are the Iranian Dutch followed here?

• Maartje Geels

  online publisher

They note that the Iranian embassy checks messages on Instagram, hears strange voices during telephone conversations, and is filmed during demonstrations. The Iranian Dutch speaking against the regime claim to be supervised by the Iranian authorities. The NOS spoke to some of their experiences since the large-scale demonstrations in Iran started a month and a half ago.

Parisa has noted several times that her stories (messages that can only be seen for a short time) have been visualized by an account from the Iranian embassy in the Netherlands. She is not alone in this. “I know dozens of Iranian Dutch that their social media accounts have been seen by the embassy.”

When she realized that the embassy in The Hague was looking at her messages, she was terribly shocked. “Just when you speak out against police brutality, you get the ‘activist’ stamp from Tehran and come on the radar. Even if you are a normal citizen of the Netherlands.” This can have consequences for the renewal of passports, but also for the safety of family members who are still in Iran.

Parisa no longer dares to call on the “normal” phone line. “I hear beeps during telephone conversations, especially when I call Iranian relatives. That’s why I no longer dare to have contact with them, we don’t dare to talk about them.”

According to Parisa, many Iranian Dutch now communicate over a VPN connection or through well-encrypted chat apps. “I also pay close attention to weird e-mails. You are constantly afraid of spyware being inserted into your phone and services being read.”

Maryam * also thinks she has been annoyed. During a call you hear echoes on the line or parts of the call are cut off. “I called a friend recently and she noticed it too. You have some really weird bullshit with your phone, she said.”

Another woman the NOS has had contact with says that during a telephone conversation with a female family member she heard a male voice during the conversation. You have also spoken out against the Iranian regime.

The Iranian Dutch suspect they are also being monitored offline. This happens, for example, during events like the one in Amsterdam earlier this month. About a thousand people attended. Images owned by the NOS show a woman squirming in the crowd with her back to the stage. She holds the phone high above her head.

“She caught my eye out of the corner of her eye. I noticed her turning towards the stage with the phone in her hand,” says Samira *. “Instinctively I got the wrong feeling. I tried to hide behind the protest signs with the others, but she already had us in her picture.” A volunteer from the demonstration, who wishes to remain anonymous, confirms that the woman was filming the faces.

According to Christopher Houtkamp of the Clingendael Institute, monitoring of Iranian activists in the Netherlands is entirely possible. He is interested in life in the diaspora and in the long arm that foreign regimes have in the Netherlands. “This kind of methods are certainly not unknown. Regimes, from large to small, undertake such actions, we know, for example, from China and Rwanda, but also from Sierra Leone and Iran.”

According to Houtkamp, ​​the goal is not necessarily to gather information, but it is mainly about intimidation. Social media is used for this, but it also happens “offline” by filming people during demonstrations. “I am not surprised that the protesters feel spied on. The intimidation of political opponents is one of the main objectives of diaspora politics,” he explains.

This is especially true of Iran. Since the 1979 Islamic revolution, many Iranians have fled the country because of their political views. “Most of the people who came here are opponents of the current regime,” explains Houtkamp. “Iran, more than many other regimes, benefits from monitoring those movements. The opposition in the West is considerable, it can effectively destabilize the regime in Tehran.”

Houtkamp cannot say if there really was spying among the interviewees. In 2019, the AIVD confirmed that two Iranian Dutch citizens were almost certainly killed by the regime in 2015 and 2017. were liquidatedbut little is known about other forms of threat.

“Compared to other regimes that engage in diaspora politics, Iran is on the highest spectrum of violence,” says Houtkamp. “But very concrete examples are not publicly available, the regime will never say anything about it,” said the researcher. “But Iran definitely has the resources and motivation to spy here.”

People the NOS spoke to described the actions as intimidating and frightening. They know they cannot return to Iran for the moment. They also fear for the safety of family members who still live in the country and are wary of other Iranian Dutch.

“We are afraid that the diaspora will be repressed and that our families will be questioned,” Parisa said. The fact that she was probably intercepted on the phone, she calls it “mind-boggling frightening”. “But I also feel anger. Are we worried about what is happening in Iran, where they have the courage to keep an eye on us?”

Maryam: “Now I feel safe for the moment because they won’t do anything for a group of protesters in the Netherlands so quickly, they don’t have time for that. But the diaspora is defending friends and family in Iran and clearly trying to do it to nip the germ. “.

Samira, who demonstrated in Amsterdam: “I felt in danger. I kept fearing that I would be sought here and that they would do something to me. It took two days before I could sleep again.” However, she doesn’t think about quitting. “The Iranian regime acts through fear, they want to intimidate you. But I can’t sit still.”