I won’t mourn the sudden death of the man who oversaw my sham trial

As reports of the Iranian president and the foreign minister’s “hard landing” aboard a helicopter in a remote part of north-western Iran emerged on Sunday night Australia-time, Iran’s dissident community reacted with incredulity. Iran is after all, a country in which state media is deeply mistrusted, and conspiracy theories reign supreme.

When confirmation finally came that President Ebrahim Raisi, Foreign Minister Hossein Amir-Abdollahian and other senior regime officials had been “martyred” in the crash, the mood on both the Iranian street and among Iran’s sizeable diaspora was largely one of giddy jubilation.

Kylie Moore-Gilbert was one of five Australian victims of “hostage diplomacy” during the time when Raisi was Judiciary Head.Credit: Scott McNaughton

In a strange quirk of the universe, a man who was widely loathed by the Iranian public was suddenly removed from the scene in the most dramatic and unexpected of ways. As many have commented, they would have preferred to see Ebrahim Raisi dragged before a court in The Hague to answer for his crimes. But for Raisi’s numerous victims, his untimely death was the next-best outcome.

In the West we could be forgiven for assuming the country is stricken with grief. Many Western news outlets led their coverage with black clad women and men beating their chests, sombre prayers at Tehran’s Grand Mosque and mourners swarming toward a procession of caskets draped in Iranian flags and garlands of flowers.

Such scenes contrast sharply with the mood on the street, where Iranians have been dancing, handing out sweets, setting off fireworks and posting an endless stream of helicopter-themed memes. The revolutionary fervour of the “Woman, Life, Freedom” protests, which erupted in September 2022 following the death of Mahsa Jina Amini at the hands of the morality police, continues to simmer. In an embarrassing development, the regime has started threatening and even arresting Iranian social media users celebrating the president’s death.

Tone deaf to the prevailing view inside Iran and the diaspora that Raisi was a tyrant with an inordinate amount of blood on his hands, a string of Western governments and international organisations, including NATO, the European Union, and the United Nations, expressed their condolences for those who were killed in the crash.

Illustration by Andrew Dyson

A statement by the US State Department was particularly bizarre, given that Raisi was sanctioned by the US for human rights abuses at the time of his death, and that one of the best-known slogans of the government he headed is “Death to America”.

Not to be outdone by its allies, the new Australian ambassador to Iran, Ian McConville, posted: “On behalf of the Australian government, I convey condolences to the families of all those affected by this incident.”

Given that Australia has consistently avoided taking a principled stance on the Islamic Republic’s sponsorship of terrorism, its hostage-taking of innocent Australian citizens and its attempts at transnational repression here on Australian soil, such a statement was predictable. It is nonetheless disappointing that Iranians must look to even less influential countries like Lithuania for leadership in denouncing a man widely regarded to be complicit in mass murder.

Australia might think that matters such as the executions of thousands of political dissidents in the 1980s, which Raisi presided over as a judge on the so-called “death commissions,” have nothing to do with us, and therefore we should be free to follow diplomatic protocol in expressing our condolences. But Raisi had a hand in persecuting Australians, too.

Iran’s President Ebrahim Raisi has died in a helicopter crash. Instead of sending our condolences we should be handing out sweets in celebration.Credit: AP

In 2019 I was put on trial in a shadowy “Revolutionary Court” in Tehran where I was convicted on fabricated charges of espionage, and sentenced to 10 years in prison. An academic, I had visited Iran in 2018 at the invitation of a local university, and was in the country for less than three weeks before I was arrested and effectively made into a diplomatic hostage.

The man who oversaw the Iranian judiciary at the time, including the revolutionary court system, was none other than Ebrahim Raisi.

Raisi not only approved the illegal and unsubstantiated prosecution of an innocent Australian, he presided over a judicial system that openly facilitated the Islamic Republic’s business model of the hostage-taking of foreigners and dual-nationals for diplomatic leverage.

At least four other Australian citizens were caught up in Iranian “hostage diplomacy” under Raisi. Two Aussie backpackers, who had been arrested at gunpoint while attempting to drive from Perth to London, were released in a prisoner swap later in 2019. Another quietly returned home in 2021.

Eighty-three-year-old Iranian-Australian grandfather Shokrollah Jebeli wasn’t so lucky. Jebeli died from medical neglect in Evin prison in January 2020. The Australian embassy had pushed for Jebeli’s release on medical grounds, but attempts at providing him with diplomatic assistance were rebuffed.

The Iranian community in Australia includes numerous direct victims of Raisi’s crimes. I have met several who escaped the dead president’s “death commissions” by the skin of their teeth, as well as others whose family members were executed on Raisi’s orders. They are rightly outraged that Australia should send even the most lukewarm of condolence messages for the death of the Butcher of Tehran.

Just as Western governments failed to offer meaningful support to the brave Iranian “Woman, Life, Freedom” protesters, beyond a handful of symbolic sanctions and “thoughts and prayers” on Twitter, we are yet again signalling to those who are willing to give their lives for a free and democratic Iran that our condolences are not with them, but with the regime.

President Raisi is responsible for more than four decades of horrific human rights abuses, with Australian citizens among his victims. We, too, should be handing out sweets.

Kylie Moore-Gilbert is a Research Fellow at Macquarie University and the author of the memoir The Uncaged Sky: My 804 Days in an Iranian Prison.

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