The Islamic Republic’s leadership should “acknowledge the crisis” it faces and respect “people’s rights,” says Green movement leader and former prime minister Mir Hosein Mousavi. The “Green Path of Hope” is not directed by political parties but a diverse movement struggling for a “progressive Iran,” he said in his first interview on the crisis.
Hardline legislators have urged Iran’s general prosecutor to act against Mousavi for ”harming the image” of the Islamic Republic. Legal proceedings against the reformist leader could revive street protests which have tailed off since the Qods Day mobilization.
But the Green movement is expected to hijack the official November 4 demonstrations celebrating the 1979 invasion of the American Embassy in Tehran to rally around slogans demanding that the U.S. confirm its support for human rights and democracy in Iran.
The Obama administration has been criticized for cutting funds to pro-democracy and human rights NGOs, reportedly as a good will gesture to Tehran. “It is disturbing that the State Department would cut off funding at precisely the moment when these brave investigations are needed most,” said Senator Joe Lieberman.
A senior US official told a recent colloquium on Iran that democracy and human rights remained on the negotiations agenda while emphasizing that appearing to promote regime change would give Iran a pretext to walk away from the talks.
Some Iranian exiles had previously suggested that Western democracy assistance would backfire, allowing the regime to portray activists as agents of the West, but the balance of opinion appears to be shifting.
The U.S. government should “get in touch with the civil society people in Iran,” says Haleh Esfandiari, an Iranian-American academic at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars who was recently imprisoned in Tehran. “If they want to accept it, they’ll take it,” she says. “The people on the ground always know best, better than the people who are just sitting [in Washington] and judging the situation from afar.”
Shirin Ebadi, the Nobel laureate, has criticized U.S. interference in Iran’s internal affairs, but now she too is concerned that democracy and human rights are being marginalized in the current rapprochement with Tehran:
Its impact will depend on whether the nuclear energy issue is negotiated alone, or if democracy and human rights, too, are on the agenda of the talks. Because in the latter case, people in Iran will understand that the West is interested in their fate as much as it cares about its own security, which will strengthen the green movement.
But if in the negotiations, the West sacrifices democracy to gain on the nuclear issue front, naturally the impact is negative. It does not mean the movement will subside, but the people of Iran will be left alone in their struggle.
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