Interviews with Nima Rashedan

My problem was not an individual case. At the time of my arrest, a couple of other Iranian journalists, activists, had been in jail; they had actually been in prison in the very same facility as I. This was a whole campaign of intimidating journalists, just to bring their critics down. And I think – as I was between many, many different newspapers and media – I was well known, so they probably thought if you put somebody who is well known under arrest, this is going to be some sort of intimidation PR for other journalists.

So after that, when I left the country, I left the country in June 1999, and then they started failing, actually, to slow down the Reform Movement and the demand of journalists for more flow of information and demand of people to get more information.

They started a mass arrest campaign. In one day, they shut down, with the direct order of public order of Supreme Leader Mr. Khamenei, they shut down something, like, 50 newspapers in a single day. They rampaged over the offices of newspapers. They broke the computers; they took the belongings of journalists. It was a kind of war on media. Indeed, I studied, you know, actions like this by different governments in this dimension; I have never seen in our contemporary history the government just rampaging and seizing the media, and arresting en masse, arresting of everybody who has been active in media.

So, I came out of Iran and I just realized quickly that with a country which, every year, Internet users are being ten times more; there is a huge interest in the Internet. The best thing to do is establishing a political left side.

I wrote, in 1999, after I left Iran, I wrote the very first political articles online. There had never been any political article in Persian before my article; and then, two years after that, there was in the very famous website, 4,000 political articles. Journalists in Iran, they got their own email address – and we are talking about 1999, not 2005. So, they got their email address, they were first submitting their article to an editor; and if an editor said, “No, this is dangerous for me,” they published it on the Internet, under their own name, sometimes using a pseudonym, but sometimes even under their own name.

From 2000 to 2002, I can say 50 percent of the whole news and media analysis was political articles that were on the Internet; and the Internet became some sort of a new media for people involved in politics and people interested in politics. And it caused, in my opinion, it caused a vast change in Iran. It really changed the aspect of Iranian society.

There were a lot of groups, that were never able to come close to us when I was at the Reform Movement newspaper; we could not conduct any sort of interview with people of religious minorities, with especially Jewish people or Bahá’ís – they were, like, the biggest taboo. With the beginning of the Internet, they could say, “We exist,” and they became part of contemporary daily Iranian political discourse. People recognized them. They do exist. The government of Iran paid hundred thousands of dollars to show the public some stuff – which was in the medieval time in Europe – like, for example, blood libel of the Jews.

By the time of the Internet and the start of reading our Persian contact, it came out that they are people like us: they are doctors, engineers, bankers, lawyers, they are living and working with us, they are not monsters, they are not doing anything – actually, they are good for humanity. So, this was when I first wrote an article with the names of Nobel Prize winners in physics, in chemistry, in medicine; and I said, “Something like half of these people are from a Jewish background.” This was a bomb for the Persian public. They would never imagine that a person from the Jewish confession could do something good for humanity.

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.