British-Iranian dual national Alireza Akbari executed by Iran

TEHRAN/LONDON - British-Iranian dual national Alireza Akbari has been executed by Iran, its state media has said.

Foreign Secretary James Cleverly had appealed on Friday to Iranian authorities not to proceed.

But a statement from the Iranian Students’ News Agency less than a day later said: “The sentence of Alireza Akbari, the son of Ali with dual Iranian-British citizenship, who was sentenced to death on charges of corruption in the land and widespread action against the country’s internal and external security through espionage for the intelligence apparatus of the British government, was executed.”

Mr Akbari was an Iranian former deputy defence minister who was arrested in 2019 and accused of espionage for MI6 related to past nuclear talks between Iran and western nations, according to reports.

He denied the charge and said he was tortured and forced to confess on camera to crimes he did not commit, BBC Persian reported.

Foreign Secretary Mr Cleverly had warned Tehran that London was watching the case “closely”.

He tweeted on Friday: “The Iranian regime should be in no doubt. We are watching the case of Alireza Akbari closely.

“Iran must not follow through with their brutal threat of execution.”

Earlier this week, Mr Akbari’s wife Maryam told BBC Persian she was invited to a “final meeting” at the prison where he was put in solitary confinement.

Commons Foreign Affairs Committee chairwoman Alicia Kearns previously accused the Iranians of seeking to “weaponise” dual nationals as anti-government protests convulse the country.

“It is another horrifying example of the Iranian regime – because they feel they are cornered, because there is such significant pressure from sanctions – weaponising British nationals and industrialising hostage-taking,” she told BBC Radio 4’s PM programme.

She said Mr Akbari may have been singled out by the regime because of his closeness to a leading Iranian moderate who has led calls for dialogue and discussion.

Tehran has detained a number of dual and foreign nationals in recent years, including British-Iranian national Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe, who was held in 2016 and released last year.

Iran and Britain's history of strained relations

British-Iranian relations, which have been strained for decades, were back in the spotlight after Iranian authorities executed British-Iranian national Alireza Akbari for spying, charges he had denied.

Here is a timeline of main bilateral developments since the 1950s:

1953 - Britain and the United States help orchestrate the overthrow of popular Prime Minister Mohammed Mossadegh and restore Shah Mohammed Reza Pahlavi to power.

1979 - Islamic Revolution overthrows the U.S.-backed Shah.

1980 - Britain closes its embassy in Tehran.

1988 - Britain restores full diplomatic relations with Iran.

February 1989 - Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini calls on Muslims to kill British author Salman Rushdie for blasphemy against Islam in his book "The Satanic Verses", prompting Britain to break diplomatic relations in March.

1990 - Partial diplomatic relations are restored.

1994 - Britain accuses Iran of contacts with the outlawed Irish Republican Army, a charge Iran denies but relations worsen. Iran and Britain expel each others' diplomats over the IRA issue.

1998 - Iran formally dissociates itself from the call to kill Rushdie.

1999 - Iran says relations between Tehran and Britain have been upgraded to ambassadorial level.

September 2001 - British Foreign Minister Jack Straw visits Iran to strengthen an international "anti-terror" coalition after the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks on the United States.

2004 - Iran arrests eight British military personnel for straying into its waters from Iraq. They are later freed.

2005 - Britain says there is evidence Iran or the Iran-backed Lebanese militia Hezbollah was the source of technology used in roadside bombs against British soldiers in Iraq, a charge Tehran Iran denies. The same year, Iran accuses Britain of being behind bombings that killed six people in Iran. London denies it.

March 2007 - Iranian forces seize eight Royal Navy sailors and seven marines from their patrol boat in the Shatt al-Arab waterway separating Iran and Iraq. They are freed in April.

June 2007 - Iran's Foreign Ministry summons the British ambassador to protest against the award of a British knighthood to Salman Rushdie.

June 2009 - Britain freezes Iranian assets under Western sanctions imposed over Iran's disputed nuclear programme. The same month, Britain protests to Iran after Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei calls Britain "the most treacherous" of Iran's enemies. London and Tehran each expel two of the other's diplomats.

July 2009 - Iran releases on bail the last of nine Iranians who worked at the British embassy and who had been detained in June for alleged involvement in unrest following an Iranian election.

2011 - Britain imposes financial sanctions on Iran, ordering all UK financial institutions to stop doing business with Iranian counterparts and Iran's central bank. Iran's Guardian Council approves a parliamentary bill reducing ties with Britain.

November 2011 - Britain shuts Iran's embassy in London and expels its staff, saying the storming of the British mission in Tehran that month could not have taken place without consent from Iran's authorities.

2015 - Iran reaches a nuclear deal with the United States, Britain, France, Germany, Russia and China. Under the agreement Iran accepted curbs on its nuclear programme in return for a lifting of many foreign sanctions. Iran reopens its embassy in London hours after Britain restores diplomatic ties.

April 2016 - Iran detains British-Iranian aid worker Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe, who was employed by the Thomson Reuters Foundation, a charity operating independently of Thomson Reuters and its news subsidiary Reuters. She is later convicted of seeking to overthrow the clerical rulers, a charge she denied.

May 2019 - Twitter suspended Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei's account over a tweet that said Khomeini's fatwa against Rushdie was "solid and irrevocable".

March 2022 - Zaghari-Ratcliffe and another British-Iranian dual national, Anoosheh Ashoori, return to Britain from Iran.

August 2022 - Salman Rushdie is stabbed on stage at a literary event in New York state. Iran's Foreign Ministry says no one has the right to level accusations against Tehran. Several Iranian hardline newspapers praise Rushdie's attacker.

October 2022 - Britain imposes sanctions on three Iranian military figures and a defence manufacturer for supplying Russia with drones used to attack targets in Ukraine.

November 2022 - The head of Britain's domestic spy agency says Iran's intelligence services have made at least 10 attempts to kidnap or kill British nationals or individuals in Britain.

December 2023 - Iran's Revolutionary Guards arrest seven people with links to Britain over anti-government protests.

January 2023 - Iran sentences to death and executes British-Iranian national Alireza Akbari, a former Iranian Defence Ministry official, on charges of spying for Britain. State media say he was involved in the 2020 assassination in Iran of a top nuclear scientist. Akbari denied the charges.

New barbarians and the Lola affair in France

New barbarians and the Lola affair: How a child's murder in France weaponised for the advent of anti-immigration laws

By Sarra Riahi, London, The New Arab, 23 December 2022

Sarra Riahi looks back on the coverage and political recuperation of the Lola affair by the media and figures of the French extreme right, highlighting the patterns and tropes of extreme right-wing coverage.

Two months ago, the body of a 12-year-old schoolgirl was found curled up in a suitcase in the courtyard of her building. A day later, the media revealed the prime suspect was a homeless Algerian woman, residing in the country under expulsion. From then on, a racist frenzy took over the media landscape.

Demonstrations in support of Lola were led by the far right across the country and framed the case as a civilisational war on the French by Muslims and immigrants.

We were told of a “Francocide,” Lola was killed for being French. Through their lawyer, Lola’s parents have asked for all usages of their daughter’s name and photographs to stop immediately.

In the streets of Lyon, one could hear the crowd chanting “death to immigrants, outside terrorists” and “remigration”. An immigrant is then a Muslim and in essence a terrorist.

In this 'theatre' piece, where France is under attack, Lola becomes a martyr. The others are also given a role: Immigrants, Arabs, blacks, and Muslims. They are the others, and they are all the same. They are the new barbarians.

Racism and Islamophobia: an escape route from political accountability

The demonisation of Muslims and immigrants serves as a distraction from political and socioeconomic downturns.

Yasser Louati, human rights activist and policy analyst, speaks about a racist holy trinity: “Muslims are said to threaten the national security, identity, and economy. Depending on the opportunity, politicians, and the media cast French Muslims in one of these roles.”

In the last decade, successive governments were rejected for their neoliberal policies (labour law under Hollande or pension reform under Macron). They spurred vast contestation in the country, notably the yellow vest movement in 2018. Most French politicians cannot speak on socioeconomic grounds. What is left to address is identity.

But Islamophobia is more than an escape route for politicians. The mainstreaming of Muslim and non-white individuals' dehumanisation sets a fertile soil for the implementation of repressive policies.

Renaissance presents a new immigration bill for 2023

Shortly after the announcement that the suspect was under expulsion, the focus shifted to OQTF (Obligation to Leave the French Territory) and the so-called laxity of French immigration policy. At stake are the rights of immigrants. Interviewed by Le Monde after Lola’s murder, Minister of Interior Darmanin and Labor Minister Dussopt timely presented the new immigration bill to be discussed in Parliament in 2023.

The key announcement was the creation of a residence permit for "jobs in tension" This residence permit, intended for asylum seekers to be able to work while awaiting a decision on their application, is entirely subordinated to the needs of the economy, and is therefore of limited duration and without any real possibility of integration. It is the resurgence of utilitarian migration policy that marked postcolonial times.

But our minister is quick to jump from the question of work to that of security.

Drawing on the Lola affair, Darmanin asserts immigrants are responsible for a high rate of crimes and advocates for tougher scrutiny: “We must now be mean to the mean and nice to the nice.”

The nice, for him, are the “chibanis”, older immigrants, often North Africans, who came to work in France during the thirty glorious years (1945-1975). The trope of innocuous old men serves the dehumanisation of those he considers "mean”, today’s newcomers. At work here, is the subjection of immigration policy to moral categorisation.

Darmanin announced the bill also aims at extending follow-ups to all individuals under expulsion: “The prefect will ensure that life is made impossible [administratively] for them, for example by ensuring that they no longer receive social benefits or social housing.”

Whilst it could have opened crucial discussions such as the psychological consequences of migrants living conditions and the shortcomings of children and women's protection, the tragic murder of Lola was weaponised.

“The victims serve as scapegoats, and it is not new. We saw it with terrorist attacks, with Samuel Paty," Louati tells The New Arab. "We use tragedies to advance an ideological agenda and to hammer out a reactionary discourse that has become the norm in France, at least in the political and media sphere.”

Flashback: Samuel Paty and the Anti-Separatism bill

Exacerbating marginalisation, surveillance, and security, France's homegrown War on Terror has led to a full-blown Islamophobic witch hunt on racialised communities and organisations.

On October 2, 2020, Les Murreaux, Macron introduces his fight against Islamist separatism. Islam was “in crisis”, we were told, and Macron would save it from Muslims themselves.

Such a view is symptomatic of orientalism. Even existing “here” in France and as French citizens, Muslims remain “there, and them”, barbarians from the Orient. Reminiscence of coloniality.

“This discourse of the Murreaux is part of the policies applied in the colonies a century ago. We want to control the religion to control this population. Through the essentialist gaze, all North African and Arabs are religious and governed by a Muslim code of ethics. In 1894, Leon Roche, a French diplomat, obtains a tailor-made fatwa from Mecca. The fatwa said, ‘Algerians do not have to fight against France if it allows them to perform the rites,” says Louati.

Following the murder of Samuel Paty, a French teacher who was murdered near his school in 2020 for allegedly showing a picture of the prophet Mohammed, a dozen of Muslim organisations were criminalised and shut down with little to no judicial grounds.

“We had a state of emergency, at the time I was a spokesperson for the CCIF (now CCIE), and I took care of the families who were searched. For two- or three-weeks police raided Muslim houses with all might, terrorised couples, traumatised children for life, and families exploded. No one took a stand," Louati reveals.

Setting a precedent, it legitimised more scrutiny of those identified as Muslims and immigrants.

Louati explains: “When the media push the view that there is a population in France that is the internal enemy, that it is the only one capable of committing this kind of crimes, you justify its perpetual criminalisation, you maintain the idea that it does not belong to the national community, and you justify special laws that target this ‘other’ specifically.”

At each crime committed by a non-white, a French Muslim, afro-descendant, or immigrant cannot but feel, the untold role, that will come for him or her, in the Republic theatre piece.

Sarra Riahi is a French-Tunisian journalist. She is also the head of advocacy at @webelongeurope

The Kosovo-Serbia dialogue: How the EU can lead

By Engjellushe Morina, European Council on Foreign Relations, 16 December 2022

The EU-facilitated Kosovo-Serbia dialogue process has entered a dynamic new phase to the backdrop of Russia’s aggression in Ukraine. One ripple effect of the war has been to strengthen Kosovo in the process, as a pro-EU country supportive of Ukraine. In contrast, as a country close to Russia, Serbia appears in a less favourable light. It has resisted imposing sanctions on Russia and otherwise aligning its foreign policy with that of the European Union – which it is supposed to do as an EU candidate state.

Close observers of the dialogue process assumed the war would see the EU and the United States make new efforts to persuade the parties towards a lasting solution. The leaders of both countries have strong mandates from recent election victories, which should mean conditions are ripe for a solution.

There is also a solid coalition government in Germany which, rhetorically at least, favours bringing the Western Balkans closer to the EU sooner rather than later. Emmanuel Macron’s election to a second term in office further adds to the favorable conditions, so does the presence of Joe Biden in the White House, who has long interested himself in the Western Balkans.

Nonetheless, the situation on the ground remains a stalemate that is, ultimately, detrimental to both parties. In September 2021, some Kosovo Serbs began to refuse to abide by new rules brought in by the Kosovo government concerning ID cards and car number plates. This year, Kosovo Serb officials decided to withdraw their participation in Kosovo institutions, including the parliament.

Last month, a long drawn-out meeting presided over by the EU’s high representative, Josep Borrell, with Kosovo’s prime minister, Albin Kurti, and Serbia’s president Aleksandar Vucic, resulted in no resolution to these issues. On the contrary, the meeting revealed serious disagreements over the approach of the facilitators and the parties to the agenda: Kurti maintained Kosovo’s insistence on only discussing a final agreement to address all outstanding issues between the two sides, including recognition of Kosovo. In contrast, Vucic wanted to stick to smaller issues only. Borrell, according to Kosovo’s president, Vjosa Osman, sided with the latter by insisting on an agreement on car plates before moving on to other issues.

Kurti’s position is that strengthening the sovereignty and territorial integrity of Kosovo is paramount, as is respect for the rule of law by all. He wants to focus discussions on a framework for a final agreement that the EU recently proposed (also known as a Franco-German proposal) with American backing. He prefers to avoid – as he sees it – wasting time talking about number plates. Kurti continues to believe that the creation of an Association of Serb Municipalities (ASM), a condition set by Vucic and supported by the Serb community in Kosovo, is dangerous for the sustainable statehood of Kosovo. He fears such a mono-ethnic organisation could hasten the disintegration of the country.

ECFR’s recent mini-series of short essays provide insights into the issues currently surrounding the dialogue process by pointing out not only the pitfalls but also the opportunities it contains. Politicians from Kosovo and Serbia contributed to the series.

Bernard Nikaj is an opposition politician in Kosovo and spies an opportunity to reach a final agreement. He writes that the EU and US are very much in synch, but identifies the EU’s weakening leverage in the region. He analyses the ways in which the EU has failed not only Kosovo with regard to visa liberalisation but the whole region by succumbing to enlargement fatigue. Nikaj suggests the EU should take its own peace project more seriously by moving from the role of facilitator to that of actor. It should acknowledge that this important peace process in Europe cannot be left in the hands of Balkan leaders alone.

Natan Albahari, an opposition MP from Serbia, suggests that Vucic often uses the Kosovo problem for internal politicking, depending on the need as he sees it. One moment he will claim that diplomacy for a hundred years is better than conflict for one day; the next moment he says that Serbia will never either directly or implicitly recognise the independence of Kosovo.

It is, incidentally, worth adding that it has become increasingly hard to understand Vucic’s neighbourhood policy – sometime he alludes to the importance of being constructive, and then he goes on supporting, if not inciting, Serbs’ withdrawal from Kosovo institutions. Such acts are in complete breach of the Brussels Agreement reached in 2013 and all efforts made to date to normalise relations between the two.

Albahari emphasises the importance of the Serbian parliament in reshaping Belgrade’s negotiating position and strategy towards Kosovo. He reminds the reader that any agreement reached with Kosovo will require its support through ratification. Albahari further adds that the key to unblocking the process lies with Kurti, in whose gift it is to establish the ASM and implement the 2013 Brussels Agreement in full. Doing so will convince the Serbian public and politicians alike that the rights of Serbs in Kosovo will be respected and the community will be protected. He states that Kurti will also have to consider dropping his demand for formal recognition given how difficult it would be to obtain sufficient support from across the full political spectrum in Serbia.

Demands on either side remain high in the search for some sort of normalisation of relations. This leaves little room for cooperation between Kosovo and Serbia outside the dialogue process. But Shqipe Mjekiqi, the vice-president of Kosovo Democratic League, identifies avenues where political cooperation is not only possible but could be especially beneficial for the Kosovo Serb community, beyond issues surrounding the ASM. In particular, she argues that Serbia should support Kosovo’s bid to join the Council of Europe as it would promote the rights of Serbs in Kosovo.

Kurti is eager to strengthen the sovereignty of the country he leads and secure its territorial integrity, especially concerning the north of Kosovo. This also explains why he is reluctant to implement the ASM. However, Vucic and the Serb community in Kosovo are adamant that without the implementation of ASM they will not move an inch towards any final agreement; nor will they take steps such as removing roadblocks Kosovo Serbs have recently erected in the north. Indeed, insisting on and agreeing the ASM now could render the EU proposal obsolete.

The parties should therefore take up the EU proposal and use it to move the process of the dialogue forward to an eventual final agreement. This agreement should include pathways for the long-term integration of minority communities in Kosovo. This would in turn enable both Kosovo and Serbia to move along a path to membership of the EU and eventually NATO and other international organisations for the former.

The EU-facilitated dialogue is virtually the only major foreign policy question in which the EU is the sole lead, although it receives strong support in this from the US. A successful conclusion to the process will not only bring the EU back into the game in the Western Balkans, a region the bloc has paid too little attention to for too long; it will also provide a boost to its security and stability and restore its credibility as a foreign policy actor. The EU as a strong global player would be able to persuade Serbian public opinion that there is no alternative to the European future.

The European Council on Foreign Relations and CEMAS do not take collective positions. ECFR and CEMAS publications only represent the views of their individual authors.