Germany can no longer calm down with a few sanctions

Sarina was, as they say, a normal teenager. She was 16 years old, they say she liked to draw and play sports, she sang into an invisible microphone while driving, tried on different hairstyles, and for a while she was shooting small videos for social networks. There she asks, for example, what 16-year-olds need. She lists a lot. Then say that all of this requires one thing above all else: freedom. And since it would be difficult here. In Iran.

The song she sang is a song against religious rule. The hairstyles she did were dangerous. Her courage was great and passionate.

Sarina Esmailzadeh was killed four weeks ago. She had been at a demonstration in Gohardasht in the city of Karaj in Alborz province. Security forces smashed her head in, says Amnesty International. They threatened her family, who eventually recorded a video telling the official version of a suicide, according to the human rights organization.

Organizations like Amnesty are trying to count who has died from "unlawful violence" in Iran in the past five weeks since protests began in Iran following the murder of 22-year-old Jina Mahsa Amini. There are said to be more than 240 people, including at least 23 children. Thousands have been arrested, but everyone knows that counting is useless. When more than 80,000 people took to the streets in Berlin over the weekend, some carried pictures of missing relatives, friends and loved ones.

How many were actually murdered, kidnapped from the streets and from their homes, tortured, raped by the Iranian regime's security forces, is uncertain. If only half of what is currently being heard and sometimes seen from Iran is correct, on shaky mobile phone videos that go online despite the internet blocking, every recording is a danger, then Germany, Europe can no longer calm down with a few sanctions . And there's nothing to suggest that everything isn't right, much to the contrary that it's even worse.

They were on the side of human rights, on the side of women in Iran, it was said after the EU sanctions package was announced last week. But just a little. With just a few sanctions against people who are unlikely to hurt them - travel bans and frozen accounts for the vice police who are unlikely to want one and hardly have the other. Who benefits from the mullahs' regime and how can they be targeted with sanctions? Why not go at least as far as the US and Canada on this matter?

The sanctions were also announced at a moment when it became clear at the latest what the Iranian regime was doing - apart from terrorizing its own citizens: supplying Russia with weapons. While the Chancellor is once again generally silent on the subject, Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock was fortunately very clear in her assessment: Both regimes, she said, are brothers in spirit and support each other. But what was the result? Politically, so far – too little. But what is sure to follow from this is this insight: the question of how an open society deals with a totalitarian one is increasingly becoming the key question of our time. And the answer will have to take into account that the totalitarians are deaf to the language of diplomacy.

At a major rally in Berlin, demonstrators from all over Europe expressed their solidarity with the protests in Iran. With this campaign, the "Woman Life Freedom Collective" wants to stand up against oppression and discrimination in Iran.

Source: WELT/ Matthias Herreiner

It's not a small revolt, it's a revolution that's been happening in Iran in the past few days at the latest. Driven forward not only in Tehran and other big cities, not only by young women or certain milieus, but by men and women from all walks of life, young and old, in many provinces. They are not demanding reforms, as before, but the end of the regime. They need far more support, from the West, from Germany, from us.

There is the question of the nuclear agreement and how to proceed. It is an important question and it is the most sensitive of all, because the security of an entire region depends on it. But there are many others that are easier to answer. And wait for answers.