Interviews with Nima Rashedan

I think, just comparing Iran and Egypt, there were people – millions of people – on the streets of Tehran; and the government was shooting them, and CNN was on the streets of Tehran for the first days. So, here you have the president of the United States coming and publicly saying: “for me, Mr. [Mir-Hossein]Moussavi and [Mahmoud] Ahmadinejad have no difference; I’m just attracted to these robust discourse of the election.” The U.S. administration, there in Washington, D.C., they were so interested in talking to Mr. Ahmadinejad that they never publicly – at least for first one or two weeks – they never publicly gave any support to those 16- and 17-year-old girls, which with bare hands, they were standing against one of the most well equipped anti-riot armies.

They just neglect. And the people, they were dying in Tehran, and they were calling their famous slogans. They were calling: “Barack Hussein Obama, are you with them or are you with us?” This was an answer which we didn’t got from President Obama for something like six or seven months after that, when he was sure that the protest movement is well-rooted enough in the society, and also, Mr. Ahmadinejad is not a good dialogue partner. For the first time, he said: Yeah, I’m supporting the Iranian Green Movement. But at least for the first one or two month, which we really needed that support, [they were] public and very insistent on this U.S. position: that we are not meddling in Iranian affairs. But look at Egypt: from the very first days, the administration started to say Mubarak has to go, although Mr. Mubarak has done not even one percent of what Iranian regime did against the protestors.

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.