Iranians caught between COVID-19 and regime suppression

Islam Mohamed

The Iranian regime is using the COVID-19 pandemic to tighten its grip on Iran and silence the opposition.

The regime has been offering security solutions to the pandemic since its outbreak in Iranian cities.

Detentions

Iranian authorities have launched a massive arrest and detention campaign against writers and journalists, despite confessions by Iranian officials that the government had failed in addressing the COVID-19 crisis.

The authorities especially detained the journalists and the writers who criticized the performance of the Iranian government as far as the crisis is concerned.

The Iranian Revolutionary Guard especially targets activists who use social media in criticizing the government.

The guard has stepped in to contain the disease, after the government failed in doing this.

Over 40 websites had been taken down for publishing information about the COVID-19 pandemic, a senior officer of the guard said.

He said 16 administrators were also referred to trial for publishing this information.

Emergency

Around 724 Iranians had died so far because of COVID-19 and over 14,000 others contracted it, according to Iranian official media.

Nevertheless, the real figures of disease infections and fatalities can be much higher.

Iran has the world’s highest COVID-19 fatality rate, despite official efforts to gloss over the real numbers. Medical teams are, meanwhile, proving in capable of coping up with the number of new cases at Iranian hospitals and health facilities. Some medical professionals are also falling victim to the disease.

Iranian Supreme Guide, Ali Khamenei, issued an injunction for Iranian authorities to consider health professionals killed by the disease to be “martyrs.”

The decision, Iranian media said, came at the request of the Ministry of Health which wants to calm down a public angry at the increasing rate of disease fatalities and infections.