In recent years, the leaders of the Mujahedeen Khalq (MEK) have intensified their efforts to be taken off the U.S. Department of State’s Foreign Terrorist Organization list. Delisting has garnered support from prominent current and former American politicians. In 2009, the MEK was taken off the European Union’s terrorist list. The U.S. State Department kept the MEK on its list of terrorist groups. Just over a year ago, however, the US Federal appeals court ruled that the State Department must reconsider its previous decision (1).

The MEK is a political and paramilitary organization founded in 1965 in opposition to the Shah. Marginalized in post-revolutionary Iran, it turned its weapons against Ayatollah Khomeini and his supporters, proclaiming its mission to be the downfall of the Islamic Republic of Iran. In 1986 the French government forced them to leave Iran; the group moved its operations to Iraq, then under Saddam Hussein, where they fought alongside Iraqi soldiers against Iran during the Iran-Iraq war.

The MEK has been linked to a number of assassinations in both pre- and post-revolutionary Iran. Among those killed in operations linked to the MEK have been Americans (2). In the early day of the Revolution, the MEK led a failed attempt to seize the American Embassy in Tehran; the plan was infamously implemented later on by student followers of Ayatollah Khomeini.

Despite the MEK’s presence on the list of terrorist groups, the State Department has not treated it like other terrorist groups, for example al-Qaida. For instance, some members of the MEK live in the U.S. and have been allowed to publically advocate for the MEK in the United States. Many observers contend the U.S.’s listing in October 1997 of the MEK was an attempt on the part of the U.S. at a certain degree of rapprochement with Iran under reformist President Mohammad Khatami (1997-2004).

Delisting of the MEK has potentially enormous consequences for the Iranian regime and U.S.-Iran relations, and therefore the decision ought not to be taken lightly. Clearly, removing the MEK will be a political loss for the Islamic Republic of Iran, as it has long labored to marginalize the organization. When the European Union removed the MEK from its list of terrorist organizations, it was considered by most onlookers to be a serious blow for the Islamic Republic. However, it bears noting that the regime is an expert in seizing political losses as opportunities for heightening its anti-foreign propaganda. If the MEK is de-listed, the regime will likely increase its propaganda against the MEK, as well as against the U.S. government.

Also opposition groups of almost all stripes will blame the U.S., recognizing that the delisting of the MEK, include traditional opposition groups excluded after the Revolution, as well as reformist groups that have gained international attention after the fraudulent election in 2009 were marginalized. If the U.S. delists the MEK, the reaction of groups close to Mir Hossein Moosavi and Mahdi Karroubi, the Green Movement leaders now both under house arrest, as well as Mohammad Khatami will be crucial. Because Moussavi and Karroubi are under house arrest and unable to address the public, their reactions to recent developments are unknown. However, in the past, they have both been highly critical of the MEK. Notably, two members of the reform camp criticized the current attempt to delist the MEK in a recent article (3). Given the regime and wide array of political groups opposing the delisting of the MEK (including monarchists, republicans and etc), it is likely that most Iranian people— whether actively involved in an opposition group or not— will look unkindly on the delisting of the organization.

Most analysts will rightly view the delisting of the MEK as punishment of Iran for its nuclear policies, as well as for its support of terrorist organizations, including Hezbollah in Lebanon, Hamas in Palestine and the other groups in Iraq. A delisting of the MEK by the U.S. would represent a shift of attention from the mainstream opposition groups of the Green Movement and reformists to another group and other approach.
We must also consider the inhuman and unlawful condition of the people who are or were members of the MEK who left Iran by chance but because of the MEK recognition as terrorist group by US could not obtain the minimum rights of human outside Iran (4). The most glaring example of this is Camp Ashraf. The situation of residents of Camp Ashraf is because of the wrong policies of the MEK leadership and on the other hand because of trouble moving from Iraq as the MEK is in black list. They have also faced attacks by Iraqi soldiers. The most recent attack, on April 8, 2011, left approximately 34 casualties of the MEK members. (5)
If the US government will subject this decision to two conditions to be fulfilled by the MEK, the negative consequences will be reduced among oppositions and civil society actors. The conditions encompass firstly MEK leaving aside the army aspect of organization completely and secondly closing Ashraf Camp and taking policy of political activities without any weapon. US state must provide grounds to accomplish two conditions in cooperation with allied Europeans and also must force the MEK leaders. Absolutely, the aforementioned conditions will decrease fears of terrorist’ moves of the MEK in future as well as solve the problem of human rights of members in or outside of Ashraf camp. Ashraf closure is being precisely followed by EU and the MEK had admitted to perform it (6). Thus, it might not be far from reach.

The MEK renouncing violence and closing Camp Ashraf Camp, which is in close distance of Iran’s borders, would be a big point for Iran’s regime. After that, the Islamic Republic state logically cannot easily accuse opposition movements of being MEK members and subject them to harassment, prison, and even torture or execution.

Although the conditions mentioned above for removing the MEK from FTO might be in contrary to US policies for restricting Iran’s regime, politicians must in this case preferably assess the human aspect of problem and aside the political programs of the MEK or the benefits of states (Iraq, Iran or US). The west should look to find solutions for this problem and in any possible ways the human rights of the residents must be protected. If that means closing Ashraf and pushing the MEK to publically renounce violence, then the US should embrace that as a policy.

Having militia is a traditional strategy for a political group. The political party must have political activities transparently. The army belongs to states not parties.

1-http://articles.cnn.com/2011-07-15/politics/us.iran.opposition_1_terror-list-opposition-group-camp-ashraf?_s=PM:POLITICS
2-http://www.cfr.org/iran/mujahadeen-e-khalq-mek-aka-peoples-mujahedin-iran-pmoi/p9158?breadcrumb=%2Fregion%2Fpublication_list%3Fgroupby%3D3%26id%3D135%26page%3D1
3-http://www.salon.com/news/politics/war_room/2011/03/26/iran_green_movement
4-http://www.mardomak.org/story/63656
5-http://www.bbc.co.uk/persian/iran/2011/04/110414_l26_un_mko_ashraf_death.shtml
6-http://persian.euronews.net/2011/07/28/iranian-mujahedin-demonstrated-outside-th-european-councils-building/

Their surprisingly different answers have stuck in my mind, but maybe the difference is not so surprising after all. Verhulst is an author who was born and bred in Belgium, whereas Bouazza was born in a poor Moroccan village, his parents emigrating to the Netherlands when he was seven years old. In his autobiographical bestseller De helaasheid der dingen (‘The Shittiness of Things’, 2006), Verhulst describes how he did not want the child when his girlfriend got pregnant, but she decided to keep it. Both in his novel and in interviews, Verhulst has told how he would rather not have been a father – today, he barely has any contact with his son. Without wanting to judge Verhulst’s answer, Bouazza’s answer to the question ‘how to avoid happiness’ reveals a different sort of personality and writer. Bouazza gives an answer which is not cynical and much less related to his personal life, and in his writings, he is indeed much more committed with the world at large than Verhulst.

Ann De Craemer at the grave site of Sohrab Sepehri

Thousands of people turned up for Ahmad Shamloo’s funeral in July 2000, which is totally unthinkable in the West when a poet dies

I am giving this example because I thought about it when reading a new Dutch translation of the poetry of Ahmad Shamloo. I read about how thousands of people turned up for his funeral in July 2000, which is totally unthinkable in the West when a poet has died. As far as I know, there is no country in the world where poetry is so highly revered as in Iran. The difference with the way poetry is dealt with in my own country, Belgium, could not be starker. In 1928, Dutch writer and poet E. du Perron wrote two famous lines which are still – and even more than in his day and age – applicable to poetry in the Low Countries, and probably Europe/the West at large: ‘Poetry remains, naked and unbowed, a pastime for only the gentle folk.’

Poetry is longer of any importance in my country. If a new volume of poetry sells 300 copies, the publisher is counting his blessings. Nevertheless, both Holland and Flanders, ‘the Low Countries’, have a ‘Poet of the Fatherland’, something which Dutch-Iranian publicist Afshin Ellian ridiculed in one of his latest columns: ‘Only in low countries do we find comedians who accept this weird title in a non-poetical culture.’

Ellian may exaggerate somewhat in his column, but he does have a point when he calls my culture a non-poetical one. How different is Iran: the love of Persian people for poetry is definitely one of the reasons why I will eternally be in love with Iran. In my country, ‘only the gentle people’ indeed read poetry, while in Iran poetry belongs to all classes. In June 2009, a taxi was bringing me from Arak to Kashan. When I saw the glittering colors of a mosque in the small village of Mashhad Ardehal, I asked the driver to stop, but changed my mind when noticing the mosque was still under construction – as so many mosques are in Iran. Hamid however smiled mysteriously and told me I should really visit the mosque. We walked around the site for some minutes and then he gestured me to come closer. He disappeared around a corner and stood there waiting for me with a big smile on his face. He pointed at the ground, where I saw the gravestone of Sohrab Sepehri – one of my favorite Iranian poets, but I had never actually asked myself where he was buried. Hamid kneeled down, touched the gravestone and murmered the lines that are written on Sohrab’s grave: If you come to visit me,
/Come gently and slowly/ lest the fragile china
of my solitude cracks.

I then fully realized how important poetry still is in Iranian daily life, and I think I know part of the answer to the question that is the case: poetry in Iran is also political, because its subtlety, its metaphors and double meanings allow poets to express their opinion in a country where having one can lead to death. In the West, poetry is indeed a pastime: we are living in such (political and social) luxury that we don’t need the subtleties of poetry as a vehicle for freedom of expression.

Let me express a double wish now that people in Libya have taken to the streets to fight for their freedom. Let me wish that their joy gives hope to Iranians, and let me also wish that when Iran is free and politics becomes a less urgent matter, poetry keeps having its importance in the Persian mind. Let Iranians still think of their poets when they rejoice in their freedom and remember the darker times that a master like Shamloo has described so stunningly: I dread to die/in a land where/the grave diggers’s wages/exceed the price of human freedom.

To Dr. Ahmed Shaheed
United Nations Special Rapporteur for Human Rights in Iran

Allow me to begin with my best wishes for a great success in your new mission.

26 months have passed since the 2009 Presidential elections in Iran and the waves of mass protests that followed. Peaceful protests were met with large-scale shutdown of free communication, censorship of independent press, dismantling of opposition parties and a bloody crackdown on protesting citizens, leading to the arrest and incarceration of tens of thousands of political activists, party leaders, members of unions – particularly those of journalists, students, teachers, and workers across the country.

The government claimed that only 3 people were killed as a result of torture in prison, but based on credible local media outlets, who had interviewed at least 47 families with dead family members, this number is in excess of official figures. Many Iranian reporters believe that the number of people killed in the aftermath of the elections was significantly higher. Notwithstanding that the raping and murdering of prisoners and government critics began long before the 2009 elections.

Dr. Ahmed Shaheed, UN Special Rapporteur for Human Rights in Iran

Iran is a part of the global community, hence obligated to respect and to uphold certain ethical and internationally recognised values. Based on section 7 of International criminal laws, organised military action against unarmed citizens of a country constitutes crimes against humanity.

Many families of the slain protesters in Iran are given renewed hope that with your appointment as a special Rapporteur of the United Nations for human rights issues in Iran, their voices will be heard and global silence and dismissive outlook will be broken. I recognise that this issue is not unique to Iran. The blood baths running through Syria do not seem to have raised as much global outrage as they should have. Lest the global silence about these cries for justice, more than ever cultivates the notion that the “death of one man is a tragedy, but the death of millions, a statistic.”

Throughout the course of the 2 years since the 2009 elections, despite mounting pressures and intimidations, the families of the victims have broken their silence and repeatedly reported their painful cases. Formal requests by a number of families to meet with the UN special Rapporteur have been published in Persian language media. At least three families have expressed to me personally their desire to attend a meeting with a UN representative in order to report and request an investigation to the murder of their loved ones. I will refer to these in the final paragraphs of my letter.

The real reporters of violence and carnage that has taken place in these countries, including Iran, are in fact these families who keep ignoring the enormous pressures and threats and continue to report and disseminate the information and details of death of the Iranian citizens. In the early days of the protests, many families reported these deaths to the investigative committee set up for such cases. The committee in turn published more than 70 names of the slain protesters, the fact or fallacy of which required investigation and a response from intelligence and judiciary officials. Instead, on 7 September 2009, security forces raided the office of the committee and confiscated every document and property and arrested all members of the committee. The authorities issued a statement denying the death of several people named on the list.

State-backed media reported that the number of protesters killed totalled 36. On the 2nd anniversary of the disputed elections, Sepaah (Revolutionary Guards) commander Saeed Ghaemi announced that over 30 people had been killed during the protests, all of whom members of the Basij [paramilitary militia].

The trend of intimidations has, with some degree of success, forced many such families into a gradual retreat from legally pursuing their cases. An all too familiar silence of the victims. The phenomenon of Internet and virtual networks has enabled families to voice their grievance and prevent the prolonged silence.

As they find the courage to break their silence after 2 years, more families come forward and add to the killing list. I personally interviewed a father of young student who was shot in front of a mosque on 20th June 2009, who said: “I had lost my child, I had lost every hope in my life. The mental and emotional pain was unbearable and unspeakable. I thought, what good would talking about his death do? It will not return my child to me.”

The question of “will an interview or legal pursuit, bring my child back to me?” was asked by many of the families who were dismayed and disappointed with the non-responsive authorities that they had simply given up all hope. The mother of Ramin Aghazadeh Ghahremani, who had died under brutal beatings and torture at Kahrizak told SORKHSABZ, a website dedicated to information about the election victims – “What weighs heavily on my conscience is that I personally delivered my son to the authorities after he was summoned. This has driven me to the brink of madness in the last two years. I delivered my son to them; they delivered his corpse to me. Where was I supposed to go after that? And to what end? None of us in my family were into politics. Besides, I had other young children to worry about.”

This mother had once before spoken in this regard, with Shargh newspaper, but again, her fear for her other children had prevented her from consenting to the publishing of the interview. Many families of the victims had reported that their other children had been threatened and forced into silence.

Fear was clear and present in the voice of family members of Hossein Akhtar Zand, the young man who was thrown from top a medical clinic in Isfahan, on 15 June. Thus, the family briefly told JARAS: “All our pursuits proved to be futile. In order to stay alive – in a small town – there are not too many options except to maintain our silence!”

Most of these families also look at the efforts of the others with similar experiences, who had been vocal in the media and actively pursuing the cases of their children through daily trips to the courthouses, to no avail. Their remarks such as “They have ordered us to stay silent” without disclosing “who” has ordered them, is in itself incredible.

For example, Hamid Hossein Baik Araghi, another young man killed during the rallies on 20 June, was introduced as a Basiji by two of the most prominent state-backed newspapers of Kayhan and Fars. His family immediately told JARAS that such information was completely false. Other slain protesters tainted as Basij members, are Davoud Sadri; Saneh Zhaaleh; Kaveh Sabz-Alipour and Maysam Ebadi, whose families had all denied any affiliation with the Basiji or the government. Many of the families had never been politically active or affiliated with any groups or parties. They had only participated in the protests against the election results. Others had been mere pedestrians or in the traffic and shuffled into the crowd.

The family of Lotfali Yousefian, the 50-year-old man who died of respiratory complications due to inhalation of tear gas on the 2nd anniversary of the protests, was told by doctors in Ebn-Sina hospital, that “We will declare ‘heart attack’ as the cause of death, because if the real cause is reported, then the authorities may not release his body to you.” Yet other families had been forced to sign non-disclosure forms in order to be able to obtain the dead bodies of their loved ones, hence, forced into silence.

It is not too late for many other families to still come forward and unravel the painful truth

It is not too late for many other families to still come forward and unravel the painful truth. The question is, what will be the heavier burden: The torment of their silence, or the consequence of telling the truth?

The Islamic Republic’s blatant refusal to investigate and take responsibility for these cases comes at a time when there is an obvious and undeniable foot print left all over these cases by regime elements (both official or indirect). Despite the death certificates issued by the coroner which indicates that the death was due to gun shot. They go further by arresting a prominent lawyer, Nasrin Sotoudeh, who is jailed and banned from practicing law, for the crime of defending prisoners and acting for families of the dead.

Sir, as the UN’s Special Rapporteur to Iran, you are now responsible and have been commissioned to investigate such injustices and hold the key to the window of hope for many families of the victims of 2009 presidential elections. Among the families of the slain are those such as Sohrab A’raabi, Ali Hasanpour, Mostafa Karim Baigi and others, who despite the threats against them, have quite vocally and actively demanded from international organisations to send representatives to meet with them in Iran.

I will now return to the three families who have requested a meeting by giving you a short background on each, as well as a list of those who have spoken out.

Sohrab A’raabi, 19, was shot during the protests on 15 June. For 26 days, his mother Parvin Fahimi had no idea as to Sohrab’s whereabouts. For 26 days, she thought her son was alive and in prison, like 1000′s of others, until one day they delivered his dead body to her. In a personal interview with me, Parvin Fahimi has emphasised, as she has done many times in the past, her pleas with every individual or organisation or entity to review and investigate her son’s case.

Ali Hasanpour, 48, father of 2, was killed on 15 June 2009. His wife Ladan Mostafaie has asked numerous times in interviews: “Are bullets the way to respond to protests?” My husband was killed for asking for his vote! And no one in this judicial system of ours can tell me who killed him.” For 105 days, she thought her husband was alive and in prison. She was even told by the authorities that it is possible her husband might have fled the country. But she too was given the dead body of her husband. Also, in a recent interview with me, she said that Iran is a member of the UN Human Rights Council. She has asked me to convey her desire and request from the Special Rapporteur to hear her case and help find those responsible.

Mostafa Karim Baigi, 27, like 1000′s of others, had participated in the rallies of 28 December (Ashura Day). He was shot in the head, then thrown from an overpass bridge. His family was not permitted to hold a funeral or a proper burial, so they were forced to bury him in the middle of the night in the presence of security forces. His mother Shahnaz Akmali has repeatedly demanded the attention of all human rights organisations and the United Nations in her son’s case.

These are the names of 47 of post-election slain protesters who have given interviews to various media:

1- Amir Javadifar 2- Mohammad Kamrani 3- Mohsen Rouholamini 4- Ramin Pour Andarzjani 5– Ramin Aghazadeh Ghahremani 6–Ali Hasanpur 7- Sohrab Arabi 8–Ahmad Naimabadi 9- Moharram Chegini 10- Ramin Ramezani 11- Davood Sadri 12- Sorour Boroumand 13– Fatemeh Rajabpour 14– Hesam Hanifeh 15– Kianoosh Asaa 16– Mohammad Raisi najafi 17– Mostafa Ghanian 18– Ali Fathalian 19– Lotfali Yousefian 20– Bahman Jenabi 21— Naser Amir Nejad 22– Hossein Akhtar Zand 23– Maysam Ebadi 24– Ahmad Nejati Kargar 25– Ashkan Sohrabi 26– Neda Agha Soltan 27– Masoud Khosravi Doust 28– Kaveh(Sajad) Sabz Alipour 29– Masoud Hashemzadeh 30– Abbas Disnad 31– Mohammad Barvayefh 32– Behzad Mohajer 33– Mohammad Javad Parandakh 34– Mostafa Kiarostami 45– Fatmeh Semsarpour 36– Hamid Hossein Araghi 37– Mohammad Hossein Fayz 38– Hossein Gholam Kabiri 39– Seyed Ali Mousavi 40– Mostafa Karim Baigi 41– Shabnam Sohrabi 42– Shahram Farajzadeh 43– Mehdi Farhadi 44– Saaneh Zhaleh 45– Mohammad Mokhtari 46– Behnood Ramezani 47- Alireza Eftekhari

Ever since Luther and the rise of Protestantism, Europe has gone through several periods of radicalism: religious, romantic or ideological radicalism that, unfortunately, each and every time went hand in hand with bloodshed. But the continent managed to survive each of these periods, often by transforming the innovating aspects of these radical waves into progress and refinement of society. The current religious freedom, the discursive democracy and the collaboration between employers and employees and, yes, even the entire welfare state – they are all the result of the ascendance of radical thoughts and movements that shocked society, causing it to be set in motion and be forced to face new challenges.

Anders Breivik

Undeniably, the current revival of national, religious and regional chauvinism is the new radical current in Europe. And, without a doubt, Geert Wilders of The Netherlands can be seen as the most important leader of the European radicals, which is confirmed by the content of Breivik’s video manifest. But neither should we underestimate the Christian-fundamentalist background of the Norwegian.

So will we now witness a massive plea for prohibiting the Bible because this book would lead to genocide, just like we witnessed what happened to Islam and Quran in many European countries after 9/11? Will the resentful sermons of Geert Wilders, who is the most outspoken Islamophobic European politicians, be banned from our television screens, and the writings of his ideologist Bosma from our bookstores? Should we now expect extensive criticism on the Christian religion in our newspapers? Will all Christians in Europe – and especially those from Norway – be called to account for this murderous deed, just like European intellectuals have regularly called Muslims to account for the terrorist deeds of Islamist extremists? And will those who have ‘freed’ themselves from Christianity be promoted to columnist, MP or professor – the reward that European ex-Muslims (like Ayaan Hirsi Ali) got for being prepared to call Islam and the Middle East dangerous and backward? Will from now on every criticism on multicultural society be looked upon as extremism and every person who is against multiculturalism as an ideologue of White Power terrorism?

No, all of this won’t happen, and that is a good thing. Adult democracies know how to make a distinction between the right to deviating ideas and radical expressions on the one hand, and extremist deeds on the other hand. To prevent violence between different social groups, a democracy has to channel the battle of ideas into a civil and balanced debate. This will lead to an isolation of the most extremist and violent stream within radical or deviating ideologies from the (usual) nonviolent supporters they have.

A proof of this is the successful experience Europe has had with left-wing extremism, which was the last extremist wave passing through Europe: the left-wing terrorist organizations from the sixties, seventies and eighties had no chance at success because nor the state nor the media nor society silenced leftist radicalism. Most young radical Marxists had no reason to go underground because they had all freedom to express themselves aboveground.

That is what should also happen with the current Islamophobic nationalism: give them the space and the right to speak and plead about how they think society should work; let them express themselves about their utopia. Or to be more precise: let them fill their websites with their nightmare scenarios, because they have more of those than they have utopian dreams. In short, give radical thinkers the space and by that cut off the path of extremist perpetrators.

The way in which our democracy dealt with Islam and Muslim immigrants after 9/11 is of course rather hypocrite and silly

All this being said, the way in which our democracy dealt with Islam and Muslim immigrants after 9/11 is of course rather hypocrite and silly. How many words have not been spoken in various European media (especially in North and Central Europe) about the essential danger of Islam? The entire Muslim part of the population was being generalized and criminalized, and this is a community that rarely had a leader who could retort. And if there indeed was such a leader, like Dyab Abou Jahjah, the media immediately harassed him as a potential terrorist. And do you remember the recent mudslinging at Tariq Ramadan in Dutch media that lead to his departure from Rotterdam University? It’s about time Europe starts reflecting on its double moral standard, in particular The Netherlands, the country of Geert Wilders.

Incorporating new radical currents into the organized social and political diversity of a democratic society is something else than being taken off guard by radical rhetoric. In The Netherlands, the country where I live, there is no one who dares to answer to Wilders and his sermons of fear. The centre parties, the Christian democrats and the conservatives (who are in a cabinet thanks to Wilders) copy his rhetoric; prime minister Rutte (VVD) wants ‘to give back The Netherlands to the Dutch people’ and vice-premier Verhagen (CDA) even shares the fear for Muslims with those who voted for Wilders.

The PvdA (social democrats), GroenLinks (Greens) and D66 (liberals) remain very silent about how the cabinet fell on its knees for Wilders’ rhetoric; there is no progressive political party that dares to stand up for the multicultural society. It is not a healthy development that the main European political-ideological currents of liberals, social democrats and social democrats either follow the rhetoric of the new radicals of Europe, or are take off guard by them. And in the long run, this is what should worry us even more than the gruesome act of terror of Anders Breivik.

It took some time to arrive at this insight, however. In the first few years after the revolution, Makhmalbaf’s satirical arrows were still aimed at Marxism, rather than the oppressive nature of Khomeini’s Islamic state. Shervin Nekuee is a writer, now living in the Netherlands, where he is editor-in-chief of a website called TehranReview. He fled Iran when he was nineteen to avoid the high chance of “martyrdom” in the Iran-Iraq War. Eleven-years-old at the time of the revolution, he noticed how friends and relatives in Teheran quickly divided into passionate devotees of communism, or Islamism. His brother, hitherto a lover of pop music, began to learn Lenin’s texts by heart. Irritated by all this sudden dogmatism, Shervin was much amused by Makhmalbaf’s television play, A Cage Within a Cage, which poked savage fun of the communists. This play later formed the basis of Boycott, which, in Shervin’s words, was like “kicking the leftists when they were already down.”

One of the immediate effects of the 1979 revolution was the suppression of Western culture, including Hollywood movies, as well as the highly popular Indian musical films. But as Makhmalbaf observed, “some bad things can help us in good ways. Before the revolution, Hollywood and Bollywood killed Iranian film. We had zero Iranian films. After the revolution we had the chance to make our own films.” There was suddenly an audience for them. No longer able to see foreign films, and deprived of many other forms of art, such as music and dance, forbidden by the puritanical mullahs, Iranians developed a hunger for Iranian cinema, which was still allowed – possibly, as was suggested to me by several Iranians, because the Ayatollah had neither interest in, or knowledge of the movies. This is when Makhmalbaf’s, and Kiarostami’s films became wildly popular.

Recalling that early post-revolutionary period, Makhmalbaf added that political oppression itself may have helped to make cinema popular: “People wanted images, not words. Images contain fewer lies. Writing is subject to more censorship, more government control.”

This may be so, but images are still censored. Kiarostami’s latest film, Certified Copy, is banned in Iran, supposedly because Juliet Binoche’s dress isn’t sufficiently modest. Makhmalbaf told me that his son’s documentary about Samira cannot be shown in Iranian video clubs because his sister’s headscarf fails to conceal all her hair. And Gabbeh, after all, was banned at least partly for its visual effects, which expressed undesirable hedonism.

In any case, the poetic imagery in Makhmalbaf’s films became more and more metaphorical and surreal. This, too, was a way to avoid censorship. The Afghan refugee in The Bicyclist (1987), for example, going round and round a town square on a bicycle for a week without stopping, as a kind of carnival attraction, to make money to survive, is unforgettable. By then, Makhmalbaf’s had begun to lose faith in the religious revolution. In his words: “When I was seventeen I was ready to die for God… With The Bicyclist I began to move away from religion.”

It is also in this period that Makhmalbaf began to take a serious interest in the plight of the Afghans, millions of whom had fled from war and hunger to Iran, where they were treated with neglect, at best. His most famous movie outside Iran, Kandahar (2001), about a young Canadian-Afghani journalist travelling back to her native country to stop a desperate young woman from committing suicide, is perhaps the only feature film ever made about Afghanistan under Taliban rule. The movie was shot near the Iran-Afghan border. Despite some wooden acting in English, a language Makhmalbaf speaks reasonably well, it is the imagery that sticks in the mind: UN helicopters dropping artificial limbs over the desert, like loaves of bread, chased by hundreds of hopping men maimed by landmines. This, Makhmalbaf said, was the only fictional image in the film, which also features an enigmatic American black Muslim, who came to seek God, but allegedly became a terrorist.

George W. Bush asked for a screening of Kandahar at the White House, presumably to get a better idea of the country he invaded. God only knows what he made of Afghanistan filtered through Makhmalbaf’s surrealistic imagination.

Kandahar was made under the relatively moderate presidency of Mohammad Khatami, when there was some room for artistic expression, including cinema, enough at any rate to be able to make good movies in Iran. But there were still limits. Censorship under Khatami was subtle and rarely straightfoward. Instead of banning critical films, they were allowed only limited release. Kandahar was only screened in one cinema in Teheran.

In 2002 Makhmalbaf made Afghan Alphabet, a documentary about Afghani children in Iran, who were deprived of schooling. All they know is what they hear from Mullahs, who tell young girls that it is sinful to show their faces. One of the problems was the government’s refusal to educate even Afghans who were born in Iran. Makhmalbaf showed the film to Khatami and his advisors: “It made them cry and they signed a permission for Afghan children to go to school. So cinema could still play a role in Iran. ”

After Khatami lost power in 2005, Makhmalbaf was unable to shoot another movie in Iran, and left in that same year. In fact, his most profound films were made in the mid-1990s, when Khatami was a member of the powerful Supreme Council of Cultural Revolution. The films were still political, but in a philosophical way that did not upset the government enough to get them banned. It was no longer the power of this or that group that interested Makhmalbaf, but the nature of power itself. This is when he began to seriously examine what he regards as the flaws in Iranian culture: “Shooting the Shah wouldn’t have changed anything. You must shoot into the minds of people through art to make them see things in a different way. I tried to change our culture by teaching a more relative view.”

Salaam Cinema, the movie that begins with the pandemonium of five thousand actors hoping for an audition, is perhaps Makhmalbaf’s most sophisticated investigation of the dynamics of power. He plays himself, auditioning actors, telling them to do this and that, to cry, to laugh, and probing their desire to be in the movies, to be famous. You can see how the director uses his power to manipulate people into doing things they might not wish to do.

He picks two young women to audition others. They immediately become as manipulative and bullying as the director himself. Makhmalbaf said in Paris: “The two girls succeed, but they become dictators. That is because they reflect Iranian culture. My film is critical of the use of power in the shadow of fundamentalism.” I asked him why crying played such an important part in the auditions. He laughed: “Because people are always being told to cry for God. The main activity of the Mullahs is to make people cry. ‘Cry! Cry for more killing!’” I mentioned that one woman refused to cry. He clapped his hands in delight: “That woman! That woman is Green Movement. That’s what she represents.”

One astonishing thing about Salaam Cinema, a wordy, intellectual work that would be lucky to survive in an American art house for more than a week, was seen in Iran by a million people. Perhaps the success of this film, more than any other, confirms Makhmalbaf’s view that people under a dictatorship crave images with the ring of truth. They recognized that it was about them. “Iranians don’t like to be criticized directly”, Makhmalbaf explained. “But you can give them an example of how to look at themselves. So I criticize myself as an example.”

Criticism of power, in Makmalbaf’s work, also means the criticism of male power over women. This is as much of a theme in his films, and writings, as the suffering of Afghans. In 1984, just five years after the revolution, he wrote a novel, entitled The Crystal Garden, about the tribulations of a number of women living in the servants’ quarters of a house abandoned by a rich family after the revolution. His film, Gabbeh, deals with the patriarchal control of women’s lives. The true story of Kandahar begins when an Afghan refugee in Canada receives a letter from her younger sister who cannot stand living under the Taliban any longer, and says she will kill herself before the imminent eclipse of the sun.

Makhmalbaf married twice. Both his wives worked closely with him on his films. His first wife, Fatimeh Meshkini, with whom he had three children, died of burns after a tragic accident in 1992. During the making of Salaam Cinema, he married her sister, Marzieh. They raised and educated his children themselves, teaching them filmmaking from a very early age. The children learned “by helping out”, said Makhmalbaf, “by working on all levels of filmmaking.” Hana made her first documentary, in Kabul, when she was only thirteen, and Samira, who acted in The Bicyclist, made her first feature film, The Apple, when she was seventeen. Makhmalbaf, the proud patriarch, met me once more in Paris to hand over a pile of DVDs, all films made by his wife and daughters.

The question, not only concerning the Makhmalbaf family, but all artists, especially filmmakers, living in exile, is how their work can be sustained in foreign countries. There are problems of language, cultural familiarity, and of losing a home audience. Not entirely, of course. DVDs of Makhmalbaf’s films, old and new, are smuggled into Iranian underground markets, mostly from the Gulf.

Hamid Dabashi, an Iranian-born professor at Columbia University who has lived in the US since the 1980s, told me that national borders don’t matter so much any more: “We live in a different world now. You can operate outside your own country.” He calls Makhmalbaf “a troubadour”, and recalled how in Paris the director would be suddenly embraced in the street by Algerians, who had seen some of his films.

One way of dealing with banishment from Iran is to make films in its periphery. Makhmalbaf has not only made films in Afghanistan, but also in Tajikistan, Pakistan, Turkey, and India. “Language is still a problem,” he acknowledged. When he made A Time of Love (1990) in Istanbul, he had to learn the Turkish dialogue by heart, “so I could control it”. However, he acknowledged, “I could never have made Salaam Cinema in another language.”

There is another factor that has mitigated the problems of exile. Technology has made national borders more porous. Twitter, Youtube and Facebook played vital roles during the protests in Iran after the last election. Makhmalbaf was so excited about these new possibilities that he called the protesters in Teheran transmitting images from their cell-phone cameras “the most honest filmmakers in Iran.” He told The Wall Street Journal that “the thing they are doing is more important than all of the history of our cinema. For the past thirty years, we were trying to reach some kind of reality in art. We used our films like a mirror in front of society. But their images are full of reality. There is no artificiality.” The borders between real life and cinema, always thin in Makhmalbaf’s work, had become seamless in the political revolt.

One can forgive him for the slight hyperbole. But technology did indeed play a vital role in keeping the outside world informed about Iran. The question remains, however, what effect people outside Iran can have on an increasingly rigid and authoritarian country. Kiarostami’s skepticism about the possibility of making good films outside the country one knows best cannot be dismissed. His own last film, Certified Copy, seems to be a perfect illustration of this. An Englishman and a French woman fret about their relationship in a beautiful Tuscan town, switching from English to French to Italian, almost at random. The movie is intelligent, beautifully made, well acted, but oddly sterile, abstract, as though shorn of genuine cultural context. To be sure, Kiarostami’s Iranian movies also tend towards abstraction, but they are still anchored in a way that is plausible, that smells of life instead of just being an intellectual concept.

Makhmalbaf has thought of moving to the US, since he is more comfortable in English than French, but gave up on the idea when he realized he couldn’t possibly make the kind of movies he wants in America. Hollywood, he says, is like a factory: “If you repeat your success, copy yourself out of fear of failure, you become like a factory. I prefer to take risks.”

Then, after a moment of silence, he repeated what he had said in the beginning of our interview: “I hate politics. And I really miss cinema. Ordinary people eat bread. An artist needs to make something, or you lose your identity.” This is not just a question of being distracted by politics, of course. Many conditions are essential for making a movie. They are hard to achieve for a filmmaker at home, let alone for a troubadour in exile. Mohsen Makhmalbaf is one of more than two million Iranians forced by politics to live abroad. The sooner he can return to making the films he wants to, preferably in and around his native country, the better, not only for Iran, but for all lovers of cinema in the rest of the world.

Salaam Cinema (1994), one of the masterpieces of Iranian film, begins with a riot. Thousands of delirious people, men and women, press and push and shove their way towards a school building, desperate to get inside. It looks like a kind of religious stampede, or a rock concert run out of control, with waves of screaming people threatening to break over earlier waves of humanity crushed against the gates. The religion in this case is cinema. And the scene is absolutely real. To celebrate the centennial of film, an advertisement was placed in a Teheran newspaper asking for one hundred actors to audition for a new movie by Mohsen Makhmalbaf, the most popular director in Iran. Five thousand people turned up.

Such films by Makhmalbaf as Salaam Cinema and Gabbeh (1995) drew millions of people in Teheran alone. He was so celebrated that in one well-known case a man went around town pretending to be him and offering people parts in his next film. This imposture prompted the no less celebrated Iranian director, Abbas Kiarostami, to make a film entitled Close-Up (1988), starring Makhmalbaf as himself.
Makhmalbaf can no longer live, or work in Iran. Firmly on the side of political reform, he left after the election of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad as president in 2005, and is persona non grata in his own country. Two years ago he used his movie fame to enter politics as the overseas spokesman for the reformist candidate in the last presidential elections, Mir-Hossein Mousavi. When large numbers of Iranians were convinced that Ahmedinejad had robbed Mousavi of his rightful victory through fraud, hundreds of thousands protested in the streets of Teheran. Many were arrested, tortured, and in some cases killed. Makhmalbaf wrote in The Guardian of London: “I have been given the responsibility of telling the world what is happening in Iran. The office of Mir-Hossein Mousavi, who the Iranian people truly want as their leader, has asked me to do so.”

And so he became a kind of roving ambassador for Mousavi’s Green Movement, giving interviews, writing op-ed pieces, donating his film prizes to the Green Movement, and making the rounds of various European capitals, the European Parliament, and the White House. He says he no longer has time to make films because he is too busy “working for the Iranian people”.

Speaking for political candidates is not normally the role of artists, but then the situation in Iran is not normal, nor is Mousavi a normal politician, or indeed Makhmalbaf a normal filmmaker. In fact, the two have some important things in common. In 1979, a painter and architect by training, Mousavi represented the leftwing of the Islamist revolution. His intellectual hero – like Makhmalbaf’s – was the philosopher Ali Shari’ati, who combined revolutionary Marxist rhetoric with Shia Islam. Mousavi’s other hero was Che Guevara. As a Muslim activist he was much favored by the Ayatollah Khomeini, whom he served as prime minister until 1989. When a constitutional change abolished the prime ministership, he retired from politics.

Makhmalbaf, revealing as much about himself as the politician he champions, wrote about Mousavi: “Previously, he was revolutionary, because everyone inside the system was a revolutionary. But now he’s a reformer. Now he knows Gandhi – before he knew only Che Guevara. If we gain power through aggression we would have to keep it through aggression. That is why we’re having a green revolution, defined by peace and democracy.”
This is pretty much a summing up of Makhmalbaf’s own trajectory, from a religious revolutionary zealot to a liberal critic of the Islamic regime. Not all Iranian artists see it as their role to be activists in exile. Kiarostami, seventeen years older than Makhmalbaf, has avoided political comment in his films, or acting as a public dissident. As a result, he can still move in and out of Iran, while Makhmalbaf, like many other Iranian artists and intellectuals, can’t go back. Exile is not always a matter of choice. And the question whether it is better to pull one’s punches to work inside a dictatorship, or to speak out and take the artistic and political consequences of enforced exile, is not unique to contemporary Iran. But a recent public spat between Kiarostami and another filmmaker in exile, Bahman Ghobadi, born in 1969, set out the stakes quite clearly.

Kiarostami attacked Ghobadi, who made the well-received No One Knows About Persian Cats, about the underground rock music scene in Iran, for making a sensational film, and abandoning Iran. He stated in an interview for the Iranian press: “If Bahman Ghobadi thinks there are better circumstances for creating movies outside of Iran, I congratulate him. But for me, personally, I don’t believe in leaving Iran. The place I can sleep comfortably is my home.” Ghobadi, who hardly chose to leave Iran, answered, in an open letter, that Kiarostami had the right to remain silent, while his countrymen suffered, but not the right to criticize others for speaking out. He added that: “The people will not forget the silence of artists.”

In fact, Kiarostami has not kept entirely silent. At this year’s Cannes Film Festival he protested against the incarceration of Jafar Panahi, a filmmaker (The Circle) who supported Mousavi and was openly critical of Ahmedinejad’s regime. Makhmalbaf has not attacked his old mentor, Kiarostami, but his choice was already made in 2005: better to brave the lonely freedom of exile than enjoy the dubious comfort of being the most famous film director under a dictatorship at home. And by the way, Kiarostami’s most recent film, Certified Copy, shot in Italy and starring the French actress Juliet Binoche, has been banned in Iran.

***

A slim man with large mournful eyes, Makhmalbaf now carries a French passport. He lives in a simple apartment in Paris with his family, all of whom are filmmakers involved in one way or another in each other’s work. The Makhmalbaf Film House, whose website is handled from London by the son, Maysam, is very much a family enterprise. Makhmalbaf’s wife, Marziyeh Meshkini, has made two award-winning films, scripted by her husband. His daughter, Samira, has made five, two scripted by her father, and one based on one of his novels. Maysam has made a documentary of Samira directing a film. The youngest daughter, Hana, was the last to leave Iran after making a fine documentary, entitled Green Days, about the 2010 election. Hana and Samira assisted their father in a documentary about Afghan children, Afghan Alphabet (2001), for which Marziyeh did the stills. And so on and on.

“I really hate politics”

I met Makhmalbaf at his preferred hangout, a touristy café on the Boulevard Saint Michel. He arrived on his motorcycle, sat down at a table inside, ordered a Coke, and declared with great feeling: “I really hate politics.”

For a man who professes to hate politics, Makhmalbaf always was a profoundly political figure. He was born in Teheran in 1957. His first dramatically political act was the knifing of a policeman, when the Shah was still ruling the country in 1973. Makhmalbaf was part of a group of teenage Islamist rebels. The attack on the cop was botched, Makhmalbaf was shot in the stomach, and he spent five years in prison where he was tortured by the notorious SAVAK. Among other torments, he was whipped on the soles of his feet with telephone cables, while strapped to a seat tilted backwards, known as “the Apollo chair”.

His prison experience, as a young Islamist surrounded by hardened communists, is dramatized in Boycott (1985) one of his earliest films, and the stabbing of the policeman is the subject of A Moment of Innocence (1995), which shows both the point of view of the cop and of the young rebel. In a bizarre twist, which nicely matches the cinematic world of Makhmalbaf, or indeed Kiarostami, a world where fantasy and reality are never very distinct, the actual policeman turned up as one of the aspiring actors for Salaam Cinema. He was turned down, but this episode is then used in A Moment of Innocence. Many directors, like novelists, mine their own lives to enrich their art. Few do it as much as Makhmalbaf, whose life and films are intertwined in a way that is almost seamless.

Makhmalbaf began to question his revolutionary zeal in prison. He despised the communists, whom he regarded as dogmatic Stalinists, whose endless arguments about doctrine were remote from what was happening in the streets. This is certainly the picture you get from Boycott, a propaganda film for the clerical regime which had already turned against the leftists by then and executed a large number of them. The movie is shot much like a popular thriller, with crude zoom shots, wild over-acting, and an over-excited score. But despite the callow style and the heavy-handed anti-communist message designed to help Khomeini’s regime, the underlying theme is typical of much of Makhmalbaf’s work: the conflict between private passions, and the desire to fight, or die, for a great cause.

The young rebel in Boycott is torn in this way. In the course of “saving society”, he is arrested by the Shah’s police for being a terrorist. The communist leaders in prison want him to make a great political statement in court, and die a hero’s death, whereas the young man would really much prefer to stay alive and see his wife and child again. In the end he is executed anyway, on a rainy day, alone, without heroics, still full of doubts. The communists then spin a myth of glorious martyrdom around his ignominious death.

But the problem in Iran, as Makhmalbaf sees it, went deeper than leftist dogmatism, or indeed clerical authoritarianism. In the Shah’s prison, he had a kind of conversion. He began to reject political dogma of any kind and turned to Iranian culture as his main concern. In Paris he told me: “I realized in prison that our culture had a problem with democracy. If you only believe in one God, in one religion, and that only one country, Iran, is favored by God, then truth can just be one thing, and you end up with a dictator. That is why later, little by little I tried to clean things up in my mind, by reading books, by travelling, and finding out what is true in a relative way. That is how I ended up expressing myself through art.”

“I realized in prison that our culture had a problem with democracy”

He had come a long way, from inauspicious beginnings. The son of an illiterate public bathhouse operator and a nurse, who were married for only six days, Makhmalbaf was raised mostly by three women: his mother, who kept the household going, his grandmother, who made him a strict Muslim, and his aunt, a schoolteacher, who inspired a love of reading. His stepfather, a follower of Ayatollah Khomeini, instructed him about politics.

Aspects of his peculiar childhood resurface in several films, including films by his own children. The absent father figures in Silence (1997), about a blind musician in Tajikistan. Not only is he fatherless, but the young musician is warned to put his fingers in his ears when he goes out, lest he be led astray by pretty tunes. Makhmalbaf likes to tell the story of his own pious grandmother, who ordered him to shut his ears and eyes outside the house to block out sinful sights and sounds. Mahmalbaf wrote the script for his daughter Samira’s brilliant film, The Apple (1998), about a true story of two young girls who were confined to their house for years by their religious father, out of fear that they would be ruined by worldly corruption. Makhmalbaf himself was locked up at home, as a young boy, to prevent his father from kidnapping him.

Already deeply religious – Makhmalbaf was a seminary student in the holy city of Qom – his piousness was pushed into a revolutionary direction when he was fifteen after hearing a four-hour speech by Ali Shari’ati, the same thinker who influenced Mousavi. Inspired by this, he started a library with other young friends, and collected all of Shari’ati’s works. But words were not enough. Like the young hero in Boycott, he felt the time was ripe for saving society through an act of martyrdom, in the spirit of Shari’ati’s rhetoric. When I asked Makhmalbaf what had attracted him to Shari’ati’s ideas, he stressed Shari’ati’s charismatic style: “He was our teacher. His speeches were like poems. He spoke from the heart, with the power of poetry. Listening to him, I was shaking with emotion.”

It wasn’t so much what Shari’ati said, it seems, as the way he said it that excited the young Makhmalbaf: the poetry, the emotion. But Shari’ati’s blend of leftist ideas and religious puritanism was an inspiration behind the revolution that made temporary allies of religious zealots and Marxist revolutionaries. The power of poetic images, rather than narrative, is also a mark of Makmalbaf’s films, and indeed of many Iranian films. The reason, in his view, lies in the nature of Iranian culture: “Because of Islamic restrictions, we didn’t have a painting tradition like in the West.” What he meant is a tradition of realism; depiction of the human figure is forbidden in Islam. Islamic art is abstract, and this might have contributed to a strong leaning towards poetic metaphor even in Iranian cinema, instead of realism. Makhmalbaf put it this way: “We have no understanding of painting in Iran. In Europe cinema comes from painting. In our cinema we use poetic imagery. Sometimes I translate poetry into images directly.”

In Gabbeh, for example, poetry as well as the images woven into a carpet tell the story of a young woman who wants to go off and marry a romantic horseman, glimpsed in the hills, howling like a wolf. Much is made in the movie of the power of color: “Life is color, death is black.” At several points in the film, women actually draw colors from the carpet to apply them to scenes of real life, as though the story were woven from pictures in the rug. The images are poetic, but the politics are not far below the surface. Even the use of color as a metaphor is pregnant with meaning when all women are forced to wrap themselves in black. It was a bold film to make in a country where art and music are suppressed as much as sexual and political liberties. No wonder the film was banned for several years.

Makhmalbaf grew disillusioned with Shari’ati’s revolutionary zeal, and began to question his own politics when the 1979 revolution had hardened into a brutal dictatorship. He now says: “Shari’ati, despite his poetry, his power, his knowledge, justified revolution to create another prison for our culture. I still love him, but Khomeini’s ideology came from Shari’ati’s ideas.”

Peterson was in Iran during the strange exciting days of the presidential elections and could witness and feel everything. Nevertheless, his book cannot be considered only as a simple report on Iranian protests. The writer has tried to find the origins of the events by searching the history of contemporary Iran and showing a future perspective by considering the present situation of the country; as the secondary title of the book, Iran – A Journey Behind the Headlines also shows.

Peterson has been engaged in the case of Iran since 1996 and has written many detailed reports and articles on the issue.

About two years ago, in your book Let the Swords Encircle Me, you discussed the start of an irreversible decline in Iran regime. Do you still think so? Or do you think that the regime has been able to overcome the post-election crises?

I think events of the last two years have only shown how the Islamic System in Iran is in great crisis, and since the 2009 an irreversible one. Though the hardliners and the ‘osulgaran’ or principalist faction, to which Ahmadinejad belongs, have declared victory of one kind or another virtually every day since that stolen vote, in fact even though they have succeeded in pushing the Green Movement and reformist leaders out of public view, they have demonstrated the deep divisions that exist among factions at the highest level of the political system. What struck me in 2009 during the street battles was the clear belief, among the enforcers, that old-school tactics work today as well as they did decades ago: truncheons, beatings, arrests. That belief told me that mindset of the enforcers was archaic and therefore, in this day and age, incomplete. It may have APPEARED to the enforcers that they “won,” by eventually snuffing out street protests. But do they really believe they also CONVINCED people of their cause?

You are among the journalists who witnessed the events after the 10th presidential election in Iran and praised the Green Movement. Now, it has been sometime since those large demonstrations last happened in Iran. Has the Green Movement been weakened? How do you totally consider its situation now that the election has just had its second anniversary?

The Green Movement has certainly been very weakened by the removal of many of its means of communication, and means of public demonstration of its strength and power. But the Green Movement – in all of its various shades and manifestations – still very much exists. And it exists very widely. As a proof, witness the fact that even two years after the vote, not a single day goes by without some senior official talking about it. They are obsessed. No one doubts the presence of the sun on a cloudy day; neither should anyone doubt the existence of the Greens.

It has been sometime since the Green Movement leaders, Mr. Mousavi, Mr. Karroubi and their wives have been under house arrest. What is its effect on the circumstances of struggles in Iran? May it cause the circumstances to go toward radicalism?

The fate of Mr. Moussavi and Mr. Karroubi tells us how weak and voiceless they have currently been forced to become, thanks to powerful anti-democratic, anti-republican forces in Iran. But it also demonstrates very clearly how important these men remain, as a perceived danger to Iran’s hardline factions – and the impossibility of erasing their ideas, complaints, and plans for reform of the political system. I think their house arrest has had a radicalizing influence on the pro-democracy movement, because instead of hearing the voices of these men for moderation and reform of the Islamic system – in a way that preserves that system – people now have every right to believe that it is impossible to reform that system from within. Therefore, only radical measures should be used – such as violence – to deal with radical aims like removing the velayat-e faqih.

The house arrest of Mousavi and Karroubi had a radicalizing influence on the pro-democracy movement

You wrote on the recent disagreements between Mr. Ahmadinejad and Ayatollah Khamenei as the “worst storm” of Mr. Ahmadinejad’s presidency. Do you think that Mr. Ahmadinejad and his supporters can resist against Iran’s supreme leader? Which group will benefit from balance of power in future?

I don’t believe that Mr. Ahmadinejad can prevail against the supreme leader, mostly because he has so little political support from the factions that these days matter most in Iran, and also because he has angered so many during his most divisive time as president. Both men have been diminished as leaders by this fight. Ahmadinejad has been shown to be petulant, and overly ambitious, and sometimes recklessly oblivious to the impact of his actions. Now his attackers feel free to criticize the “deviant trend” that they perceive among the president’s closest allies, and even describe it as the most “dangerous” threat to the political system since the Islamic Revolution – which is saying a lot, indeed. But at the same time, Khamenei has been shown to have misjudged mightily the man he backed for president as a “divine assessment.” He has stepped in to micro-manage this crisis, and found that his traditional role as the one above politics, who can balance competing factions, has been undermined. Because both camps have been diminished, this shows a fundamental weakness in an Islamic system that Khomeini once called the “Government of God.” The question people ask, of course, is: if this is God’s government, how could be possibly be so messy?

Throughout your book, you have shown that Iranian educated and young people’s desires and wishes differ from the ones of the regime. What are the roots of this division and the results it may cause?

There are many reasons for the gap between the desires of many Iranians – especially the young and educated – and those of the regime, which so often seems caught in a time warp, as if the clocks stopped during the Iran-Iraq war. Many of the early, strongest reformers were hardline radical supports of the Revolution in the early years, people who toppled the Shah and fought the “infidel” Saddam in Iraq, and believed in all the tenets of the Revolution that called for justice and freedom. Those reformers thought the Revolution needed to evolve, and thereby carry Iran’s huge youth population with it. But for those ideologues frozen in time – those were unwilling to see any change at all, and who prevailed in the late 1990s and ever since – they have lost huge portions of Iran’s population who want to engage with the outside world, and show Persia to still be a place of unique ideas and culture.
The fact that Iran’s cinema is regaled around the world – often using techniques that directors learned watching the war-time work of Morteza Avini and the Revayat-e Fath series of war films – tells much about what rich culture exists in Iran. And the fact that so many of Iran’s finest directors are now in exile, or jailed, or ordered not to make films for 20 years – says much about the decrepit thinking that prevails among Iran’s leadership today.

A chapter of your book has concentrated on the cultural approach of Mr. Khatami administration. How do you consider the function of his administration? What were the effects of his reforms on Iranian society?

There were no secrets about how Iranian culture blossomed during the Khatami era; it was enough to simply remove some of the government-imposed restrictions on people’s lives, and permit some freedoms. Iranians don’t need to be told what do to, and they grabbed that loosening very strongly. Of course, he was a man who adhered to the law, and many Iranians say he was too much of a gentleman to step into the rough-and-tumble of Iranian politics. And of course, his problem was that his opponents did not respect the law, and were happy to use violence and force to intimidate and kill, and to make their point.
Again we come back to this unsustainable calculation on the part of the hardliners and regime enforcers, like Ansar and other militant groups: a fundamental belief that you can beat people into submission; that you can “win” by using force, and make people change their minds and support you. But as we can so clearly see, in Iran this is no longer the case. And in fact, I think it is not wrong when Mr. Mousavi describes how the real lesson of Imam Hossein for Iranians is not for the most devout – who often wield the clubs and chains in God’s name – but is for the reform/Green Movement. Because it is all about resistance to tyranny, resistance to the use of force, resistance to being forced to believe anything that you know is not right.

You showed that in spite of Iran official propaganda, most of Iranians are pro-American people. Don’t you think that the U.S. sanctions against Iran may cause Iranian people to change their mind about America? Do such sanctions cause anything other than harms for Iranian people?

I am not sure how US sanctions against Iran affect views of Iranians toward the US. There are so many issues between these two countries, and yet Iranians respect very much the rhetoric of American democracy and freedom, if not how it has been practiced in recent decades in Iraq, Afghanistan, and many other places. Many Iranians have been affected negatively by the sanctions on the personal level, which is a very big problem for the American policy-makers who say: “We are not targeting ordinary Iranians.” And yet, it is those very ordinary Iranians who have very limited opportunities for banking abroad, or even booking a holiday in another country. So the sanctions have had those drawbacks. They have also given the political system an excuse to blame the US and UN for their own economic problems, and have forced the Sepah (army) and other regime organs to become much more self-sufficient, on everything from defense manufacturing to the nuclear program. But on the other hand, the sanctions have also raised the pressure on the regime in many ways. Will that “change behavior” in Tehran, as Washington wants? I doubt it. But the strain has been great.

Iranians respect very much the rhetoric of American democracy and freedom

What could be the effect of the region developments on Iran? Will the results be for Iran’s regime or against it?

I believe that one of the biggest problems for the Iranian political system in the coming years will be the fallout from the anti-regime revolutions sweeping across the Arab world, the so-called “Arab Spring.” For three decades, Iranians boasted that it was they – the Persian, Shiite Iranians – who had the courage to topple their regime in a popular and total revolution, while the Sunni Arabs sat and did nothing against all the dictators, monarchs and autocrats who ruled for so long across the Arab world. Then we had the 2009 election and pro-democracy protests, which have so far failed to dislodge or improve the Islamic Republic. And now we have the Arab example of “uprising.” And not just one, but Tunisia, Egypt, and almost certainly soon Libya and Syria and Yemen, and possibly Bahrain. Will all these Arab activists not re-invest the Iranian street with a feeling of life and potential for change? Of course it will.
Which is why I think it has been so dangerous for the regime to embrace these changes as an “Islamic Awakening,” as Ayatollah Khamenei has done. Of course, he wants to appear to be on the right side of history, on the right side of “revolution.” But having reported on these revolutions in the Arab world, and knowing the divisions and hypocrisy in Iran that have diminished Iran’s reputation across the Arab world as a “model” of anything, I believe that the Islamic Republic will not be able to avoid the flow of change for long. I am not sure that this means that, five years from now, the Islamic Republic will have been “erased from the face of time,” but I expect that this system will no longer persist as it is currently configured. That won’t be the result of any definitive outside intervention, I believe, but from the mismanagement and misjudgment of Iran’s own hardline leadership.

This interview tries to offer an analysis on after-election events in Iran.

Let’s review the events from the first step. Two years ago, almost on the same date, Iran witnessed the largest street protests since the revolution. How could Mousavi, Karroubi and totally the reformists lead people to come to the streets?

Two years ago people came out, first to vote and then to protest, because they wanted change through the choices offered by the political system during the elections. It was not only the vote itself that mattered, but the whole electoral process that preceded the actual vote and started a lot of debate throughout society, in the media and even on television, about what kind of politics, freedoms, justice and political representatives that people want. Also, the sense of common solidarity energized especially the young and inexperienced people, who experienced a sense of collective power and dignity they had not experienced before.
In Iran since the revolution we have had a lot of accumulated experience about electoral politics. The Islamic Republic has never been a democracy, but it has always been, more or less, a republican system: on the one hand we have a small political elite who monopolize power, and rarely allow anyone else to join in. The political elite of Iran all know each other through the complicated networks of madressehs, Khomeinist political affiliations, military backgrounds, and even a lot of convoluted and semi hidden intermarriages. Many prominent political personalities are married to somebody else’s daughter or son, even if they come from very different political camps! But this elite has always been ideologically divided. To keep its hold on power it relies on unity. Khomeini’s constant slogan was ‘unity!’ (vahdat-e kalameh). This divided political elite distribute power among them, and maintain public support and political legitimacy by going to the population for votes. In that sense the Islamic Republic has always been a republican system, where the popular vote distributes political power among competing factions of the ruling elite. But it is not a democratic system, because the process is not open to all citizens, but only to those handpicked by the regime. Khatami tried to change that, at least at the local level, by the local council elections in 1999, when literally everyone could stand for elections, and win!
The rule of this game was, at least until two years ago, that if a faction lost in the elections, they would stand aside and wait for the next round. In that sense, by cheating in the elections, Khamenei & Ahmadinejad violated the rules of the system’s own game, which had been in place since 1979. This explains the unprecedented outrage which brought millions out in the streets and on the rooftops.

By cheating in the elections, Khamenei & Ahmadinejad violated the rules of the system’s own game

So, the Iranian population has had a long accumulated experience of the limits as well as the possibilities of electoral politics. I don’t think most Iranians have any illusions that elections by themselves will magically improve their lives. At the same time, they have learned that elections always do make a difference, at least in registering their voices. We have to remember, in modern complex societies, loyalty to the system comes through voice. In 2003 disgusted Tehranis boycotted local elections for the city council. The 11% of Tehranis who voted elected Abadgaran to the council, who in turn chose Ahamdinejad as the mayor. This prepared his path to the presidency in 2005, when a lot of people either abstained from voting or voted against Rafsanjani. Elections have consequences. We have learned that. In a complex society, with a closed system, no candidate is ideal. But the consequences of different choices are real. That is why people who boycotted elections two years ago, or many of the 30% of the electorate who had never voted since the revolution, came out to vote this time. I think the process was also very different this time. Mousavi had to interact with his public, and to adapt to the demands of a politically maturing civil society. For example, he had to listen to a coalition of 70 feminist and women’s groups, from across the ideological spectrum of religious/secular activists, who wanted to know what he was willing to do for women’s legal equality if they voted for him. In that sense, Mousavi and Karoubi had to become political representatives of their supporters, instead of appointed leaders. This give and take, which is the starting point of democratic politics, was the reason why the population was outraged at the electoral fraud of 2 years ago and came out in protest against the stolen elections.

Do you suppose that it was possible for the Green Movement to win during those days or not? How could it win on that time essentially?

It does not seem likely! The conservatives had a plan to steal the elections and use force if necessary. They were organized and had plans. The Greens did not. I think if there had been more planning and organizing, especially to spread the protests out of the streets and into workplaces – factories, offices, bazaars, – there would have been a good chance to make the reactionaries accept the result of people’s vote, or at least to allow an open recount of the vote. But the Green Movement is NOT a ‘movement’ in the strict sense of the term. Mousavi correctly called it a ‘wave’, and that’s what it really is. Social movements have a center, they have organizations, they strive to become institutionalized, even if they are clandestine and illegal. Trade unions, political parties, anti war movements, civil rights and feminist movements are good examples. The Greens never became ‘a movement’ in that sense, so it is difficult to imagine how they could have won in a sustained state of repression. This is a lesson we need to learn. Without organized and unified coalitions, leadership, and a clearly articulated common cause it is impossible to win against repressive forces.
I think autocrats can be overthrown by popular explosions of anger, but there is no guarantee that the aftermath will be better! The moment blind anger and violence become the means for political change anything can, and will happen. For the Greens to have created political coalitions to resist repression by taking the fight out of the streets and into workplaces they needed to have included workers and working people into their agenda. But the neoliberal policies since the end of Iran-Iraq war had targeted the working population. In that sense the working people – factory workers, teachers, farmers, nurses, office workers, etc. may have felt sympathy for the Greens, but only as individuals. However they had neither the ability, nor a reason to risk their own survival by organizing collectively in their workplace. This was the failure of the Greens, and I would say the reformers, not to have included the demands of the working people for social justice, into their agenda. What we saw was that street protests will not succeed by themselves in the absence of organized resistance, which can shift the place of resistance, out of the streets and into the workplaces.

This was the failure of the Greens, and I would say the reformers, not to have included the demands of the working people for social justice

The noticeable point is how the government has insisted obstinately on its word and decision that caused it not to take a step backward during two years. Until when can the government continue to do this? What consequences has the obstinacy caused for them?

None of us can predict how far things can go. The capacity for violence by the regime is immense, and it has not even started to tap into it! Look at Syria, Yemen, Bahrain, even Egypt; more people have been massacred in these Arab countries than Iran. By comparison the scale of repression in Iran has been more limited! Why is that? My feeling is that in Iran if violent repression, especially in large cities, goes beyond a certain point the main body of security forces may not hold together. But that is not necessarily better for the future of democracy. You can end up with smaller independent pockets of truly fascistic forces that will no longer be restrained by anything like loyalty to Vali-ye Faqih. Iran can very easily become a nightmare of violence and explosive anger, like Algeria in the 1990’s or Afghanistan. These are different societies, but the fearful violence there came because the political glue that was holding these societies together fell apart.
It is ironic that institutions like the Vali-ye Faqih, the Sepah, and Basij may be the main obstacles to democratic popular will, but at the same time they are like a glue that hold together a true nest of stinging bees. The fact that these ruling institutions no longer rely on negotiation or compromise with public opinion but only on brute force is a very dangerous sign. Obstinacy, inflexibility, and resorting to brute violence may signal the end of politics and of the possibility of negotiation. Democracy can only proceed through a gradual mobilization of society and the recognition and acknowledgment by all political players of the limits of their power. On the other hand, when brute violence rules anything can happen. We may think Russia, Algeria, Afghanistan in the 1990’s as very different from today’s Iran, but what is common to these disastrous cases is that their states failed to maintain a minimal degree of legitimacy by acting as a glue that holds society together. The moment you have a failed state only those who are able and willing to resort to violence will remain in the political arena: primarily young and angry men, willing to use the gun against anyone who disagrees with them, and people who see victory as the elimination of their rivals. In this kind of atmosphere women, older people, artists, intellectuals, ordinary people, i.e. the vast majority of the population, have no role to play in shaping the future, except as cannon fodder.

Studying the statements and words issued by the two Green Movement leaders, Mr. Mousavi and Mr. Karroubi, one can find that they have never decided to pass the system and change the structures fundamentally; it had been so at least before they were arrested. What possibilities does this reformist act cause them to gain and also to lose?

I think I partly answered this question. There are plenty of people who call for the overthrow of the Islamic Republic, as if somehow, magically, this system will be replaced by a better alternative. This is what most of us Iranians believed in 1978 when we overthrew the monarchy! Experience showed that the revolutionary overthrow of a bad system does not necessarily mean you get something better. You can get war, chaos, ethnic violence and separatism, economic chaos and impoverishment of masses, etc. Democracy is build by organizing society from bottom up, so that even if you have an authoritarian state it feels powerless against an empowered society. This takes hard work and organizing, but the alternatives are not better.

You seem to be interested in class analysis of the Green Movement and after election events. Is such an analysis that powerful that it can explain such a movement comprised of different classes such as university students, employees, merchants, intellectuals, etc.?

To think otherwise would be naïve! Of course millions voted and then protested as individuals against the elections, but the deeper political discontent of this society are not the problems of individuals only, they are collective problems: those of ethnic and religious minorities, of women treated as second class citizens, of citizens wanting political liberties in a rigid ideological system, but also and especially of poverty, economic insecurity, and social justice. Class issues are not the only factor of discontent in Iran, but to not recognize that they are a vitally important element motivating political participation would be a mistake.

And the last question; how is the Green Movement going on in the absence of its two main leaders?

The strength of the Green movement comes from its limited common denominators: that the elections were stolen, that all political prisoners should be freed, that all those who broke the existing laws should be punished. These are the demands that hold us together and give coherence to the movement, whether its leaders are free or imprisoned. The moment we move beyond these common demands, and start claiming larger demands that have not been debated democratically, that most of us disagree over or are unclear about, this unified but limited movement can fall apart. We must not think the Green movement is the solution to Iran’s problems, it is just one step in a long process. We must first accept to hold together with a common platform we can all agree upon, whether leaders like Mousavi and Karroubi are there or not. Let us win this first victory, and then we can debate and propose all sorts of more radical solutions for the future of Iran.

However, the Islamic Republic regime managed to put an end to the protests by resorting to violence against the demonstrators, detaining the prominent figures of the two contending presidential candidates, establishing a security and military atmosphere and months of struggle with the protestors. What is for sure is that after two years since the Green Movement started, the deep dissatisfaction among people regarding the absence of citizenship rights has not faded away. On the other hand, the impressive actions of the activists of this movement such as their demonstrations, strikes and coherent organised political work has been reduced to the lowest minimum of what it could be.
What measures and strategies are there for the Green Movement to bring to fruition the hopes that this movement has created in the hearts of those who love freedom? On the occasion of the anniversary of the demonstration of millions of people of Iran to reclaim their citizenship and civil rights, TehranReview interviews Iranian theorists and scholars.

In the third episode of this series of interviews, we spoke with Mehdi Jami, Iranian journalist, blogger, photographer and filmmaker. He was the first director and editor in chief of Radio Zamaneh since it was established in June 2006 until October 2008. He worked with BBC Persian Service from May 1996 to May 2006. Before working for the BBC, he was mainly involved in teaching Persian language and literature and working with the Great Islamic Encyclopaedia.

Given the events of the past two years and what the Green Movement has experienced since its inception, what do you think is the importance of media for this popular movement?

Whatever the Green Movement has, it owes it to the media! Quite recently, the results of a research in Tehran showed that the Greens have used Facebook more than other users of this small media. I think they have also been ahead of others in the use of YouTube. Maybe only in the area of blogging they came across new contenders, but they were almost pioneers in every other social media. Of course, a great part of this is due to the fact that the Greens were deprived of having paper media. Therefore, they have used the online media. This, however, reveals their cultural preparedness to use the new media.
I think in terms of media, as far as it concerns individual behaviour and even network behaviour, they have really excelled themselves and they have truly proved that if there is a people in the Middle East who is prepared for citizen journalism, it is for sure Iranians. The Greens pushed the Persian media to a new age in which media shifts from informing to networking, deliberation and dialogue.

“The Greens pushed the Persian media to a new age”

However, as far as it concerns big media, except at times when they conquered the BBC, they almost had no success at all! This is an important point to ponder. Structurally, the Greens claimed a space that other rivals neither paid attention to nor were interested in. Or they were missing the expertise or media resilience for it. However, with mainstream media, the predominant structures did not allow the birth of an independent Green media. This remains to be a huge obstacle. Therefore, contrary to what was expected, televisions were launched which did not have any Green characteristic or were not even political in its common sense such as the Man-o-to, but a Green television was never launched: there was no real media with proper audience. We neither got a Green television nor a Green radio. What was launched was born out of the previous structures which were predominantly party-oriented ones. Just in the same manner that Kurdish parties have their own channel, a political party in Iran now had its own TV. However, whereas Kurdish televisions have their own audience among their party followers/members, its Iranian counterpart has no audience at all. The Iranian audience is not oriented to party politics and is frustrated with partisan behaviour.

In fact, in the world of television, no one managed to find the sensitive spot of the Green audience. BBC was voicing its own concerns. The VOA cannot even say what it wants to say. The new partisan television, Rasa, could not respond to the needs and demands of the market. The older media generation’s problem is being outdated and incapable of making connections. All in all, the Green media was left with personal media or social networks. In other words, what the Greens experienced with small media could not be transformed into a television model, which should be a television for informing combined with networking.

I think this discursive obstacle has been a serious one. However, one of its reasons has been political. The Green leaders were not active and motivating, in a broad sense, in the field of media making.

Following the beginning of protests, the motto of “every citizen is one media” was raised and many warmly received it. However, transforming ordinary citizens to journalists, regardless of the issue of information, seems to have created some sort of a chaos in the media career: just about anyone who had the material and profession wherewithal did not provide an acceptable standard of work, in terms of professional standards, under the influence of the dominant media atmosphere. How do you see the role of citizen-journalists in enhancement or undermining the professional information career?

Whatever the Green movement has, it owes it to its citizen-journalists! However, this is only one part of the issue. The other part is that both the regime and the anti-Green opposition created a massive amount of “counter-news” to fundamentally incapacitate this source of information and make it unimportant. On the other hand, lack of timely training, i.e. citizen-journalists being untrained, made the situation even worse. Nonetheless, some efforts were made to bring in an element of critique of news items and trainings for content production to find its way into social networks. I think a certain collective consciousness has been engendered in social networks which has given credit to citizen productions. However, saying that this has led to chaos, it seems like a defect from an ordinary eye. On the other hand, it is something quite normal. In the shift between one system or period of news and the next system or period, there is always an episode of chaos, confusion or even opportunism, and fake productions. This chaos is a sign of a new order. That is nothing to worry about. However, it requires management. One has to think about it, recognise the chaos so that it can be led to the next level of forming the new order. The next order will undoubtedly be influenced by citizen-journalists. We have to be ready for it. This is an experienced path that the Greens have taken so far and it is irreversible.

In my opinion, state media such as the BBC and the VOA must learn from the small media and move from informing to networking. Even in their current model and with the best renovations and reforms they will not be able to succeed in the new age of media.

That our professionals may still be confused is again nothing strange. Professionals need to refresh themselves and learn. They should acquaint themselves with new methods and improve their tone and language in choosing their topics and make them more popular. This has not happened yet, though. I can give dozens of examples in which professional media have ignored the news items that people were interested in. This is a gap that has to be bridged. People from both sides of the gap can contribute to bridging this gap. Citizen-journalists who have a tendency towards a professional/trained understanding of their work and the professionals who show awareness of understanding the new media atmosphere can work together.

Given the political divisions among Iranians and old differences among different groups, how can a relatively impartial and professional news network increase the solidarity among people and at the same time attract the attention of people from other countries to Iran?

This is a very difficult issue. I do not believe in impartiality and I find it misleading, but I do firmly believe in fairness and seeing both sides of the story in news. This is the basis for civil and media ethics. This is however not something that we can see today in the Persian media. And it seems far to have such an all-encompassing inclusive media to form without a shift in discourse, unless we can assume that a small consistent group with excellent media capabilities and enough financial strength can pioneer in this work. I do not know such a group with high political goals and standard avoiding constant internal conflicts and bashing others. Even if they exist, they do not generally have a vision of modern media. And of course the farthest groups to such modern approaches in media are the political parties and groups, because as we know them today, they have short-term goals and they are generally pursuing propaganda and whatever they wish to do, it is definitely not promotion of media work. Therefore, you cannot expect them to play a role in media progress. Whatever work they do is outdated or cliché. Even when it has new looks it is dealing with media with the same old methods and in any case it reveals their lack of media literacy. In other words, our political groups have not yet realised the value of media work and lack the competence to use it.

As regards solidarity, the issue should first happen outside the media and then the media can become an embodiment or reflection of it. If the idea of solidarity is weak in the outside or is shaky, then naturally no media would come into existence based on it. I think the more practical model for it is to seek the improvement and promotion of solidarity between those citizens who are ready for it and advance it to a higher level, then to think of a broad solidarity. Let us assume that we have ten media outlets by and for ten different social segments with proper media atmosphere. If we establish this phase, then we will be more successful in implementing wider solidarity. Given the natural plurality among Iranians, this model will work better.

From another perspective, even now one can find groups which have gathered around some online media outlets and they are somehow finding their identity there and the work of that media is their referent index. These can be foundations for transcending models. However, the major issue is whether those groups believe in media promotion as part of their goals or not. The presence of a powerful media rival may give these media-groups the motivation for growth.

Regarding how people of other countries view Iran, it is a very much connected with Iranian communities in Europe and America and it is not simply the issue of media; although the media can help significantly. In other words, we need a media which can bring together members from Iranian communities which are more homogenous and create a synergy among them. This media can attract the attention of non-Iranians. However, right now, every group is struggling for its own particular goals without necessarily having a network of connections or news or liaison among them. Will such a media come into existence? I am hopeful although we may not see it in a very near future on the horizon.

Let us consider media outlets such as the BBC or VOA which have more means than other Persian media. To what extent can we see them consistent and committed in the charter of a serious media to the issue of informing people? We can now see that the VOA is embracing a more popular attitude as opposed to the BBC which is somewhat elitist.

I think the BBC has played an important part. This is undeniable. However, I do not generally see the mandate of the BBC to be informing people in terms of, for instance, helping the ideas of Mir-Hossein Mousavi. BBC is following the British outlook in the world, our region and Iran. We must not expect the BBC to have this function, just as we should not expect Radio Farda to be like this. I have even told my friends that Radio Farda should not approach the Green Movement unless to a certain extent, because it might be seen as representing the movement and this is not something to accept from Radio Farda. Nor is it to the interest of the movement. In other words, it will just be artificial. If the BBC was influential in the 1979 revolution, it was probably because our people did not have media capacities themselves and consciously or unconsciously the BBC had become the voice of the revolution. However, one must not have such an expectation from any of the media outside the country because there is so much media diversity that people can have their own networks and cater for their needs of information now. And they are actually doing this. Just consider the issue of news gathering. If we did not have the citizens voluntarily filming from their protests, no formal journalist from the BBC or from any other media outlets in Tehran or other cities could get any news out. All formal channels were closed and it was only the people who could informally let the news out.

“In my opinion, these state media can learn from the Green small media and move from informing to networking”

The case of the VOA is different. I think we should differentiate between a small narrow media current there with the dominant voice. The Parazit programme has managed to make connections with a huge group of the younger generations. This was more than anything else due to the personal initiative of the producers of the programme rather than the general policy of the VOA, because if this policy was there, sings of it should have been reflected in its other programmes too.
The VOA is currently under renovation and change. However, until now, it has had no role but in the periphery of the events, particularly because it has been compared with the BBC. The BBC made the VOA market stagnant in the 2009 elections of Iran. Now, I hope that changes in this network can take it up to speed with the BBC or make it a popular media for the people. Being popular is not bad in itself, but the fact that the elite does not view VOA a professional outlet is of course bad. Obtaining a positive view of the elite is what should be added to the popularity of the VOA.
However, the VOA also has its own policy and its own media mission and one cannot expect the VOA to function as a Green media. Nonetheless, I think if the media policies of Obama regarding being in touch with the people and hearing their voice, which was recently announced, is followed in the VOA and gets implemented, then I think the VOA has taken a huge step forward. Its current condition, as its managers and broadcasters admit, is not desirable. In the two years of the life of the Green Movement, I do not naturally find a prominent place for it. But tomorrow can be another day. In my opinion, these state media can learn from the Green small media and move from informing to networking. I mean in their current model, even with the best of renovations and reforms, they will not be successful.

Among the roles of a journalist one can point out the “discovery of truth”, a most prominent example of which can be seen in the Watergate issue. Why is it that after two years since the problematic presidential elections, no media or journalist has managed to do anything serious in terms of discovering the truth? Can we say that thirty years of suppression by the Islamic Republic has managed to eradicate these activities from the media? If this is so, what is the solution?

Apart from the debates of the past two years, the idea of investigative journalism in search of truth did not have any precedent in Iranian media. In Iran, we do have whistle-blowing such as what the Salam newspaper used to do or what the newspapers of the early years of the revolution did or what recently the Alef website does, but we do not have investigative journalism. Apart from a few exceptions here and there, this style of journalism does not have deep roots for the simple reason that we do not have independent journalism. In the contemporary period, since before the revolution, the context of our journalism was different from that of western journalism. For example, even if a journalist got word of some secret affair, they did not have the legal and juridical support and they would be easily put in prison. Even apolitical dissent would cause trouble for the journalist, let alone struggling with the powerful.
In the past two years, severe suppression has been an obstacle for the formation of certain forms of investigative journalism, except when the journalist leaves the country and again it has taken the form of whistle-blowing.

Mainstream Persian media outside the country are generally disconnected from the issues of the Iranian society and cannot therefore support this kind of journalism. Therefore, the issue becomes this: either the people who have the knowledge and the clues do not have the power to express it, or if they say it nobody supports them. Essentially, they cannot enter the matrix of power and there is no tradition for this type of journalism. The journalist, who can easily be labelled as a spy for its simplest work, cannot subsequently go into investigative journalism or curiosity in recording and revealing corruption and mismanagement in all its forms. I think if the ordinary people get involved in the media, they can take on the role of discovering the truth themselves, but that requires a different mechanism to become practical.

Considering the launch of networks such as “Man-o-to” and “Farsi1”, it seems that the future of media becomes like separated islands. What impact can this have on liberation political movements?

I think these should be accepted as media realities. The media is not only about politics. But what is happening is depoliticizing the people and the TV audience. This is of course dangerous for the future of the media and it is exactly what the “holy regime” in Iran seeks. The regime would warmly welcome any means to harness the politicization of the people and I believe they have no serious qualms with Farsi1 or Man-o-to.

As regards the current which is now influencing the Persian audience beyond our control, we should naturally be active and plan for it to bring in new media or renovate older media and overhaul them to revive a wave of countering depoliticizing. If news based media cannot go beyond this pitfall, they will lose the ground. Consequently, any voice seeking democratic developments would fade out or weaken. Using your terms, they become like islands and no one can hear their voice anymore. In the way of renovation or change, if these media fall in the trap of becoming like Man-o-to or Farsi1, it is another threat. However, if a more comprehensive outlook is adopted, there is a hope that changes may be in the right direction, so it can make the regime a little agitated and the audience would fall from the heaven of fake comfort in which they see the world as nothing is happening! To adopt that outlook is a delicate matter and it is necessary for media designers to talk about it at length.

Should liberation movements try to have their own media or should they have their share in every media?

It is practically so. The movement which does not have media is a dead movement. Of course, I said that the Green Movement has had its own media and particularly in the field of small citizen oriented media it has been successful and even pioneering from a modern media perspective. However, it has not created big comprehensive media outlets and we have not done so either. I mean neither the leaders have taken this matter seriously, nor the followers, the people, the investors and those who see the opportunities, have opened new paths. This worries me. However, this feeling and this demand is out there and it is strong and I believe it is like the beauty which does not bear remaining in concealment. It is no inconceivable that these satellites open some space in Iran for private televisions. These televisions will rapidly find their counterparts outside Iran among Iranians. Behind this dam, there is a massive force building up. I don’t know how but I know that certainly there are new and wonderful events in the field of television which are in the making. Television is the media of the future. Or I had better say televisions. Developments are not in the direction of creating “one” network. It will have diversity for the simple reason that future televisions depend on the audience. This makes them diverse.

“The movement which does not have media is a dead movement”

Most state media in the world are focussing on social issues. Should the Green Movement media behave like this or should it, in the absence of an independent Persian media, be more comprehensive?

I think after the Jomhouriyyat newspaper of Emad Baghi which was short-lived and after the Radio Zamaneh which was specifically focussed on social issues, the Persian media has now gone beyond a frontier which is in my opinion the frontier of future media. The more the media think about the audience and the audience takes a more active role in it, they become more social. Being politics-oriented is a flaw for media work and right now, media such as the BBC and the VOA are damaged because of this flaw. The media which primarily deals with politics will not be a comprehensive media and will be circling in the boring cycle of politics. If we want politics to find its right place, we must not let it take the place of everything else. Mainstream media are designed based on a discourse that narrates as if only politics is effective element in the world’s affairs. That is not so. In the real world, there are myriads of other factors which are impacting our life apart from politics and a comprehensive media must address all these issues to give us a balanced view of the world in which we live.

It is my conviction that for the Green media of any kind, issues related to the society, ideas, culture, the environment, education and school should be more important than for any other media outlet. This is how I understand “comprehensive media” in your question and not necessarily more political. Green media are also media and should not make the mistake that in order to take root, they should follow the model of older media. They should follow their pioneering path and always remain in tune with modern outlooks of media. If the world goes towards more social media further depending on the audience, then the Greens should follow suit with its Iranian flavour and carry on. This requires the Green media to be active in the debates on modern media. This would help them to avoid the pitfall of clichés and declining discourses and lets their initiatives have a theoretical media justification. A theoretical understanding will naturally give them confidence and they can have an impact on mainstream media too. The Greens should keep the media advantages that they have gained by experience and develop them.

Popular movements in the Middle East are not the hot topics of the world media. What can be seen in these movements is the strong and undeniable role of a media called Aljazeera, to the extent that this media has been transmitting even the tiniest pieces of news with the least of facilities despite the banning of its activities in the midst of most of these movements. Other Arab countries have struggled to imitate each other. If we had such a media network in Iran, would it be possible to have further success?

If we had an Aljazeera in Iran, there would be no need for protest or revolution! We want to reach a society in which networks such as Aljazeera are not taboos in the country or exceptions and they become the general model and an acceptable level for news media. Now, let us assume that in Afghanistan you had a Persian Aljazeera. Or, for example, the Tolo TV, which is their best television network, was taking on the role of Aljazeera and continuously covered the news of Iranian protests and its global credit attracted the attention of Persian speaking people and the rest of the world. I think the Iranian protests would seem different and it would have different outcomes and the pace of developments would be different. In response to earlier questions, I said that the absence of supporting structures has been a cause for investigative journalism not to take root in Iran. Having a Persian Aljazeera in a neighbouring country would give the protests a supporting media structure. This would naturally change the situation.

“If we had an Aljazeera in Iran, there would be no need for protest or revolution!”

A glance at the contemporary history of Arab countries shows that every media which has been established outside the Arab environment have eventually failed until the Aljazeera network and then Alarabiyya were established. This somehow shows that the people trust their own indigenous media more than media which are run from abroad. Can we extend this model for Iran or other Persian speaking countries? Can we say that until a media from inside Persian speaking countries is established, it cannot find the all-encompassing aspect or the impact of Aljazeera or Alarabiyya?

Let us address the issue based on the same idea of supporting means. Persian media abroad is based on supporting and highlighting issues or problems which are not raised inside the country, or domestic media do not have the power to raise them, or because domestic interests do not necessitate raising them. Now consider the point that for the past three decades, the media outside the country have been continuously talking about human rights violations in Iran and they have published news, reports or analysis on it. However, serious human rights movement in Iran started when domestic civil forces inside the country started their activity to tackle them. For example, in the past two years debates about issues such as constant references to the massacre of prisoners in the 80’s have been unprecedented. Even Amnesty International has not made a significant movement in this regard until after 20 years, and, for example, has had no role in annual commemorations of the victims of these massacres. However, in the past two years debates about the issue have been so widespread that we can say it has become part of the collective conscience of Iranians. What has changed? I think social sensitivities have changed, as we have a huge number of individuals active in small personal media. People have found each other in the network of newly established social media, weblogs and audience-oriented media and they have shared their memories, questions and common grievances with others.

Three decades of foreign media reporting and talking all about these issues, was never as influential as when people have been re-reading the post-revolution history. Just like the case of recent years when people constantly asking the question of why Khorramshahr was liberated but never properly rebuilt. And there are dozens of other new questions and debates small parts of which had been reflected in mainstream media.

In other words, it is not just the issue of trust. People should have reached a level of recognition of their own identity and an understanding of their social and political issues for these debates to enter thousands of other circles of debate. I think it is only people-based and audience-oriented media that can sense the sensitivities in their right time and react to them and push them to media debate circles and in their own turn impact these debates. This constant contact with people is what happened in the Aljazeera and Al-arabiyya and changed them into two powerful media network. Therefore, we can say that the media which lose their contact with the people in one way or another lose their impact too. This is what you describe as “trust”. If they are in touch with the grassroots and maintain this connection in different ways and continue it, they will be influential and win the trust of people.

Our current condition is that we neither trust the domestic media nor the foreign Persian-speaking televisions outside Iran. What we want and has strategic importance is connecting the people with the media. Their being domestic or foreign is a secondary issue, but it is natural that it would be preferable if a domestic media can make this connection. However, the problem is that our domestic media, inside and outside the country, are still running according to orders and they do not get their agenda from the people. Examples of the sport programme called 90 in Iran and satirical Parazit abroad tell us that when you take your agenda from the people, the result will be remarkably different. The fact that we have reached this connection in satire and in sport is quite meaningful. These two areas are where people have been most engaged with the media. Our main issue is then finding this link and connection in other areas of daily life. This is a modern media principle.

The second memory is about my father. It belongs to the same years. When my father came home from work, he used to change his clothes and go to the garden. He picked the vegetables, watered the plants patiently and obsessively, cleared the weeds, and cut the buxus plants. Then he stood up, touched his mustache, and watched the outcome of his work. A garden full of flowers, filled with the smell of petunias. But one day everything became different. My father came home and nodded his head to me who had come to say hello to him excitedly. He came inside, leaned against the cushion, then took a cigarette out of his pocket and began smoking. My mother who had realized something was going on, sat beside him and asked if anything was wrong. My father explained that they had warned him not to wear short-sleeve shirts and haad punished him in the factory. But he had not resigned and had came to blows with the factory guards. He said he might be fired, puffed at his cigarette, and put the butt in the ashtray my mother had brought him. Then he gave a look at me who was standing in the corridor listening to him frightfully and shocked.

Every part of our life seemed to be under control

Such things were common those days. Every part of our life seemed to be under control. When we wanted to take a trip, in addition to the terminals being dirty and crowded, we had to travel in the old and broken busses which crept up the steep roads and usually broke down in the middle of the way and arrived late. But the worst of the trip were the police stations. Bearded soldiers came inside the bus, searching the faces one by one, and pointed at some people “get down.” Or they warned the women whose scarves were tilted, were asleep or were not paying attention to have the right hijab! If they were so shameful, they would bend down their head and say “observe your hijab, my sister”. Although they had not learned to be polite those days and didn’t know that they can say these words in a respectful manner. Suppose we wanted to go to the north, we wanted to go to the beach and swim a little bit. I cannot forget the ridiculous way we used to swim: naked or half-naked men and dressed women who wanted to swim with their husband or children. Even then they would not leave us alone. The speakers kept shouting: “observe your manners, observe”. That’s it. Those days are filled with the memories of my parents planning to have hidden entertainments. They are filled with their anger and curses every time they said they were disappointed of the regime.

However, the story of my life was no different.

When I grew up and went to school: “Don’t wear jeans! Don’t shave your head this way! Don’t wear pictured t-shirts! Don’t bring walkman in the campus!” and many other does and don’ts. But one of them I will never forget and every time I remember it I feel the same humiliation. I was at the first year of high school and had been accepted in a well-known school. The schools had just begun and as usual I had new clothes, new books and notebooks. I was enthusiastic. I listened carefully to what the principal said as I was so excited of growing up and going to high school. I had had a haircut the day before. I had not shaved my head in any restricted style and I had not cut it down in the Titanic fashion which wad popular those days. I had just bought an inexpensive tube of gel to become handsome and the other morning I put a little bit of gel on the front part of my hair. As the principal finished speaking, students went inside the classes in a line. When it was our class’s turn, the head teacher pointed at me as soon as he saw me. I was horrified. What’s wrong? What have I done? The students who went inside the classes looked at me and murmured something to each other. When everyone went inside, the head teacher came to me, pointed at the school door and said “Go home”. I was close to tears. I said “But why sir? What have I done?” He said go and wash your hair and then come back. “I haven’t done anything wrong sir,” I said. “What have you rubbed to your head?” he said. “It was just a little bit, sir.” I said. “Go home, wash your hair and then come back,” he said. “No one is at home sir. My parents are at work,” I said. “Go to the school’s WC and wash your hair. It shall be the last time you come to school like this,” he said. I was degraded. I lost all my eagerness and self-confidence. When I went to the class, the teacher had already come and there was only one seat left. Feeling lost and defeated, I sat by the desk with my wet hair, under the surprised and ridiculing looks of my classmates. I could never forget that anger and rage during the four years I was at that school and I could never help disliking there.

I became older and went to university. I could no longer tolerate all the humiliations. But what could I do? An hour after we talked to the girls, our name was on the board. Come to the security office. Their behavior had improved. They tried to look friendly, smiled, held their prayer beads, and kept asking. They no longer shouted like the soldiers of my childhood, but they said the same thing, “Observe your manners.” The Guidance Patrols had just begun working, and the streets were filled with Mercedes-Benz, Elegance instead of the old Toyotas and Paykans. Women wearing chador and men holding guns stood in the crossroads and main squares, with grim faces and said “Observe your hijab, ma’am.” Even they put some people in the police vans. If anyone resisted, they would beat her down and it would lead to torn clothes and the screams of the women who resisted and didn’t want to resign. I can still hear the screams of the girl in that film on the internet. The young girl kept shouting “Leave me alone, leave me, I don’t want to get inside.” I got a headache when I saw those patrols. I was so filled with rage, I came home nervously and had to take pills to calm down. Then came the days of the 88 election. When people cried “We no longer want the regime of Guidance Patrols,” I could see my childhood days and the police Toyotas. I could see my father smoking angrily. When people shouted “Free hijab is the right for every Iranian woman,” I remembered my mother putting her hair in the scarf. When irritated people put their hands up as a sign for victory, I remembered all my birthday parties that were ruined with the sound “The police! The police!” I remembered all the fear and anxiety I had when taking the hand of the girl I loved, all the time worried that the police would come and take us to the police station.

Things are still the same. Only on 1388 they removed the patrols at least from Tehran, in fear of the angry people. When I read the news that the Moral Security of the Society Project is once again going to start, and when I saw those hateful faces in the crossroads, I started shivering. “What have we done wrong, that we should go through this much humiliation?” I wondered. “How long should we feel this anger in our hearts, go through hidden shivers, clench our fists, fill our hearts with hatred and turn into disappointed and frustrated people? How long?”

می گویند به هرچه باور داشته باشی، هر طور زندگی کنی، به هرچه عشق بورزی، همانطور خواهی مرد. ساعت ده شب است و پیکر بی جانت که دیشب همین ساعت ها بالای سر پدر قرآن می خواند در تاریکای شب و وحشت یک گورستان کوچک محلی به خاک می سپارند تا به گمانشان فردا دیگر خاطره ای از تو در گوش زمان و زمین باقی نماند. امشب اما گورستان کوچک لواسان تکرار آوایی را در گوش خود می شنید که خاکی های خسته مدینه هزار و چهارصد سال پیش می شنیدند. می گویند جمعیت هم صدای یا زهرا، یا مظلوم سر داده بودند و جز صدای هق هق گریه و ضجه زنان و ضربه های گورکن بر خاک نمناک گور پدرت، صدایی در شبی چنین سوگوار شنیده نمی شد.

از منبر‌هایشان شنیده بودیم که فاطمه زهرا به فاصلهٔ کمی‌ پس از پیامبر و بر اثر ضربه ای‌ که به او زدند درگذشت و شبانه به خاک سپرده شد.

می گویند مادر سهراب پیکر بی جانت را در آغوش گرفته و التماست کرده سلامش را به سهراب برسانی. خیلی های دیگر هم می خواستند از تو بخواهند پیام آور سلام شان باشی. نگاه کن به گورستان های جنوب تهران، همان گورستان خاوران را می گویم. بهشت زهرا را یادت نرود بانو … گورهای دسته جمعی امشب به احترامت یک دقیقه سکوت کرده اند.

دوم

نبودم. کیلومترها فاصله بود بین من و کلاس های قرآن ات و روسری سپیدی که به نشان صلح بر سر می کردی. نبودم و کیلومترها فاصله بود بین من و تو که در سوگ پدر، تصویر قاب گرفته اش را حمل می کردی تا شاید نگاه آنها که محاصره تان کرده بودند روی چروک های صورت پیرمرد بیافتد و یک لحظه شرم کنند. نبودم و بودند دوستانی که سال ها رفیق خنده ها و بغض هایت بودند. یکی می گفت رو بر می گردانت سلام می کند به تو، می رود سراغ دکتر ملکی سلامی کند که می بیند فریادی بلند می شود. سر می چرخاند. خبر دهان به دهان می شود. تو در چند قدمی پیکر پدرت جان دادی …

در روایات اسلامی می گویند تا وقتی مرده را در قبر نگذاشته اند و سنگ لحد بر پیکرش ننهاده اند، روح هنوز در حوالی بدن است و نمی داند که مرگی رخ داده است. می گویند خود مرده هم در تشییع پیکر خود شرکت می کند؛ اما به محض اینکه درون قبر گذاشته می شود و سنگ بر سرش می خورد می فهمد مرگی که در مراسمش شرکت داشته عزای خودش بوده. چطور پدرت در تابوت نظاره کرد ضربه بر پیکر دخترش را بانو؟

سوم

جایی خواندم که پدرت بارها خواسته بود پیش از مرگ نگاهش به نگاهت دخیل ببندد. شنیده بودم بارها خواسته بود تو را ببیند و چه غروری بود در نگاهش وقتی نامت را تکرار می کرد. تو اما وقتی آزاد شدی که چشم های پدر دیگر تو را ندید و گوشش دیگر زمزمه های بابا بابای تو را نشنید. بگو الان که سنگ لحد بر سینه تو و پدر گذاشته شده و همه، شبانه شما را ترک کرده اند کدام خاطره را برای پدر تعریف می کنی؟ برایش می گویی که چطور سوزش درد ضربه ای که به پهلویت خورد جانت را آزاد کرد تا کنارش آرامش بگیری؟

بگو هنوز هم می گویی خشم را کنار بگذاریم و متانت به خرج بدهیم وقتی تو را شبانه به خاک سپردند و بی گناه جانت را گرفتند؟ بگو هنوز هم می گویی خواسته هایمان را روی کاغذ بنویسیم؟

بگو صدای ضجه های سوگواران این سالها را به گوش خدا خواهی رساند؟

In this piece, I would like to argue that Obama’s failure to attract the attention of Middle-Easterners is not necessarily a bad thing for those people; in point of fact, it does bode well for them on a plane unheard of in recent memory, i.e., the plane of action. In what follows, I will unpack why that is.

I. The Negatives

As was easily predictable, the speech was full of vacuous rhetorical truisms, selective praises and rebukes or what have you, which is expected from politicians generally and more so from Obama who is a very glib one at that.
It praised the ‘brave freedom-loving people of Tunisia and Egypt’, but failed to admit that the US and its allies supported those dictators against those very brave people until the tides had turned against the dictators and their deposition was a matter of hours or days only, and that one of the reasons why such dictatorships survived so long in the first place was the regular financial and military support of the US and its allies (such as France) for the Egyptian and Tunisian dictators.

It selectively (but rightfully) reproached in very harsh terms ‘unfriendly dictators’ of Libya, Iran, and Syria who brutalize their people, but failed to address the Bahraini and Yemeni ‘friendly dictators’ in equally critical terms. What is more, it failed to even mention the Saudi and Kuwaiti situations where dissenters and democratic activists were crushed down savagely.

It talked of the lack of economic neoliberalization as one of the reasons that had instigated the uprisings and revolutions in the region, but willfully ignored the fact that one of the major reasons why Egyptians and Tunisians got fed up with their situation and took to the streets was the devastating consequences of neoliberal economic policies in those countries implemented by those dictators, policies that had not only loaded the dictators’ pockets and brought the workers down to a slavish status but had actually caused poverty and unemployment rates to go through the ceiling in the long run.

In terms of the Palestine-Israel issue, the speech made an apparently controversial and promising remark by saying that a return to the 1967 border is the solution to the problem; but the promise faded away when Obama added the clause ‘with mutually agreed borders and land swaps’, which means Israel has a veto on Palestinian ‘rights’ and on whatever agreement deal the Palestinians and the overwhelming majority of the international community strive toward.
In other words, the implication was that things can go on as they have for decades with Israel and the US unilaterally vetoing all the legitimate rights of the Palestinians and demands of the international community. This implication was not comprehended by some lobbyists; Obama had therefore to clear things up in his address to AIPAC three days after the speech, and say explicitly what he had implicated in the Mid-East speech: ‘there was nothing original in my proposal’ and that the return to 1967 was not what he had meant.

Along the same lines, Obama legitimized once more the new discourse that is being propagated by Israel that it is a ‘Jewish’ state and Israel is ‘the homeland of the Jewish people’, deliberately not taking stock of more than one million non-Jewish citizens in Israel (more or less 20% of the whole population) who would be relegated to the status of second class citizens by this discourse.

Could anyone in their right minds possibly imagine a state such as the American state itself claiming to be a “Christian state” and America being “the homeland of the Christians”? Probably not! Not even in the theocracies of the Middle East can you find a dictator who would claim his country to be one for the Muslim population alone, not in rhetoric certainly.

People fully understood what was missing in the speech and what it means to have friendly rhetoric and do the opposite in practice

And the negative list could, to one’s chagrin, go on and on. People fully understood what was missing in the speech and what it means to have friendly rhetoric and do the opposite in practice, which is why the speech fell on deaf ears for good reasons. But, so much for the negative!

II. The Positive

There was one tremendously positive aspect to the cold reception the speech met with. People in that region have ‘acted’ on their own, and have achieved considerable results, and can afford to ignore empty rhetoric, be it from their dictators or Obama. They have taken the active role in the still unfolding scenarios that are taking place. Politicians, including Obama, are forced to ‘react’ to what they do. This is a major achievement.

This confession in Obama’s speech was explicit when he had to emphasize one factor that was predominant in the recent events in the region: ‘self-determination.’ We can’t judge whether Obama enjoyed or detested this confession. One thing is however clear: it was unprecedented.

For decades the dominant discourse of the American administrations has been centered on the question ‘how should we influence or change the politics of the region?’, i.e., the active stance that included invading countries, regime change, nation-building, and such. Obama was the first American president in recent memory who was effectively forced to change the discourse and say “the question before us is what role America will play as this story unfolds’, i.e., the reactive stance. Things are happening there and America should react to them.

The Middle Eastern masses have paid a huge price to impose this change of tone and discourse on the American administration. For decades, many Middle-Easterners were quick to blame others especially the West and more so the US (not without some legitimate reasons) for the miseries that had befallen them. It was a mournful passive/reactive stance. But the tides have turned.

The new uprisings and revolutions have for the first time given the people of the region the active stance of those who by themselves and against overwhelming odds bring down despotic regimes (some of which supported by superpowers such as the US) and force those very superpowers to step back and reflect upon the question as to how to respond and ‘react’ to how those people ‘act’. This is the positive news ‘for the people’ in the nonevent that was Obama’s speech.

There is however a long way to go. The majority of the countries in that region are still under dictatorial conditions. But the trend has been set. If there is anything to be had from the recent revolutions, it is the lesson that people can set out to ‘act’ and bring about real change, and when they succeed in doing that, they don’t need to be particularly interested in reactive clichés and empty rhetoric from anyone. It is a legitimate luxury for the people to be able to ignore a speech like that by the most powerful man in the world (militarily speaking), and they deserve to be congratulated for that.

Professor Dabashi, thank you for being with us. Almost two years ago, you wrote in an article entitled ‘People power’ that the biggest winner of Iran’s 2009 presidential election is the Iranian people and their democratic aspirations. You also wrote that Ayatollah Khamenei was the greatest loser of that election, because the process of election and massive participation of people (not its fraudulent result) proves the will and capability of Iranian citizens and their democratic intelligence, which makes Velayat-e Faqih and his guiding disposition irrelevant and obscure within Iranian society. Two years later, the what you called (latent) winners and losers are apparently in inverse positions. Ali Khamenei looks more powerful than ever and there is no sign of manifest power of people in terms of civil disobedience, demonstrations or strikes, or news about construction of new political networks and organizations to empower political activism.
Is the Green Movement dead? Is this the beginning of a new long season of disillusion in Iran, like we have been experiencing in the last century time after time with the return of dictatorship after a short time of hope for freedom – like after the Constitutional Revolution, after the Musaddiq government, and after the first year of the 1979 Revolution?

HD: I must first begin by saying that I do agree with your summary of my thoughts two years ago about the Green Movement, but disagree with your characterization of our current condition. Two years into the commencement of the Green Movement, and even before the rise of the Arab Spring, which will have an enduring effect on it, there are so many achievements that it will take me a long time just to enumerate them. So no: the Green Movement is not dead. It is perfectly alive and well. You just need to have a sharper set of antennae to receive its signals. Before anything else, you must remember that social movements have their own innate logic, which are by definition societal and collective. We must try to decipher that inner logic and not assimilate these movements backward to things we know from similar events. The Green Movement as a social fact is far ahead of our analytical capabilities, and we as analysts, or historians, or theorists, are lagging behind the factual evidence of our own people who have courageously and creatively launched this movement. The reality of this movement in my judgment is far richer than the poverty of our philosophy can afford fathoming. With that in mind, let’s look at the achievements of the Green Movement a bit more closely. At this moment, the illegitimacy of the Islamic Republic as a state apparatus is even more exposed for the whole world to see (especially in the Arab and Muslim world) than it was two or twenty or thirty years ago. The halo of sanctity it had falsely manufactured around itself has disappeared, and its propaganda machinery, once boasting with thinkers like Abdolkarim Soroush and filmmakers like Mohsen Makhmalbaf, is now reduced to the combined banality of Fatemeh Rajabi, Mohammad Javad Larijani, Hossein Shariatmadari, Sa’id Tajik, and Mohammad Marandi. This is the level and the capacity of the best that the Islamic Republic can mobilize to defend itself in the realm of ideas, intelligence, and argument. The juridically manufactured institution of Velayat-e Faqih with which the Islamist Sultanism has sought to give itself a Shi’i disposition is even more exposed for its outdated and banal character than ever before. I do not attribute the rise of the Arab Spring entirely to the Green Movement, but I do believe that they both stem from identical, unstoppable, and open-ended modes of defiance. The Green Movement has even more importantly succeeded in retrieving and exposing, in the public domain and discursive registers, our innately worldly and cosmopolitan political culture in a manner that undermines the militant Islamism of the regime. The sham of the Islamic Republic stealing and distorting a worldly and robust political culture via a brutal Islamization of our multifaceted and polyfocal political culture is more than ever before evident for the whole world to see. The absence of street demonstration is no indication that the repressive organs of the Islamic Republic have succeeded in suppressing the civil rights movement. Quite to the contrary: that suppression has in fact ever more powerfully rooted it in richer and more robust soil, resulting in sweeter and shapelier fruits. All it took was one simple question, “Where is my vote,” and the Islamic Republic was forced to expose all its ugly and brute force for the whole world to see. After that inaugural question, the Green Movement went through three successive and crucial stages of street demonstrations, discursive elaboration, and now being linked to the Arab Spring. So we have every reason to be optimistic and celebratory rather than disillusioned. Not only we are not reverting back to the aftermath of the Constitutional Revolution or Mossadegh’s era. In fact we are not even back to the Reformist era of Khatami’s period. By virtue of the Green Movement, and precisely because of the courageous stands and public pronouncements of both Mir-Hossein Mousavi and Mehdi Karroubi (as well as many others—from Zahra Rahnavard, Mostafa Tajzadeh, Fakhr al-Sadat Mohtashamipour, and Mohammad Nourizad, to Mansur Osanlou, Majid Tavakoli, Bahareh Hedayat, Ahmad Zeidabadi, Jafar Panahi, Shirin Ebadi, and Nasrin Sotudeh, and many others) we have witnessed a whole new episode in our social history. We have every reason to celebrate the achievements of the Green Movement and charge ahead.

All it took was one simple question: “Where is my vote”

Does the Green Movement have a common and coherent strategy these days? If so, how would you define it? If not, is this bad? If not, why not? And if it is bad, how we can change this situation?

HD: No it does not have a common and coherent strategy. But neither did the Tunisian or Egyptian revolution. They both unfolded spontaneously and progressed apace until they achieved a certain stage of their objectives, which was the toppling of the top dictators. By the same token that the Egyptian and Tunisian revolutions are not over yet, and those of Syria, Libya, Bahrain, and Yemen have just started, the Green Movement in Iran will go through various phases in terms at once domestic to the Iranian scene and yet responsive to the democratic uprisings in the region. “It,” meaning the Green Movement, is a living organism, and as such it cannot have a “common and coherent strategy”, which usually comes from a single or organized leadership. We do not have such a leadership in the Green Movement, and as I have said from the outset this is both a social fact and a good fact. Even those who think they oppose the Islamic Republic, or particularly those who think they oppose the Islamic Republic, they in fact mimic its history and in the heart of their heart are wishing for a Khomeini sitting under an apple tree in the suburb of Paris and calling the shots in Iran. They must correct their lenses; not the Green Movement cutting and pasting itself to their distorted and crooked vision. You do not impose on a massive social uprising your particular failures in a dead and decayed past, as I see some retiring revolutionaries do in Europe, still clinging to the outdated memory of this or that runaway president or failed cult. You must try to understand the specific social characteristic of a movement made up almost entirely of a new generation. If you think that if Bani-Sadr, for example, had remained the president, this or that would have happened, and thus thirty years later are still trying to find a parking place on that crossroad, then you are out to lunch in more than one sense and entirely ignorant of how to read the Green Movement. The Green Movement has its own innate logic and rhetoric and cannot be reduced to anything before it, including and in particular the Reformist Movement of the Khatami era. We have witnessed a massive transformative uprising that has pushed forward our political culture by leaps and bounds. This uprising does not have a “strategy” because fortunately it does not have a leader, an ideology, a political party in the standard understanding of these terms. It has a social logic of its own, a collective memory it has heroically construed, a societal disposition of its own, and it continues to guide itself by virtue of that very nature. This does not make the movement ineffective. It makes it grassroots, enduring, multifaceted, rich, diversified, unstoppable, and open-ended. You cannot understand this movement with the limited vocabulary of hitherto retired revolutionaries of bygone ages. What will change this situation is not any “strategy” that we might fathom, but the fact that the three grassroots movements—labor, women, and students— that gave political rise to the Green Movement in the first place, will now continue to work their innate logic out and at one and the same time sustain the uprising and exacerbate the crisis-ridden disposition of the misbegotten Islamic Republic. By “strategy” you man more when and how will the regime collapse; whereas I have always said and continue to say that this movement is not geared either to uphold or to dismantle this regime? It is already ahead of this regime. The continuation or collapse of this regime is entirely inconsequential to the principal objectives of this movement, which is achieving them apace, if you learned its innate logic and did not impose on it your own cliché-ridden definition of a “revolution,” or “reform.” This movement has left even Khatami (which is closest but not integral to it) behind, let alone Bani-Sadr or Masoud and Maryam Rajavi, or the late Shah’s son Reza Pahlavi. The movement itself, of course, not these retired expatriate revolutionaries who get up in the morning, write an opinion piece out of their tired old cliché frustrations for one website or another insisting that this is a “revolution” and not a “reform”—which means their limited critical imagination can only zigzag for or against Khatami. In short, we need not change the situation, as you say. The situation is changing itself. We must just recognize the change and mark and identify and celebrate and push it forward. The structural crises of the Islamic Republic are definitive to the labor, women, and student movements—and these three movements are leading this uprising, not by any set strategy, but by the fact of their economic, social, and political realities.

We must never wait. We must always think and act.

Do we have to wait for a new street politics-momentum or should one think of how to create this momentum?

HD: We must never wait. We must always think and act. Street politics has its place and we may yet again witness its resurgence. But at this point far more important is the centrality of the three grassroots movements I mentioned: labor, women, and students. These are the enduring institutions of democratic uprising that will continue to corrode into the banality of the Islamic Republic. Soon after the 14 February 2011 street demonstrations I said that the Green Movement has entered a more radical phase. By this radical phase I do not mean blind acts of violence. I mean the endemic and structural crises of the Islamic Republic have now achieved a public forum, a public voice, a public space, and thus any single labor unrest, any single women’s rights issue, and every single student act of defiance will be collectively registered on that matrix and push the movement forward. Mousavi and Karroubi meanwhile have said much, have opened the horizon beyond anything that even Khatami could have had the courage to imagine, and while silenced and in custody, they remain the most eloquent voices of this uprising.

The Islamic Republic has died before its death

Some commentators are emphasizing that one should look at things in the long run and work on creating and cultivating the culture of freedom in Iran instead of focusing on challenging and overturning the Islamic Republic and its political structure in the short run. What is to be done in your view?

HD: We have a perfectly robust “culture of freedom.” Like any other culture we have our own flaws. But that does not mean we are constitutionally incapable of democracy, or that we have a “Jame’eh Kolangi/Makeshift Society,” as it has been suggested—in a moment of bizarre self-Orientalization. We must relentlessly challenge the Islamic Republic, its very foundation, its having brutally distorted our political culture, its sustained history of one atrocity after another—university purges, cultural revolutions, mass executions, forced exiles, etc. In challenging the very foundation of the Islamic Republic, we ordinary folks must understand our immense power. We ordinary people, citizens of our future republic, are far more powerful than all the organs of the Islamic Republic put together. For every execution that they have done over the last two years, we have scandalized them globally and thus prevented ten other executions. Hadi Qaemi is an infinitely superior defender of human rights in Iran that Mohammad Javad Larijani. Every political activist they have put to jail and sought to silence has in fact become far more eloquent in his or her denunciation of this brutality. Jafar Panahi is under indictment and his film was just screened for the whole world to see at Cannes. I assure you, Panahi has never been more popular, his films more widely seen, his cinema more dear to his people, his vision more globally shared. The Green Movement has at once ennobled and enabled us all. Every single Iranian in every single city around the global is infinitely more powerful in representing the realities of our homeland than the entire foreign ministry of the Islamic Republic. It is we, ordinary people, not the Islamic Republic, who are opposing the imposition of sanctions on our homeland, and scandalize the neocon comprador intellectuals who go to the US government and ask it to impose “crippling sanctions” on our brothers and sisters. It is we, not the Islamic Republic, who are opposing war, protecting the territorial integrity of our country in the international community, and denouncing covert operations against our country. We are enabled; we have taken possession of our homeland; we have become agential—and you ask if the Green Movement has failed? Outdated and banal political organizations, the byproducts of the Islamic Republic itself, are exposed for the bankruptcy of their ideas and practices. We are practicing the culture of freedom, dreaming big dreams, signing more liberating songs, painting more beautiful pictures, making more ennobling films—and you ask if the Green Movement has failed? The factual reality of the outdated and banal institutions of the Islamic Republic from the office of the supreme leader to any other institution is entirely useless in upholding the national and global integrity of our country, our homeland, our culture, and by the same token we have become actors of our own destiny. This to me is an infinitely superior achievement than any so-called “revolution” that might result in any one of these retired and corrupt “revolutionaries”—employed by or collaborating with the neocon chicaneries of Europe or US—to come to power in Iran. We must be happy and delighted that precisely because of the prolonged and healthy unfolding of the Green Movement grand charlatans working for such Zionist and neocon outlets as WINEP or Hoover Institute, and thus promoting the interests of US and Israel, are exposed for what they are. Imagine if the catastrophic ideas and aspirations dominant in the Bush Institute were to be the result of a revolution or a regime change. Imagine if the criminal consequences of a neoliberal economics were to be the highest aspiration of a regime change in Iran. What then? I believe it is infinitely better for us to dissect and understand these issues right here and right now while we are laying the foundations of our democratic future. Neither inside Iran nor outside Iran has the Islamic Republic managed to prevent a single production and dissemination of critical ideas we need to cultivate an convey. Look at the magnificent letters that are sent to and are coming out of Evin and Kahrizak, poetry and courage that comes out of Kurdistan, exquisite works of journalism that Fereshteh Ghazi is doing in covering the victims of executions in Iran. Give me one Fereshteh Ghazi, one Akbar Ganji, one Jafar Panahi, one Mostafa Tajzadeh, one Mehrangiz Kar, one Noushin Ahmadi Khorasani—and you can keep all these Che Guevara wannabes to yourself. Through the globalized media we are now connected as we have never been. Look at your own TehranReview, or even the binary opposition between Jaras and Khodnevis. Look at the magnificent work of Mana Neyestani. We are home. This is where we want to be. The Islamic Republic is entirely irrelevant and inconsequential, and under the pressure of its own innate paradoxes it will collapse. Meanwhile we must do more of what we are doing. Live our lives, fight our battles, love our homeland, educate the next generation, and make the Islamic Republic even more irrelevant to our future than it is. The Islamic Republic has died before its death. Meanwhile Jafar Panahi is making films, Mohammad Reza Shajarian is singing, Mohsen Namjoo is composing, Shahin Najafi is rapping, Fereshteh Ghazi is reporting, Akbar Ganji is investigating, Mana Neyestani is drawing, Termeh is painting . . . and in and for all of us in the mountains of Kurdistan Farzad Kamangar is teaching our grandchildren.

Elizabeth Bucar’s Creative Conformity: The Feminist Politics of U.S. Catholic and Iranian Shi’i Women was published in March 2011 by Georgetown University Press. We interviewed her on her book and the problems Iranian Shi’i and U.S. Catholic women face.

It seems quite strange to compare feministic movements in Catholic and Shi’i worlds. What are the similarities between such movements in Iranian and American societies?

I think the strangeness, or rather uniqueness, is what originally drew me to this case study. Although much scholarly work has been written on feminist politics in these two worlds, I am a firm believer that careful comparison can help us understand different religious traditions and practices by placing them in relief against each other. The similarities I found were not that women in these two worlds “want the same things.” Rather I found some semblance in the way they engage their respective religious traditions, particularly the way they respond to clerical directives about what it means to be a good Catholic or Shii women. For example, women it both contexts leverage their experiences as mothers to make arguments that push back against some aspects of clerical teaching, whether they are fighting for women’s legal custody of children after divorce (in the case of Shii women) or arguing for a more holistic view of sexual ethics beyond procreation (in the case of Catholic women).

You seem not to believe that Catholicism and Shi’ism are essentially against feminism. What are your reasons for refuting such a view?

This is a very good question, and cuts right to the heart of part of what I am trying to argue. First, I simply don’t believe –nor do I find evidence to support– the claim that “feminism” is merely what western, liberal, or secular women think it is. Other scholars have argued for the danger of western feminist agendas that seek to “save” Muslim or Catholic women from their men and from their religion, and how this is grounded in imperial assumptions about the superiority of some forms of secular life over all others.
Second, I understand feminist politics to be anything that challenges ideologies that misrepresent women or women’s experiences. Some of these are based in religious discourse, some are not. I intentionally leave undefined what counts as misrepresentation since this will depend to some on a woman’s perspective and context. Finally, if we look at what actual Catholic and Shii women are doing, we find incredibly innovative attempts to advocate on behalf of women within what to an outsider might seem insurmountable odds. Every feminist action takes place within some context: Catholicism and Shii Islam are simply examples in which male authority has helped support patriarchal teachings, but the traditions themselves are not anti-women or antithetical to women’s flourishing.

Other scholars have argued for the danger of western feminist agendas that seek to “save” Muslim or Catholic women from their men and their religion

Do Catholicism and Shia believe in gender equality and women’s freedom indeed? According to which principles they do?

Yes, both traditions have teachings that support a view of women as equitable to men. They share a stance of gender complementarity, in which men and women have different duties and rights, but have equal human dignity and spiritual capacity.

How can we explain the issues such as freedom of wearing or not wearing a veil and abortion under the principles of Shi’ism and Catholicism? Can we stay Shi’ite or Catholic and believe in such issues as well?

You mention the two “hot button” issues in both traditions: abortion in the Catholic church and hijab for the Islamic Republic of Iran. In both cases, the “official” position is not necessarily supported by the community. In the case of abortion, we have polls that clearly show there is almost no difference between rank-and-file American Catholics and American non-Catholics in terms of the moral acceptability of abortion. In other words, despite the Vatican’s condemnation of abortion, many U.S. Catholics (approximately 40%) believe it is a woman’s choice. In Iran, hijab is compulsory, and women potentially face legal punishments (e.g., fines) if they wear “bad hijab,” thus few will go on the record as being against Islamic dress code for women. That said, many women are happy to complain about the law off the record, and I don’t just mean women who see themselves as “secular” or “western.” Even women who say they would continue to veil even if the law was changed dislike the compulsory nature of veiling, which in many ways takes away a women’s ability “to choose” to veil for pious reasons.

Some believe that some of the laws being approved to limit women are not approved because of religion, but because of morality. What are the boundaries between religion and morality?

This is a very important question for the current situation in Iran. We can answer it in a number of ways. On the one hand, in Iran there is no clean line between not only religion and morality, but also between politics and religion. The Iranian constitution, for example, blurs this line, as do the current Iranian authorities who often prosecute political dissidents perceived for moral crimes. On the other hand, I think your question expresses a level of frustration in Iran that all Iranian laws are supposedly “Islamic”, which makes their reform difficult. For example, one argument often made by women trying to reform gender discriminatory laws in Iran is that these laws have their roots in cultural patriarchy rather than sound fiqh, or Islamic legal thought. In other words, reform is justified because these are not laws based in sharia. They argue, and I think often rightly so, the laws that limit women’s freedoms are actually contrary to fundamental Islamic ethical and legal principles.

According to your research, what do you think about the step Iranian feminism movement has reached? And how do you forecast its future?

This is such a difficult question given the current state of Iranian politics. Iran seems to be in such a moment of change, but I am hard pressed to predict where that change may lead. Let me also say that as an American, I certainly don’t stand in some privileged place from which I can or should judge other feminists movements. The US has its own problems, and on some issues Iranian women have much better rights. For example I often remind my students of the generous maternity and employment laws in Iran, that give time off to breast feeding mothers. At my own university, there is no paid maternity leave. I was back at the front of the classroom, teaching a full course load, three months after the birth of my daughter. Americans have a bad habit of judging others as worse off, especially other women, and especially other Muslim women. It is rarely this simple.

What are the most effective strategies for feminism movements to confront Shia or Catholic Fundamentalism?

Creative conformity of course! What I mean by this is that the most effective tactics against fundamentalism are those that are faithful to the tradition (conform) and yet take the tradition someplace new (creative). In the book I discuss five specific rhetorical tactics focused on symbolics, procreation, hermeneutics, embodiment, and what I call “republication.” These tactics take fundamental aspects of the tradition and show how women’s experiences (as mothers, for example) provide insights into what it means to be a good Shii or Catholic woman that male clerics can not possibility know.

Yes, Mr. Llosa! Becoming aware that you have won the prize, I cheered, went and bought those books of you I had not read and suggested my friends to do so. It was a long time I had not read such thick books: seven, eight, or nine hundred pages. I was used to reading novellas, short stories, and novels of other types. But reading your novels these days put me in the mood of story. In the atmosphere of those horrible events and brilliant narrations that only you seem to be an expert in. In the busy world of today, your magic spell made us stay at home and put off every other plan we had. Only you can make us take such heavy books out to the street, keep reading them standing in the metro, and leaf them in the class while the professors frown with regret.

Oh the storyteller grandpa, this was how I became fond of you. First I read The Feast of the Goat. As the story went on I felt that it is happening right here in Iran. I felt that Urania is one of the girls of my homeland, losing their honor day by day. I felt that Trujillo is the same as the dictators of my own country who have dominated people’s lives and minds in such a way that they have lost any will and are ready to become so miserable. In your story Trujillo lies with the ministers’ wives anytime he wants. The ministers know what is happening and are even pleased about that. I wondered if such a thing is possible. “Maybe it’s only imaginary”, I thought. But as I searched more I realized that it is true and a few days ago I read on the web that “if his majesty (the supreme leader) forbids me to continue living with my wife right now, I would obey in spite of my interest in my wife.” I shivered with fear and realized that everything is possible as long as there are people who are totally absorbed in someone.

After The Feast of the Goat, I began reading Conversation in the Cathedral, a great novel which would no doubt be among the ten wonderful books I have ever read. You had once said “I spent such energy narrating this novel that I don’t think I can ever write something like it.” You are right. It is not possible to write anything similar. The book consists of a series of conversations in different situations and you keep the story going through them and describe the power relations. How have you done that? One keeps wondering how such a form can continue through seven hundred pages. Conversation in the Cathedral is a novel of dialogues and characters. It consists of a city of characters, from the pimps, prostitutes, drunks, and homosexuals to politicians, diplomats, and interviewers. You have described all of them one by one, as if you have been in their place once and have lived with them. This type of narration, mixing different stories in a complicated manner and moving them forward simultaneously is a dazzling job. Characters talk with each other and through their conversation, Peru is portrayed. A portray of Lima is drawn. How similar Lima seems to Tehran and how much Peru looks like Iran. I wondered all the time how they have permitted this book to be published when they keep censoring words like ‘breast-pocket’ and so on. I talked about it with the bookseller man and he said: I am sure they have made a mistake and will prevent its publication in the next edition. I was so anxious that I began calling my friends and telling them to go and by the book quickly before they shred it.

How similar Lima seems to Tehran and how much Peru looks like Iran

How tragic to know that Iran today is like Peru fifty years from now. In this book you have described the people around the dictator; in contrast to The Feast of the Goat the main character was the dictator himself: the same flattery, the same betrayal and brutality. I could see the example of each of the characters in the real world: people filled with lies and crafts, although having human senses. Even the most hateful people in your story are pitied and the major character sometimes does things that make the reader angry. Yes, it’s the common fate you have deliberately depicted. You are one of the writers who still believe in the influence of literature on people and said this in your Nobel lecture:

“Without fictions we would be less aware of the importance of freedom for life to be livable, the hell it turns into when it is trampled underfoot by a tyrant, an ideology, or a religion. Let those who doubt that literature not only submerges us in the dream of beauty and happiness but alerts us to every kind of oppression, ask themselves why all regimes determined to control the behavior of citizens from cradle to grave fear it so much they establish systems of censorship to repress it and keep so wary an eye on independent writers. They do this because they know the risk of allowing the imagination to wander free in books, know how seditious fictions become when the reader compares the freedom that makes them possible and is exercised in them with the obscurantism and fear lying in wait in the real world. Whether they want it or not, know it or not, when they invent stories the writers of tales propagate dissatisfaction, demonstrating that the world is badly made and the life of fantasy richer than the life of our daily routine. This fact, if it takes root in their sensibility and consciousness, makes citizens more difficult to manipulate, less willing to accept the lies of the interrogators and jailers who would like to make them believe that behind bars they lead more secure and better lives.”

Yes Mr. Mario! You writers are the ones who encourage sedition. You are the ones who reproduce sedition with your dark books and blasphemous pens. Reading these books one begins comparing the existing situation with that of the fiction and becomes encouraged to do something. The least one can do is to read the book and then hand it to his/her friends to read, then the friend does so, and also the others, and many other books are in this way handed over. These readings become murmurs and bring this question into mind that why or why not we should live like this. This is the beginning of the sedition.

A few days ago I began reading another book of yours: The War of the End of the World! A nine-hundred-page breath-taking book. I bought it the first thing after receiving my monthly payment. I will read it with joy and I will suggest it to my friends, although I know I will not enjoy any book as much as Conversation in the Cathedral. Thank you Mr. Novel! Thank you for lighting our hearts with your books in these days of darkness.

Up until then, Bahrain was part of the territories of Iran and the Persian-installed ruler of Bahrain was its governor. As the movement of the people of Bahrai for independence began, the international community joined them in their cause, and in practice the Shah was not faced with a dilemma but with the only choice left for him: agreeing to the independence of Bahrain. Perhaps, what made the Shah think long and hard was how he could in the course of accepting this independence get something in return from the West. It was agreed that a referendum must be held under the supervision of the UN for the people of Bahrain to vote for independence or remaining under the sovereignty of Iran. This is how the referendum was held in Iran and the Shah of Iran had to submit to an outcome which was all too clear in advance in a democratic gesture.

However, on the other hand, the Shah had become rich with the colossal oil revenues and he had given loans to great countries such as the UK and was thus holding them in debt to himself. Thus he had gained the privilege of full control over the Persian Gulf as the oil vein of the planet. During this phase, Iran interfered in the affairs of the countries of the Persian Gulf to the extent that with its direct military intervention, the coup d’état of Oman was defeated. In this military campaign, Iran did not find it necessary to liaise with the US – its closest ally.

In order to grasp the importance of this critical event, it would be useful to look at the process of independence in southern Sudan. Omar al-Bashir, the Sudanese leader, was under heavy pressure from the international community because of the Darfur crisis, and The Hague had declared him as a criminal. Under these pressures, he had to agree to a referendum to decide about the fate of southern Sudan. The outcome of this referendum was clear right before it. Southern Sudan became independent and pressures on al-Bashir became less, to the extent that his case in the International Criminal Court has been put aside for a while and European countries and the US do not speak much about the need for the arrest of al-Bashir by Interpol.

However, for some time now, Bahrain has been witness to the uprising of the people of this country against the Al Khalifa dynasty and the violent crackdown on this movement. What is interesting here is the level of intervention by Iran in Bahrain. This interference reached a point that Hossein Shariatmadari, the license holder of Kayhan newspaper and close ally of the Supreme Leader in Iran, asked for the direct military intervention of Iran in Bahrain to support the cause of its people; he also mentioned the example of Iranian intervention in the case of Oman during the Shah’s time.

Such activities of the Iranian regime do not go unnoticed by the Arab countries in the Persian Gulf and they make an effort to confront this; however, the question is why has Iran not considered the revolution of the people of Tunisia, Egypt, Yemen, Libya and even Syria as important but deals with the issue of Bahrain as a matter of utmost importance? The rulers of the Islamic Republic certainly have their own reasons for this level of intervention in an independent country in such an overt manner.

Why does Iran deal with the issue of Bahrain as a matter of utmost importance?

The ruling regime in Bahrain

The government of Bahrain resembles the Syrian regime in many ways. In Syria, which is a country with a Sunni majority, it is now over half a century that the Asad family, which belongs to the Alavi minority, runs the state. The foundations of this regime are based on the full support of Iran on the one hand and the occupation of certain parts of the Syrian territories by Israel on the other. When such a regime faces a revolt of people, it quickly realises that it has no popular grounds and no backing in the grassroots and thus it should either continue its hold on power with violent suppression or step down from power like the Shah of Iran or Zine El Abidine Ben Ali, the former President of Tunisia, before much bloodshed (like the case of Libya).

Iran is very well aware of the fact that there is a Shia majority in Bahrain and supporting them can guarantee a good foot hold for Iran in this strategic region in case of the collapse of the regime in Bahrain. This is what happened in Iraq. However, Syria is not a similar case because once Asad is removed from power, one of the most important (if not the most important) pillars of the foreign policy of Iran would be severely shaken or destroyed.

The Islamic Republic has an extremely weak foreign diplomacy and operates in an isolated space. Iran does not have the necessary means for putting diplomatic pressure on the international atmosphere (even in terms of propaganda). Thus, going back to its old habit, it tries to have an influence on the fate of Bahrain through public support for the revolutionaries in Bahrain and also covert operations there.

The Iranian regime has a long record of creating discord among one nation and then creating smaller groups among them and then raising one group to power. The case of Lebanon on the 1980s and then Iraq in recent years are good examples of this policy. The tense atmosphere in Lebanon, which was struggling with war in the 1980s, allowed Iran to first create smaller groups in this country and then support Hizbullah to come into full military confrontation with the other Shii group (the Amal movement) so that Lebanon eventually comes to a point that its fate rests in the hands of the Hizbullah. The same atmosphere came into being in Iraq in a different way and this scenario is now happening in Bahrain.

Nonetheless, the global atmosphere is not the same as during those years and at least the active media may cause obstacles for this strategy to bear fruit. A glance at the recent statement of the Cooperation Council for the Arab States of the Gulf (CCAG) and the reproachful attitude of these countries towards Iran, beside the impressive move of Kuwait against Iran in the case of arresting some people on charges of espionage and then as this confrontation spread across other Arab countries, shows that these countries are trying to take action against Iran now so that they would not have to be in a passive and reactionary position towards Iran in a not too far future.

The Oil Highway

Geopolitically, Bahrain is located in a point in the Persian Gulf which is a critical passage for the transport of oil in a region which provides the greatest part of the world’s oil. In circumstances where the Hormuz strait is pretty much controlled by Iran, Bahrain can easily become a location which can be a manoeuvring area for the forces opposing Iran before Iran takes control of the area. It is exactly for this reason that the US has chosen this small country as the site for building one of its biggest military bases in the world and has concentrated a large number of its military force there. Beside a military base, the US has established its largest marine patrol outside the US territories in the US: the US Marines in this country are from 53 different nationalities and they serve their military service in this area. Every now and then, senior intelligence authorities of the US visit them. Michael Chertoff, the US Secretary of Homeland Security, was visiting this military base in Bahrain in 2007 and said that the very powerful presence of the US in Bahrain is a clear message to supporters of terrorism proving that this strategic region cannot become a battle ground for them to show their power with the US remaining indifferent to it.

It is clear that as much as the tensions in Bahrain are a valuable gift to Iran, the US and its allies are greatly concerned, to the point that they completely ignore the suppression in Bahrain and even move further than this to send the Saudi Arabian Army to Bahrain to assist the government in crackdowns.
On the other hand, Iran has no intention of ignoring the situation in Bahrain and there is every chance that if the situation goes on for a while, it may send forces of the Revolutionary Guards from Lebanon to engage in military action. This kind of engagement is quite possible if the Shia groups in Bahrain ask for the full support of the Supreme Leader of Iran and then if voices are heard in Iran that it is a religious duty to support the people of Bahrain. The government of Bahrain has immediately sensed this threat and dismantled all Shia political parties in Bahrain so that at least they are deprived of any legal protection and they can be suppressed much easier.

Iran has no intention of ignoring the situation in Bahrain

Bahrain: the espionage centre in the Persian Gulf

Many years ago, the lifestyle and the demography of the Lebanese society allowed the powerful countries of the world to establish their intelligence bases in these countries. Lebanon has always been one of the most important areas in the world for security and intelligence activities. However, since civil war started in Lebanon and it continued for a while, the space for any kind of reconnaissance work became very much limited. It is quite natural that when streets of a country turn into a shooting field and setting up check points, and kidnapping becomes the rule and the means of fighting, any kind of intelligence and reconnaissance work is disrupted. Therefore, this reconnaissance centre was gradually dismantled and it was replaced by Cyprus.

In the Persian Gulf, though, a similar location is neither Kuwait nor Saudi Arabia or Qatar: it is Bahrain which is the host of the bigger intelligence and security services in the world, thus making this small country an important strategic point. If we put together the military and intelligence elements, these two are sufficient to turn the disruption of the security of a country into a threat. The people of Bahrain are pursuing their demands of freedom and they may not clearly realise that their movement has pushed the world to stop the downfall of the Bahrain regime and prevent the sliding of all the huge assets of the Persian Gulf directly towards Iran.

Bahrain and its impact on the Saudi Arabia

Bahrain is located near the al-Qatif area in the East of Saudi Arabia. This area has the largest number of Shias as a minority which is under pressure in Saudi Arabi. Immediately following the tensions in Bahrain, the people of al-Qatif started similar movements. One can imagine that if the Bahrain regime collapses and the Shias in Bahrain rise to power, the Shia minority of al-Qatif will not remain silent and will start movements against the central government.
This situation becomes even further complicated when we see that the Shias in the north of Yemen (the al-Houthi group) have been fighting Saudi Arabia and causing problems on behalf of Iran. Now, after the situation in Yemen, the space for the resumption of their activities after a period of an iron fist rule becomes much opener.

Since the Arab countries have no considerable popular grounding, they are faced with this real threat that if the Shia minorities who make up the minority in most of these countries start an uprising, people from other tribes and clans may join them, thus making the control and suppression of this uprising extremely difficult for the central government. The victory of the Bahrain movement can become a starting point in the countries of the Persian Gulf encouraging the Shias in the East of Saudi Arabia to make a move. At the same time the Shias in the South of Saudia Arabia may put pressure on the government in the border areas with Yemen. In other countries like Kuwait, the Shia can become united with the Bedouins and follow up on these movements and eventually make the entire region unstable.

When Iran finds a strong foothold in Iraq, it is most wise if Tehran looks for bases in Bahrain, Yemen, Kuwait and Saudi Arabia and start a full fight with the governments of these countries. Whether the Islamic Republic’s dream of monopolising the Persian Gulf and defeating the US and its allies is realised or whether the West can manage these events in the Persian Gulf relying on the Saudi Arabia, is an issue which eventually depends on the fate of Bahrain. Bahrain has an area of over 700 square kilometres of which only 400 square kilometres are desert land. This country has now become a battlefield for the influential countries of the world to flex their muscles. In this muscle-flexing, the people of Bahrain are used as the fighting gloves.

Buruma is a Dutch writer and academic who studied Chinese and Japanese literature and arts, through which he became familiar with Asian culture and soul. It caused him to author numerous articles and books such as Tokyo: Form and Spirit (1986) and God’s Dust: A Modern Asian Journey (1989) trying to create understanding and peace between Eastern and Western cultures. But maybe his most important book is Occidentalism: The West in the Eyes of Its Enemies, co-authored with Avishai Margalit. Though the book was first published in 2004, it is still being considered as a notable work. The book discusses an ill mind that imagines the West to be devoid of any virtues, believes that it is the symbol of sins and corruptions and must be destroyed. The point is that the term “Occidentalism” itself doesn’t refer to such a meaning. It is used as an inversion of Orientalism and means the knowledge of Western cultures and traditions, but Buruma regards both terms as negative concepts, as Edward Said did decades ago by his book Orientalism, challenging the concept and regarding it as something derived from Western imperialistic views on the East. Said’s 1978 book can be considered as a motivation for Ian Buruma to write Occidentalism, the fact that caused us to interview him.

Why do you regard the term “Occidentalism” as a negative concept?

The way I used the term does not refer to criticism of American or European policies, or even cultures. ‘Occidentalism’ is a violent fantasy that imagines the West to be so wicked that it must be destroyed. This is a symbolic West, of course, a demonic image associated with sin, greed, corruption, sexual depravity, etcetera. It is a form of dehumanization, because it holds that Westerners have no souls, just base appetites.

Do you think that “Orientalism” is used in the same way?

In the sense that ‘Orientalism’ also dehumanizes people from the Orient, yes. In the case of Orientalism, people of the East are considered to be like children, who need to be mastered by the ‘adult’ West.

What are the roots of Occidentalism? Colonization and Imperialism? Which period does Occidentalism refer to? And what is the relationship between Occidentalism and Modernity?

The demonic image of civilization that is so corrupted by sensuality and material greed that it must be destroyed goes back to the biblical story of the Tower of Babylon. The Twin Towers of New York were the modern version of Babylon.

Do you regard Occidentalism as an illusion or a type of paranoia?

Both.

Which nations or countries have such a view about the West more than the others? Are the Muslims more predisposed to have such a view?

No, they are not. Avishai Margalit and I argued in our book, Occidentalism, that the demonic idea of Western depravity actually originated in the West itself, specifically in 19th century Germany, as well as Russia. Japanese ultra-nationalists in the 1920s and 30s, who were in fact much influenced by the West, particularly by German ideas about the West, often became Occidentalists.

The demonic idea of Western depravity actually originated in the West itself

What is the effect of religion on developing the “Occidentalism”? Can we regard Occidentalism as something such as a clash of religions?

No, not necessarily. Radical versions of Islam can lend themselves to demonic images of the West, but so can radical versions of Christianity. The Russian ‘Slavophiles’* of the 19th century were Russian Orthodox. And the people who denounced wicked Babylon were Jews.

Can we explain terrorism and the reasons behind it through knowing the concept of Occidentalism? Or do you think them to be related to religion?

This depends on which version of terrorism you mean. Terrorism is a tactic used in many different places under very different circumstances. Islamist terrorism is a form of revolutionary religion, which is a political as much as a religious ideology.

Which factors develop Occidentalism nowadays? Let’s suppose that the East would modify all its views about the West and the western phenomena. If so, are the policies and the acts of western states going toward making the Occidentalism abate?

This question still suggests that Occidentalism is a clash between a geographical West and East, or between Westerners and Orientals. This misses the point. It is a clash of ideologies, not civilizations, or different cultures. To an Occidentalist, many people in the East, especially if they are secular liberals, should be denounced just as much as Westerners. So Western policies are not the crucial factor.

What is the role of both western and eastern intellectuals in reproducing the Orientalism and the Occidentalism? How can an intellectual keep away from these powerful stereotypes?

Western and Eastern intellectuals, who share similar ideas about the desirability of individual freedom and democratic institutions, have more in common with each other than they do with people who are opposed to such ideas, wherever they may live. Western intellectuals who prize political liberties will be on the side of the Iranian Green movement. And Middle Eastern liberals will surely be receptive to liberal ideas in the West.

What is the alternative discourse on describing and expounding the world?

The alternative is not to be enslaved by dogmas, wherever they originate, and to see societies as collections of individuals, who must build institutions to solve conflicts peacefully, and create laws to guarantee civic liberties. Again, in this respect, liberal-minded people, whether they come from Tehran or New York, should be on the same side.

* Slavophilia was an intellectual movement originating from 19th century that wanted the Russian Empire to be developed upon values and institutions derived from its early history. Slavophiles were especially opposed to the influences of Western Europe in Russia. There were also similar movements in Poland, Hungary and Greece. (Wikipedia)

Keshavarzian is Associate Professor of Middle Eastern and Islamic Studies at New York University and former editor of the Middle East Research and Information Project (MERIP). He is the author of Bazaar and State in Iran: the Politics of the Tehran Marketplace (2007) in which he compared the economics and politics of the marketplace under the Pahlavis and under the Islamic Republic regime. Keshavarzian has also published articles on clergy-state relations and authoritarian survival in Iran.

Which step has the Green Movement reached? What difficulties can the fact – that Mr. Mousavi and Mr. Karroubi have been arrested or under house arrest – cause for the opposition and even the government?

The imprisonment of Mousavi and Karoubi is obviously of symbolic importance and illustrates the confidence of the Ahmadinejad government and regime at this moment. It would be interesting to know what exact calculations and tactical discussions have been taking place among the decision makers since the 2009 elections. Why did they not arrest them earlier? Why did they arrest them now? Yet, I don’t believe that the Green Movement can be ended by arresting these people, who themselves have shied away from being “leaders.” By the Green Movement, I mean both those who self-identify as its members and those who are sympathetic to aspects of its demand for transforming the regime in ways that make it more transparent and accountable.

However, from my vantage point, the Green Movement faced profound challenges and shortcomings for many months before these recent events. The rallies and protests in the summer of 2009 were important events that demonstrated a new political language or “discourse” around individual rights, procedural transparency, equality before the law, and responsibilities of rulers to ensure accountability and participation of citizens. These conceptions of politics and relations between the governed and the governors obviously emerged out of a longer tradition that goes back to the Mashruteh, but it really was a crystallization of the agenda of the reformist movement of the 1990s (1370s) and larger socioeconomic changes of the last three decades.

While the large rallies exhibited enormous bravery, they also had limits

Yet, while the large rallies and other forms of civil disobedience exhibited enormous bravery and a will to express unity despite diversity, it also had limits. By the autumn of 2009, the street, university campus, and blogosphere were no longer safe and effective places for mobilizing against the state. This had at least two implications. First, in order to generate new spheres for political action, the Green Movement, which has been restricted to university activists, organizations tied to reformist parties and civil society organizations, and women’s groups, needed to establish alliances with pre-existing movements and social groups. The obvious one is the labor movement, but even some factions among the rural population, merchants, and state employees could have been identified. Of course the interaction between the Greens and these other groups would have required negotiation and compromise and would have transformed the nature of the movement and its demands. Second, the increasingly harsh clampdown was a clear indication that the regime was willing and able to unify around Ahmadinejad and would not tolerate public dissent even by former regime elites.

In the beginning days of last year, Iranian people hoped and believed that some changes would happen in 1389. Now, 89 has passed and no changes have happened yet. What do you think the reason is?

As I mentioned above, I feel there was a lot of wishful thinking that colored analysis of the severe limits of the movement. The Green Movement was both repressed by an institutionally robust state and held back by an opposition that spoke on behalf of a broad spectrum but was unable or unwilling to actually engage with more diverse constituencies. 1389 was a time when many analysts and pundits could have taken time for reflection, self-criticism, and re-formulation of the movement. This is true for those inside of Iran; but I hesitate to emphasize this because these people are living and working in highly restricted conditions. Thus, I think the onus for self-criticism is mostly for those outside of the country who spent much of the fall and winter of 1388 (especially around Ashura) presenting a triumphalist message that the Greens were going to out-maneuver the state. Not only did these pundits over-estimate the organizational breadth and coherence of the Green Movement, but they downplayed the agency of the regime. Many analysts outside of Iran seemed to underestimate the ability of the rulers in the Islamic Republic to use various political, economic, and social welfare intuitions to mobilize resources and support, distribute patronage, and offer avenues to reproduce regime elites. For instance, there seemed to be an implicit assumption that the Islamic Republic needed Hashemi-Rafsanjani more than he needed his levers of powers. Also, almost all of the analysis of the subsidy reforms predicted that this economic restructuring would result in economic crisis and political upheaval. I have to admit that I too thought the subsidy reforms that began last year were politically very risky and could bring a wider spectrum of Iranians involved in the protests. It is unclear what will happen in the coming months, but it is noteworthy that the subsidy reforms have proceeded extremely smoothly—there have been almost no riots or major immediate economic crises. However, Ahmadinjead’s administration has demonstrated that it is able to marshal the banking system as well as the radio and TV to implement these reforms that may have negative consequences for domestic productivity and equality in the long-run, but in the short term have been presented as a national necessity and empowering for “the consumer.” This reality should call on people and strategists to acknowledge the weakness of their predictions and begin to understand the institutional capacities of the regime. It is only after self-critique that new and more effective strategies can be formulated.

The Arab Spring will probably have consequences for politics in Iran, but it is too soon and difficult to know what the consequences will be

An analysis to forecast the fate of Iran democratic movement has been created considering the revolutions and uprisings that have covered all the Middle East nowadays. Can the fate of dictator governments of the region affect an isolated government such as Islamic Republic of Iran?

The Arab Spring will probably have consequences for politics in Iran, but it is too soon and difficult to know what the consequences will be. The protests in the region are evolving and highly unpredictable. On the one hand, those who would like to reform and change the Islamic Republic may learn from their counterparts in the region. For instance, it is clear that the cooperation and coordination between labor activists and youth groups in Tunisia and Egypt were critical in challenging the leadership of the regimes. The international alignments in the Iran case are quite different and work against rather than in favor of a peaceful transformation. On the other hand, the regime has been wary that these uprisings may prove inspirational to Iranians, but also threaten allies such as Syria and open the door to US intervention as in the case of Libya. Having said that, I suspect that the Islamic Republic’s position in the regional order will not be hurt by a change in the leadership in Egypt or the added pressure on Saudi Arabia by events in Bahrain and Yemen. In fact, it is Israel and the US who will have more difficulty adjusting to the emerging regional order.

Some consider Iran’s economy to be the Achilles’ heel of its state and believe that the state or even the government would finally fall through the economical problems; the same thing that happened to the Soviet Union. Do you consider economy to be a proper motive for change in Iran?

The economy has been the Achilles’ heel of this regime for over three decades, no? When we look at the rebellions in the Arab World in the last few months, it is striking that two of the economies that had the steadiest growth rates and allegedly most dynamic economies in the region were Tunisia and Egypt. What this tells me is that what is important is how economic grievances, about unemployment or inflation or inequality, are translated into political demands against the political establishment. There is enormous potential for this in the Iranian case, but I have not seen this take place. For instance, the plight of industrial workers is intimately tied to the political decision to privatize firms and change the legal status of workers to contract workers with little access to job protection or social welfare. These demands should resonate with the larger concerns of the Green Movement because they are based on notions of equality and social as well as civil rights. Simultaneously, we have seen merchants and shopkeepers protesting Ahmadinejad’s taxation policies and attempts to open up the accounting books of the commercial sector. The merchants’ concerns stemmed from their lack of trust of state tax collectors and can be framed around the issue of the absence of transparency in state’s own budget and accounting. Iran’s rich history of dissent has many examples of economic grievances being interpreted and presented as political challenges to the state; just think of the Mashruteh, the oil nationalization movement, or the numerous workers actions and bazaar closures in 1357.

About two years have passed since the Green Movement was born. Now, what do you think its achievements are?

I think the Green Movement has had a number of achievements and I hope my critical tone does not imply that I think that the struggles in Iran are in vain and that it was doomed from the outset. The movement has deepened the language of rights, notions of diversity in unity, the centrality of the plight of women and how it has ramifications for all of society, and the belief that political agency belongs to all and power must not be exercised by only a few. Meanwhile, while the regime has been able to present a unified block against the Greens, it is clear that even among the so-called conservatives, there are rivalries and ideological disputes that need to be processed sooner rather than later. The parliamentary elections thus will reveal conflicts that the regime has tried to keep under wraps. Finally, key groups in producing the state’s hegemony – politicians, journalists, filmmakers, and professors have defected since 2009. The regime will have to invest in reproducing new agents that it will never be able to fully control. Thus, there will be other opportunities for those struggling to make Iran more politically and socially democratic. When these opportunities arise, the inspirational, foolhardy, and tragic experiences of the Green movement should not be forgotten.

We told him: you don’t know English at all. He said: I will learn. After all it is better than staying here. We told him: you can continue your study here, get a PhD and become a university professor. He said: I’d rather go back to our village and butcher sheep than studying here. He was annoyed. He had been irritated during his dissertation. He came to blows with his professors and he finally got a bad mark. He was infuriated after the defense session. He swore loudly although he is usually a peaceful person. Javad started studying English. He studied for two years until he finally got the required mark. He knew nothing to begin with, and he studied day and night. His apartment was like a language lab. There were sheets of paper on every wall: English words and phrases, hopeful sentences, days left from his English exam.

After the 2009 disputed election, I didn’t go home for some days and stayed with Javad. His apartment was near Enghelab Street and I could reach the demonstrations easily. Whenever I was coming out of the house I asked him, ‘Don’t you want to come, Javad? Everyone is on the street.’ He said ‘No, I am finished off with these things. I haven’t even voted, let alone taking it back. The only thing I want is to leave this country.’ And so he did. He texted a few weeks before and said that he had won a scholarship from a Spanish university and was waiting for his visa. The night before his departure we went to visit him. I said: you must be so excited now. He said: no, I am not. I am only certain that this is not a place to stay.

Nasim is a friend of my girlfriend. We are so close, mostly because of the days that we went to demonstrations together. The events of those days have affected us so deeply that we always keep talking about them. Nasim belongs to a rich family, but she is an independent young woman. She used to work and had bought herself a Peugeot 206 and sometimes took us to Zahirodole, Emamzadeh Taher, and Ahmad Abad. We called her the cemetery taxi-driver. Nasim is a passionate girl. She cannot help talking or crying. She worked in a public organization. She put on her green bracelet and went to work. She announced the demonstration schedule out loud and discussed political issues recklessly. The heads of the organization had no doubts. They fired her right away. Nasim came home and cried and cried. Then she said: there’s no problem, this is a good chance for me to study for MA courses. She studied hard and got a high rank in the exam. But when she found out that she was a suspended student and could not enter university, she didn’t wait a second. She applied for a university in Malaysia and was accepted after one month. When she hugged us in the airport and was crying, she said: I still don’t want to talk about it, because I am sure if I think deeply, I would stay. I would stay and cry so loud that they will come and put me away in prison. She left and told us: forgive me for being free from the protests for two years. I promise to come back and be with you.

I met Farhad in the mountains. On a summer day, when I had decided to go to the mountain alone, I saw Farhad sitting in the shelter, singing for himself. We talked to each other and became friends. Farhad’s family had applied for immigration to Canada many years ago, and they had received their immigration cards. But Farhad didn’t want to go. He said: we have to stay. We have to build our future with our own hands. We should do what we can for our country. Farhad wasn’t an emotional person, he believed in what he said. His family called him from Canada every day and asked him to come. But Farhad resisted until he was arrested in the rally. He was in detention for a few days, and then he was set free. He was whacked badly, but he said: I have paid the expenses like everyone else. There is no difference. He kept participating in the demonstrations, until they attacked his house one night when he had gone to the super market. He was identified, but luckily he saw what happened and ran away on his flip-flops. He went to one of his relatives’ house, borrowed some money, and escaped from the Kurdistan border. Now Farhad is exiled or homeless as he says. A homeless person who is kicked out from his own country with flip-flops. Farhad is still determined. He says: I will come back to Iran as soon as I know that I would not be arrested. He says: I will not rest until I see that my country is improving.

If we become desperate, and run away, can we still have hope for Iran’s future?

Tehran’s weather in the spring time is wonderful for taking a walk in the streets filled with the smell of blossoms. Especially if it is raining you don’t want to go back home. You just like to walk along and watch the jasmines hanging down from the walls and feel the freshness of the rain. You wish Tehran was always this calm and beautiful. But a few days ago when we said goodbye to Javad, the weather did not have that sense anymore. Seeing the dark sky, I felt lonely and depressed. I realized that more than ten friends of mine have gone from Iran and some others are planning to go. I don’t want to judge these people, but if we become desperate, whether temporarily or by force, and run away, can we still have hope for Iran’s future? I don’t want to stick to clichés, but I like my country because I have grown up here. All the mountains, polluted rivers, ancient places that have been destroyed by now, draw me like a magnet. If I was born somewhere else, I would feel the same about that place. But I don’t want to feel defeated. I don’t want to admit that I am giving this land away to the people who have no interest in it and are fantasizing about the day it is ruined. We should stay and resist and call back all Javads, Nasims, and Farhads, and try to put things back to where they should be.

* a line from a poem by Iranian poet Ahmad Shamloo

So this is what utter despair can look like. On Wednesday, Kambiz Roustayi, a 36-year-old Iranian asylum seeker, set himself on fire on one of the busiest squares of Amsterdam. Not Teheran, not Tunis, not Cairo, but the capital of a democratic country. April 6, 2011 was one of the first glorious days of spring, but Kambiz could not feel the sunshine anymore. The only heat he could think of that day when travelling to Amsterdam to execute his dark plan was the heat of the flames that would put him out of his misery.

Because misery is exactly what Kambiz was faced with. He had been ‘living’ in the Netherlands for eleven years, but his request for asylum had failed several times. Last week, another refusal of the Dutch authorities was one too many for this young man, who went to university in Tehran and had worked as a journalist in his country. He expected to be deported and was afraid of being arrested or even executed in Iran, as he had written articles that the Iranian regime disapproved of. Kambiz died on Thursday as a result of his injuries. A friend of his, Parvis Noshirrani, told Dutch television on Thursday that Roustayi announced he was planning to commit suicide at a meeting with civil servants on 25 March at the asylum centre. But Noshirrani says he was not taken seriously and was not given help. ‘He was fed up with the situation. Roaming the city, sleeping in the streets. No status, no travel documents, no future. If he had returned to Iran, he probably faced the same fate.’

Immigration and Asylum Minister Gerd Leers called Mr Roustayi’s death ‘very tragic’, but says that all procedures were followed correctly and that the man was given proper legal assistance. This is of course the answer we can expect from a minister like Gerd Leers. He is the man who announced in February that he wanted to ‘sharpen’ the Dutch asylum policy. If for instance an asylum seeker wants to appeal against a refusal for asylum, he has to wait for the verdict in his country of origin – no matter how dangerous the situation over there is. It is an inhuman and barbarous attitude, but Leers is surfing on the waves of populism that Geert Wilders’ xenophobe political party PVV (Party for Freedom) has been sending through a country that was once praised for its tolerance. With his sharpened asylum policy, Gerd Leers seems to want to act just as tough as Geert Wilders.

Acting tough causes some vulnerable people like Kambiz Roustayi to no longer see light at the end of the tunnel

But acting tough causes some vulnerable people like Kambiz Roustayi to no longer see any light at the end of the tunnel. Actually, the inhuman asylum plans of Leers reached a tragic climax on the very day that Roustayi committed suicide. In the morning, it was announced that eight Iraqi families who were denied asylum would be deported from Amsterdam to dangerous Bagdad the following day. In the afternoon, Kambiz Roustayi put himself on fire. Unfortunately, we can no longer ask him, but the deportation of eight families to his neighboring country Iraq might have fastened Roustayi’s gloomy idea. Just before he put himself ablaze, he shouted that you only get asylum in Holland if you are gay or christian. This is not just a cry of despair. It is a cry that reveals a bitter truth. In March, Gerd Leers said that when an asylum seeker can ‘prove’ that his sexual orientation is a cause for persecution in his home country, he could be granted asylum in the Netherlands. Apparently, having written articles against the regime, which in Iran is also a cause for arrest or even execution, is not taken into account when considering asylum. The Islamic Republic is not at war, which seems some people to cause to forget what a horrible dictatorship Iran is. It is a shame that Holland deports people to countries where the lives of people are in real danger. It is a shame that this minister wants to act as the uncompromising tough guy and shout that we should not grant so many immigrants asylum in the Netherlands when actually, since 2003, sharpening asylum procedures has hardly had any effect and those who do flee their country are mostly citizens who are living in dangerous dictatorships. How can we send those people back if we consider ourselves democrats and defenders of human rights? As Mr. Van Haren, the lawyer of Kambiz, said: ‘The authorities may be right to reject an asylum request and deport an asylum seeker, but if he is still here after eight or ten years and you see him deteriorating, and become mentally finished, only physically okay, there comes a time when the authorities have to take responsibility. You cannot just show someone the door.’

How can we send those people back if we consider ourselves democrats and defenders of human rights

The death of Kambiz does not only teach us that Holland should reconsider its asylum policy. Over the past week, it also made me think about how little attention we actually have for the lives of asylum seekers. They only seem to get a human face when something terrible happens. The Afghan girl Sahar gave a name and story to asylum seekers in Holland only when she was in danger of being deported – a decision that was reversed by Gerd Leers on Friday, which might have been influenced by the tragic suicide of Kambiz, though of course the minister will never admit this. Kambiz also gave a human face to the plight of refugees and asylum seekers in our rich western countries, but he could only do so by choosing to set himself on fire. According to his friend Mr. Noshirrani, this is exactly what Roustayi had in mind with his act of desperation. ‘He wanted to save other lives by ending his own. There are plenty of people in asylum centres, there are plenty of people who are deported without mercy.’ It made me think of the words of Holland’s best-known former asylum seeker, the Persian-Dutch writer Kader Abdolah, who wrote this about his life in an asylum center in his debut De adelaars (The Eagles): ‘Will I ever find rest over here, I thought. What will I do in this country? Do I have enough energy to start all over again? Thinking about the future made me fearful.’ (1)

These are probably the exact same thoughts that came to Kambiz’ mind while living in the asylum center. But contrary to the man telling the story in Abdolah’s De adelaars, Kambiz had to wait for eleven long years for an answer about his future. It made him desperate and it made him chose flames instead of sunshine.

We should of course not forget that the main culprit in all of this is the Islamic Republic of Iran, which forces people like Kambiz to flee their dictatorial regime. But once these people are here, we should show them that we are democrats and not barbarians. We should not let them live like drifters for eleven years and let them end up in flames on a sunny day in the city centre of Amsterdam.

Kambiz is gone, but I whisper some lines of poetry from his beloved home country that can soften the pain somewhat: A thousand gleaming sunbeams with each step you take, / a thousand weeping stars / of my desire: / if love alone could speak. (Ahmad Shamloo)

(1) Kader Abdolah, De adelaars, De Geus, 1993, p.34.