“It is ludicrous to say that the three million people who poured into the streets of Tehran, and the thousands who have been defiant in the face of murder, torture, and rape, are all pawns of some foreign conspiracy,” he says. “What the regime is doing is to demonize a genuine indigenous struggle for democracy as a foreign conspiracy, and to render unpatriotic those who are asking for human rights. It’s those at the forefront of the struggle in Iran who are making the real sacrifices, showing by their actions how desperate they are for change. All we’re doing from abroad is supporting them and giving them knowledge and skills and encouragement.”
Of the 20 or so Iranians who attended the 2005 workshops in Dubai, all returned safely to Iran, with the exception of one group, which consisted of the wife, daughter, nephew, and friend of prominent Iranian reformist and prisoners’ rights advocate Emadeddin Baghi, who has spent years in jail because of his activism over the past decade. Baghi was not able to go to Dubai because Iranian authorities held his passport.
Back in Iran, at least one member of this group chose not to hide their attendance at the workshops; for almost a year this brought no repercussions. But by 2006 Mahmoud Ahmadinejad had replaced reformist Mohammad Khatami as president, which cast a chill over reformist groups in Iran. And in February of that year, U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice asked the Senate for $75 million to promote democracy and human rights in Iran. Talk of regime change was back in the air. All four members of Baghi’s group who went to Dubai were arrested.
Around this time, the Washington Post interviewed Baghi about the conference. Predictably, with his wife and daughter in jail and facing interrogations, Baghi condemned the whole operation.
Ahmadi held at least one more workshop for Iranian dissidents but has now stopped. Most of his workshop material and curricula are online and translated into Farsi. The material has been downloaded, he says, tens of thousands of times from inside Iran. Akhavan, from his current post at McGill, remains active on the board of the Iran Human Rights Documentation Center and continues to advocate for Iranian democracy. The Iranian government has denounced him as a CIA agent. Both men still believe that a peaceful transition to democracy is possible in Iran.
The demonstrations that shook Iran this summer were suppressed with overwhelming force. In recent weeks, as reports have emerged detailing the brutality suffered by protesters in detention, leading clerics and other members of Iran’s establishment have voiced their outrage. When the acid-burned body of Saeedeh Pouraghayi was released to her family, 20 days after she was arrested for shouting “God is great!” and “Down with the dictator!” from her rooftop, defeated opposition candidate and former prime minister Mir Hossein Mousavi attended her funeral. There are fault lines running through the country’s political elite that weren’t visible before the June 12 election.
Ahmadi sees two major factors in Iran that he says will affect the way Iranian politics develops in the years ahead. One is the increasing power of the Revolutionary Guards, who are pushing the Islamic Republic of Iran closer to a traditional military dictatorship than a theocracy. The second factor is the growing co-operation between reformists, who believe that democracy and respect for human rights can be developed within Iran’s existing political system, and revolutionaries who believe the system itself must be changed.
Previously, the former were tolerated while the latter were crushed. But this summer, even those who simply wanted the votes they cast in an election to be counted fairly risked detention, beatings, and rape. It has pushed reformists and revolutionaries together and increased the likelihood of more widespread protests against the regime in the future.
