Interviews with Nima Rashedan

I think those who are questioning sanctions on Iran, they are not talking just out of a vacuum; they have a background. These people are the very same people who were supporting Khmer Rouge in Cambodia. They were supporting the Cultural Revolution in China, which we know would cost millions of people’s lives.

I think questioning sanctions against Iran is questioning the international relations and our history of involvement, pro-democratic involvement, for the last 50 years. There were sanctions, efficient sanctions, against the South African regime by the United Nations and by Western powers. And we know it was effective because at the end, Apartheid is gone. And look, there was Apartheid and whole discrimination against the black ethnicity.

So, now you have a [an Iranian] government which is discriminating, torturing, shooting, killing the whole [Iranian] population. Women are being stoned because they have been raped. First they have been raped and accused of being raped, then later they are being stoned. And I don’t think this is much minor cases if you compare – of course, any human rights violation is painful, it’s bad – but if you compare this with what happened in Pretoria [South Africa], I think these are quite obvious that they need more attention.

People are being killed and abducted just because they wrote blogs. And this is unlike the South African government. This is a government that in one week confiscated three arms packages: one in Malaysia, one in Thailand, and one in Africa (in Gabon and Nigeria). I think 90 percent of the population in western Iran, they don’t know if there is any armed conflict in Gabon and Senegal.

But the Iranian government is actively involved in supporting terrorist globally. There was a report that Iran is actively supporting terrorists in a triangle between Paraguay, Argentina, and Brazil. They are taking people from their villages in the Amazon jungles; they are sending them to Qom to convert to Shia Islam, and they are being sent back to Argentina. This is unbelievable.

And so, you’re dealing with this government. What should we do? There was a time that they wanted to talk. What did they get from talks? I think those who are questioning the efficiency of sanction against Iran, they are – let me put it publicly – that they are being compromised or they are naïve. They did not read the history.

Imagine if we didn’t go with sanctions against South Africa. Where is President Mandela right now? Who is this reform? Where was the improvement of human rights? It’s useful to track whoever comes out against sanctions in Iran – to track him, to see his comments, to see what’s his political agenda, and why he is criticizing the sanctions. I would say 90 percent, they have financial interests or they’re having problem with global democracy.

There are people in the United States from the so-called progressive left, who are saying that United States support of Israel, United States support of democracy, United States support of Arab Spring is some sort of meddling in internal affair of sovereign nations, and you shouldn’t do that – you should just come back to the United States. I can’t argue with them since they don’t believe in democracy.

I can’t argue that sanctions are helping democracy. They don’t like democracy. They say democracy is some sort of bourgeois set of rules. Media and elite in U.S. Congress, there have been comprises with big corporations. I cannot talk to them. They don’t like me. They say, “You want to do the very same mess in Iran. This is not democracy.”

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.