Rooyesh

There has been a lot of misunderstanding as to why Iranian pro- democracy forces oppose the $75 million the U.S. government provides to aid civil society in their country [" A Lever of Change in Iran," op-ed, Oct. 19].

Allow me, as someone who spent six years in Tehran’s Evin Prison on a bogus charge of endangering national security, to clarify what we oppose and what we favor.

The threat of war looms over us. But Iran and the West need to have friendly and peaceful relations.

Peace is a product of democracy. Despotic states are furtive and untrustworthy. The Iranian people want a secular, democratic state that is committed to respecting human rights. The West would not need to fear a democratic Iran.

As a fundamentalist state, Iran is dangerous, but it is dangerous for its own people, not the United States. The Iranian people, myself included, need freedom, democracy and peace — not war conditions and constant worries about a potential barrage of U.S. missiles.

The seeds of democracy need fertile soil to take root and grow. In Iraq, Egypt and Saudi Arabia, the soil is fertile for fostering fundamentalism. If fair elections were held in those countries, fundamentalists would win. Iran is the only country in the Middle East in which modern, democratic forces would win any free and fair elections. A peaceful transition to democracy is our goal. But the Iranian regime suppresses civil society on the pretext of a coming war and describes its opponents as U.S. stooges and mercenaries.

Governments provide foreign aid — indeed, form their foreign policies — based on their national interests; those who receive aid naturally have to align themselves with the donor’s policies. We understand this with regard to Iranian support for Hezbollah in Lebanon and various Afghan groups. Not surprisingly, the Iranian people do not want their democratic movement to be dependent on or subservient to any foreign government.

Consider, also, that U.S. foreign policy in Asia and Africa is dictated by American political and economic interests, not by concern for democracy. Turkmenistan, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan and many other countries with friendly relations with the United States are major violators of human rights and have despotic regimes. In none of these cases has the U.S. administration attached much importance to human rights violations, nor does it prioritize funds to help make those governments democratic.

Over the past two centuries, many Iranian politicians were paid or influenced by foreign powers. As a result, most Iranian intellectuals and democratic forces are deeply critical of external support. Iranians are viewed as discredited when they receive money from foreign governments. The Bush administration may be striving to help Iranian democrats, but any Iranian who seeks American dollars will not be recognized as a democrat by his or her fellow citizens.

The Iranian regime uses American funding as an excuse to persecute opponents. Although its accusations are false, this has proved effective in poisoning the public against the regime’s opponents. Fear of foreign meddling is one reason for the regime’s staying power.

Of course, Iran’s democratic movement and civil institutions need funding. But this must come from independent Iranian sources. Iranians themselves must support the transition to democracy; it cannot be presented like a gift. Expatriate Iranians can assist the transition. Many of the social prerequisites of democracy exist in Iran today, but dollars cannot produce the bravery or love of freedom that individuals need to make the transition possible.

So here is our request to Congress: To do away with any misunderstanding, we hope lawmakers will approve a bill that bans payment to individuals or groups opposing the Iranian government. Iran’s democratic movement does not need foreign handouts; it needs the moral support of the international community and condemnation of the Iranian regime for its systematic violation of human rights.

What else does the pro-democracy movement in Iran want?

The Iranian government is using technology it has purchased from Western companies to block Web sites and otherwise keep Iranians from using the Internet. The West has profited at the Iranian people’s expense by selling these technologies to Tehran. The regime’s extensive censorship and media hegemony must be ended. We want the Iranian people to have access to the Internet and free television to be able to hear criticism of the regime’s policies and learn about alternative models of government.

The support we need at this point has nothing to do with funding the regime’s opposition but with aiding Iranians in the quest for independent media and accurate information.

Akbar Ganji, an Iranian journalist and dissident, was in Evin Prison from 2000 to 2006. He received the 2007 John Humphrey Freedom Award, a Canadian human rights and pro-democracy prize. This column was translated from Farsi by Nilou Mobasser.

The prospect of war with Iran is beginning to look real. The hardening of positions in both Tehran and Washington over the past week has brought relations to their lowest point since the Iran hostage crisis that began in 1979.

Both sides insist that they seek no military conflict, but tensions on issues ranging from Iran’s nuclear program to influence in Iraq and the Arab-Israeli peace process is turning their differences into all-out regional power struggle. Last week, Secretary of State Condeleezza Rice criticized Iran’s “emboldened foreign policy” and “hegemonic aspirations,” while asserting that the U.S. will continue to be engaged on economic, political and security issues in the Middle East. “We are there to stay,” she declared.

On the critical issue of Iran’s uranium-enrichment program, Tehran and Washington are now engaged in a game of geopolitical chicken, which favors hard-liners on both sides, making compromise more difficult, escalation more likely and war - by accident, if not by design - a greater possibility than before. President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, after stepping up defiance of U.S.-led efforts to compel Iran to halt enrichment, this week appeared to gain greater domestic influence over the issue with the replacement of Iran’s pragmatic top nuclear negotiator by a key Ahmadinejad ally.

After President Bush invoked the specter of World War III to press the urgency of stopping Iran, the Administration followed up with another round of punitive measures. “It looks like a slow-motion train wreck,” said Barbara Slavin, author of a new book, Bitter Friends, Bosom Enemies: Iran, the U.S. and the Twisted Path to Confrontation. “Neither side is willing to back down and the chances for conflict are growing over the nuclear program and Iran’s support for U.S. adversaries in the Middle East.” The showdown has elements of a perfect storm. The decline of U.S. fortunes in Iraq has been accompanied by a rise in Iranian assertiveness, which has intensified with Ahmadinejad’s recent tough talk.

Trumpeting Iran’s nuclear ambitions as a nationalist cause, Ahmadinejad rejected the agreement by his moderate predecessor, Mohammed Khatami, to voluntarily suspend uranium-enrichment during three years of negotiations with European powers. Ahmadinejad abandoned Khatami’s “dialogue of civilizations” for more confrontational rhetoric, calling for Israel to be “wiped off the map” and goading the West by denying the Holocaust. Iran enthusiastically backed Hizballah and Hamas in their confrontations with Israel, and denounced the U.S. occupation of Iraq.

Ahmadinejad has repeatedly pooh-poohed the idea that the U.S. might take military action against Iran, to the anger and alarm of others in the Iranian leadership structure, who accuse him of downplaying a real danger. Ahmadinejad says that he considers the U.N.’s case against Iran’s nuclear program closed, and dismisses U.N. sanctions as “piles of paper.” Bragging that Iran’s uranium-enrichment efforts have succeeded in achieving “the capacity for industrial-scale fuel cycle production,” he also recently withdrew a compromise Iranian proposal that would base its enrichment activities in an international consortium that would allow Western countries to participate in and monitor Iran’s activities. “The proposal was based on the situation last year,” Ahmadinejad explained.

“New terms must be defined.” Against the backdrop of crucial parliamentary elections in 2008 and his presidential reelection bid in 2009, Ahmadinejad is now seeking a greater leadership role in nuclear decision-making, which is controlled by the regime’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. Last week, Ahmadinejad accepted the resignation of Ali Larijani, the pragmatic conservative chief negotiator who is a bitter political rival to the President. Although all Iranian leaders defend their right to uranium-enrichment technology for purposes of producing nuclear energy, Larijani believes it is in Iran’s national interests to reach an understanding with the West. But on at least two occasions, Ahmadinejad has publicly slapped down Larijani’s conciliatory efforts. A similar hardening of positions has been taking place in Washington, with U.S. rhetoric assuming a more confrontational tone in the past two weeks.

On Oct. 17, Bush warned that “if Iran had a nuclear weapon, it would be a dangerous threat to world peace” that risked a third world war. Four days later, Vice President Dick Cheney warned, “The Iranian regime needs to know that if it stays on its present course, the international community is prepared to impose serious consequences… We will not allow Iran to have a nuclear weapon.” Last week, a day after Rice told Congress that the U.S.’s 2006 offer of talks with Iran was “still on the table” if Tehran suspended enrichment activities, the Administration designated Iran’s Revolutionary Guards Corps as a proliferator of weapons of mass destruction, and named the Corps’ Quds division as a supporter of terrorism. The tougher tone suggests that U.S. policy has taken a subtle, yet decisive, turn toward not merely stopping Iran’s nuclear program, but seeking the end of the Islamic regime. Cheney’s objections to Iran went well beyond its uranium-enrichment activities, to include Iran’s policies toward Israel and the U.S., its activities in Iraq, its suppression of domestic opposition and what he called its drive for “hegemonic power” in the region - a term echoed by the less hawkish Rice in her congressional testimony. Cheney, like Bush and Rice, stopped short of advocating a new U.S. policy to aggressively pursue regime change, as in Afghanistan and Iraq. But the Vice President pointed the Administration in that direction.

He castigated “the nature of the regime”; said that Iranians have a “right to be free from oppression, from economic deprivation and tyranny”; and declared that “America looks forward to the day when Iranians reclaim their destiny.” Cheney’s indictment of Iran’s regime as one that deserves to be eliminated could be read as another point of U.S. pressure, designed to entice Iranian leaders to accept the U.S. offer to negotiate a peaceful end to the crisis. But such rhetoric, instead, may prove the point of Iran’s hard-liners, that there is really nothing for the U.S. and Iran to talk about.

Source: Time

Confronted by mounting U.S. and U.N. pressure, Iran has been steadily shifting its trade from West to East and, with the benefit of record high oil prices, is likely to be able to withstand the new U.S. sanctions, according to U.S., European and Iranian analysts.

China, a permanent member of the Security Council that can veto any U.N. resolution, is expected to overtake Germany as Iran’s biggest trading partner this year. Germany and other European countries had consistently been Iran’s largest trading partners for more than a decade, according to the Iran Investment Monthly.

The U.S. Treasury said that more than 40 banks, mostly in Europe, have curbed business with Iran as a result of U.S. pressure, but smaller banks, Islamic financial institutions and Asian banks are likely to step in and replace the Western financial institutions through which Iran has long sold oil on the international market. Oil traders said that Iran does an increasing portion of its petroleum sales in euros and yen, instead of U.S. dollars, and often through third parties, to help its customers circumvent U.S. financial sanctions. “Given particularly the price and demand for oil, Iran clearly has leverage with countries that need Iran’s oil,” said Shaul Bakhash, a George Mason University historian and author of “The Reign of the Ayatollahs.”

In addition, he said, “Iran has a huge cushion of foreign-exchange reserves.” Iran’s oil revenue this year will far exceed the government’s budget forecasts, which had assumed an average oil price of $60 a barrel. On Friday, oil settled above $90. The extra revenue will make it easier for the government to maintain social-services payments designed to bolster its popularity amid economic problems. Iran has also moved to protect what Leo Drollas, chief economist of the Center for Global Energy Studies in London, calls its Achilles’ heel — gasoline imports. Because of its limited refining capacity, Iran last year imported 200,000 barrels a day of gasoline, about a third of its consumption. But the government has trimmed gasoline subsidies, which has curtailed consumption and smuggling, cutting imports of gasoline in half. Nonetheless, U.S. efforts to exert financial pressure on Iran were having some impact, even before the new measures taken last week against firms linked to Iran’s Revolutionary Guard Corps.

Lukoil, a Russian company with an extensive gasoline marketing network in the United States, announced last Monday that its exploration work in Iran’s big Anaran oil field “is currently impeded because of the U.S. sanctions,” which bar investments of more than $20 million in Iran. The U.S. sanctions, announced Thursday, complicate new oil projects by targeting Iran’s main oil-field engineering firms. The firms are controlled by the Revolutionary Guard, which the Bush administration has accused of supporting terrorism and aiding nuclear proliferation. One of the firms sanctioned Thursday, Khatam al-Anbiya, is the rough equivalent of the Army Corps of Engineers, according to Karim Sadjadpour, an associate at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. The Treasury Department said the firm had $7 billion of contracts in the oil, natural gas and transportation sectors. European oil companies are holding off on exploration and production deals in Iran. Royal Dutch Shell, Total of France and Italy’s ENI have held talks or reached preliminary agreements for new oil and gas projects in Iran in recent years. But now they say they are unlikely to move ahead, in large part because of the commercial terms Iran is offering. Chinese oil companies have not signed contracts yet for commercial reasons, according to Julia Nanay, a Caspian region expert at PFC Energy, a Washington consulting firm. The picture on the financial front is similar.

The United Arab Emirates, a key transit point for Iranian imports and a major financial center for Iran, had closed 42 firms doing business with Iran before the new sanctions list, said an official there. He said it remained unclear how the new U.S. measures would affect Iran’s Bank Melli, targeted by Treasury for allegedly facilitating ballistic and nuclear equipment purchases. The bank, Iran’s largest, had nearly $1.4 billion in assets in its U.A.E. branches at the end of 2005, according to its Web site. Bank Melli also has branches in London, Paris and Hamburg. Even if Iran finds ways around U.S. financial sanctions, U.S. pressure could increase the costs of Iran’s international banking transactions. European and Japanese banks have made it more difficult for Iran to arrange letters of credit, Drollas said. “Most of Kuwait’s banks have stopped dealing with Iranian accounts,” said Abdul Majeed al-Shatti, chairman of Commercial Bank of Kuwait. “There are opportunities in Iran. Unfortunately, we need to be part of the international system,” he said. “We have a lot of dealings with the United States.”

He said his bank had not issued any letters of credit for transactions with Iran in more than a year. “It raises the cost of operation for all Iranian banks,” said Jahangir Amuzegar, a former Iranian finance minister and representative to the World Bank before Iran’s Islamic revolution. “But whether sanctions are going to cripple banking operations, I don’t think so. Sanctions are effective only if they are comprehensive and universal.” Germany and France have been slowly reducing banking exposure and government credit guarantees for exports to Iran, thus shrinking potential for losses in the event of a confrontation with Tehran. Germany issued about $2 billion of credit guarantees for trade with Iran in 2005, helping companies do business that might otherwise be too risky. This year, the government said, the guarantees will drop to about $715 million. France’s embassy in Washington said French banks reduced their exposure to Iran from $5.7 billion in December 2005 to $3.8 billion a year by the end of 2006. Both countries still buy oil from Iran. The most important question may be what political and psychological impact the sanctions will have on Iran, especially with parliamentary elections next spring and presidential elections in 2009.

Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has faced growing internal rumblings over his erratic economic policies. A few critics of the regime inside Iran have gone public. “Are we to endure the hardship of sanctions and other harsh measures on our nation as a result of our illogical and unreal glorification?” Mohsen Mirdamadi, former chairman of parliament’s foreign relations committee, said at a reformist conference Friday. But other observers said that sanctions had little political effect in places like Cuba, Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe), South Africa and North Korea. “Iranians have a strong sense of themselves,” said J. Robinson West, chairman of PFC Energy. “If these new sanctions create internal problems and cause the people to unify, then they won’t work. But if the sanctions can drive a wedge” between the regime and its constituents, they have a chance to work. Sanctions could even generate greater resistance. “This is a regime that hates to be seen to be backing off under international and U.S. pressure, so it seems unlikely that the threat of international sanctions alone will cause the Iranians to back off on the nuclear issue,” said Bakhash, the George Mason historian. Carnegie’s Sadjadpour said: “These sanctions are not negligible, and they’re not going to be pain-free for Iran. The question is: Will they be substantial and painful enough to change Iranian behavior? No, I don’t think they will be.”

Source: The Washington Post