Until We Are Free

by Shirin Ebadi

  One prerequisite for running seemed to be speaking out on record against the 2009 fitna, or conspiracy, as the hard-line establishment had termed the Green Movement uprising. The reformists at first considered making their election participation contingent on Mousavi and Karroubi’s release from house arrest, though later they shifted course and agreed to field a candidate. None of their picks secured clearance, however, so they backed Hassan Rouhani, a moderate conservative who in the world of Iranian politics had long been comfortably considered part of the conservative elite. He had held numerous senior security positions over the years but was seen as being a pragmatist rather than a right-wing Islamist ideologue.

  On the election trail, Rouhani sounded more progressive than someone of his political stripe and began attracting the attention of the moderate middle class, who would have ordinarily backed a reform candidate. During one of the televised debates between the candidates, he argued that Iran shouldn’t pursue a nuclear program at the expense of everything else that mattered to people’s livelihoods. “It is very good for the [uranium enrichment] centrifuges to turn,” he said, “but the wheels of the country must also turn.”

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  In June 2013, Iranians took to the polls under sunny, bright skies to again vote for president. They did this as an act of faith, hoping that the system would not tamper with their votes, as it did in 2009, and would allow them the freedom to choose their elected leader, as the Islamic Republic’s constitution, for all its flaws, provides for. The favored candidate of the establishment was a dour old negotiator, Saeed Jalili, but in the days before the election, an outpouring of frustration and discontent broke out around the status quo Ahmadinejad had created. Significantly, it was not just ordinary Iranians who were furious but also many stalwart regime figures who were themselves participating in the election. The supreme leader’s old foreign policy adviser, Ali Akbar Velayati, and nearly all of the other candidates used the televised national debates to lambast Ahmadinejad’s foreign and economic policies. It was finally clear and exposed on national television, and upheld by senior regime figures, that Ahmadinejad had steered Iran to the brink of war and economic collapse.

  Since I spoke to my friends and relatives in Iran every day, I knew well how high inflation and the collapse of Iran’s currency, the rial, were destroying people’s quality of life. Many of my daughters’ friends who had left Iran to study abroad had been forced to return home, as the rial had lost nearly half of its value in two weeks of 2012. The situation was so bad that Iran, once a wealthy country, owed money to the World Bank, and its inflation rate hovered around 50 percent. The United States’ sanctions had also contributed to the economy’s deterioration, hindering trade and choking Iran off from the international banking system.

  Naturally, the candidate who sounded the most pragmatic, who spoke of hope and moderation, who promised to fix the economy and repair Iran’s relationship with the West would generate the most popularity. This man was Hassan Rouhani, and he made a key the symbol of his campaign. He would unlock all the doors for Iran, he vowed, and bring the nation back into the world. He won resoundingly.

  The day the authorities announced the results, Iranians celebrated in the streets, pouring into parks on foot and cruising in automobiles up and down Tehran’s major boulevards, honking their horns. Strikingly, some chanted the slogan “Thank you, dictator!” With this they were conveying to the supreme leader how much they resented his authoritarian rule but, at the same time, showing their gratitude for having their votes respected.

  For me, watching from afar, it was a bittersweet moment: Iranians’ demands for free, democratic elections had been so far reduced, their expectations so diminished, that they were gladdened by vote counting that was not fraudulent, in an election process that had vetted candidates so stringently that it could hardly be considered a competition. This change was the very outcome the political system had been seeking. Through the brutal crackdown in 2009, Iranians’ aspirations for democratic change had been crushed, and in their place the people had acquiesced to the state’s rigid, controlled handover of the presidency to one of the few men it had deemed sufficiently loyal.

  It only took as many days as Rouhani needed to appoint his cabinet for it to become clear that he was not the leader people had imagined. His choice for justice minister was one of the clerics accused of directly overseeing the mass execution of political prisoners in 1988, in which an estimated forty-five hundred citizens were killed. When I had represented the family of Dariush and Parvaneh Forouhar, dissident intellectuals who’d been stabbed to death in their home in 1998, the cleric’s name had come up repeatedly, invoked by the agents accused of carrying out the killings. At the same time, the supreme leader kept insisting in his public speeches that Iran would not be compromising on any of its policies, either foreign or domestic.

  And what of Ahmadinejad? The ex-president, who’d had some serious disagreements with the supreme leader during his second term in office, once again became the focus of attention after declaring his support for the leader. That same summer of Rouhani’s election, the supreme leader appointed Ahmadinejad to the powerful Expediency Council, which is charged with mediating disputes between the parliament and the Guardian Council. Therefore, although everyone had thought that Ahmadinejad’s political career was over, he had in effect started a new era, and had received his reward for remaining aligned with the supreme leader. Ahmadinejad’s “invaluable efforts” during his time as president, the supreme leader said, had earned him a place at the helm of one of the state’s most influential bodies. It was an early signal that while Ahmadinejad had been shifted out of the limelight, his radical positions were still shared by the highest authorities. In the meantime, Mousavi and Karroubi were still under house arrest, and hundreds of others who had ended up incarcerated because of the 2009 presidential elections were still languishing in prisons.

  The Iranian state, as ever, is extremely adept at hiding the costs of its various policies from its citizens. Ayatollah Khomeini’s favorite expression after the 1979 revolution was that the “the Islamic Revolution must be exported beyond Iran’s borders.” In the intervening years, the precise meaning and impulse behind that view has become clear. It drives Iran’s arming and support for Hezbollah, through which Iran extends its influence throughout the Levant and to the very borders of Israel. It drives Iran to create instability in corners of the region as far-flung as Yemen, aiding the country’s Shia rebels. Those with longer memories will, of course, recall the Mykonos incident, when Iran dispatched assassins to execute Iranian activists in a German restaurant. The cases are myriad. Iran has sent arms to Gambia, confiscated off the coast of Nigeria. And, more recently, there is the suppurating civil war in Syria, a conflict that has made four million Syrians refugees. This conflict is abetted by Iran, which is bolstering its ally Bashar al-Assad, bent on retaining its supply route to Syria and beating back the Sunni extremists that, incensed by Iran’s backing of Shia forces in Iraq, have essentially opened a wider front against Iran. All of this shows the legacy of Khomeini’s bid to “export” the revolution, which in practice has meant that Iran has used and continues to use any means and resources to advance its international influence, regardless of what interference this poses in the affairs of other countries.

  What I believe has slowly become clear to the people of the world, especially Muslims, is that Iran waves the banner of Palestinian solidarity chiefly to promote its own interests. When Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas asked the U.N. General Assembly to admit Palestine to the United Nations, Ayatollah Khamenei denounced him as a traitor; with such a request, Iran’s supreme leader argued, Abbas was accepting the legitimacy of Israel. Palestine is the golden cause of the Islamic Republic, the center of its claim that it defends the Muslims of the world. But what about the massacre of Muslims of Chechnya or the ruthless killing of the Uighur Muslims in China? Iran has said little, if anything, about these abuses because Russia and China are f
irm supporters, willing to defend Iran’s nuclear ambitions as part of their own chess game with the United States.

  Such double standards and hypocrisies reveal Iran’s political ambitions and underscore what an enormous challenge President Rouhani has before him. The Islamic Republic’s foreign policy and modus operandi in the world are largely based on negative influence: the arming of proxies, the nurturing of militias, and investment in Shia soft power; it will take a wholesale realignment of the regime’s perception of its interests to change this. But change it must. In the long term, a state that brokers its power in the shadows cannot be on sound enough terms with the world to provide security for its citizens. Under Ahmadinejad, Canada and Britain severed their ties with Iran, and the Sunni-ruled countries of the region, particularly Bahrain, the United Arab Emirates, Kuwait, and Saudi Arabia, view Iran with great trepidation and hostility. Indeed, Saudi Arabia’s rivalry with Iran is slowly eroding the region from within, with proxy conflicts emerging in Iraq and Syria, and a dangerous sectarian strife is stoking instability and religious hatred where even just five years ago there had been peace and coexistence. This is perhaps the most troubled, dangerous time in the modern history of the region.

  Having inherited a system that thrives by sowing chaos in the region, Rouhani will have to decide how far he wants to try to go. A genuine first step would be abandoning Iran’s support for Assad in Syria, but Iran may countenance such a move only when it truly sees no other way out. Sadly, despite the destruction of Syria, the leveling of the city of Aleppo, and the giant migration of Syria’s population, we are not there yet.

  The easier space, one might say, for Rouhani to bring about change is internally. How the Iranian government treats its own citizens is a private affair, unaffected by the militias roaming across Iraq or the ups and downs of the nuclear negotiations. Since 2009, violations of human rights in Iran have intensified markedly, and the United Nations has designated a “special rapporteur” for Iran, whose reports detail the gravity of what is happening inside the country.

  As for the discriminatory laws themselves—the whole legal structure through which the Islamic Republic enshrines gender discrimination and violent punishments, including lashing and stoning—Rouhani can have little impact. The laws can be changed only by the parliament, whose deputies are vetted through the Guardian Council. So despite having a pragmatist in office once again, Iran remains a country where a man can marry up to four wives, where women face enormous challenges securing a divorce, and where a married woman cannot travel without the written permission of her husband. The list of discriminatory laws that are unfit for Iran’s modern society is long, and if we are blunt about it, Hassan Rouhani stands no chance of bringing about reforms in this area.

  What he has a better chance of success with is tackling the human rights violations that are not legally based but arise from the repressive ways the authorities treat Iranian citizens. Here I mean the late-night raids on the homes of critics, the unofficial detention centers run by the Revolutionary Guards, and the use of torture to extract confessions. Should Rouhani decide to act resolutely, he might be able to intervene and slow down such systematic abuse.

  Rouhani and his allies in the government have argued that they must first secure a nuclear deal with the West, and that such a victory will propel their efforts in other thorny areas, especially citizens’ rights. But most activists and democracy seekers of various backgrounds view this position with caution. In Iran, there is always some great, challenging political feat that must be achieved before the regime can get around to moderating itself and protecting its citizens. “First we must gain control of parliament,” the reformists used to argue, back in the era of Mohammad Khatami. “First we must unseat Ahmadinejad,” they claimed during the disastrous eight years of his tenure. “First we must improve the economy,” they say now. And in the meanwhile, years and years have passed; countless Iranians have been executed, imprisoned, and tortured; and thousands of journalists, academics, and activists have been cast into permanent exile.

  The same laws govern the lives of those who remained behind. That is why I, and most activists and thinkers who wish to see Iran democratize, have moved beyond the “First this, and then…” mode of thinking. Either Iran is led by politicians and reformers who will begin the painful, onerous task of fixing the country from within, brick by brick, law by law, or we will continue to stumble along, the economy deteriorating by the day, the middle class zoning out on Turkish soap operas, while Iran’s enormous potential as a regional superpower is frittered away, until it is a second-class state that is shunned by the world and viewed by its neighbors as a pestilence.

  The only way Rouhani can find a route to meaningful change, to a real victory over the hard-line ideologues, is by relying on the strength of Iran’s disaffected masses. If he allows people to stage public demonstrations, if he permits newspapers to publish more freely, if he lets intellectuals and journalists and community leaders hold public meetings and exchange ideas in open debate, he can create a wave of public support for change that will shake the system to its core and force the traditionalists and the fundamentalists and conservatives—led by the supreme leader at the top—to retreat.

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  Although Iran’s nuclear negotiations tumbled in and out of the news headlines, in a seemingly endless process that defied resolution, by the end of 2014 my thinking about the country’s “inalienable” nuclear rights, as the regime liked to call them, had changed. For much of the 2000s, I believed staunchly that international law gave Iran a legitimate right to nuclear power and that the government—despite being undemocratic and extremist in most of its policies—was correct in demanding this right from the international community. Most of the Iranians I knew, especially those living inside the country and enduring the economic deterioration and privation that resulted from the Western sanctions, had once felt the same way.

  It was, perhaps, a simple sense of national pride or, for some, nationalism. Iranians understood well that the reason they were growing poorer by the day was that their government wouldn’t budge on the issue of uranium enrichment. For the public, it was hard to decide what to think. Since 2007, when the nuclear issue began to seriously undermine Iran’s relationship with the world, the government had gagged the domestic media from covering the nuclear program outside of official decrees. There were no op-eds or columns or reported analyses that dispassionately examined, and helped the public understand, how a nuclear program would benefit or undermine Iran’s national interests. This gag order essentially prevented the media from fulfilling their proper role, keeping the public informed about an issue of vital national importance. As the sanctions steadily ground down Iranians’ quality of life, I realized that I, too, did not know enough. Would it all be worth it, in the end, even if it was our right?

  In 2013, at a roundtable in Belfast held by the Nobel Women’s Initiative, I met an extraordinary woman named Rebecca Johnson, a renowned expert on nuclear disarmament and nonproliferation. She had visited Iran in the past, and she made some compelling and incisive points about the environmental dangers of nuclear energy and how urgent it was for countries to seek out and pursue renewable energy sources that would not pose the sorts of grave risks to their population that nuclear power does. I invited her to spend some time with me and my colleagues and organized a workshop where she could meet with a number of Iranian human rights and civil-society activists. She brought along some of her colleagues, several of whom were nuclear physicists, and they demystified a number of the arguments the Islamic Republic had upheld to justify why it was pursuing nuclear power so doggedly. We learned that nuclear power was wholly unrelated to the research involved in radiation therapy for cancer, for example, and also about the dangers of toxic waste from nuclear enrichment.

  After meeting with Rebecca and her colleagues and devoting those hours to understanding a subject that was fairly specialized, I came to entirely change my views on nuclear power
and Iran’s pursuit of its right to a nuclear program. I came to see that nuclear power, even when used for peaceful purposes, is rife with dangers. Germany has reversed its course and will be shutting down all its nuclear power plants by 2022. The United States has refrained from building any new ones. The catastrophe at the Japanese Fukushima plant in 2011 only underscored how perilous nuclear power can be, even when overseen by a diligent and responsible state—which, alas, Iran is not.

  If the Islamic Republic is determined to have nuclear power so it can build a bomb, that is reckless and pathological. If it seeks, as it claims, only to produce fuel for its nuclear reactor at Bushehr, then this is not in Iran’s interests. Iran is drenched in sunlight and could make fast, effective use of solar energy. It sits atop the world’s third largest oil reserves and the second largest reserves of natural gas. In addition, one of the world’s most significant earthquake faults lies straight beneath Iran; it regularly produces tremors and, every few years, a major quake. With all of this taken together, it’s clear that Iran is not a country that needs to or should gamble with its citizens’ lives by pursuing nuclear power. We simply must not.

  It was after this shift in my views that I started a campaign aimed at bringing the question of nuclear energy to the center of public debate inside Iran. Iranians needed to hear about the realities of nuclear energy, and to learn precisely what it was that they were sacrificing for, during their many years of financial hardship under sanctions. The campaign slowly gained traction, and with time, people inside Iran found the courage to speak up and carve out a space in which to discuss what was best for the country. In 2014, during a panel discussion at Tehran University, the professor of political science Sadegh Zibakalam sat alongside Ahmad Shirzad, a former MP and current physics professor. They said publicly that the nuclear program had inflicted a greater blow to Iran than eight years of devastating war with Iraq.