U.S. Imposes Sanctions on 8 Iran Officers for Crackdown
By MARK LANDLER
WASHINGTON — Opening a new front in its pressure campaign in opposition to Tehran, the Obama administration on Wednesday place eight Iranian officers on a blacklist for their role inside bloody suppression of anti-government demonstrators immediately after the disputed Iranian election final year.
Below an executive order signed by President Obama, the United states will freeze foreign assets and deny visas on the eight officials, who consist of the commander with the Islamic Innovative Guard Corps plus the minister of welfare and social security.
Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton, who announced the sanctions with Treasury Secretary Timothy F. Geithner, accused the men of ordering the arbitrary arrest, beating, torture, rape, blackmail, and killing of Iranian citizens from the violent crackdown right after the June 2009 election.
“This is the very first time that the United states has imposed sanctions on Iran based on human rights abuses,” Mrs. Clinton stated. “We would like to be ready to let you know that it may possibly be the final, but we fear not.”
The administration’s action comes from the wake of tougher United Nations and American sanctions imposed towards Iran because of its nuclear plan. Mrs. Clinton and Mr. Geithner claimed that those measures have been beginning to show outcomes: Iran has begun negotiating with the U.s.a. and other main powers about returning for the table to discuss its nuclear ambitions.
Wednesday’s measures were a lot more symbolic than substantive. The most considerable figure around the list — Mohammad Ali Jafari, the commander in the revolutionary guard corps — has already been place around the blacklist by the U.s.a. due to his involvement inside the nuclear program.
The sanctions reflect how far the Obama administration has come in its response to the upheaval in Iran. When angry crowds first took to the streets of Tehran to protest the disputed elections in June 2009, Mr. Obama was reluctant to voice his concern, fearful that the Iranian regime would seize on his words to paint the opposition as tools of your America.
Since the Iranian government’s brutal crackdown, and what Mrs. Clinton described as a mounting cycle of repression — the banning of political parties, the closing of newspapers, the jailing of human-rights activists — the United states of america has been increasingly vocal about rights abuses. Now it has named the officers it believes are the chief culprits.
“We’ve constantly mentioned that we not only cared about the nuclear program in Iran, we cared concerning the people of Iran, and we cared about their conditions in their country,” Mrs. Clinton mentioned on Wednesday.
