Interviews with Nima Rashedan

So later I got interested not only about Iran but in the whole phenomenon of totalitarianism. So I went and I studied; as my professional studies, I went to study the post-communist and communist era of Central and Eastern Europe. Just imagine here, we have Prague in 1968, the [leader of Czechoslovakia, Alexander] Dubček is in power, and he’s coming with the very tiny reforms. Actually, Dubček is a communist. He has no problem with the establishment; he just wants to do some very tiny, minor economic reforms.

Later, when they got the tapes between the meetings of the Warsaw Pact, we will see that [General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, Leonid] Brezhnev was pretty afraid to siege and to occupy Czechoslovakia. But then [General Secretary of the Central Committee of the Socialist Unity Party of Germany, Walter] Ulbricht of the DDR, or German Democratic Republic, which was more orthodox, came with this very famous snowball argument: saying if Dubček starts to do this minor reform, then you cannot stop this process. Everywhere they want to have more reform, and then with reform, with the very tiny reform, then you have this huge avalanche, and the whole system will collapse.

That’s exactly inside the thinking of Mr. Khamenei, it is that if I go just one step back – and I’m telling this frankly to the people in Western administrations, in the U.S. administration, in politics, that if they think that they can somehow do these arguments and dialogues with Khamenei, he really, solidly as point of his personal political psychology, believes that any step back will be read by the public and by the West as point of weakness, and then they want everything.

So, this is not going to work with him, negotiation, step back, step forward. So, I think from the very start of reform movement, it was crystal clear that they are not going to tolerate that. If it comes to, as they did, house arrest of Mousavi, Karroubi, , Khatami, they are not going to tolerate that. There will never be any chance for a genuine reform based on the civil society capacities in Iran.

They know perfectly that the people are so fed up with this system; and the whole system is so inefficient ideologically that if they just open any tiny window, the whole system is going to collapse. And I think this is our strong point, because the job is almost done. It just needs a very tiny, little move because people are ready.

I’m quite familiar, I think, on my own level, to think tanks and institutes which are working in Iran; and I know the discourse here in D.C., in United States. Nobody would ever imagine that there would be five million people protesting in Azadi Square in Tehran – nobody, nobody. The intelligence community, they were always playing that down. They would say no, it has no roots. If you see all the reports, everything – almost everything – done by many, many think tanks in Iran, nobody was ready for five million people coming to Tehran and saying “death to dictator.” And that’s one half year before this [Arab] Spring of Middle East. So, I think the thing is just ready for a kind of, you know, the kind of involvement of Western and Eastern Europe and Central Europe, just helping people to be able to express their opinion.

We do not need to make an opinion there. Opinion there, public opinion, is even in a lot of points more anti-establishment of the Islamic republic than opinion of the West. I think Mr. Ahmadinejad, in particular, in some of Western countries has probably more support than in Iran. He is president of the unique country where people came – under the threat of the police, under the threat of harassment – they came to the center of Tehran to sympathize with victims of the 11th of September. So, as far as I know, in no other country in the region, even U.S. allies, for example, Turkey, has something like this ever happened: a country where 40, 50 percent people vote for anti-secular parties, nothing happened – something like that. But in Iran, under the threat of arrest, the people, the young people, they know that they were going to be arrested. They came to express their sympathy towards the United States of America.

They publicly support United States of America´s fight for freedom. These are unique things; these are the things you can see only in the United States, in Israel, and in Iran. So, I think public opinion is pretty ready. It just needs taking all hope. It just needs, you know, this assistance, which the West gave to Eastern European countries to free them from the Soviet Union.

Nima Rashedan was among the first Iranian cyber-activists. Born in Tehran in 1974, his father was a leftist opponent of the government headed by the Shah, so the family was forced into exile in the United States but returned to Iran after the 1979 revolution.

Upon his return, Rashedan became a member of student organizations and worked as a journalist, becoming one of the first writers to publish articles in Farsi on the Internet. In the late 1990s, after the election of President Khatami, he began writing pro-democracy articles.

In 1998, Rashedan was arrested and served time in prison, including a month in solitary confinement. After his release, Rashedan immigrated to Switzerland. He now lives in the Czech Republic and continues his work as a cyber-journalist and advocate. A frequent focus of his work is the similarity between the methods and objectives of the current Iranian regime and those of the former Soviet Union.