GUEST BLOG: Samira Taghavi – Response to the 15 February, Mahuta Press Release

The ‘Women, Life, Freedom’ movement has been alerting the Minister of Foreign Affairs, Nanaia Mahuta and her government to the supply of Iranian-made drones to Russia for months now. Last year we noted that the Iranian regime was responsible for killing not just Iranian civilians but Ukrainian civilians – including Ukrainian children.

The slowness of Mahuta’s response underscores that the Ardern/Hipkins governments have been complacently content to move with glacial ‘speed’ in inventing the smallest possible steps against Iran, rather than simply adopting – quickly – the list of meaningful actions that Iranian New Zealanders have been pleading for now nearly half a year. Bolder, principled, meaningful action is immediately required, against officials of the Iranian police state.

The most important Iranian official that our government can quickly sanction is the Iranian ambassador to New Zealand – by his expulsion. Our embassy in Turkey can instead adequately deal with our very small trading relationship with Iran. We demand that this government waste not even one more day, in taking this important step – inaction simply emboldens the regime to waste more lives.

The New Zealand government talks of ‘leading other nations by example’ (such with as climate change). It is embarrassing that such moral imperative is totally forgotten when it comes to supporting the civilian population of Iran, who are daily being murdered, tortured and raped by the servants of the brutal Iranian dictatorship.

The Hipkins government is also apparently content to keep pretending that putting the entire Iranian Revolutionary Guard onto our ‘Terror Entities List’ is a difficult thing – when the Ardern government put the entire ‘Proud Boys’ group onto the list in short order – the ‘Proud Boys’ being of apparently tiny size and effect compared to the Revolutionary Guard, which is responsible for countless deaths.