How Not to Help Iran’s Protesters

T he ongoing riots triggered by the death of Mahsa Amini, the 22-year-old Kurdish woman murdered by the Islamic Republic’s chastity police, have unleashed a torrent of discussion about how America should respond.

Some observers would like to see President Biden intensify sanctions on Tehran to show support for the protestors and, ideally, hobble the regime. Others want to lift the sanctions to empower the Iranian people. According to Esfandyar Batmanghelidge, who is one of the proponents of the latter argument and of diplomatic engagement with Iran, “sanctions relief will make no difference as to whether the Islamic Republic can beat protestors, but . . . gives Iranian society the means for lasting political action.”

In reality, though, sanctions relief would only enable the Islamic Republic to fund its coercive apparatus, rather than empowering ordinary Iranians.

To begin with, the Islamic Republic directs significant funds to its intelligence and political institutions, which play a big part in the regime’s machine of internal repression. The Ministry of Intelligence and Security (MOIS), the Islamic Revolutionary Guards (IRGC), the Police Force (Nirooye Entezami), the Basij Mobilisation Resistance Force (the Basij), the Islamic Republic’s Cyber Army (Artesh-e Cyberi), and the Islamic Republic of Iran Broadcasting (IRIB) company all receive a substantial budget. They spend the lion’s share of these resources on violently suppressing domestic dissent.

In Fiscal Year 2022, these six organizations received over $38 billion in funding from the government (calculated based on an exchange rate of 42,000 rials to $1). The IRGC’s budget for FY 2022 was $22 billion, a 58 percent increase from 2021. According to the FY 2022 budget, the government is obligated to provide the IRGC with €4.5 billion worth of crude oil; the IRGC then transfers this oil to neighboring countries to make more money.

In 2022, the MOIS’s budget has also increased by 31 percent from 2021, reaching $3.5 billion. The allocation of the Police Force has also doubled from 2021 to 2022, reaching $10.294 billion. Moreover, the 2022 budget obligates the government to provide the Police Force with an extra $4.761 billion in revenue from oil and petroleum-product exports.

The budget of the Basij, the militia that has played a leading role in the brutal crackdown on the protesters, has also increased in 2022 by 3.5 times, hitting approximately $1 billion. In addition, the Basij can access $317 million in funds ostensibly earmarked for the “reconstruction of martyrs’ cemeteries” and other services. And the budget obligates the Central Bank to provide the Basij with $1.5 billion in loans for setting up solar-power plants.

PHOTOS: Protests in Iran

The Cyber Army, an organization that tracks and exposes political and human-rights activists, received over $405 million in the state’s FY 2022 budget. The budget of the Islamic Republic of Iran Broadcasting (IRIB) company, another of the regime’s suppressive organs, has also been increased to $1.26 billion in FY 2022. The IRIB uses all that money to fund its activities as the regime’s propaganda machine, including the broadcasting of forced confessions made by political detainees and human-rights activists.

In 2021, these organizations were given half as much as they’ve been given in 2022, which indicates that the regime probably anticipated the nationwide unrest that has now broken out. The IRGC, the Basij, the Police Force, and the Cyber Army are also almost surely being given extra government funds to suppress the protest movement. And non-uniformed regime-supporter units — the so-called violent Plainclothes, an equivalent to the Nazi Party’s Brownshirts that operates under the IRGC Intelligence Organization — receive government funding under the table.

It is also important to note that apart from the state budget, these entities have other substantial funds at their disposal. The IRGC controls a business empire estimated to constitute one-third of the country’s economy. As I have written elsewhere, the IRGC has always tried to mask its extensive economic empire. The organization eschews the traditional pyramidal ownership structure in favor of an elaborate network of hundreds of nominally private companies run by Guards veterans or subsidiaries that own shares in other companies. The total number of parastatal companies is thus difficult to estimate, but their combined economic clout is undeniable. To take just one example, the IRGC’s engineering arm, the Khatam al-Anbia Construction Headquarters (GHORB), is the largest construction firm in Iran.

Lifting sanctions on the Islamic Republic would enable IRGC companies to enter into business with Western firms. According to Iran’s Foreign Investment Promotion and Protection Act (FIPPA), foreign companies need an Iranian partner, which for large-scale projects often means a firm controlled by the Revolutionary Guards.

The Islamic Republic spends significant resources on the import of tools — including riot gear, weapons, and communications-monitoring technology — to suppress domestic dissent. For instance, it has purchased the DES-516B Anti-Riot Water Cannon Vehicle (each unit allegedly priced at $650,000) from the Chinese manufacturer Dalian Eagle-Sky. It has also bought surveillance and repression technology from Chinese tech corporations Tiandy and Huawei, in an effort to strengthen its telecommunications network and help the Revolution Guards enforce public order. Chinese companies have helped install more than 2,000 surveillance cameras in Tehran and other areas of the country, as part of bilateral agreement between China and Iran that calls for the installation of 15 million such cameras on Iranian soil.

Before the imposition of sanctions, the Islamic Republic’s Police Force spent billions of dollars on buying STEYR HS .50 sniper rifles from the Austrian company Steyr Mannlicher, motorcycles from the Austrian manufacturer KTM AG and the Japanese Honda Motor Company, and communications-monitoring equipment from the Finnish Nokia Networks conglomerate. All of this equipment has been used against civilians, and if sanctions were lifted, the regime could resume importing more of it.

Owing to sanctions and its increasing of the funds available to its repressive organs, the regime is currently facing a budget deficit, one that makes it more difficult to continue footing the bill for the repression of the Iranian people. Sanctions relief would make that task much easier and is thus the wrong way to help the protest movement in its fight against the regime.