Iran, Repression, and South Africa’s Responsibility

The Iranian people are not enemies of South Africa. They are not pawns in a geopolitical contest. They are humans demanding what all people demand: safety, dignity, and a voice in their own future.

Photo by Craig Melville on Unsplash

Written By: Kamohelo Chauke

There are moments in global politics when silence becomes complicity. When reporting gives way to moral evasion. When historic alliances are no longer invoked to guide justice, but to shield power from accountability. What is unfolding in Iran is one such moment and South Africa, a country that has never hesitated to speak loudly on global injustice, cannot pretend not to see.

Iran is experiencing deep and sustained internal unrest. What began as protests driven by economic despair has evolved into a broader rejection of authoritarian governance and the systematic silencing of citizens. Across cities and towns, ordinary Iranians, workers, students, women, pensioners, and shopkeepers have taken to the streets demanding dignity, economic relief, and political voice. The state’s response has been swift, violent, and familiar.

Security forces have fired live ammunition into crowds. Thousands have been arrested. Internet blackouts have been imposed to disrupt coordination and hide the scale of repression. Courts have been fast-tracked not to deliver justice, but to issue exemplary punishment. Reports of deaths, torture, and looming executions hang over the country like a permanent threat. This is not governance. It is control through fear.

To understand why this moment has erupted, one must understand how long Iranians have been pushed to the edge.

For years, ordinary Iranians have lived under relentless economic pressure. Inflation has destroyed purchasing power. Youth unemployment remains entrenched, locking millions of educated young people out of opportunity. The national currency has collapsed repeatedly, wiping out savings overnight. While international sanctions have played a role, corruption, mismanagement, and elite capture have hollowed out the economy from within.

At the same time, political space has steadily closed. Elections are tightly controlled. Candidates are vetted or disqualified. Journalists are imprisoned. Civil society organisations are dismantled. Protest has been criminalised. Dissent is treated not as a democratic signal, but as a security threat.

For women, repression has been especially brutal and personal. Morality laws police bodies as much as behaviour. Women have been arrested, beaten, imprisoned, and killed for how they dress, how they speak, and how they exist in public. Thousands have been detained for so-called “improper hijab.” Many have reported abuse in custody. The message from the state has been unambiguous: obedience is mandatory.

This crisis did not begin yesterday. It has been building for decades.

Iran consistently ranks among the world’s leading executioners. Hundreds of people are executed annually, often after deeply flawed trials. Protesters, journalists, political dissidents, and ethnic minorities have faced death sentences. Torture is well documented. Forced confessions are common. Families are frequently informed only after executions have taken place.

When protests erupted in 2009, 2017, 2019, and again in recent years, they were met with lethal force. In some crackdowns, hundreds were killed within days. Thousands disappeared into detention centres. Accountability was virtually non-existent. This is the historical weight behind the current explosion.

What makes this moment particularly uncomfortable for South Africa is not only the brutality itself, but who is responsible for it. Iran is not an abstract foreign power in Pretoria’s diplomatic imagination. It is historically part of the anti-imperialist bloc the ANC government frequently invokes when positioning itself on global conflicts. Iran is often framed as a victim of Western aggression, sanctions, and interference.

Those realities may hold water. But they cannot excuse a state crushing its own population.

South Africa knows this terrain well. We know that governments can claim revolutionary credentials while acting in fundamentally unrevolutionary ways. We know how the language of liberation can be weaponised to justify repression. We know how states can speak in the name of “the people” while brutalising the very people they claim to represent. That is why South Africa’s response matters.

The reports emerging from Iran should unsettle anyone who takes human rights seriously. Protesters shot in the streets. Teenagers arrested. Families searching for loved ones with no information. Journalists silenced. Lawyers intimidated. Hospitals monitored by security forces. A digital blackout imposed to ensure suffering remains unseen.

According to Iran International, citing senior government and security sources, at least 12,000 people have been killed in what is described as the largest killing in Iran’s contemporary history, much of it carried out during a nationwide internet shutdown. These are not the actions of a confident or legitimate state. They are the reflexes of a regime afraid of its own citizens.

South Africa’s foreign policy prides itself on moral clarity or at least claims to. From vocal condemnations of Israel to interventions at international courts, to forceful speeches at multilateral forums, our government insists it will not remain neutral in the face of injustice. Yet when abuses are committed by allies, that moral clarity becomes selective and subdued.

This inconsistency is not just hypocrisy. It is dangerous.

It signals that human rights are transactional. That repression is tolerable when committed by the “right” government. That solidarity with states outweighs solidarity with people. Over time, this hollows out South Africa’s credibility and reduces its moral language to performance.

History warns us against this path. Allies are not infallible. They are not morally immune. Many liberation movements including in Africa became indistinguishable from the oppressors they once fought when accountability and democratic renewal were abandoned. Iran’s current trajectory reflects this familiar tragedy.

It is precisely because Iran presents itself as revolutionary and anti-imperialist that its repression is so devastating. When a state that claims to resist domination turns its weapons inward, it exposes the emptiness of its rhetoric. When resistance to external power becomes an excuse to deny internal freedom, the revolution has already collapsed.

South Africa cannot pretend this is none of its business. Our government has never exercised such restraint elsewhere. We have intervened loudly in conflicts thousands of kilometres away. We have issued statements, hosted summits, filed court cases, and applied diplomatic pressure when it aligned with our ideological posture.

To suddenly discover non-interference when Iran is involved would be an act of political cowardice.

Intervention does not mean military action or regime-change fantasies. It means speaking plainly. It means using diplomatic channels to demand restraint, due process, and respect for life. It means publicly affirming the right of Iranian citizens to protest without being killed, jailed, or disappeared.

Solidarity must always be with people before governments.

South Africa should call for independent investigations into abuses. It should support international monitoring mechanisms. It should insist that executions of protesters real or threatened are unacceptable. And it should do so without euphemism, without whataboutism, and without hiding behind anti-Western reflexes.

Some will argue that criticising Iran strengthens Western narratives. This is a false choice. Justice is not a Western monopoly. Human dignity is not a NATO project. Opposing state violence against civilians requires no alignment with Washington or Brussels, only alignment with conscience.

Others will warn of diplomatic fallout. But a foreign policy that fears honesty is already bankrupt. If alliances depend on silence in the face of brutality, they are not worth preserving. True solidarity allows and demands criticism when lives are at stake.

The Iranian people are not enemies of South Africa. They are not pawns in a geopolitical contest. They are human beings demanding what all people demand: safety, dignity, and a voice in their own future. Their suffering deserves more than selective outrage and diplomatic convenience.

This moment calls for moral fibre, not performative morality, for principled consistency. South Africa must remember that the true test of a foreign policy is not who it defends when it is easy, but who it defends when it is uncomfortable.

If we claim to stand for human rights, then we must stand for them everywhere, even when the violator is an ally. Especially then. History will not judge us by the flags we stood under, but by the people we chose not to abandon.

Kamohelo Chauke is a community and student activist at the University of the Witwatersrand, where he has held multiple leadership positions, including serving as a Student Representative Council (SRC) member from 2021 to 2023.