May 26, 2018
Nobel Prize laureate Shirin Ebadi, who has long con-demned American politicians calling for regime change in Iran, says she has given up her hopes for reform and now advocates regime change in Iran.
“Reform is useless in Iran,” Ebadi told Bloomberg News in an interview just after the Sizdeh Bedar holiday. “The Iranian people are very dissatisfied with their current government. They have reached the point and realized this system is not reformable.”
She said the regime should be brought to an end through a UN-monitored referendum on the Constitution that proposes the elimination of the unelected office of Supreme Leader. The Iranian people, she said, “want to change our regime, by changing our Constitution to a secular constitution based on the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.”
She did not advocate any violence and was opposed to any American involvement.
She got some pushback. Many objected that she gave the interview to Eli Lake, who has long and loudly campaigned against the Islamic Republic.
She also drew criticism for condemning the National Iranian American Council (NIAC). Professor Noam Chomsky of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) told The Iranian, “I don’t know on want basis Shirin Ebadi is confident that she knows better what Iranians want than NIAC, to take one of her example.”
Farideh Farhi of the University of Hawaii said, “The gratuitous dig at NIAC of all the Iranian-American organizations that are around sounds more like her defending herself against a question posed by Lake regarding her past connection to NIAC, an organization Lake has spent good effort, rather successfully, trying to defame and delegitimize.”
Farhi also did not think much of Ebadi’s proposed referendum, although many opposition figures inside Iran have been proposing the very same thing in recent months. Farhi said, “No government in the world is going to invite the United Nations in to administer a referendum…. And, certainly, a UN move to compel Iran is a precedent that will not be accepted–not only by the likes of Russia and China, but also almost all sovereign governments of the world.”
Ebadi said she never believed President Rohani was a reformer. Nonetheless, she said she was reluctant to call for the end to the regime because the 1979 revolution was so traumatic. Many Iranians oppose any more revolutions saying, “We’ve already had two revolutions and both failed.”
Ebadi issued a statement that was published in February with 13 other dissidents and human rights advocates that called for a referendum. In her interview with Bloomberg, however, she got more specific about what Western governments and particularly the Trump Administration could do to assist the Iranian people.
To start with, she made clear that she opposes any military invasion of Iran or any kind of US interference with the opposition. “The regime change in Iran should take place inside Iran and by the people of Iran,” she said. “But you can help the people of Iran reach their own goal.”
Ebadi said the West should implement sanctions that weaken the regime, but do not hurt the people themselves. For example, Ebadi says the US and European governments should sanction Islamic Republic of Iran Broadcasting (IRIB). This conglomerate controls all radio and television broadcasting in Iran.
For Ebadi this is personal. IRIB broadcast her husband delivering a forced confession implicating his wife. While in Evin prison, Ebadi’s husband was flogged for drinking and threatened with death by stoning for adultery if he did not confess to the alleged illegal activities of his wife. Eventually he relented. “My husband was forced to confirm the alleged veracity of all the charges they regularly bring against me,” she said.
So Ebadi said targeting IRIB is a good way of crippling the regime’s ability to attack its opponents and spread its propaganda. The concept is simple. She said no Western satellite provider should allow IRIB to broadcast its propaganda abroad. That would not, however, limit IRIB’s activities inside Iran.
Ebadi said she was wary of reimposing some of the more crippling sanctions that were lifted in 2016 as part of the nuclear deal. The secondary sanctions on Iran’s Central Bank, she said, benefited figures close to the regime who made a fortune in hiding the money of regime elites. Meanwhile, average Iranians suffered hyperinflation. Inflation in Iran was high, however, long before the tough sanctions were imposed in 2012 and started coming down in 2013, long before the sanctions were lifted.
Ebadi said European businesses were wise to hold off on striking deals. “They are reluctant to invest in a country with no political stability,” she said. “How could you trust a government when every day in several corners of the country people are demonstrating and are unhappy? My message to the Iranian government is: if you want foreign capital and the creation of jobs, you need to make people happy.”
For now, Ebadi thinks it is important for the US to establish a channel to the legitimate and independent Iranian opposition. She warned the regime has established all kinds of fake nongovernmental organizations and groups overseas that appear independent, but really do the government’s bidding.
One example, she said, is a group known as the Organization for Defending Victims of Violence, which has represented Iranian civil society at the annual meetings of the UN Human Rights Council. In 2011, the Center for Human Rights in Iran described it as “an NGO that, in spite of its name, has not done anything during the session to defend the rights of Iranian victims of violence.” Indeed, Ebadi said its former executive director, Alireza Taheri, was her interrogator when she was arrested in 2005.
Another example Ebadi pointed to was the National Iranian American Council (NIAC). Ebadi told Bloomberg she regrets participating in an event with NIAC in 2011. “When I analyzed what they say and do,” Ebadi said, “I realize what they say is closer to what the government says than what the people want.”
Ebadi said she would support a new organization of Iranian-Americans to support her country’s freedom movement —”an organization that would be independent from the Iranian government and the US government.”