Is Abdolkarim Soroush the Leszek Kolakowski of Iran’s Green revolution? This intriguing question was raised at the recent memorial meeting for the communist-turned-dissident philosopher who became the intellectual godfather of Solidarnosc and, by extension, of democratic Poland.
Similarly, Soroush was once a fanatical ideologue, committed to Ayatollah Khomeinei and complicit in the Islamic Republic’s violent purge of leftists and secular democrats in the 1980s. Like Kolakowski, he has also become a leading revisionist, and recently issued a “coruscating denunciation” of the regime:
Alluding to the Supreme Leader’s admission that the prestige of the Islamic Republic has been damaged by reports of brutality in the nation’s jails, Soroush writes sarcastically, “I salute you for identifying and declaring the squalor and abjectness of religious tyranny…. I want to say to you that a page has been turned in time’s ledger and that fortune has turned her back on the regime….”
Soroush believes that the regime’s victory is a Pyrrhic one, that the effort of suppressing the demonstrations, murdering and torturing scores of citizens, and staging a show trial has exhausted it.
Many Iranian dissidents are disappointed by the West’s apparent readiness to put democracy and human rights to one side while they negotiate with Tehran about the regime’s nuclear program.
“For those who took to the streets this summer,” one dissident writes, “anything that endows the Islamic Republic with legitimacy, including a prestige-enhancing deal with the West, would be regarded as a sell-out and a betrayal—although the demonstrators, by embarrassing the regime, may have helped to bring about a change.”
The trial and conviction of Kian Tajbakhsh, an Iranian-American academic accused of promoting democracy, is further proof that “some of the most hard-line elements in the Intelligence Ministry and the Revolutionary Guards are now setting domestic policy,” writes Haleh Esfandiari, director of the Woodrow Wilson Center’s Middle East Program, and author of the book My Prison, My Home.
Democracy and human rights advocates argue that the Obama administration is placating the regime in Tehran at precisely the time when domestic unrest makes it more vulnerable to external pressure. Whereas the administration of George W. Bush failed to exploit potential openings under the reformists, they suggest, the Obama administration is too accommodating to the hardliners now in charge.
“When we needed an Obama, we had Bush, and now we need a Bush, we have Obama,” one activist said.
Ladan Boroumand and her sister Roya, co-directors of the Abdorrahman Boroumand Foundation recently received the Lech Walesa award, along with Shadi Sadr, a fellow Iranian human rights activist. She believes that Washington has been taken in by the arguments of those who contend that Iranian activists don’t want or need external support and that supporting the Green movement will endanger activists.
“It is ironic that in spite of the US administration cutting funds to human rights groups, freeing Iranian terrorists in Iraq and trying to appease Tehran, the regime sentenced Kian [Tajbakhsh] to 12 years, which totally belies the claim that pro-democracy support is the cause of persecution in Iran,” she told Democracy Digest.
US officials insist that democracy and human rights are not only on the negotiations’ agenda but were explicitly raised by U.S. representatives at the October 1 meeting in Geneva, while stressing that direct support to the Green opposition would give Iran an excuse to walk away from the talks.
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