UNITED STATES COMMISSION ON
INTERNATIONAL RELIGIOUS FREEDOM
PUBLIC HEARING
ADVANCING
RELIGIOUS FREEDOM AND RELATED HUMAN RIGHTS IN IRAN:
STRATEGIES FOR AN EFFECTIVE U.S.
POLICY
WELCOME AND MODERATOR:
MICHAEL CROMARTIE, CHAIR,
U.S.
COMMISSION ON INTERNATIONAL RELIGIOUS FREEDOM
SPEAKERS:
JEFFREY FELTMAN,
PRINCIPAL DEPUTY ASSISTANT SECRETARY FOR NEAR EASTERN AFFAIRS,
U.S.
DEPARTMENT OF STATE
BARBARA SLAVIN
SENIOR DIPLOMATIC REPORTER,
USA
TODAY
SUZANNE MALONEY,
SENIOR FELLOW,
FOREIGN POLICY,
SABAN
CENTER FOR MIDDLE
EAST POLICY
PAYAM AKHAVAN,
ASSOCIATE PROFESSOR, FACULTY OF LAW,
MCGILL
UNIVERSITY
ROYA BOROUMAND,
CO-FOUNDER,
EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR,
ABDORRAHMAN
BOROUMAND FOUNDATION FOR THE PROMOTION OF HUMAN RIGHTS AND DEMOCRACY IN IRAN
PAUL MARSHALL,
SENIOR FELLOW,
HUDSON INSTITUTE
THURSDAY, FEBRUARY
21, 2008
10:00 A.M. TO
12:30 P.M.
Transcript by
Federal News Service
Washington, D.C.
MICHAEL CROMARTIE: Ladies and gentlemen, welcome. Before I introduce myself, could I just ask
you to please go ahead and turn off your cell phones? We'd appreciate that. Good morning.
Thank you for coming. My name is Michael Cromartie and I serve as chair of the U.S.
Commission on International Religious Freedom.
I'd like to welcome you to today's hearing on "Advancing Religious Freedom
and Related Human Rights in Iran." I'd also like to welcome our C-SPAN
audience. We have a large number of
issues to address in a very short time with a very distinguished array of
witnesses, so I'll be brief.
U.S.
government-level discussions of U.S.
policy on Iran
have focused overwhelmingly on the important nuclear question. As a consequence, it seems sometimes as if we
hear very little about the precarious state of human rights, including
religious freedom, in that country. This
is at a time when under the rule of President Ahmadinejad, the status of such
freedoms has markedly deteriorated, especially for religious minorities, and
for Baha'is, Sufi Muslims, and Christians in particular, as well as Muslim
dissidents and reformers.
For example, over the past several
years, and particularly since President Ahmadinejad came to power, members of
the Baha'i community have been harassed, physically attacked, arrested and
imprisoned. For instance, in November
2007, three Baha'is were sentenced to four years in prison for allegedly
spreading propaganda against the regime; 51 others received suspended
sentences. Their alleged crime: setting
up a program to educate poor Iranian children.
Sufis face growing government
repression of their communities and religious practices, including increased
intimidation and harassment and the detention of prominent Sufi leaders by the
intelligence and security services in the past year. In 2006, Iranian authorities shut down a Sufi
community center in the Shi'a holy city of Qom.
More than 1,000 Sufis were arrested after they took to the streets in
protest. Several served one-year prison
terms.
Now, the president of Iran's denials of the Holocaust and statements
calling for Israel to be
wiped off the map have created a climate of fear among Iran's 30,000-member Jewish
community. Official policies promoting
anti-Semitism are on the rise in Iran, and government discrimination
against Jews continues to be very pervasive.
Christians in particular, evangelicals and other Protestants in Iran continue
to be subject to harassment, arrest, close surveillance, and imprisonment. Many are reported to have fled the
country. In the past, converts to
Christianity and their advocates have been killed in Iran. The Iranian parliament is currently
considering a new law that would impose serious punishments, including the
death penalty, on converts from Islam.
Finally, dissidents and political
reformers continue to be imprisoned on criminal charges of blasphemy and for criticizing
the Islamic regime. A number of senior
Shi'a religious leaders who have opposed various Iranian government policies on
political or religious grounds have been targets of state repression, including
house arrest, detention without charge, trial without due process, torture, and
other forms of ill treatment.
The U.S.
government at the highest levels should take every opportunity to call for the
release of all religious prisoners in Iran, as well as to draw attention
to the need to hold Iranian authorities accountable in specific cases where
severe violations have occurred. This
very bleak human rights picture is being overshadowed, rightly or wrongly, by
other concerns.
Our overarching question today
though are these: Considering the
current state of U.S.-Iranian relations, what can the United States
do to address these deteriorating human rights conditions? What strategies can be employed? Should we be isolating Iran or engaging Iran without preconditions? What do we need to know about the situation
on the ground that can inform these new strategies?
I am delighted to say that we are
honored to have an excellent group of witnesses to help address these questions
in their remarks today and in their statements for the record. Before we hear from our witnesses, let me
just say a word about the structure of this hearing. We will have three panels with a total of six
witnesses, so our timing will be very tight.
We would like each of our panelists to speak for seven to 10 minutes,
which should leave us plenty of time for us to ask follow-up questions. Each of you may, however, submit longer
statements that will be posted on the commission's website. So thank you for coming this morning, and I
am privileged to introduce our first panelist.
Principal - I'm sorry, Jeffrey
Feltman is the principal deputy assistant Secretary of State for Near Eastern
affairs in the State Department. He has
served a very distinguished career in foreign service and recently was returned
to Washington from his post as our U.S. ambassador to Lebanon. We look forward to hearing from you,
sir. Thank you for coming.
JEFFREY FELTMAN: It's a real honor to be here today. I'm also pleased that you have gathered - oh,
I'm sorry. It's an honor to be here today
to meet the Commission. I'm also pleased
to see that you have gathered such a distinguished group of experts on human
rights, religious freedom, and Iran. In particular, I note Payam Akhavan and Roya
Boroumand's leadership on these issues has given voice to thousands of Iranians
whose stories would otherwise not be heard.
Next to the challenge of Iraq,
there's probably no other issue that is so important to American foreign policy
and to our future than dealing successfully with the challenge posed by Iran.
And Mr. Chairman, as your remarks
noted, Iran
poses many challenges for us. First, Iran's quest
for nuclear-weapons capability undermines global security. Second, Iran
is the leading state sponsor of terrorism and its disruptive influence is felt
across the region as it attempts to destabilize Lebanon,
Iraq, Palestinian
territories in Israel. Last, but not least, Iran's human
rights abuses and repression of its own people are an affront to international
and American values. The challenge posed
by Iran goes right to the
heart of our most vital interest in the Middle East. And human rights and religious freedom are an
important part of how we approach the challenge of Iran.
Religious freedom is also rooted in
our principles and history as a nation.
And since the passage of the International Religious Freedom Act in
1998, we have made important strides in integrating religious freedom into our
diplomatic strategy. Last September,
Secretary Rice submitted to Congress the Department's most recent Annual Report
on International Religious Freedom to demonstrate the importance we attach to
religious freedom.
A number of countries not only fall
far short of international standards, but they demonstrate little improvement
and, as a result, are designated "countries of particular concern" or CPCs. A CPC designation provides the U.S. with a
range of options including sanctions.
And Iran
is one such country. And every year
since the passage of the act in 1998, the Secretary has designated Iran as a CPC
for its flagrant disregard of international religious norms and its egregious
treatment, particularly, of non-Shi'a religious groups, but also of some Shi'a
as well.
Let me first begin by putting Iran's mistreatment of religious groups in the
context of the internal situation in Iran today and its continuing, and
I would say, deteriorating poor human rights records more generally. Since President Ahmadinejad assumed the
presidency in 2005, the human rights situation as a whole has markedly
declined, particularly over the past year.
In January, for example, as recently as January, the Ministry of Islamic
Culture and Guidance suspended the license of Zanan, a women's journal that focused on social issues. The regime also appears to be signaling that
the red line has shifted, making it difficult for Iranians to converse freely
with each other on social issues. In
addition to Zanan, some 41 newspapers
and 25 other publications have been suspended under President Ahmadinejad.
Political repression has
continued. Labor leaders such as Mansour
Osanlou have been arrested and activists locked up in some cases for simply
demanding their wages. Women's rights
activists have been subjected to beatings, receive strict prison sentences for
organizing and participating in peaceful protests or for collecting signatures
for the 1-million signatures campaign, an effort to reform Iran's laws to provide equality for
women.
Students who might disagree with
the current administration in Iran
have been tossed into jail. It has become
increasingly clear over the last three years that the current regime will not
tolerate dissent or independent thinking.
Nearly all religious as well as ethnic minorities in Iran face some
degree of social, economic, or cultural discrimination. If you do not subscribe to the regime's
interpretation of Islam, you are prevented from serving in the judiciary,
security services, and other leadership positions.
Applicants for public-sector
employment are screened for their knowledge of and adherence to Islam. Government workers who do not observe Iran's
principles and rules - and principles and rules as defined by the regime itself
- are also subject to penalties. Iranian
law forbids non-Muslims from holding positions of authority or Muslims in the
armed forces. Non-Muslims are barred
from becoming military officers.
By law, religious minorities are
not allowed to be elected to a representative body unless it's for one of the
five seats in parliament - five seats out of 290 seats - that are reserved for
recognized religious minorities. It's
against the law for religious minorities to hold senior government and military
positions and all non-Shi'a are barred from becoming president.
Members of the Baha'i faith, which
number some 300,000 in Iran,
have been singled out for particularly harsh treatment. A steady stream of anti-Baha'i hostility
plays out on television screens, magazines, and newspapers in Iran. Additionally, the government of Iran is
directly involved in the ongoing persecution of the Baha'i population. As your own report on Iran points out, in
2006, Asma Jahangir, the U.N. special rapporteur on freedom of religion or
belief revealed a letter from Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khomeini to
the command headquarters of the armed forces requesting the command
headquarters identify Baha'is and monitor their activities, including business
activities.
This year, we confirmed that 24
young adult Baha'i were sentenced for the crime of anti-regime propaganda, with
three receiving four-year prison terms.
The remaining 51 Baha'i received suspended sentences. These suspended sentences represent Iran's system
of revolving-door detentions and use of suspended sentences as a means of
intimidation. Baha'is also face severe
restrictions of education. Authorities
are currently withholding the educational records of some 800 Baha'i students,
records that are necessary to complete the university admission process.
Practitioners of Sufism also face
horrific treatment as Sufi community leaders now find themselves under constant
harassment and intimidation by Iran's
intelligence and security services.
Sunni religious groups often report abuse including detention and
torture of Sunni clerics as well as other widespread restrictions on their
ability to practice their faith, widespread restrictions that are noted in your
own report such as the lack of a Sunni mosque in Tehran.
Sunni teaching in public schools and Sunni religious leaders are also
banned under the regime. Christians in Iran, particularly
ethnic Armenians as well as Assyrians continue to be subject to close
surveillance and harassment. Members of
evangelical protestant congregations, as you noted, Mr. Chairman, are also
subject to increased surveillance and intimidation. They are required to carry membership cards,
photocopies of which must be provided to authorities upon demand. And worshippers are often subjected to
identity checks by authorities posted outside congregation centers.
Jews in Iran face official
discrimination. Anti-Semitic government
statements, conferences, media programming, books, and other publications, all
of which blur the line between Judaism and Zionism, are commonplace and foster
a hostile atmosphere for the Jews. Two
synagogues in the country were recently attacked. In response to these abuses, abuses that are
documented in your report and documented in our reports, the United States
actively pressures the Iranian regime on human rights issues including
religious freedom.
Our relationship with Iran, of course, is unique in that we do not
have a diplomatic presence in Iran,
but which force us to look creatively at how to use all tools available to us
to advance human rights and religious freedom in Iran. To raise the profile of individual cases and
key issues, we regularly issue statements highlighting and condemning Iran's abusive
behavior towards its citizens. Most
recently, we joined the international community in calling for the release of
the detained Baha'is. In addition, as
you know, Iran is subject to
a wide variety of U.S.
sanctions which, under the International Religious Freedom Act, have also been
linked to its disregard for religious freedom.
Our democracy program includes
several grants that provide accurate information on human rights abuses,
including religious freedom, to Iranians.
They also disseminate information on international human rights
standards, including religious freedom, inside Iran and work to support human
rights activists across the board. I
would also like to note the increase, thanks to the 2006 supplemental bill from
the Congress, the increase in broadcasting by VOA in Persian and by Radio Farda. This was also a recommendation that the Commission
itself had put in its report on Iran.
Multilaterally, the United States worked to ensure the passage in
December of the fifth U.N. General Assembly resolution addressing Iran's dismal
human rights record. We support the work
of the U.N. Special Rapporteur on Freedom of Religious or Belief. We also work closely with like-minded allies
who do maintain diplomatic presence in Iran to ensure that they raise key
religious-freedom issues with the Iranians.
We work closely with the European Union which has made human rights,
religious and minority rights, an area of particular focus over the past few
months.
Lastly, we believe the outreach to
the NGO community here in the United
States is also essential. We meet regularly with key international and
American NGOs and interested Iranian and Iranian Americans to ensure that we have
the most accurate information available and to discuss human rights and
religious freedom on a regular basis.
As we move forward, we will
continue to highlight the regime's abuses and to stand with the Iranian people
in their quest for freedom and human dignity.
Again, I offer sincere thanks to the U.S. Commission on International
Religious Freedom for your commitment to promoting freedom of thought,
conscious, and religion for every individual in every nation and society around
the world.
MR. CROMARTIE: Thank you, Ambassador Feltman. We appreciate that very much. My fellow commissioners will have some
questions for the ambassador. I'd like
to begin myself with a question. There
are those who suggest that U.S. funding of human rights activists and groups
inside Iran make them vulnerable targets for the regime while other people
argue that the individual activists and the groups inside Iran know their own
limitations and will themselves determine how and whether to accept U.S.
support. What is your opinion on this
question about U.S. funding
of activists in Iran? Is it effective? Does it make them more vulnerable or do we
want to leave it up to them to decide?
MR. FELTMAN: Mr. Chairman, in general, we leave it up to
the NGOs we're working with, whether they want to publicize our support or
not. In general, they do not. We do not publicize the grantees who receive U.S. funding for their work in Iran. We leave it up to the NGOs if they wish to do
so themselves. One thing I'd like to
emphasize is, this is a long-term strategy.
This is the long-term game. Our
work with the NGOs, our work on the democracy program in Iran is aimed
at supporting independent voices over the longer term, aimed at increasing the
interaction between the Iranian people and the American people over the long
term, aimed at trying to disseminate information about benchmarks,
international standards on religious freedom.
It's a long-term project, but, at this point, we are very pleased with
our work with the NGO community, but we leave it up to them about whether or
not they wish to publish it. And, in
general, they don't.
MR. CROMARTIE: Thank you.
Commissioner
Land -
RICHARD D. LAND: Yes.
Do you have any specific recommendations on how the U.S. government,
including the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom, could more
effectively advocate for religious freedom and related human rights in Iran,
both in Iran and outside Iran?
MR. FELTMAN: You know, I think in terms - if you look at
the - look internationally, I don't believe that there's any government - and I
say government writ large, government including the Congress, including the
administration, including independent commissions that advise the government
like yours - there's no government in the world that has been as vocal, as
consistent, as insistent regarding Iran's systematic oppression of its own
people as the United States has been.
We're always looking for ways that we can try to moderate Iranian behavior
whether it's on human rights, including religious freedom, whether it's on the
nuclear thing. We're always looking for
good ideas and we welcome the recommendations from the commission.
But I wonder whether we could all
be doing more to increase the advocacy of other international players. I find it appalling, for example, that the
human rights council of the United Nations has not discussed Iranian oppression
of its own people. The EU has recently
been much more vocal about the oppression of the Baha'i in Iran in
particular. But I'm wondering if we need
to be doing more outreach and maybe the Commission has a role in being an
independent player and reaching out to other international players, other
governments, in having their voices joined with ours and pointing out the
systematic abuses against the Iranian people.
It's one idea that I throw out.
PREETA D. BANSAL: Thank you, Mr. Feltman. You mentioned Iran's
role in terms of, I think you called it a leading state sponsor of terrorism
around the world including Lebanon,
Iraq, Palestine,
and Israel. And I wondered, has the State Department or
the United States government
engaged in any analyses of educational materials that are taught within Iran. This is a problem, obviously, in terms of Saudi Arabia. You mentioned anti-Semitism and some of the
other problems within Iran.
To your knowledge, has the State
Department looked at any of the educational curricula both within Iran and maybe
insofar as it might be sending some of that outside?
MR. FELTMAN: Madame Vice Chairman, I will admit that I'm
not right now, today, aware of the answer to the question. I will note that we do have - that we do not
have great statistics on things like anti-Semitism in Iran. I expect the textbook curricula would be
along the same category in part because it's very difficult for us, for the
scholars and the NGOs in Iran,
to report back to us. There are certain
dangers. So we have less visibility on
some of the issues inside Iran
than we would like and that we have in some of the other countries. But I will look into the question of
textbooks.
MR. CROMARTIE: Commissioner Gaer -
FELICE D. GAER: Thank you very much and thank you for your
views. I wanted to pursue this question
of whether it's possible for the United States
to make a difference on the issue of human rights including religious freedom,
in Iran. And, in that context, bearing in mind your
response to the chairman's first question and the controversy over whether U.S.
support is productive or counterproductive, I wanted to pursue your question
about the United Nations.
You said that the - you were
surprised, disappointed that the - you thought it was appalling that the human
rights council has not discussed Iranian repression, the human rights council
being a body of the United Nations that has been created in the last couple of
years. Now, in that context, I assume
that means that you believe that multilateral human rights mechanisms have
value in connection with human rights issues.
And I'm wondering if you could comment on how the United States can be
more effective with multilateral mechanisms, in particular, by deciding not to
be a member of the council and not having a seat on the human rights council,
how can U.S. policy to see the human rights council address such issues, important
issues, as the repression of religious freedom and other human rights in Iran
be discussed by that very same body? How
can the U.S.
help that be discussed?
And I'm also aware of the U.S. action in
the General Assembly in producing a resolution.
Do you think that that's a substitute for the council and do you think
that that can have any further - what further impact do you think that that
mechanism would have?
MR. FELTMAN: Thank you, Dr. Gaer. I'm going to defer some of this to the
international organizations bureau of the State Department that has the lead on
our interaction with the United Nations, but I'd like to comment on the general
point about multilateral versus bilateral or, in some cases, unilateral
pressure on Iran. In the Chairman's
opening remarks, he noted the emphasis on the nuclear issue in Iran. Let's be clear.
A nuclear Iran poses a
strategic threat to the world. It's a
very, very important issue. And the
world has come together in a way to provide incentives, impose sanctions in an
effort to moderate Iran's
behavior. Iran's human rights, including
religious - regarding religious freedoms, human rights record is
appalling. And I'm wondering whether we
can - whether the international voices can be raised in the same way on the
human rights/religious freedom issue as they have been on the nuclear issue.
On the nuclear issue, we use a wide
variety of mechanisms. We have our own
policies, our own sanctions; we have our dialogue with our closest allies; we
have dialogue through the Security Council, through the United Nations, et
cetera. And on Iran, as I said, I believe that we, I believe
that it's very safe to say that we are the most vocal and consistent critic of Iran's human
rights practices. So I am musing out loud
with the Commission about how we build a broader coalition on the human
rights/religious freedom issue as we have with the nuclear issue.
I don't think that there's any one
solution. I don't think there's any one
thing that's going to convince Ahmadinejad to start respecting the universal
rights that should be accorded to his own population, but I believe that we
have to use all tools at our disposal.
And, again, we do not have a diplomatic presence in Iran. And so we have to be creative in how we engage
unilaterally, bilaterally, multilaterally with allies, friends, and the
international organizations. Thank you.
MR. CROMARTIE: To Mr. Leo -
LEONARD A. LEO: Thank you very much for joining us, Ambassador,
this morning. I guess you weren't here
when Ahmadinejad addressed Columbia. You were in Lebanon at the time?
MR. FELTMAN: I was in Lebanon. I certainly followed the debate in Lebanon. Of course, in Lebanon,
one has a unique understanding of Iran's destabilizing influence
because of Hezbollah so I -
MR. LEO: At the time, there were - many of us became
aware of a comment he made some years back where he said that, "And God
willing, with the force of God behind it, we shall soon experience a world
without the United States
and Zionism." And many of us at the time
determined, I think, that really the best and most effective path toward
religious freedom in Iran
and a general improvement of human rights in Iran would be essentially for a
change in government and a change in regime.
And in that regard, initiatives
including empowerment of Iran's
civil society, direct engagement of the Iranian people, the use of tactical
vehicles for democracy promotion such as the Internet, and then, of course, to
some extent, increases in U.S.
gulf military deployments become matters of important consideration. And I was wondering whether you believe that
you've received adequate budgetary and political support to bolster these
various kinds of initiatives that can help to secure promotion of a more
democratic or different governance structure in Iran.
MR. FELTMAN: Thank you, Commissioner Leo. The - as I said, we're constantly looking at
ways, at tools, at ideas, at creativity, at ways that we can try to influence
the thinking in Iran,
influence the behavior in Iran. And, certainly, on behalf of the State
Department, I say I welcome the Commission's ideas and input in this. And I noted your own recommendations in your
report about what the administration should be doing in order to promote
religious freedom in Iran.
In terms of budgetary resources,
you know, we're talking roughly $60 million for the democracy side of the
budget this year that we got from Congress in fiscal year, in fiscal '08. It's still - we're still working on the exact
allocations, but it's roughly $60 million.
And about half of that will go toward broadcasting: VOA, Radio Farda. These improved transmissions in the case of
Radio Farda, longer broadcasting in the case of VOA, including issues on human
rights and religious freedom. And then
we're also going to continue our democracy grants working with NGOs.
One of the interesting programs
that we've been able to start because of the increased resources given to us by
Congress for Iran are Internet services through blogging, websites, improved
websites in order to have, to promote a dialogue between the Americans and the
Iranians in Farsi. We're hoping that
this results in increased pressure to change inside Iran. But, again, this is a long-term project. You've raised some much bigger issues about
what we do in terms of the Iranian regime.
But what we do with our democracy grants is a long-term, is long-term
establishment, strengthening independent voices, building relations between our
two people.
MR. CROMARTIE: Commissioner Argue -
DON ARGUE: Thank you, Mr. Ambassador. And your record on commitment to religious
freedom we affirm. A couple of questions
and observation - the observation first - it would appear that efforts of the
United States to promote democracy and human rights have, in fact, in some
cases, been counterproductive. Has
increased U.S.
pressure in this regard been counterproductive?
And then, secondly, would we be
better off if we had a direct line through U.S.
diplomatic engagement with Iran
on human rights and other issues, particularly human rights abuses? I think you get my observation and then two
questions, please.
MR.
FELTMAN: You know, on - I wouldn't want
to minimize the risks to people who are working with us in Iran. I would not want to minimize the difficulties
that we face. On balance, we believe
that our engagement on democracy, human rights including religious freedom in Iran through
our democracy program has been productive.
We're very sensitive to the concerns of our partners, which is one of
the reasons why we don't publicize the grants and leave it up to the grantees
whether they wish to be publicized or not.
We're very careful with what we say about, for example, the upcoming
legislative elections. We wouldn't want
to provide any sort of pretext by which the regime could crack down even harder
on those that would like to provide genuine representation in the upcoming Majles
elections.
So, in
balance, we believe that our involvement has been productive, but we're very,
very aware of the concerns you raise, the sensitivity posed by people who are
working with us. I mean, Commissioner
Argue and Commissioner Leo, you both talked about what is - what is the best
way for us to promote our agenda in Iran more generally. Obviously, religious freedom is of immediate
concern to our discussion today, but, you know, the debate over whether one
engages Iran or whether one
doesn't engage Iran
and goes the other direction is something that's actively under consideration
by the administration at all times.
Secretary
Rice, of course, has made the offer to the Iranians that upon suspension of
enrichment processing linked to the nuclear question, she would be willing to
talk any time and any place about nuclear issues and other issues. So there is, in fact, an offer on the table
that Iran
has chosen to ignore in its efforts to develop its nuclear capacity. Thank you.
MR.
CROMARTIE: Commissioner Shea -
NINA
SHEA: Yes, thank you very much for your
testimony today and for making time to be with us. I, you know, I am intrigued by the role that
religion plays in Iranian rule, that it is clerical, a state-enforced, clerical
rule, sectarian and serves as a model, or should, a negative model, if you
will, of this kind of rule which is becoming more popular and widespread
throughout the world. And it is an
opportunity in sort of deconstructing the human rights situation and exposing
the human rights situation in Iran
to engage in a contest of ideas, if you will, with radical Islam.
And I don't
feel - I just don't have a good sense of what the State Department is doing on
that front to really look at how religion plays the role - that is, a state-enforced
sectarian religion - has an effect on women's rights, for example, or freedom
of expression, the apostasy blasphemy charges that are so common in Iran and
probably had a major role, did have a major role in shutting down those 41
newspapers that you mentioned, and then the dwindling down, the effect on
minority religions including minority Muslim religions and dissident
branches. But the demographics have been
really revealing - just shocking, plummeting of numbers in the minority
communities since the revolution.
And I just
wondered if you could comment on that, whether there are, within the State
Department, sort of working groups or people really thinking about these issues
in a larger, more ideological fashion in the contest of ideas.
MR.
FELTMAN: Commissioner Shea, the short
answer to your question is yes, indeed.
And when you look at Iran,
you know, as we've discussed, there's systematic oppression of the Iranian
people by the regime. And whether... This
is political repression. It's human
rights repression. It's religious
oppression. All of these are, you know,
religion becomes a tool in what is a systematic denial of the basic rights of
the Iranian people to freedom of religion, freedom of politics, freedom of
expression. And if someone's a Sunni Baloch,
is he facing persecution and oppression because he's a Baloch or because he's a
Sunni. It doesn't matter. There's a systematic use of the tools of
religion in Iran
in order to repress the minorities and deny basic universal human rights to the
population.
Part of what we're trying to do
with our democracy programs is raise the spotlight, raise publicity, raise
awareness of international standards of human rights, international standards
of religious freedom. How does the rest
of the world do this? How can religion,
how is religion a benefit - rather than a tool of political repression?
We have, you know, we have funded
NGOs that, again, choose to remain nameless to try to raise their voices, to
try to raise awareness of how religion is being used perversely and
particularly by comparing and contrasting, bringing information to the Iranian
people about how this operates elsewhere, how the system could work as opposed
to the way that their leaders have used religion perversely.
We are in contact with members of
the religious minorities. We're in
contact with international representatives of some of the minority groups in
order to work with them on how we advocate for rights inside of Iran. There's a continual dialogue about how we get
across the ideas that you mentioned, Commissioner Shea. I can't promise you that we have the right
levers in place. We welcome ideas and
recommendations from the Commission.
MR. CROMARTIE: Commissioner Eid -
TALAL Y. EID: Thank you, Mr. Ambassador. Some say that U.S.
foreign policy has strengthened relationships between Iran and its
Arab neighbors. As an ambassador who
served in Lebanon, what impact do these emergent diplomatic and economic
alliances have on U.S. influence on and relations with Iran?
MR. FELTMAN: Commissioner Eid, thank you. I don't think that there's any country - let
me put it this way: Iran is one of
the most isolated countries in the world.
Yes, it's Arab Gulf neighbors have to deal with Iran in some ways on a pragmatic
level. But when you look at who are Iran's friends, who welcomes Iran's repression of its own people, who
welcomes Iranian's foreign and domestic policies, it's countries like Cuba;
it's people like Hugo Chavez.
Iran doesn't seem to have many
friends either in the region or internationally. This is something I think that we can all use
constructively, the fact that Iran,
yes, Iran
has influence in the region; it's negative influence. And Iran's Arab neighbors have to take into
account Iran's size and Iran's negative influence, but it's not that anybody
welcomes what Iran is doing to its own people, what Iran is doing in terms of
its nuclear ambitions, what Iran is doing internationally.
You mentioned my service in Lebanon. And I made reference earlier to, of course,
Hezbollah, the Iranian-funded terrorist organization in Lebanon. I can't pretend Hezbollah doesn't, isn't a
strong power inside Lebanon. But when I look at the Lebanese, who are
seeking opportunities, seeking employment, seeking futures outside Lebanon because there are Lebanese who are
looking outside for economic opportunities, they don't go to Tehran.
They don't look at Tehran or Iran as their
model. They look to Dubai.
They look to North America. They look to Europe.
I do not believe that the model
posed by Iran
is an appealing vision for people of the region or for people of the world.
MR. CROMARTIE: Thank you.
I would remind commissioners we have about five more minutes in this
session. And so we have three more
questions, so let's be concise.
Commissioner Bansal -
MS. BANSAL: Thank you, Ambassador Feltman. Undersecretary Burns last year in testimony
before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee said that notwithstanding the
fulminations of President Ahmadinejad, he is not impervious to financial
pressure and diplomatic pressure. And
I'm wondering, among the many routes the United States has taken to try and
pressure Iran, you know, to what extent - can you describe for us what, in
terms of its dealings with the financial investors and, you know, the economic
- the countries that give economic infrastructure to Iran, what kinds of
diplomatic negotiations the U.S. is engaging with them with respect to their
record of investing in Iran?
MR. FELTMAN: Thank you, Madame Vice Chairman. I think this is an area where we've actually
had - we've had some success. The basic
message from the United States
to the international financial and business community is: You should not be doing business with Iran as
normal. This is not business as normal,
whether we're talking about the nuclear problem, whether we're talking about
human rights, including religious freedom, it's not a time for business as
usual with Iran.
Iran
has almost every U.S.
sanction possible imposed on it for a variety of reasons, including the
atrocious behavior regarding religious freedom.
And we - we are constantly raising with our international partners,
government and private sector, the risks to doing business with Iran. I think you've seen publicity recently about
some Bahraini banks, for example, that have broken off financial relations with
Iran. I think this is an area that, you're right,
has promise, and also we're seeing some signs of success where people are
paying attention to the risks of doing business with Iran, doing business with an
international pariah state, and they are making decisions to reduce their
exposure. We believe that the Iranian
regime has taken notice of this.
MR. CROMARTIE: Commissioner
Land -
MR. LAND: Thank you.
Has the U.S. government's decision last year to have direct talks with
Iran on security in Iraq provided a springboard to discuss other issues
including the human rights situation in Iran?
And do you think that Iran
would be willing to engage on a larger set of issues?
MR. FELTMAN: The discussions with Iran carried out by our embassy in Baghdad so far deal with the situation in Iran - in Iraq, I'm sorry. We believe that Iran
should have an interest in helping stabilize the situation in Iraq and that
that's of interest to all of us. The
discussions in Baghdad do not have a broader
agenda because of the focus on Iraq.
As I said, in the context of the
nuclear question, in the context of our work with what we call the P-5 plus
one, the five permanent members of the Security Council plus Germany, regarding
Iran's nuclear ambitions, of course, the Secretary's offer still stands, that
if Iran would come clean, would cease its reprocessing and enrichment
activities, that we would be willing to - the Secretary has indicated her
willingness to meet any time, any place.
Iran,
so far, has not answered that call.
MR. CROMARTIE: We have about two more minutes in this
panel. Commissioner Gaer, you have the
last question.
MS. GAER: Thank you very much. I wanted to pursue this issue about the
direct talks. With the noble aims of
U.S. human rights policy, whether it's dealing with Iran or other parts of the
world, the question that always comes before our commission is the
effectiveness of human rights policy.
And without direct talks and contacts with Iran,
do you think, sir, that the United
States can get its concerns about human
rights and religious freedom issues conveyed and communicated effectively?
We spoke before about multilateral
mechanisms not being available, so I wanted to pursue whether you think that
direct diplomatic engagement with Iran on human rights issues would
yield any better results for the victims of abuse. And I'm speaking in particular not just of
U.S. citizens, although we've had some cases this year of that, but also of
Iranian students, women's activists, labor organizers, any of these. Would the U.S. be able to communicate better
its concerns directly than through intermediaries?
MR. FELTMAN: I don't think that there's - Commissioner
Gaer, I don't believe there's any doubt about what our views are. Surely, the Iranians have heard us even if we
do not have a direct dialogue - face-to-face dialogue with Iranian government
officials on human rights including religious freedom. I have no doubt that they know what our
concerns are. It's clear. Your commission's work has been clear. You know, whether you welcome this or not,
you, of course, are seen as an arm of the U.S.
government and your reports and your press releases are picked up as though
they were State Department products or U.S. government products, which of
course is not the case.
But I believe that the Iranians
know very well what our concerns are.
Whether direct face-to-face talks would result in more relief for the
victims, I can't answer that question right now. I don't know the answer. The - we would see if we get to that point
based on the nuclear question. Thank
you.
MR. CROMARTIE: Ambassador, thank you so much for your time,
sir.
MR. FELTMAN: Thank you, Chairman.
MR. CROMARTIE: We're grateful for your coming. Ladies and gentlemen, we have our second
panel; will begin in about two minutes.
[...]
MICHAEL CROMARTIE: We're delighted to welcome Barbara Slavin,
who is a senior fellow at the U.S. Institute of Peace and also a senior
diplomatic reporter for USA Today. She's
also - some of you may not know, she is also the first American newspaper
reporter to interview President Ahmadinejad after he came to power. And she's the author of a book called "Bitter
Friends and Bosom Enemies: Iran,
the U.S.,
and the Twisted Path to Confrontation."
We're delighted you could
come.
I'll also go ahead and introduce
Dr. Suzanne Maloney. She's a senior
fellow at the Saban
Center for Middle East
Policy at the Brookings Institution, former policy planning staffer and a
member at the Senate - I mean at the State Department. I'm sorry.
State Department.
We'll hear from you first, Ms.
Slavin. Thank you for coming. We appreciate it very much.
BARBARA SLAVIN: Okay.
Is it on? I want to thank the Commission
very much for asking me to testify about this very important topic, and I want
to state from the outset that these are my personal views. They do not reflect the U.S. Institute of
Peace, which of course takes no policy positions.
Because of the absence of
diplomatic relations between our two countries since 1980, only a small number
of American reporters have had the opportunity to go there, and of course no
American officials have recent on-the-ground experience in Iran. I've been fortunate to visit Iran six times since 1996, and I've also very
closely followed U.S. policy
toward Iran
during this period. And let me also add
that I approach this subject from the perspective of having lived in two other
countries that experienced violent revolutions and were at one time bitter
adversaries of the United
States.
I was an exchange student in the Soviet Union in the early 1970s and I
worked as a journalist in China
in the early 1980s. In both cases, a
change in U.S.
policy toward engagement and recognition led to an improvement in living
standards and to some extent personal freedoms in those countries.
Iran's
human rights record also improved somewhat during the late 1990s while the
reformist president was in power and tensions between the United States and Iran eased. As Ambassador Feltman has pointed out,
though, repression has intensified as hard-line elements returned to power in Tehran in 2004 and
2005. In my view, it is not coincidental
that this shift followed President Bush's designation of Iran as a
member of an "axis of evil" in 2002, and his rejection of an Iranian offer for
comprehensive negotiations in 2003.
These actions embarrassed the reformist government of President Mohammad
Khatami, which had cooperated with the United
States in Afghanistan
in 2001, in part in hopes that that would lead to improved relations with Washington.
While Iran's human rights record during
the Khatami presidency was by no means spotless, the record under his successor
has been far worse. Since Ahmadinejad
became president in 2005 and especially in the past year, as has been noted by
Ambassador Feltman, executions have increased and so has harassment, arrest of
students, women activists, labor organizers and obviously members of religious
minorities as well. Innocent
Iranian-Americans, including my good friend and mentor Haleh Esfandiari, of the
Woodrow Wilson
Center had been thrown in prison on
bogus charges of promoting a so-called velvet revolution in Iran.
In my view, the U.S. decision to invade Iraq in 2003 and the
administration's highly ideological democracy promotion campaign have
contributed to the Iranian crackdown on dissent. President Bush frequently expresses his
concern about ordinary Iranians, but his overtures to the "Iranian people,"
when combined with a refusal to acknowledge the legitimacy of the Iranian
government, preemptive military action against Iraq, and threats of such action
against Iran, have convinced Tehran that the Bush administration seeks the
violent overthrow of the Iranian regime.
Such comments as Bush's pledge during his 2005 inaugural address to
"stand with" Iranians as they stand for their own liberty and his decision to
spend several hundred million dollars on democracy programs have
backfired.
They have given the Iranian
government additional pretext to clamp down on civil society and made it
difficult for Iranians to accept U.S. government funds. U.S.
rhetoric threatening to attack Iran
because of its nuclear program has also hurt civil society in Iran. In a climate in which an American president
talks of "World War III" if Iran
acquires nuclear weapons know-how, Iranians who criticize their leadership are
vulnerable to charges of treason.
At this late date in the Bush
presidency, it is difficult to see a way in which this administration might
positively impact the human rights climate in Iran. A new U.S. administration, however, will
have an opportunity for a more creative approach. The next U.S. president should certainly
continue to affirm support for democracy and human rights and the work of this Commission
should certainly continue. But Americans
should express confidence in the ability of Iranians to reform their government
on their own. The noted Iranian
dissident Akbar Ganji has said repeatedly that the most helpful thing the U.S.
government and U.S. human rights groups can do for Iranians is to publicize
rights abuses in Iran but stop threatening to change the regime by force.
As a first step, the next
administration could reaffirm the 1981 Algiers Accords, which ended the 1979 to
'81 hostage crisis. Under this
agreement, the United States
promised not to interfere in the internal affairs of Iran. Instead of allocating money explicitly for
democracy promotion, the next U.S.
administration should spend more on scholarships for Iranians to study here and
for Americans to study in Iran. It would also be helpful to lift blanket
Treasury Department restrictions on American nongovernmental organizations that
seek to do humanitarian work in Iran and which do not espouse an obvious
political agenda.
To support increased contacts
between the two countries and give U.S.
officials a better understanding of the impact of their policies, it would be
extremely helpful to have U.S.
diplomats in Iran
at a minimum to process visas for Iranians seeking to travel here. At present, Iranians must travel twice to Dubai or Turkey,
first to apply for a visa and then to obtain one before they can come to the United States. This is an expensive and cumbersome process
and it opens Iranians to additional scrutiny by Iran's security services. In an interview two years ago, as your
president mentioned, President Ahmadinejad told me that he would consider
allowing U.S. consular officials back in Iran if the United States accepted
direct flights between New York and Tehran.
This was something that Ahmadinejad proposed in early 2006. However, the Bush administration never
replied.
U.S.
officials could also acknowledge that American actions in the prosecution of
the war on terror have undermined the U.S. ability to promote human
rights abroad. When I interviewed former
Iranian President Akmar Hashimi Rafsanjani in 2005, he said that because of
U.S. human rights abuses at Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib, the United States had
"lost the moral platform" from which to judge others. In a recent op-ed in the British newspaper The Guardian,
Iranian Foreign Minister Manouchehr Mottaki
made a similar remark. Mottaki also
criticized the United States
for rejecting the outcome of democratic elections in Algeria
in the early 1990s and more recently in Palestine.
Iran, with all its many faults, is more
pluralistic and less oppressive than many U.S.
allies in the region including Saudi
Arabia.
Iran
is entering an election cycle that may produce leaders that are more pragmatic
and less repressive. At a minimum, U.S. officials should refrain from rhetoric and
actions that could intensify a climate of hostility and fear in Iran. Like China
and the Soviet Union, Iran
will inevitably change. Its
revolutionary character has already faded considerably over the past three
decades. Its population is
overwhelmingly young, literate, and aware of the outside world. Iranians need encouragement from established
democracies, not lectures. That
encouragement will be most effective if it comes from a country that has shown
an ability to recognize its own mistakes and correct its own record on human
rights. The United States has always led best
when it has led by example.
Thank you very much.
MR. CROMARTIE: Thank you, Ms. Slavin. Thank you very much.
Dr. Maloney, thank you for coming.
SUZANNE MALONEY: Thank you.
Thanks so much for the opportunity to be here today and to talk about
this very important and complex issue. I
have a lot of ground to cover. You'll
notice I submitted to you a lengthy and wordy testimony, so I'll try to hit on
a few of the important themes. I'll be
prepared to handle any of the questions you may have during the discussion
period, but also note that obviously a following panel with a number of experts
who are specifically focused on the issue of religious liberty in Iran, and so
I will defer to many of their judgments and views on that issue in order to
talk a bit about the political climate inside Iran, its future trajectory, very
generally on the human rights situation, and again to U.S. policy.
It's been 30 years since the
Iranian Revolution, which established what one might argue is the first modern
Muslim theocracy. A lot has changed in Iran, but several things remain the same, both
the fact that the leadership remains committed to its religious inspiration for
the government and the leadership's defiance and antagonism toward Washington.
I always like to stress that Iran
is really a fusion of theocratic and democratic institutions and ideals. You have the Office of the Supreme Religious
Leader, which has ultimate and ostensibly divine authority, but you also have
the legitimizing force of the popular vote, and Iran is about to engage in what
I believe will be its 28th elections in 29 years. That's a frequency that is not replicated in
many other parts of the Middle East or even
the Islamic world more broadly.
This is also a regime that despite
the narrow restrictions on electoral competition has been engaged in factional
infighting almost since the earliest days of its inauguration. This does not make it a full Jeffersonian
democracy, but these fierce battles within the leadership tend to have a great
deal of impact on the political space that is allotted to Iranian citizens as
well as the amount of religious liberty that there will be in the county.
We've seen since 2005 the closing
of the door on a very important reform movement that took place in Iran
during the late 1990s and early part of this decade. Ahmadinejad is surprisingly relevant. He holds a very unimportant office in the
Iranian bureaucracy relatively speaking, and yet by inserting himself and
asserting himself, what he has done is to have a great impact in a very
negative, profoundly negative fashion on Iran's internal and foreign policies. In doing so, he's benefited from the quiet
support of the supreme leader, and as far as we can tell he continues to have
that.
Examining Iran's future has to begin with one
simple and frankly unfortunate truth: the Islamic Republic for the foreseeable
future is here to stay. What we've seen
certainly is the hardliners have re-conquered most of Iran's electoral institutions in
the past couple of years. They've begun
fighting amongst themselves. This is
probably not all the different than what we see in this part of the world when
one particular party may hold sway in any particular institution. The conservatives are split between
traditionalists as well as a younger generation, many of whom originally supported
Ahmadinejad but at least some important proportion of whom are now distancing
themselves from him.
We've also seen some effort by the
reformists to make themselves relevant again.
They're trying to contest this upcoming parliamentary election, but I
would say at least for the outset, a reformist comeback is an iffy
proposition. They don't stand to do very
well in the elections if only because Ahmadinejad and all those around him who
support the continuing orthodoxy of the Islamic Republic are in a position to
control the ball field. And it really
remains unclear how the reformists are going to reformulate their strategy to
deal with this consistent opposition.
I'd say it would be a grave mistake
to discount the importance of elections, as I saw the Bush administration do
while I was in government between 2005 and 2007. At that time there were many who argued that
the parliamentary elections were - the presidential elections of 2005 were
effectively irrelevant. We now know that
it's very much not the case. There's a
difference between Mohammad Khatami and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. It's a difference that matters to the Iranian
people and matters in our dealings with Iran around the world. So it's important to follow these elections
to pay attention. They can have profound
influence in the short term and certainly over the long term in the way that Iran
behaves on the international scene as well on the opportunities and freedoms
available to its citizenry.
I'll also say it's a real mistake
to discount Ahmadinejad. He's very
unpopular for a variety of reasons inside the country, mainly because of its
own economic policies but also because of some of his provocative and
unfortunate statements on a wide range of issues but including and especially Israel
and the Holocaust. But Ahmadinejad is
very well placed to reassert himself. He
has patrons all around the system, and he's also proven to be a far more adept
politician within Iran
than I think anyone gave him credit for, including many of the Iranians that I
talked to.
Finally, just in talking about the
country's future, I'd say be prepared that we simply don't know what's going to
happen. No one in Washington
predicted the ascendance of Khatami, of Ahmadinejad, and I suspect that
whatever happens next people in Washington
will be the last to forecast its coming.
Very quick few words on human
rights and religious freedom, and I apologize because these will be inherently
superficial and brief. Again, you have
some very widely noted experts who will follow this panel. As several of the prior panelists have
already noted, the situation under Ahmadinejad has gotten dramatically worse
whether you look at censorship, whether you look at the treatment of activists,
intellectuals, lawyers, and other representatives of the human rights
community, it's gotten dramatically worse.
I would just point out one particular set of appointments that I think
is particularly relevant from the point of view of human rights and it's
emblematic of Ahmadinejad's track record on this issue.
His appointments of Interior
Minister Mohamed Al Mustafa Pur-Mohamedi and Intelligence Minister Gholam-Hussein Mohseni-Ejei are particularly incredibly distressing. Both of these individuals who have been noted
by Human Rights Watch and are well known within the Iran political sphere as
for their role in the execution of political prisoners during the 1980s, the
murders of writers and dissidents by agents of the intelligence ministry in the
late 1990s, and the prosecution of a wide range of dissidents and writers throughout
the reform period. Their records were so
problematic that the Iranian parliament itself was hesitant to confirm them
because it recognized that other countries might not in fact accept them to
travel. These individuals are a shame to
Iran and to the Iranian
people and it's important for the U.S.
government and for other governments to make that clear in dealing with Iran.
I'd also note that Ahmadinejad's
treatment of human rights was clear from his decision to dispatch Saeed
Mortazavi, who was known as the butcher of the press for his role as a Tehran
prosecutor general during the late 1990s when he closed a number of newspapers
and put a lot of journalists in jail.
He's also reported, including by a report from one of the panelists on
the next session, to have participated directly in the interrogation of an
Iranian-Canadian photojournalist who was killed after being taken into custody
in 2003, Zahra Kazemi. That's a very
egregious case.
I'm not going to go into greater
detail on the issue of human rights and religious liberty. It's widely known. I would highlight the persecution of the
Bahais as the most egregious case within the Iranian context, but there are a
number of other issues. Whether one
looks at the Sufis, Sunnis, or even the treatment of Iran's
majority religious - Shi'a Islam - by politicizing religion, what the state has
effectively done has posed a lot of negative implications for the Shi'a
community and for the Shi'a community more widely outside Iran. There's a top-down network of influence which
effectively counters all of the historical trends within Shi'ism and it's very
negative, I would say, for the development and flourishing of this
religion.
I'd also highlight that what we've
seen particularly over the past 15 years is a flourishing of free thought and
dissent among even within the seminaries in Iran, and this is a very important
and powerful trend that should be watched.
Just let me conclude with a couple
of points on U.S.
policy. First, I think we have to
acknowledge that our only tools are diplomatic tools. We don't have a viable military option that
leaves us in a better place in the Middle East. That was true before the NIE, it remains true
today. And I think to the extent that we
try to wield the military option even in rhetoric, it hurts our interests and
hurts our ability to engage with the Iranians.
That brings me to my second
point. We have to have an abiding
commitment to engagement as one of the indispensable instruments of American
statecraft and power.
It was easier to talk about
engagement during the late 1990s. You
had a very urbane, suave, well dressed Iranian president who spoke in very nice
terms, who engaged with CNN and talked about our own Jeffersonian ideals. It's a lot harder when you've got a
Holocaust-denier as your president. And
still I think we have to acknowledge that the purpose of engagement is not
simply to talk to nice people or to talk to people who think and look like us,
but it's to deal with the most serious issues on the agenda for American
foreign policy and that is ever more true today than it was during the
1990s. We're not trying to make friends,
but simply to advance our interests.
Engaging Iran does not mean an
automatic path to rapprochement or a grand bargain, but it means returning to
the position that was the widely held, long held position of the U.S.
government prior to the Bush administration that we're prepared to talk to any
Iranian leader so long as it is in an authoritative fashion and so long as we
as a government are allowed to put all of our issues and concerns on the
table. That obviously includes human
rights issues. The engagement does
preclude us from raising these issues.
It only enables us to do so directly with the abusers themselves.
And I would note as Barbara did
that Akbar Ganji among others has noted the inverse relationship between -
hostility between Tehran and Washington and the treatment of Iranians as
home. Iranian dissidents call on us to
engage with their regime not because they like it, not because they want to
perpetuate it - because they know their situation only degenerates when we're
in a hostile situation.
Finally, and this is something that
Barbara went into great detail on and I can only echo all of her
recommendations. We have to drive a
stake through the heart of the myth of externally orchestrated regime
change. This means effectively
disbanding or significantly retooling our entire democracy program. I worked on that program while I was in the U.S.
government. I can talk to it in greater
detail as well as to offer some suggestions on how we might do this, but again
I would tell you that every single one of the most preeminent dissidents in Iran
has come out against this program.
I'd also note that one of the more
effective groups in terms of highlighting the situation with respect to Iran's human rights situation, the Boroumand
Foundation, whose founder is going to speak to you in the next session, is one
of those groups that has not received U.S. government funding, at least
to my knowledge. And it demonstrates the
ability for groups outside of the U.S.
government to really have an impact and to really engage with Iranians because
they do not have the difficulties of an association with the U.S. government.
We need to expand exchanges, we
need to make it possible for all organizations to work inside Iran and engage with their counterparts in Iran by creating a blanket license for NGOs to
do work in Iran. There will never be a good opportunity to
deal with the Iranian regime. This
administration has talked about not wanting to be a supplicant, about trying to
get the power situation right in the region.
That's simply not going to happen.
Our interest in addressing the challenges posed by Iran cannot be deferred until we've reached the
most conducive balance of power or until Iran has finally elected an
amenable array of leaders.
With that, let me close.
MR. CROMARTIE: Thank you.
Thank you, Dr. Maloney.
We'll now entertain questions from
the commissioners, and as chair I'd like to ask the first question. First, for Barbara Slavin. Thank you so much for your comments. You interviewed President Ahmadinejad. We'd like to know what were your impressions
of him. Does he really believe that Israel
should be wiped off the map? Does he
really believe the Holocaust did not occur?
Is he sane? (Laughs.)
MS. SLAVIN: I'm not a psychologist and I've spent perhaps
90 minutes with him in 2005 and then actually I saw him again when he came to
the United Nations in September, and I saw him over a more prolonged
period. He's not insane. He is a product of his upbringing, which was
very narrow. He's somebody who barely
left Tehran
before he became president. The
presidency is his first elected office.
He was trained as a traffic engineer, so his background is not
political, it's not diplomatic. He is a
very devout Shi'a Muslim, but he follows a rather superstitious and narrow
interpretation even of Shi'a Islam.
He's not a man who one wants to
defend, certainly, but he has made some overtures to the United States -
admittedly some of them rather ham-handed - and I think one the mistakes that
the U.S. government has made it's that it's not tried to respond to these
overtures in some way. I mentioned his
proposal for direct flights between New York
and Tehran,
which got no response. He also sent a
rather strange letter to President Bush in May of 2006 which was an odd letter,
but it was an opportunity for the president to respond. Again he did not respond. It's a part of a policy of this
administration of not affording any kind of legitimacy to Iranian officials and
institutions, which in my view has been a mistake.
His view on Israel is that - and this is not just his view,
but a view of a certain circle within the Iranian regime - is that all
Palestinians all over the world should be allowed to vote in a referendum on
the status of Israel and Palestine. It's not a right that he affords to Jews all
over the world as far as I know. And
that Israel will collapse as
the Soviet Union did because it is not a
legitimate state and because it was founded on injustice. He has said that Iran
will not bring about the demise of Israel. Israel will collapse on its
own.
On his views on the Holocaust, we
have seen some evolution. When I
interviewed him, I got very angry with him at one point and I said, why don't
you just go to Auschwitz and see for
yourself? And he said, oh, no, that
wouldn't help.
But in New York in September, we had - about 50
Americans had a private dinner with him and one of those participating said to
him, you know you're being compared to Adolph Hitler all over this
country. How do you feel about that? And Ahmadinejad said that Hitler was a
despicable individual whose actions had led to the deaths of 60 million
people. He didn't mention the six
million Jews in particular, but I think he understands that these comments have
aroused much outrage in the world, and it's my view that he repeats them from
time to time to get support from the Arab street rather more than the Iranian
street.
MR. CROMARTIE: Okay.
Commissioner Gaer?
FELICE GAER: Thank you very much. These were very interesting
presentations. I wanted to pursue
Barbara Slavin's observation that there's been an escalation of repression
since the "axis of evil" speech, and ask you if you think - as a parallel to
that - that engagement with Iran would, for example, change the rhetoric on
Holocaust denial, which has threatened the Jewish community, and has led the
leader of the Jewish community to say that this is creating problems for that
community, as a community, because of the threatening atmosphere.
I'd also like to ask if you think
that on the issue of exchanges, if you think there's an opportunity there in
the human rights or religious freedom area.
Is there a possibility for exchanges of imams, clerics, religious
leaders who could do more than end up as - what shall we say - willing idiots
by going to the country, but who could really have a role there in terms of
their own communities?
MS. SLAVIN: Let me answer the second question first. I think there definitely is and there have
been some exchanges already. There's
something called the Abrahamic dialogue - I don't know, I think some of you may
be familiar with it - which brings Iranian clerics here and sends Americans of
faith to Iran, groups like the American Friends Service Committee. The U.S. Institute of Peace had a delegation
that went in the fall of American Sunni Muslim experts on issues like human
rights and they went to Iran. They had a very interesting series of
meetings with both secular and religious leaders in Iran
on these issues and they found Iranians extraordinarily well informed,
particularly in Qom,
interestingly, on such issues as universal values and justice and so on, and
how they're treated by various religions and by international law.
Absolutely, I think that would be
great. I don't mean to suggest that
there's an automatic connection between the axis of evil that somehow became a
self-fulfilling policy. Obviously, Iran was doing
a lot that was dreadful before that speech and a lot that probably merited the
designation, although I personally don't like throwing around words like "evil,"
when applied to other countries.
However, it is clear that from that
moment and also the rejection of this offer to negotiation that the Iranians
presented in 2003 - from that time on, Iranian hardliners began to return to
power in municipal, parliamentary, and then presidential elections, and
reformists who had advocated better ties with the United States were humiliated. They were judged to be naïve. They were told that the only thing the United States
would understand was a tough, forcible regime.
So I think there is a relationship. Obviously, after the experience we've been
through over the last few years, this is going to take time, and if the U.S. and Iran sit down and start talking to
each other tomorrow, it's not going to result in an immediate improvement in
relations, in the situation of Iranians in terms of human rights. But I will note that even the publication of
the NIE - very controversial here - had an effect of actually liberating more
criticism of the Ahmadinejad regime because Iranians felt that the threat of a
U.S. attack had minimized and we've seen extraordinary criticism of Ahmadinejad
in the last couple of months.
MR. CROMARTIE: Commissioner Shea and the Commissioner Argue
and then -
NINA SHEA: Thank you very much. Neither of you addressed the phenomenon that
I've been reading about of a very strong pro-American sentiment among the
population. Is that because you don't
observe that yourselves or do you take issue with that observation of others? Is there a pro-American sentiment? How strong is it? And what should we be doing to work with that
other than exchanges? For example,
should the content of U.S.
broadcasting be changed? Is it good as
it is?
Barbara, you said that the United States
should not be giving lectures, we should be encouraging. What implication does that have for USCIRF,
for our commission? Are you saying that
we should not be reporting on human rights and doing critical analysis of its
human rights situation there - religious freedom situation? What do you mean by being encouraging? And
I'm also curious about your determination that the religious character has
faded. I'd like to know what you mean by
that and what way. And does the
pro-American sentiment, which from all indications does exist in certain strata
of the society and certain popular areas, does that indicate that the United States policy of being critical and
isolating Iran
is welcomed by some? Thanks.
MS. MALONEY: I'll start and then shift over to Barbara, to
give her time to devise some answers to the many questions that you posed. But in terms of pro-U.S. sentiment, I don't
think you'll find any disagreement among anyone who's had an opportunity to
travel to Iran. I haven't been there now in five and a half
years, but I did spend a couple of summers there studying and returned as
regularly as I could get a visa to attend conferences after the fact. The experience of any American in Iran
has been compared to me as what it must be like to be a rock star or a movie
star. People immediately, even in hijab,
can recognize that you're not Iranian and the perception -
MS. SHEA: Well how do you account for that?
MS. MALONEY: I think it's a variety of different
factors. I would not say that it is a
majority assent or endorsement of American policy. I can tell you that the policy of sanctions
in particular is not one that finds great favor on the Iranian street, although
obviously I'm talking purely anecdotal evidence here. I would also stress, again, my last trip
there was in late 2002, and so obviously I don't have every clear sense even
from travel on the street as to how Iranians feel about the Bush administration
except insofar I can gauge it from the press and from the fairly active Iran
Persian-speaking blogosphere and various internet sites that provide some
window into all of this. And I would say
that is relatively negative.
But clearly Iranians like America. They like American culture. They like American history. They're interested in this country because
it's been off limits to them for so long.
It is perceived as an enemy of a government that they do not like and so
that obviously enhances its appeal to them, so there are a variety of different
things that motivate Iranian affection for America. And I think that you're right: it's an important
asset that we have in our arsenal in the way that we deal with Iran.
How do we capitalize on it, I think
it's obviously much harder. There are
many things that make it difficult for Iranians to engage directly with
Americans. As you said, exchanges are
one vehicle. They're a small vehicle,
but they're an important one because they have a kind of multiplier
effect. I was the beneficiary of several
American and Iranian-cooperatively sponsored academic exchanges that enabled
graduate students to spend time in Iran, and I think that sort of thing has a
multiplier effect as it goes out into the population. But you're right. It's not enough. Even though one could argue that five million
of the 60 million that was devoted to U.S. democracy funding is probably not a
significant enough proportion devoted to exchanges, and I would hope that in
future appropriations for democracy funding that we look more strenuously to
the exchange version.
In terms of broadcasting, I think
influence on the content is a very problematic road to travel. The Iranians that I've talked to, including
one who shortly after we had the conversation returned home to go into jail,
have said that what makes U.S.
broadcasting most appealing is when it is perceived as effectively a message
that is not politicized. And Iranians
have relatively few opportunities to get independent information. If they want the U.S.
government's official view on things, they know how to get to the State
Department website, and the Internet has a surprisingly high penetration around
Iran. But we don't need to put Radio Free Europe or
Voice of America and make them arms of U.S. policy. We need to make sure that those are perceived
as independent, objective sources of information because Iranians have too few.
MS. SLAVIN: I have been in Iran
more recently, and I'll just give you a little - again, a lot of this is
anecdotal evidence, although there are some polls that talk about Iranian
attitudes toward the United
States.
I remember going in December, 2001, right after the fall of the Taliban,
and a lot of Iranians were joking and saying, oh, come bomb us, bomb us. I went in 2005. There was a little less enthusiasm for U.S.
supported regime change. When I went in
2006, not a single Iranian I met was interested in U.S.
military action in Iran. They had seen what had happened in Iraq
and they had lost their taste for this kind of liberation.
There've been some polls that have
been done. It appears that Iranians
above the age of 45 are mostly pro-American, and that's not surprising. These are people who remember the Shah,
remember the U.S. alliance
with Iran,
many of them; some of them have studied in this country. Younger Iranians, in a poll that Readers'
Digest did in 2006, they were asked who their favorite foreign leader was, and
a large number of them said Vladimir Putin.
So perhaps we're losing the public diplomacy campaign. They seem to like Putin because he was strong
and tough and stood up for Russian interests, and they had a sense that that
wasn't happening so much with Iran.
I'm not hugely familiar with the
content of U.S.
broadcasting, so - there have been some complaints that they're not that well
done, that too much opinion slips into particularly some of the Persian content. One suggestion I have that I think would be
very helpful would be to make it explicit U.S. policy to give visas to
Iranian reporters to come to this country.
I remember in 2004 that a number of Iranians I knew wanted to cover the U.S.
presidential elections and they were not given visas. And Iranian reporters are basically confined
to New York
and to 25 miles from the Iranian mission.
It's a huge mistake. If we want
to encourage them, not lecture them, if we want to teach them about what
democracy is like, what better way than to let their reporters come here and
report on it and see it for themselves.
I think that would be fantastic.
MR. CROMARTIE: We have five more minutes in this session and
I've got five commissioners who want to ask questions. So if we could be concise, that would be
helpful. Commissioner Argue and then
Commissioner Leo.
DON ARGUE: Thank you, Dr. Maloney and Ms. Slavin for
your fine testimony.
Barbara, I've been quite engaged
with your article "How Bush Saved Iran's Neocons" - very engaging. Have we done anything right in the last eight
years?
Secondly, this commission is
specifically charged with reporting to the President and to the Congress. We've already designated Iran as a "country
of particular concern." I don't see that
that will change. But along with that
report which we trust will inform U.S. foreign policy to one degree
or another, we have an opportunity to speak to steps that should be taken. So my question is two questions: one, have we done anything right? And two, could you isolate or identify for us
four or five specific steps you would recommend, and if we don't have time for
that response, could you send those to us in writing, please, so we could review
your expert testimony. Thank you.
MS. SLAVIN: Sure.
I think most of the steps are in my testimony, and I just added the one
about reporters which I think would be great.
Have we done anything right? Yes.
We cooperated with Iran
to form a new government for Afghanistan
and we held talks from the fall of 2001 through May of 2003 on a rather high
level in Geneva and Paris.
They were held in secret, but they were still the best, most productive
and constructive talks the U.S.
and Iran
have had since the revolution. And Colin
Powell, I quote in my book as saying those talks should have been
continued. They were not. They were ended by the Bush administration
after they were revealed by yours truly among others. We have also made an offer to talk. We have put proposals on the table and we
have engaged with talks about Iraq
with Iraqis present. And I think taboos
have been shattered about U.S.-Iranian contacts. Iranians have now spoken favorably about
U.S.-Iran talks. They're no longer the
taboo that they were. So we have made
some progress over the last eight years.
MS. MALONEY: Let me just add very quickly. I'd agree with much of what Barbara just
said, but the other thing that I think the Bush administration has done which
is very positive has been to build a professional bureaucracy for dealing with Iran. When I got to the State Department in 2005,
there was one desk officer tasked to deal with Iran and he really didn't even have
time to deal with the mountain of requests and tasks that came to his desk
every day. Today, you have an Office of
Iranian Affairs, staffed by very competent, talented professionals, a number of
action officers.
You also have a office in Dubai which is effectively
a kind of virtual embassy. It has action
officers who are trained and tasked to report on things as they're happening
inside Iran. It also deals with granting visas to Iranians
when they travel there. It's a very good
vehicle for understanding what's happening on the ground. So I think it's important the Bush
administration recognized that bureaucracy was dysfunctional. It's creating a career path for U.S. diplomats to become knowledgeable on Iran
and trained in Persian language which is also extremely important, and I think
that's one positive step that should be encouraged to expand.
MR. CROMARTIE: Commissioner Leo?
LEONARD LEO: Thank you.
Good morning and thank you very much for coming. You both talked a little bit in your
presentations about one of two aspects of military policy, and that was the
issue of attacking Iran, as you
put it, bombing Iran or U.S. military action in Iran. But there's another aspect to military policy
which I wanted to pursue perhaps a little bit, and that is building leverage
against Iran
through various vehicles such as the Gulf Security Initiative. And just an observation and then a
question. You look at the countries in
the Gulf States region: Saudi Arabia, which
blamed Iran for the Khobar Towers bombing; United Arab Emirates, which has a
longstanding history of disputes with Iran over territory in the Persian Gulf;
Qatar, which is worried about its natural gas reserves in the North field and
potential dust-ups with Iran over rights to that natural gas; Bahrain, which
has had historical problems with Iran and accused Iran of supporting extreme Bahraini
dissidents.
You can even go to Central Asia and
look a little bit at countries like Azerbaijan, where we've had some
incidents involving contracted ships that were - I'm not sure they were - they
were threatened, not attacked. And then
of course, Iran's got a
curious relationship with Afghanistan
because, in a way, it looks like it's playing both sides there. On the one hand, as you rightly point out,
there were very productive talks and efforts to stabilize the country. On the other hand, there is some evidence
that there are significant arms shipments to Afghanistan
coming from Iran,
some of which are large enough to suggest that perhaps the Iranian government
has to be on constructive notice that they exist. Now -
MR. CROMARTIE: Question, please.
MR. LEO: Well, I'd like to set the stage. In any event, the point is that there are a
number of countries in the Gulf States region
and some in Central Asia which have concerns about Iran. And military policy, apart from what you
talked about, can help to isolate regimes that are destabilizing to a
region. And so my question is to what
extent - apart from direct attacks on Iran,
to what extent can the United States
use military policy, aid through programs like the Gulf States Initiative,
military aid, to help create leverage and pressure on Iran to change itself?
Certainly, Iran understands this because they
provide $100 million per year to Hezbollah.
They support Hamas. Over the
years they supported Shiite Muslim extremists groups in the six member of
countries of the Gulf Cooperation Council, so they understand the idea of using
military policy as leverage to advance their own positions, but do we
understand that well enough and can we do more with military policy in that vein?
MS. SLAVIN: Just quickly, no one is saying that the United States
should give up its military tools of containment and pressure. I would argue, though, that the U.S. invasion of Iraq was the single biggest mistake
in terms of increasing Iranian regional influence and now we're playing
catch-up in trying to deal with the consequences of our own actions by removing
Saddam Hussein. I would also point out
that Gulf countries are acutely aware of the fact that they need good relations
with the United States, but they're also bending over backwards to increase
their links with Iran even after - before, during, and after President Bush's
visit in the region. In fact, the head -
the leader of Dubai was just in Tehran,
of course Ahmadinejad has been in Qatar,
he's been in Saudi Arabia,
we've had talks between Iran
and Egypt, so I would argue
that our policies don't seem to be having the desired effect if we're seeking
to isolate Iran
more in the region.
MR. CROMARTIE: Did you want to comment?
MS. MALONEY: Very quickly, I just echo what Barbara said,
and I don't think one can say that the Gulf security dialogue has had a
negative impact, but it's very hard to see how effective it's been in
persuading any of these states to take a more assertive approach to Iran, or frankly to be more cooperative on Iraq. It has presumably made a lot of people on
both sides quite happy because it involves $20 billion in arms sales, and I
think the dialogue on things like critical infrastructure protection is an
important dialogue to have and to continue, but it's very unclear that it's
going to have any impact on Iran, particularly on the issue of human rights and
religious freedom.
MR. CROMARTIE: The chair says we're going to go over a
couple more minutes because this is very interesting. So, Commissioner Land.
RICHARD LAND: Thank you. Thank you for your testimony. And this is to both of you. The Islamic Republic system of governance
appears from the outside to be extremely complex. Many suggest that the Supreme Leader Ayatollah
Khamenei makes all the important policy decisions. Can you explain where the real power lies and
what institutions or agencies are primarily responsible for human right abuses,
and given the fact that the regime has disqualified almost all of the reformers,
do you anticipate these elections in March leading to any positive developments
on domestic conditions, particularly in relation to human rights abuses? And this to both of you.
MS. MALONEY: Sure.
Let me give a couple of quick remarks.
Power, as I said in my testimony, resides ultimately with the supreme
leader, but this is also a system which has a number of different institutions,
many of which compete with one another - a number of personalities which from
the beginning have been locked in conflict with one another, and so there is no
one person who can make anything happen in Iran. This is what makes the country so hard to
deal with on any range of issues. You
don't have a leader, say, as in Libya
who can simply snap his fingers and reverse policy.
Decision-making in Iran is
consensual and it is fiercely fought, and it's very hard from the outside to
understand precisely who has the greatest influence in making that decision,
but we know it is a range of people within the political elite, the different
institutions have different weights, the parliament - even though it certainly
can be overridden by a council of guardians which is effectively appointed
directly by the supreme leader and very conservative in nature - the parliament
has a lot of significance and importance both in Iranian history and by
devising the budget in the day-to-day policies of the state. So I
think that it's a tough nut to crack, but obviously, it leads you straight back
to the supreme leader, but also to the fact that you have a very complicated
system of many institutions and individuals.
In terms of the elections, I think the elections are of critical
importance, not because they're going to suddenly tomorrow results and a change
in Iranian policy, but this is how Iranian politics play themselves out, at
least within the confines of the regime itself.
And that has grave importance for all of us. We may not understand the important - what
the significance will be in the short term.
As we saw in 1992, then President Rafsanjani decided to exclude a bunch
of leftists who had been holding up his efforts to try to reconstruct the
Iranian economy in the postwar period.
And what that led to was a lot of people who'd been part of the
government since the early days of the revolution leaving the government, going
into quasigovernmental think tanks, universities, coming back five years later,
having done a lot of thinking about what they'd created and being very critical
of it. It produced a real change in Iran's
politics within the regime. It produced
some changes that had a real salutary effect for the Iranian people. So I think that we don't necessarily know
what the impact of any particular election cycle will be, but we know these
elections matter.
MS. SLAVIN: Just very briefly, in
my book I compare the Iranian political system to an American square
dance. I say that the supreme leader is
in the middle and around him are a dozen or so senior figures, and they come in
and out in a sort of do-si-do depending on the issue, depending on what the
supreme leader is thinking about at the time.
But no one is ever banished from the circle as long as they express
their loyalty to the system, and that means ex-presidents, ex-national security
advisers, they all have an opportunity to come back in. And big decisions are made through consensus,
on the nuclear program, on relations with the United States - all are made
through consensus.
MR. CROMARTIE: Tell us the title
of your book again, please.
MS. SLAVIN: "Bitter Friends, Bosom
Enemies."
MR. CROMARTIE: And the publisher
is?
MS. SLAVIN: Saint
Martin's Press. Thank you.
MR. CROMARTIE: You're
welcome. We have time for only two more
questions, Imam and then Commissioner Bansal.
Did you have your hand up?
IMAM TALAL EID: Yes.
MR. CROMARTIE: Well then, you need
to get the mike.
MR. EID: Okay.
MR. CROMARTIE: You need the mike.
MR. EID: Thank you, Suzanne and
Barbara. I enjoyed your comments and
constructive thoughts. Here is my
question. Denying the religious rights
of Baha'is and Sunnis and many religious minorities has a significant
historical background in Iran,
regardless of who the Iranian president is.
Also, the negative comments and impressions of Iran's president regarding the Holocaust and Israel
created great concern for Iranian Jews.
Do you have any specific recommendations on how the U.S. Commission on
International Religious Freedom could more effectively advocate for religious
freedom in Iran?
MS. SLAVIN: I think one thing you
could point out is that Ahmadinejad is always talking about Sunni Arab causes
and that perhaps he could pay more attention to Sunnis and Sunni Arabs in his
own country. Khuzestan province,
which is an ethnic Arab province in Iran,
is one of the most downtrodden, one of the most miserable places in the
country, and I always find it highly ironic that Ahmadinejad champions himself
as the great defender of Arab causes when Iran's government mistreats its own
Arabs.
MS. MALONEY: I'd simply say, try
to find ways to engage directly with Iranians.
I know the Commission was unnerved when former President Khatami was
invited to speak here in Washington
at the National Cathedral. But I wonder,
did any of the commissioners seek to have a private meeting with him or to
attend at the talk and question him publicly?
I think obviously, the Catholic
University and other
dialogues that have taken place between religious institutions are very
important ones and you should seek to be a part of them. They've had some impact, I think, in
understanding what the thinking is, and certainly we know that the seminaries
are a very important avenue of political power in Iran. So I think that's a very significant
way.
There are obviously different levels of the religious freedom problem that
you have in Iran. The Baha'is I would say is the most urgent
and the most dramatic. The position of
other quote-unquote, "protected minorities," those who have some representation
in the Iranian political system, certain Catholic - I'm sorry - Christian
denominations, Zoroastrians and Jews, do have some sort of a protected status
under the Iranian Constitution, but obviously their situation is also very
deeply problematic. So I think there are
different pieces of this puzzle and you need to engage differently in order to
make the greatest impact.
MR. EID: Thank you.
MR. CROMARTIE: Commissioner Bansal,
you have the last question.
PREETA BANSAL: Yes. I'd like to just touch on - you mentioned
that you would be happy to elaborate on some of the shortcomings of democracy
programs. And I'm wondering - I mean, both
of you have been very critical of our funding of democracy programs. I'd like to understand very specifically
what, from your perspective, these programs do that is not - you know, it could
arguably just be supporting local civil society, but it's obviously in your
perspective something more. And relate,
well, separately, I'm wondering if there's a role for engaging the expatriate
Iranian-American community in any of your recommendations or whether that's a
double-edged sword.
MS. SLAVIN: Let me say very
briefly and then I'll let Suzanne go to this because she knows about it much
more in detail. It's not so much the
programs, it's the context. When the
context is one of hostility and threats and regime change and World War III,
you cannot promote democracy effectively through U.S. government funds, and all of
this money will be seen as regime change money.
MS. MALONEY: I would agree that
the context is a real problem, but I think that the way that the program has
been undertaken, and specifically my experience in evaluating proposals and
seeing what got funded left me greatly unnerved. I think that even the fact that we cannot
talk about who the grantees are for fear of putting them in jeopardy makes it
very difficult to judge the efficacy of these programs. I am not at all confident, based on what I
saw while I was in government and what I've heard since that time through
what's been release to the press, how much of this money is actually going to
make it to Iranians on the ground.
There's really no outside ability to vet the efficacy of these programs
or the people that the funding is going to.
I think there has been a real strenuous effort within the administration
itself to find ways to be effective, but particularly when most of the
organizations and individuals who have the greatest influence within Iran
are unwilling to take our money, it's very difficult do that. Even if you use third-party cutouts, even if
you try to hold all of your activities in third or fourth countries using
multiple recipients to try to disguise the actual source of the funding.
So I think it really simply can't be terribly effective because Iranians
have said, we don't want this. The
reason they don't want it, it's a complicated situation, but it has to do a lot
with our legacy there, our involvement in 1953 with the coup that unseated the
elected prime minister, some of the past history. You know, whether that's justified or not we
can debate, but the moral of the story is that Iranian activists have said it
makes their life much more difficult when we go around talking about this. Had the Secretary of State announced that we
were going to be giving $75 million in scholarships and new academic programs
for Iranians to come here and for Americans to learn more about Iran, we would have had a public relations
bonanza on the ground in Tehran. It was deeply unfortunate the way this
program was launched and I think it will be very hard to retool it in way
that's going to have an impact on the ground in Tehran.
MS. BANSAL: So if I understand
your response, it's not just the context.
So if a new administration were to come in and change some of the
rhetoric, from your perspective, the democracy program would still remain
problematic.
MS. MALONEY: That's true. It's just very hard to do these sorts of
things when all of the credible actors on the Iranian side don't want any part
of it. And it makes the work of those
foundations and organizations that don't take U.S. funding that much more
difficult because there is no way to demonstrate or prove that there are
dissociated from these sorts of programs.
And the overall environment, even for academics to go back and forth,
has become so much worse.
MR. CROMARTIE: Commissioner Gaer
has a brief comment and then we're going to go to our next panel.
MS. GAER: I wanted to respond -
MR. CROMARTIE: With your mike on,
please.
MS. GAER: I wanted to respond to
your question - your point about whether we engaged. First of all, we did ask to meet and speak
with people at the Cathedral and with the president. They refused.
Secondly, I participated personally in the private meeting that the
Council on Foreign Relations had with President Ahmadinejad in New York during his
visit not this year, but the year before.
There was a widespread sense among all of us who were present that this
was not a person who was listening or interested in dialogue, and there was a
view that it will be better to talk directly with the Iranian people than to
continue with that kind of meeting.
MR. CROMARTIE: Okay. Thank you.
Thank you so much for your time.
Thank you for your testimony.
And, ladies and gentlemen, we'll have our next panel in about two
minutes.
[...]
MICHAEL CROMARTIE: Welcome, ladies and gentlemen, again. Thank you to our panel for joining us.
Our first speaker will be Dr. Payam
Akhavan. He is the co-founder of the
Iran Human Rights Documentation Centre.
He is also a professor of law at McGill University. He was previously the first legal adviser to
the Office of the Prosecutor, International Criminal Tribunals for the former Yugoslavia and Rwanda. Thank you, sir, for joining us.
PAYAM AKHAVAN: Thank you, Mr. President, distinguished
members of the commission, for this - Mr. Chairman, it's the French "Monsieur
le Président" we're used to in Montreal. Mr. Chair, distinguished members of the
commission, I'm grateful for this second opportunity to address you in the
presence of such eminent experts. I'd
like to make some broad remarks about the context within which we should
understand the human rights situation in Iran, and to specifically address
the importance of holding individual Iranian officials accountable for human
rights violations as part of the broader process of a democratic
transformation.
The question of religious freedom
challenges the core of the legitimacy of an authoritarian theocratic
state. In the Islamic Republic of Iran,
state power is based on the myth that there is only a single incontestable
interpretation of Islam as defined by unelected religious clerics and others in
the inner circle of the ruling class.
This ideology of exclusive authenticity is invoked to justify
constitutional structures that subordinate democratic aspirations to the
self-proclaimed divine mandate of clerics who claim to be accountable only to
God. Thousands are disqualified from
elections because the Council of Guardians does not approve their Islamic
credentials, and any expression of criticism that vaguely threatens those in
power is deemed to be un-Islamic and subject to punishment.
Leaving aside the burgeoning
Islamic reformists and secular democrats, this myth of Islamic authenticity is
easily exposed by dissent in the ranks of senior Ayatollahs, who bemoan the
corruption of their venerable tradition by the profane temptations of
power. It is in this context that the
discourse of the Islamic Republic and its demonization of religious minorities,
its democratic opponents, and others should be understood.
The construction of enemies is a
fundamental attribute of authoritarianism.
The obsessive focus on threats posed by external enemies is an integral
aspect of the political homogenization that justifies repression of internal
enemies that are invariably portrayed as agents of American imperialism or
Zionism. Authentic indigenous calls for
democracy and human rights are transformed into a foreign conspiracy against
Islam and Iranian sovereignty.
Challenging the unchecked power of the clerics is depicted as
blasphemy. A public dissatisfied with
economic decline and political repression is silenced by the rhetoric of
militant survivalism in the face of an imminent threat, whether an American
military attack or the prospect of a Velvet Revolution by Iranians, both of
which are viewed as part of the same transaction.
The all-consuming Western emphasis
on Iran's nuclear program
has allowed President Ahmadinejad's apocalyptic hate-mongering to eclipse the
aspirations of Iran's
overwhelmingly youthful population, 70 percent of whom are 30 years of age and
under. While the Western media dwells on
exoticized images of Islamic terrorists in the post-9/11 world, a profound and
irresistible demographic shift is redefining Iranian society from within. This is a disillusioned, post-ideological
generation that dreams of a prosperous and open society built on democracy and
the rule of law. It is a generation that
is Internet savvy, glued to satellite television, and no longer satisfied by
the clash of civilizations rhetoric that increasingly unpopular leaders peddle
because they have nothing else to offer their people. It is a diverse and dynamic society of
student activists and public intellectuals, journalists and webloggers,
feminists and artists, teachers' and bus drivers' unions, the complex but
intertwined ingredients of an emerging civil society that is by far the biggest
threat to Tehran's hardliners, as demonstrated by increasing desperation to
infiltrate the NGO community and to arrest and prosecute its leaders.
Throughout its modern history, Iran
has been a trophy in the machinations of foreign powers with little regard for
the welfare of its people. Today, Iran
is viewed primarily through the prism of nuclear non-proliferation, energy
security, and regional stability. While
U.N. resolutions periodically condemn Iran's human rights record, there
is no serious consideration given to the aspirations of the long-suffering
Iranian people whose voices are displaced by the logic of realpolitik. On the one hand, there is fear of military
conflict of the nuclear issue that will harm the reformists and help strengthen
the hand of hardliners in the name of fighting the common enemy. On the other hand, there is the equal fear of
a grand bargain with Iran,
which will lead to Western toleration of human rights abuses in the name of
national self-interest. In both
scenarios, the Iranian people lose.
At this critical juncture, the core
of a principled foreign policy must consist of a twin strategy of empowering
the Iranian people while isolating those that stand in their way. It would be a grave mistake to try and
dominate or manipulate the democratic process for short-term objectives. While the international community has an
important role to play, as it did in the struggle against Apartheid and other
repressive regimes, it must be understood that this struggle is first and
foremost that of the Iranian people.
A particular aspect of a principled
foreign policy that I wish to raise with this commission today is the question
of accountability for human rights violations.
This is an area where the international community has an important role
to play. From its very inception, the
Islamic Republic has engaged in widespread and systematic human rights
violations against the citizens.
Arbitrary executions, torture, religious and political persecution, even
assassination of hundreds of dissidents aboard, these are the hallmarks of a
government that has extinguished the lives of countless thousands as a means of
staying in power. There is a direct
connection between impunity for such atrocities and the continuation of
repressive policies. It doesn't take
much imagination to realize that the assumption of public office by those that
should be prosecuted for crimes against humanity is not conducive either to a
domestic policy of reform or to a foreign policy of good neighborly
relations. In the ordinary course of
events, such abuses would be handled by an independent and impartial judiciary. In Iran, however, it is the judiciary
itself that is an instrument of repression, as demonstrated by the long list of
senior Iranian officials implicated in serious human rights abuses.
A genuine democratic transformation
requires justice for the victims of these crimes and a shift in the boundaries
of power and legitimacy in a system where a culture of impunity has prevailed
for so long. There is an inextricable
relationship between holding leaders accountable for human rights violations,
opening a space for democracy and civil dialogue, and the transformation of Iran's
regional posture. Informed Iranian
sources have indicated to me in no uncertain terms that it is imperative -
imperative to send a message to the Iranian leadership that they will be held
to account for their crimes beyond the borders of Iran.
A point of departure in such an
undertaking is simply to document and publicize the truth. The Iran Human Rights Documentation Centre,
established in 2003, has engaged in the publication of meticulously detailed
analytic reports that address human rights violations and attempt to identify
those most responsible in the hopes that the uncovering of the truth will make
it much more difficult to avoid a reckoning with the past when the opportunity
presents itself.
The centre has the good fortune of
being treated with suspicion by both ends of the political spectrum: those that
believe it is part of right-wing conspiracy to legitimize the invasion of Iran
and those that think that it is an inconsequential left-wing NGO. The reality is that the center's dedicated
staff have labored to prepare some of the best-documented analytic human rights
reports on Iran, including two on the persecution of Baha'is, which are widely
disseminated in Iran, which it is hoped will contribute to creating a space for
internalizing accountability in any future democratic scenario. Some governments have privately expressed
support for the centre, but are reluctant to publicly endorse it for fear of
alienating the Iranian government.
Multilateral support, however, is vital for engaging the international
community in a process that should eventually give rise to a more formal
mechanism for identifying those responsible for crimes against humanity, with a
view to stigmatizing and isolating them, both in Iran and abroad.
There is a need for a concerted
international policy of ensuring accountability, and this at least requires
serious consideration and an informed dialogue aimed at exploring its potential
impact. One starting point could be the
extension of U.N. Security Council targeted sanctions against those involved in
the nuclear industry to those implicated in serious human rights abuses. Travel bans and asset freezes on human rights
grounds could contribute to the isolation of elements responsible for
international crimes and empower those discouraged by the impression of
invincibility created by hardliners.
Other more vigorous options could include an International Commission of
Inquiry or even discussion of an International Criminal Tribunal that in due
course could bring perpetrators of crimes against humanity to justice.
My purpose today is not to
elaborate in great detail the form and shape that such a process may eventually
take, but simply to emphasize the tremendous importance of accountability to
any principled foreign policy. I am
aware that those of a realist persuasion may dismiss this theme and these
proposals as naïve idealism, but I'm comforted by the fact that when I served
as legal advisor to the prosecutor of the U.N. Yugoslav Tribunal, we received
the exact same treatment, only to become one of the most important instruments
of governance and post-conflict peace-building in the Balkans. We must elevate our sights beyond narrow
immediate considerations and realize that a better future cannot be built
without reckoning with the past, that a principled approach is the only lasting
basis for stability, and that the achievement of democracy and human rights by
the Iranian people holds the potential of completely transforming the Middle East region.
Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
MR. CROMARTIE: Thank you, Dr. Akhavan. Thank you very much.
Dr. Roya Boroumand is the
co-founder and executive director of the Boroumand Foundation for the Promotion
of Human Rights and Democracy in Iran,
the co-author of several articles on the political situation in Iran
and on the nature of Islamic terrorism.
Thank you so much for joining us today.
ROYA BOROUMAND: Thank you for having me here and giving me
the opportunity to address the commission.
This is a first for me since we are
library rats and human rights researchers, and so you would forgive me if I
will not follow the formal format and would like to have sort of a
heart-to-heart talk with the commission.
I think what I heard before - I was going to tell you about the wide
ranges of discrimination that affect Iran - Iranian Muslims, Sufis, and the
religious laws that affect the lives of Iranian women, and I can certainly do
so. I think, however, that considering
the important issues that you are looking into, it's important for us actors in
civil society to talk to you as such. We
are no diplomats and we are no journalists.
And we are here and my organization
has been created to document human rights violations, not only to call on the
Iranian government to stop human rights violations, but also because we care
for the well-being of the Iranian population.
It is now 30 years since the revolution; and we all have experiences,
common experiences, about how things happen 30 years ago and how things could
have gone differently had the Iranian civil society been heard outside Iran. When I hear the fact that after - that the
rhetoric about human rights and the rhetoric about what the Iranian government
does wrong is counterproductive, I am a little bit concerned. Because of course, you know, I've lost my
access to the country since I was vocal against human rights in Iran,
so, you know, I can't go, come and go, but we certainly, thanks to the
Internet, can read what the Iranians write.
And they write. And you probably
have not heard.
You have heard a lot about the
Holocaust denial of President Ahmadinejad; you probably have not heard about
the Iranian political dissidents who, from their prison in Evin, sent a
statement to - with empathy for the Holocaust victims. And so I think we have - there is a
complexity in the Iranian situation that is sometimes lost because of the speed
of events here and because of the lack of language. We, as Iranian dissidents during the time of
the Shah, we were hearing President Carter talk about human rights, and we were
thrilled to see that when we write an open letter criticizing the policies of
the government that they don't come to arrest us.
So I think, you know, you have to
keep in mind the situation on the ground and that, you know, often times we
hear the "axis of evil" discourse. For example, we just heard, "It ruined
everything. Everything was lost." Everything was lost for whom? I am not a diplomat, so I don't focus on
diplomacy, but I am watching the civil society, and I can tell you - and it's
not to say that it is good to call people names, that's not what I'm
saying. I think that the discourse
contained one specific statement, which referred to the Iranian government as
the unelected leaders. And I think that
that is what had an incredible effect.
The few weeks following that
statement, nothing wrong happened in Iran. No reformist minister was arrested, no
newspaper was closed. On the other hand,
you had a flurry of statements and communiqués by students, by nurses, by all
sorts of civil society actors. You had
the release from prison for the Nowruz holidays, for the New Year holiday, of a
few students who had been held since the students' rioting and had not been
allowed out. You had incredible debate
within the parliament of Iran
about what to do next, whose fault it is, you know. The hardliners would accuse the reforms, the
reformers would accuse the hardliners - it is your fault. They would look at the debates in the Duma,
the Soviet parliament, about how they did under Gorbachev.
So, I think, you know, things are a
little bit more complex. And if you
allow me, I will take you to this time of the revolution. I think if you want to devise policy, I'm not
here to give you advice on policy, but I can give you the information, maybe
some of the information, that you may need to devise a policy that will be a
long-term, sustainable policy. During
the revolution, if you think about the images, what do you remember of the time
of the revolution? I guess, you know, I
am ready to bet that you remembered the crowds, these masses of Iranians in the
street, and a waving Ayatollah. You
remember young students, angry students with their fists up taking hostages and
chanting anti-American slogans. You also
remember young boys running on the minefields in the Iran-Iraq war.
And so all these images that you
remember, you remember veiled women demonstrating, but I don't think that you
saw the Iranian judges, the Iranian clerics, the Iranian women's rights
activists, bar association members who wrote and fought against the
establishment of a theocracy in Iran
against the constitution. I don't think
that you remember the rioting that took place in various regions in Iran during
the referendum for the constitution of the Islamic Republic and I don't think
that anyone talked about people who got stabbed, intimidated, harassed because
they opposed the Islamic Republic constitution and the laws that were going to
affect all of us for the next decades.
So, you know, when you think in
terms of Iran, there are
several Irans; there is not
one Iran. There is one Iran that is the leaders and the
rulers, and they have many factions. And
there is a real competition between them.
But there is also the other Iran that you don't hear about, and
you don't hear about it because they have been banned from participating in the
politics and administration of their country for the past three decades. You know, we know that Sunni Muslims are
discriminated against by law, they are not allowed to participate in their
government, they are not allowed to participate in the army, and they are not
allowed to be part of many of these para-state organizations because they are
Sunni, simply because they are Sunni.
And they, of course, you know, opposed the Islamic Republic from the
onset, 1979, you know. This is the
country of Shiite Muslims, so what about these millions of Sunnis? So they were really upset. And not only they, but, you know, during the
debates among the revolutionary clerics, a lot of them also got up and said,
"Well, we have millions of Sunnis. We
can't just say that this is the republic
of Shi'a Muslims." You know, intimidation, fear, so things went
the way they did.
We have a selection process that
Mr. Akhavan talked about, and this selection process eliminates from not only
the government positions, but from a lot of also para-state functions and
private functions. Any Iranian Shi'a,
practicing Iranian, whose loyalty to the principle and the principle tenets of
the Islamic Republic is not certain and is doubted. Not only them, but also, you know, we had a
lot - Iran
was a modernizing country, and it still is.
We had many political parties from the extreme left who were, I'm sure
you remember, very anti-American. The
members of these groups, hundreds, sometimes thousands depending on, you know,
which ones, they were born in Muslim families, they had been sometimes
practicing Muslims, and had decided of their own free will not to believe
anymore. These people were all
discriminated against, not only their parties were banned, but they were
arrested whether or not they opposed the Islamic Republic. They were arrested and hundreds of them were
executed in a mass prison killing in 1988 where prisoners who had been
previously sentenced to prison sentences - prison terms - were re-questioned,
and if their loyalty to religion and the Islamic Republic tenets was not
proven, they were hanged.
And so, I will end on a note that,
you know, when you look at the history, and in my written comment you will see
that we have a lot of Ayatollahs, Grand Ayatollahs, who opposed the principles
that are the principles of the Islamic Republic today and that give powers to
the clerical elite and a small clerical elite.
So, you know, the history of Iran
would show you, if you look into the history of the revolution, you see that
this was not clear cut, and that had these Ayatollahs had the support or
visibility outside Iran,
maybe the Islamic Republic would not have been what it is now. So I urge the Commissioners to, for a short
period of time, at least, think about being long-term pragmatists. Keep the human rights in Iran as a relevant
indicator of the Islamic Republic's legitimacy and include in all policy discussions
the demands of those dissenters who, in spite of the chronic crackdown on civil
society, insist on the universality of human rights, including the right to
have and practice a religion, to change one's religion, or not to partake of
religion at all.
Thank you.
MR. CROMARTIE: Thank you so much.
Dr. Paul Marshall is senior fellow
for the Center for Religious Freedom at the Hudson Institute here in Washington. He is also the author of a new book called
"The World Survey of Religious Freedom."
Dr. Marshall, thank you for coming, sir.
PAUL MARSHALL: Thank you.
Thank you, Mr. Chairman, and thanks to you and the commission for this
very important hearing.
In my remarks, I want to give a
brief overview of the treatment of religious minorities and dissidents. There is, in my written testimony, an
expanded version. And as you mentioned,
as we're on television, if I may give a plug for the book, "Religious Freedom
in the World," just out -
MR. CROMARTIE: Hold it a little higher, yes.
MR. MARSHALL: Okay.
Thank you very much - and it has extensive survey of the situation of
religious freedom in Iran.
In doing this, I'm aware that the
commissioners and the commission are very well aware of the dynamics within Iran,
but I am continually surprised by the fact of how many people are not. So it bears repetition. A second reason for reemphasizing it is that
this reveals something - it is not a side issue in Iran - it reveals something about
the nature of the regime. And as we look
at policy towards Iran,
this must be emphasized and borne in mind.
The Iranian government is one of
the world's worst religious persecutors.
As well as Muslims, all religious minorities, including Sunni Muslims,
Sufis, Baha'is, Assyrians, Catholics, Anglicans, Armenians, evangelicals, Mandaeans,
Jews, and Zoroastrians suffer. The
Assyrian and Mandaean communities have almost disappeared from the
country. As has been noted, this affects
not only non-Muslims. Muslims who do not
subscribe to the state doctrine are also subject to persecution. Sunnis, especially Sufis, have regularly been
banned from teaching their religion, and some have been tortured for their
beliefs. Shiites who dare to dissent
from state orthodoxy have been tried, including for blasphemy, one put it,
"tried for the crime of thinking."
If we look particularly at the
religious minorities, again, it should be emphasized that these are not
haphazard things of a regime which cracks down when it feels there are
problems. The question of religious
minorities and their repression is constitutionalized, legalized, and
structured. Article 19 of the
constitution dealing with equal rights notably does not exclude religious
discrimination. Again, according to the
constitution, Iran
says it treats non-Shiite Islam with, quote, "complete respect," and it gives
formal recognition to Zoroastrianism, Judaism, and Christianity, but no other
religions. Zoroastrians, Jews, and
orthodox Christians are not normally free to practice their rituals and educate
their children, but cannot enter government service or hold commissions in the
armed forces. University applicants are
screened for Islamic orthodoxy and must pass a test in Islamic theology,
obviously restricting religious minorities.
The situation for those
non-recognized religious minorities is worse.
Other features of the religious status of minorities - if a Muslim
intentionally murders a non-Muslim, they may be asked only to pay blood money,
which may be waived by the courts. The
blood money of a woman and non-Muslims is less than that of a Muslim man. There are two categories of non-Muslims:
people of the book, Christians, Jews, and Zoroastrians; their blood money is
less than that of a Muslim. Murdering
other minorities, non-people of the book, such as Baha'is, has no legal
ramifications. They, as well as those
who leave Islam, fall into the category of murder with impunity, and if killed,
no one will punish their killers. For
sexual relations between a non-Muslim man and a Muslim woman, the non-Muslim
faces death. That's the overall
structure.
Some comments on particular
minorities: under the monarchy, the members of the small Zoroastrian community
were regarded as, in some sense, an unofficial privileged status, as true
ancient Iranians. Since the Islamic revolution,
many have fled, and those remaining have reduced legal rights and suffer
discrimination in education and employment.
Jews are forbidden to visit Israel. Jewish families cannot travel abroad
together. Jewish schooling is forbidden,
as is the study of Hebrew. Since 1979,
Jews have been executed for religious reasons or allegations of spying for Israel. By 2007, the Jewish community was less than
half its size of 1979. The Christian
population endures discrimination, harassment, surveillance, arrest, and
imprisonment. Since Ahmadinejad's coming
into office, Church raids have increased, resulting in detainment of
worshippers and of church leadership, with threats, harassment, and at times
arrest. People suspected of involvement
in evangelical activity have been tortured.
The Iranian regime regards its
largest non-Muslim minority, the Baha'is, as a heresy and persecutes them
severely. As noted, its adherents are
regarded as unprotected infidels who may be killed with impunity. In recent years, the regime has developed a
coordinated strategy of repression, including having the Ministry of
Information, the Revolutionary Guard, and the policy identify all Baha'is, and
also, apart from other penalties, excluding them from high-earning or sensitive
areas. This includes not only newspapers
and periodicals, publishing and bookselling, and Internet cafes, but with
paranoid scope, higher sensitive areas are defined to include jewelry and watch
making, coffee shops, gravures, the tourist industry, car rentals, hotel
management, and tailoring and training institutions.
A new Islamic penal code has
recently been presented for discussion to the parliament, to the Majlis. This, for the first time, would make the
death penalty for apostasy and for heresy a required punishment. That is, it cannot be changed, reduced, or
annulled. It should be noted that in the
past the Iranian regime has applied the death penalty for heresy and apostasy,
but it had not been explicitly codified.
If this penal code is accepted, it would be codified and would be a
special danger to liberal thinkers, those who have left Islam, and
Baha'is. The proposed law says that
apostasy - that is, leaving Islam for one born Muslim - the penalty is death. For one who had converted to Islam and then
left, the penalty is death, with three days to recant. The punishment for a woman is life
imprisonment, and, under the guidance of the court, special hardship. For those who, and I quote, "whoever claims
to be a prophet is sentenced to death." Any Muslim who invents a heresy and creates a
sect contrary to the obligations of Islam is considered an apostate. That particular clause appears to be directed
at the Baha'is.
Let me close by emphasizing the
importance of religious freedom. It is
not only a matter of minority rights, vitally important though these are, it is
the fact that when, as in Iran,
politics and religion are intertwined, you cannot have political freedom unless
you have religious freedom. This very
structured, systematic repression also reveals something of the nature of the
system. For example, Iranian political
dissidents have at times been charged with offenses such as treason, but can
also be charged with, I quote, "insulting Islamic holy values." The argument is the regime embodies Islam,
you oppose the regime, you attack Islam, therefore you are a blasphemer. Akbar Ganji, who was mentioned, was, amongst
the charges against him was propaganda against the Islamic system, so that political
dissent is treated as a religious offense.
We should also note that the
regulations governing the lives of religious minorities and the provisions of
the proposed penal code are, again, systematically structured and reminiscent
of the Nazi Nuremberg Laws. I do not say
that lightly. I think all of us want to
avoid the situation of "reductum ad Hitlerum" every time we see a problem, but
in this case, the parallel structures of identification, exclusion from jobs
and other things, and now penal penalties are, in fact, exactly parallel. So I say this as an analytic point, not simply
as throwing out a political swear word.
There appear to be steps towards the destruction of religious
communities, and they require the international pressure against them that the
Nuremberg Laws did not receive.
Finally, it should be noted that
the proposed penal code contemplates extending its jurisdiction over actions
that take place outside of the country.
With Iran,
this is a particular concern. Note that
this is a regime that has already assassinated political opponents abroad, it
passed a death sentence on Salman Rushdie, it has called for the death of
Scandinavian cartoonists, and is currently pushing for international law -
international restrictions against what it calls insulting Islam, which, to
reemphasize, for it includes critics of the regime. This attempt at universal jurisdiction is an
attempt to export its repression. So, in
conclusion, commissioners, I would reemphasize that it's important to make the
issue of religious freedom central in terms of Iran because it is so inbuilt into
the structure and the structure of power of the regime. And secondly, it helps us to understand
it. Iran has very many dimensions, as we
have mentioned, but in respect of its legal code, particularly its religious
dimensions, it should not be understood simply as a regional power which wants
protection of its regime and regional control, but it's - if I may borrow a
term from another tradition - it has a Messianic religious element, which while
not the only dynamic in the country, still has considerable power in shaping
it.
Thank you very much.
MR. CROMARTIE: Thank you, Dr. Marshall, and I thank all of
our panelists.
We're going to go over time for a
few minutes, so if you can stay, please do.
We've come to the end, but we do want to have some questions for our
panelists. So if we can be concise, that
would be excellent.
Commissioner Bansal and
Commissioner Gaer.
PREETA D. BANSAL: Yes. A
question I have - I mean, Iran
obviously has a rich legal and constitutional history for many centuries, not
just in the current regime. A couple
related questions to what you have discussed.
One, to what degree would you say the Iranian people have an awareness
generally of international human rights and the rights guaranteed to them under
those instruments? To what degree do
they have access to the Internet? I know
you both have talked a lot about the Internet and what that offers. In certain countries, certainly there's
blocking of the Internet. I'm wondering if
you've come across any of that in Iran. Thirdly, I'm just - and more generally, I'm
interested to what degree do you think - what are the hopes of actually
achieving reform from within? And I'm
wondering what your views are about the democracy programs, like whether the U.S.
democracy programs - if you shared the same views expressed by some of our
other panelists.
MR. CROMARTIE: And if you could each answer it with less
than one minute.
(Laughter.)
Who wants to go first?
MR. AKHAVAN: Well, in less than one minute - yes, Iran
has a rich legal history. There has been
a regression. One of the embodiments is
Shirin Ebadi, who was a woman judge who was disqualified from the bench. So there's been a clear regression and the
judiciary has become an instrument of repression. All the political prisoners are prosecuted
and imprisoned, and there is a whole line of investigating magistrates and
others who have been promoted through the ranks exactly because of their
participation in this process. In terms
of awareness, it's very difficult to say, but I think there is a very vigorous
human rights movement within Iran. And the access to Internet explains in part
why there is such awareness. There are
apparently more weblogs in the Persian language than any other language other
than English, which is a statistic that I've been given - some 60,000 weblogs,
I've heard. Maybe my colleague with me
is in a better position to say.
Now, in terms of hopes of reform
within, we have to understand the European experience, 350 years of civil wars,
revolutions, world wars, before one achieves this sort of democratic
stability. Now, I'm not suggesting we
should go through two world wars and 350 years, but the point is that you
cannot simply have an instant formula for democracy. It involves a process of social-political
maturation. And I would suggest that Iran is the furthest along in the Middle East, in the Islamic Middle East, in that respect,
and it is a very difficult situation because there is this façade of extremism
symbolized by President Ahmadinejad's bellicose remarks. But immediately underneath that is a
population, which, as I said, is post-ideological, very pragmatic, and for the
most part wants stability and prosperity and openness. So it's not that the average person thinks in
intellectual terms about human rights, they want an end to corruption, they
want an end to fear, they want an end to intimidation.
And the final point about the U.S. democracy program, it's very difficult in
such a short time to explain the complexities, I think there is a danger to the
extent that civil society in Iran
is perceived as an extension of U.S.
hegemony in the region. And that's why
I'm saying that the best thing to do in certain circumstances is to stand back
and to encourage in the same way as, for example, the African National Congress
struggled against Apartheid with the support and encouragement of the
international community, but not the idea that somehow the movement has been
co-opted. So I would say that the U.S. should not disengage, but should very
carefully calibrate its engagement so that it doesn't become the kiss of death
for civil society in Iran.
MS. BOROUMAND: Again, in a very short time, it's a very
complex question. There is no miracle
solution. The Iranian constitution does
not allow its own reform, and so the reason why - part of the reason why the
reformists failed, and that is what you read in the Iranian papers, blogs, is
that they were not able to achieve the reforms.
So that's part of why the reforms are not feasible in the present state
of the Iranian constitution. It is also
that a lot of the reformist elite did not really intend democratic reform. They paid lip service to it. However, we have an Iranian government that
is also very concerned about its international image. And so, alongside with what I just told you,
you see regularly, you know, manuals and guidelines for the law enforcement
officers and who they can shoot and when they can shoot them, you see manuals
and guidelines about treatment of prisoners.
These things would not have happened 30 years ago.
And so there is reference to human
rights, there is discussion about it.
And I don't want to say that it's really sincere or they really think
that they will enforce it, but I think some in the ruling elite believe that
they have to think about these things.
And that is not because, you know, we are screaming here, but it's
because there is a constituency within Iran that, unlike 1979, is using
the language of human rights, is referring to conventions, international law
systematically. Women, students,
political activists, prisoners, you know, this language is all over the
place. And the ordinary Iranians may not
know the details and sophistication of it, and this is part of why we try to
promote the literature of human rights and the history of other countries, but
certainly things are not as simple as they were in '79. And so the situation is not hopeless by any
means.
MR. MARSHALL: If I may just add on that. In terms of democracy promotion, as many
people have argued, in some ways the use of the word, the centralizing word,
democracy is unfortunate because there's emphasis on elections and missing out
on the republican, small-R, aspects of that, and the stress on free
societies. I'd just make that first
comment. The second one is focusing on
the religious aspect, that the key clash of ideas or war of ideas in the modern
world is the one taking place within Islam.
That has been pointed out before this morning, not only amongst the
population at large, but amongst the Ayatollahs. There are a variety of Sunni figures, who on
religious grounds, are highly critical of the regime. And insofar as we are able to give a platform
to people, it's also important to give a religious platform and to as much as
possible allow people to criticize the religious basis of the regime, on which
it's often quite insecure.
MR. CROMARTIE: Quickly.
MS. BOROUMAND: Yes. I
think one issue that needs to be emphasized is that whether or not you engage
the Iranian leadership or not, whether or not you decide to talk to them, it is
important for you to know exactly who they are and what they are about. But it's like any negotiations. If you include human rights and you tell them
that, you know, when they say democracy that they don't mean it and you
understand that they don't mean it, so that the discussion is about the facts
and the issues, and not about diplomatic niceties. Then, I think, the interlocutors will be
challenged into thinking about how they can look better in the international
community, and then maybe they will think about how to reform their laws.
MR. CROMARTIE: Commissioner Gaer, go ahead.
FECLICE D. GAER: Thank you all very much for helping us
understand what we see and what we don't see.
I wanted to pick up on the question
I asked earlier in the hearing. We're
being told that a range of Iranian dissidents, human rights activists feel and
caution that U.S.
support for them or their human rights issues can be counterproductive. I'm wondering if you could comment on whether
religious communities, and the communities about whom you've testified here
today, feel the same way - Baha'is, Jews, Christians, Sunni Arabs, including the
Turkmen, who have been under some pressure recently - and would U.S. engagement
with Iran change this view?
MR. AKHAVAN: If I may, the problem is U.S. support can mean so many things, and we
need to calibrate what we mean by U.S. support. Is it for violent overthrow of the regime or
is it for giving resources to women's rights groups to organize
themselves? There are so many different
forms that we can't speak in blanket terms.
So I think that at one level, yes, U.S. support has played into the
hands of the regime by allowing it to demonize the civil society. And if you look at the arrest of Dr. Haleh
Esfandiari, Professor Ramin Jahanbegloo, and all of these public intellectuals,
you see that in every instance the charge is one of sort of conspiracy to
ferment a Velvet Revolution as part of some sort of U.S. conspiracy. Now, the regime would probably do that
anyways, but I think that this sort of bellicose rhetoric only helps them
rationalize it and legitimize it in the eyes of the public, the Iranian public,
that otherwise would be prone to supporting this sort of opposition. So it's a question of calibrating.
But on the other hand, as I
mentioned, there's a fear of some sort of military confrontation, violent
overthrow, on the part of the Iranian public, but there's an equal fear of a
grand bargain which would lead to appeasement of Iran. And that's the other side of the
equation. So I think that the point is
that there must be engagement, but engagement should be principled. And if I may just briefly explain that. One of the points here is that you have two Irans: you have the Iran
of the hardliners, you have the Iran
of the vast majority, which has yet to find a political voice, but which is in
the process of doing so. The policy has
to, on the one hand, isolate the hardliners and empower the majority. That's why it has to be calibrated and
nuanced.
Now, getting back to the question
of accountability. I'm not going to give
you the details, but I would say that at least two members of the cabinet of
Mr. Ahmadinejad could be prosecuted for crimes against humanity. I'm not using that in a polemical way. I'm a former war crimes prosecutor. I can tell you what the evidence against them
is. The former Minister of Justice, Mr.
Shooshtari, was implicated in the mass execution of 4,000 people in 1988, the
famous execution of 4,000 leftists in Iran. The prosecutor-general of Tehran, Saeed Mortazavi, is implicated in the
arrest and torture of thousands, including Canadian-Iranian photojournalist Zahra
Kazemi. So you see here a sort of
process by which human rights abuses are a right of passage to gaining power,
and that defines the sensibility of the government, both in terms of repression
of domestic dissent and how it perceives its foreign policy interests.
The point that I'm making is that
at the end of the day, the cost of the violations have to be
individualized. You cannot impose
sanctions that are going to hurt the ordinary people that are already
suffering, you must send a message to those that use human rights violations as
part of their cost-benefit calculus, that they will personally pay. And had there been more time, I would have
been very pleased to speak about how some elements of the regime have, in
addition to human rights violations, stolen hundreds of millions of dollars of
the oil wealth of Iran and used it in investments across the world, probably in
this country, as well. So we need to
look beyond this, sort of, abstract notion of Iran, and start targeting those
individuals and their practices.
And I just wanted to end by saying
that it was very impressive, I suppose, for my dear friend Roya and I to hear
that Mr. Rafsanjani had been telling Dr. Slavin that America's
reputation has suffered as a result of Guantanamo Bay. Anyone that knows anything about Mr. Rafsanjani's
record, including his role in a number of assassinations abroad, if I may add,
including the assassination of my dear friend Roya's father in Paris, his role
in the bombing of the Jewish Cultural Center in Argentina, would, I think,
think twice before quoting him as a critic of U.S. human rights policy.
MS. BOROUMAND: Well, I also think that when you hear that
human rights advocates are saying that the U.S.
support to human rights in Iran
is counterproductive, you have to, again, look at the complexity. We have many human rights advocates. We have many groups that you don't ever hear
about. And we have some higher-profile
advocates who also have their own judgments.
So, what you hear is not necessarily on weblogs, it's not necessarily on
statements. The Iranians mostly focus on
what goes wrong in their houses, you know, and in their homes, in their
country.
So in the past 30 years, I think
because our foundation looks at the number of victims and documents daily the
executions, I can tell you that the minute there is no visibility on Iran's
human rights violations, the number of executions goes up. You talk about the nuclear issue, 475
executions in 2007. You talk about human
rights violations and executions, the number comes down. It's just, you know, it's like organic.
Now, does that mean that, you know,
you can affect extreme change, you have to talk to your European
colleagues. They were engaging in Iran
on human rights, and as far as we could read them, and we were not involved in
these discussions and in the meetings that they had with the Iranians, neither
was the judiciary, by the way. You know,
the most important people never really attended these meetings. So they were frustrated. So I think you have to devise with them how
to go about it because that the same time there are important publications and
workshops due to these, you know, these engagements. But overall, as far as we are concerned here,
there were no changes in the laws and there were no opening for political parties,
no opening. So, you're talking
democracy, you're talking political participation. No opening for any party outside of the very
small nucleus of revolutionary parties.
So, this is a case-to-case basis.
But if you stop talking about human rights in Iran,
human rights in Iran
will worsen. There is no doubt.
MR. CROMARTIE: Thank you.
Dr. Marshall, quickly.
MR. MARSHALL: Yes. I
couldn't pretend to speak for all the religious minority groups in Iran,
but I may say generally most are not so active democracy-promoters, they're
simply active trying-to-stay-alive-till-tomorrow-promoters. So there's too much pressure for them as
communities, though individuals are involved.
What, I think, across the board they appreciate is their situation being
publicized and also the government being criticized on this point. As I think we all know, one of the worse
things which people in a repressed situation - one of the hardest things is if
you think that nobody knows and nobody cares.
You're isolated. That's the way
the world is. And then you hear that
someone said something. And this is
known that we are not forgotten. That
itself is tremendously strengthening.
So, I think, continually raise these religious discrimination issues
because they're so stark, and, in many cases, so unusual.
And also, my sense is - I may stand
corrected by my fellow panelists - but my sense is that the Iranian government
is particularly sensitive and nervous on this point. If I may give just two
examples from Ahmadinejad's last visit, that when these issues are raised, he
doesn't defend them. He doesn't argue
that the regime is right. He backs
off. When in New York, he was asked about the Baha'is, he
just sort of obfuscated. He said,
"They're not recognized." He didn't say,
which is what his official position is, "They are heretics and they should be
killed." When he was asked about
homosexuals, he did not refer - he did not say, "It's an abomination, they
should be killed," as the legal code says.
He says, "We don't have any." So
these are things which they're actually very unwilling to defend in a public
forum, which means there's either bad conscience or it's bad politics. So, I would suggest continually raising this
with them.
MR. CROMARTIE: Thank you.
Ladies and gentlemen, I think it's fair to say you can tell the success
of a hearing is when it goes over time and you feel bad about ending it, but
we've gone 20 minutes over time and we do need to bring this to a close. Thanks so much to our panelists for joining
us. I'd like to also say thank you to
the commission staff for all the hard work they put in to make this such a
success. Thank you all for coming and
staying with us. We appreciate it very
much.
(END)
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