Interviews with Nima Rashedan

I think there was a huge debate among Iranian scholars, bloggers, and journalists on the role of the United Nations [UN] and, especially, the Committee for Human Rights in Geneva. And no one is denying that the UN can play a positive role.

But I was reading a lot of texts, which I think represent a very, very high proportion of Green Movement activists; and they were asking questions like: we had the Darfur crisis, and we had things in Tibet going on, we had things in Russia, in Africa, different places of the world; the very same Committee in Geneva spent one and a half years and was unable to have a single resolution in Darfur, where, during part of the time, 10,000 to 15,000 people were dying daily. And the very same council, in the very same period, had nine statements against Israel.

You may wonder why the Iranian public is talking about that. Because, I think there is this capacity to analyze the whole issue; and they can see that, perhaps having hope in that council in Geneva, which has always been compromised – it’s the council in which Saudi Arabia and Sudan and China are sometimes members of the Committee – this is not a very realistic hope for the UN and Human Rights Council in Geneva to come and condemn Iran as somebody who is violating human rights.

So, who are you going to ask? You want to ask China to vote against Iran or you want to ask Sudan against Iran? They knew that, unfortunately, the structure of the UN and the Human Rights Council is pretty politicized, and it’s ineffective – it’s a kind of playground between African and Arabic nations against the West and so on. And at least for the very short future, nothing great is going to come out of that for Iranian 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.