesdropping on phone conversations of dissidents are among the many strategies taken by government security forces stationed abroad. They are trying to send a signal to dissidents that the government is always monitoring their actions and will try to prevent their political activities.

The Panorama television documentary, which was aired on Persian networks and Iranian social sites, caught the attention of many Iranians. Many articles were published condemning the information-gathering methods of the government.

A few weeks later, on November 5, the pro-government Fars news agency, which has close ties to the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps, and the state-run IRNA news agency published a story that confirmed these suspicions. They even went further by claiming that dissidents inside and outside Iran will be identified and dealt with at the right time. IRNA and Fars quoted IRGC Brigadier General Masoud Jazayeri, vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. In an interview with Kayhan on the eve of November 4, Jazayeri called the supporters of the Green Movement abroad “foreign extensions of a soft coup” and said, “So far, a large number of the infantry of the enemy has been identified. The Islamic Republic will not allow the extensions of a soft coup to act on another sedition and if necessary, the government will make them face serious challenges.”

These threats failed to prevent the masses from participating in the November 4 demonstrations in support of the opposition movement, but making such threats was unprecedented in recent years. So far, no Iranian military official has threatened the dissidents in such a tone.

But there is a precedent in post-revolution Iran for the government to monitor, if not assassinate, activists outside Iran. In the years following the Islamic revolution, several dissidents were assassinated in Western countries. This chain of terror began with the assassination of Shahpor Bakhtiar, the Shah’s last prime minister, in Paris, and continued with the assassination of Abdurrahman Qasemlou, the leader of the Kordestan Democratic Party, in Vienna, and ended with the assassination of four Kordestan Democratic Party activists in Berlin. This led to a period of tense relations with Europe in the 1990s.

Now, in reaction to these threats made by the IRGC, the network of young Iranians in Berlin in charge of organizing many demonstrations wrote a letter to the German Ministry of Interior, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, and the European Parliament, and asked all European governments to take these threats seriously and ask the Iranian government for clarification on threats to commit crimes on European soil.

Despite the government’s tireless efforts to threaten dissidents abroad, evidence shows that such threats do not have a real impact on the scope of the protests.

Keyhan Kasravi is an Iranian activist living in exile in Berlin.