“For us, always, there is a risk,” Ellie Borhan, an Iranian activist who founded the London-based Stage of Freedom group to expose atrocities committed by the Islamic Republic, told The Jerusalem Post when asked if she felt safe protesting in the diaspora.
The risk is greater now because the regime is aware it “doesn’t have much time [left],” she said. “They know they are finished.”
“We know that in the UK, we have many people who the Islamic Republic directly or indirectly funds,” Borhan said, adding that many of those now accepting orders from the regime are not from Iran but from Islamic countries like Iraq and Pakistan.
Since protests erupted more than a month ago in Iran as a response to the country’s economic crisis, thousands have been killed by the regime for participating in the demonstrations.
The UN Human Rights Council, European Parliament, and various international human rights organizations have condemned the regime’s extrajudicial killings, Internet blackouts, and the use of arbitrary detention against those speaking out.
The activist, who traveled to the United Kingdom more than 20 years ago as a student, told the Post that she was in an Uber once while discussing the protests over her phone. Her driver, a Pakistani man, began aggressively insisting she must support the Islamic Republic because, Borhan said, he told her this constituted “fighting for Islam” and “defending Palestine.”
Despite being around 6,000 km. from her home country, where the Lion and Sun flag is banned, she said she now felt unsafe standing alone with the Persian symbol, even though she had felt safe doing so three years earlier during the Women, Life, Freedom movement.
“You should be very, very careful, or you should hide it when you are alone, because you get attacked,” Borhan said, describing an escalation in the use of violence.
Organizing protests against regime from London to Munich
Borhan recently organized coaches to take activists from London to Germany to demonstrate outside the Munich Security Conference, where hundreds of thousands of protesters gathered on Saturday to demonstrate in support of Iran’s exiled Crown Prince Reza Pahlavi and demand regime change. Outside Munich, on the Global Day of Action for Iran, there were protests in Los Angeles, Toronto, and London, where more than 1.2 million people demanded change and justice.
Bohran recounted how the protesters demanded that more be done to protect Iranians by weakening the regime's repression apparatus, especially the IRGC and its leadership, that the international community impose maximum economic pressure by freezing regime assets and shutting down its shadow oil fleet, and guarantee internet access in Iran by expanding Starlink and blocking regime shutdowns. There were also demands to expel regime diplomats, prosecute officials for crimes against humanity, and proscribe the IRGC as a terrorist organization, as well as secure the immediate, unconditional release of all political prisoners. Finally, Borhan said the protesters wanted to see the world prepare for a democratic transition and the recognition of a legitimate transitional government.
She shared that she felt her calls for regime change were heavily suppressed during the protests in 2022, following the state’s murder of Mahsa Amini, but that the sentiment could no longer be ignored.
“They wouldn't listen to us. And no matter how much we were saying ‘No, we want regime change,” she recounted. “Even in newspapers, they were only focusing on women's rights and human rights, and they were not talking about much about fundamental change.”
The Iranian people want Pahlavi to run an interim government until they can vote on what comes next, whether that is a return to the monarchy or a democratic republic, she said. “After that, it became clear, I think many media started to not highlight it much, or not talk about it much,” she continued.
Much of the discomfort around platforming the desires of the Iranian people comes from acknowledging that the majority of citizens of Iran want peaceful relations with Israel because of the strong “historical bond” the two peoples share. For Western left-wing activists, who often dominate women’s rights and human rights spaces, this is a contentious issue that has left many unwilling to continue to stand for the rights of Iranians, she said.
“Many press or many activists, who were talking about women, and freedom three years ago, they've been completely silenced,” she continued. “They're not talking about it at all [now]...So, it's so difficult for me as a woman to see that other women, who never lived under the oppression of the Islamic Regime or who don't know what the reality of the Islamic regime is, are starting to somehow support the Islamic regime.”
Borhan said that she felt betrayed when she saw Huda Kattan, founder of the global cosmetics brand Huda Beauty, share pro-regime content on her Instagram, and uncomfortable at seeing British-Pakistani political commentator Bushra Shaikh spread misinformation about the regime from within Iran.
Borhan accused the people of “picking and choosing” when to support women, only offering their alliance and support when it is women they agree with.
Ignored by those supporting the regime for its identity as an oppositional force to Israel is a regime that is “using the Iranian’s assets, the money which belongs to Iranian, to invest in ”spreading their ideology and supporting the terrorist activities like Hamas, Houthis, and Hezbollah,” she outlined.
Referring back to the Uber driver incident, Borhan explained that those who were outspoken in their support for the regime were expecting Iranians to sacrifice their standards of living and human rights for the sake of pro-Palestinian foreign policy.
“We have the people who don't have food on their table, we have people in Iran who are not able to go to get medical treatment. We kids who have to work at age seven, not able to go to school, because they wanted to get some money to help their own family,” she described. “All Iranians are hostages right now. So it's like 90 million are hostage right now by the Islamic regime, because the Islamic regime doesn't care about their own people.”
Exemplifying this lack of care is the brutal treatment of women. Borhan described how the regime removed the uteri of women it had killed to hide evidence of rape.
According to a publication by the IDF on the abuse of women by the Islamic regime, women are forced into marriage with their executioner and raped before their deaths as a way to prevent them from accessing heaven.
Numerous groups, including Amnesty International, have detailed the use of sexual violence against women, men, and children in the regime’s custody. In 2023, Amnesty published a 120-page report, ‘“They violently raped me”: Sexual violence weaponized to crush Iran’s “Woman Life Freedom” uprising,’ detailing testimonies of sexual violence from 45 survivors.
“Our research exposes how intelligence and security agents in Iran used rape and other sexual violence to torture, punish, and inflict lasting physical and psychological damage on protesters, including children as young as 12. The harrowing testimonies we collected point to a wider pattern in the use of sexual violence as a key weapon in the Iranian authorities’ armory of repression of the protests and suppression of dissent to cling to power at all costs,” Amnesty International’s Secretary-General Agnés Callamard said at the time of publication. “Iran’s prosecutors and judges were not only complicit in ignoring or covering up survivors’ complaints of rape, but also used torture-tainted ‘confessions’ to bring spurious charges against survivors and sentence them to imprisonment or death. Victims have been left with no recourse and no redress; only institutionalized impunity, silencing, and multiple physical and psychological scars running deep and far.”