Iran’s Politics Open a Generational Chasm
By Nazila Fathi

The New York Times

October 22, 2009
TORONTO — It had been years since Narges Kalhor could talk about politics with her father, Mehdi, a senior adviser and spokesman for President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad of Iran. He advocated greater restraints on social and political expression, while she favored more freedom. Still, they had always managed to get along.
But after Iran’s disputed presidential election in June and the protests that followed, the disagreement exploded into a breach. Last week — as her father accused her of being manipulated by the opponents of the government — Ms. Kalhor, now 25, applied for refugee status in Germany.
“The difference between my generation and my parents’ generation, who are very ideological, is just increasing day by day,” she said in a telephone interview from Germany. “Their goals have not materialized, and it is our turn to lead the way.”
While Ms. Kalhor’s case has been widely publicized, she is hardly alone. Numerous children of prominent Iranians have become estranged from their powerful parents since the election, which the opposition says was rigged. Thousands more middle-class families have been divided by the generational chasm that opened over the summer.
Mohsen Ruholamini, the son of a senior commander of the Revolutionary Guards, was arrested during the protests in July and tortured to death, according to his father, who has staunchly defended the government’s handling of the unrest.
The son of another senior official close to Mr. Ahmadinejad, who is a student activist in Tehran but spoke on condition of anonymity to protect his father, said he and his father had for years avoided talking about politics.
“I know he has tried to protect me in the past and he tells me that whatever I do, I should not get into trouble,” he said. Last year, his father tried to send him to London to continue his studies and stay out of politics. But he refused to go and stayed to campaign against Mr. Ahmadinejad.
Mehdi Khazali, the son of Ayatollah Abolghassem Khazali, a senior cleric close to Mr. Ahmadinejad, criticizes the country’s top leadership on his blog, drkhazali.net. At one point, he wrote that his father supported Mr. Ahmadinejad and the conservatives only because he had been “cheated, lied to and taken advantage of for his religious beliefs.”
Because of the growing alienation of young Iranians, family dynamics could be complex, particularly among the families of elite government officials. “These children are more affected by society and even Facebook and Twitter on the Internet than their families,” said Alireza Haghighi, an Iranian political analyst at the University of Toronto. “The younger generation has been very frustrated with the political situation.”
In Ms. Kalhor’s case, her parents’ religious and political conservatism did not extend to daily life. Her father, who has been an adviser to Mr. Ahmadinejad since 2005, helped and encouraged Ms. Kalhor to become a graphic designer and a filmmaker.
Mr. Kalhor embodied other contradictions, having appeared as a campaigner for Mr. Ahmadinejad on national television in 2005 wearing his long hair in a ponytail — something that is frowned upon by conservatives — and saying that all Iranians in exile, including the son of the shah, would be allowed to return to the country if Mr. Ahmadinejad were elected.
Ms. Kalhor said that through it all she remained close to her father until a year ago, when he moved out after separating from her mother. But she was also developing her own political views, she said.
“My generation wants its most basic needs such as freedom of expression and personal freedoms,” she said. “We want to live, we do not want to face persecution for expressing our political opinion; as women, we don’t want to walk on the street with the constant horror that we could be intimidated for showing an inch of hair.”
She said she began participating in the rallies in favor of Mr. Ahmadinejad’s leading opponent, Mir Hussein Moussavi, before the elections and voted for him in hope of real change. Infuriated by Mr. Ahmadinejad’s re-election, which she called a “gross lie,” she joined the protests, during which, she said, she was beaten by the police and tear-gassed.
“This was an explosion of 30 years of suppression and intimidations of my generation,” she said of the protests. “I am happy that we finally found the courage to speak up.”
Ms. Kalhor went to a German film festival last week to show her movie “The Rake,” which is based on a Kafka short story about torture in prison, “In the Penal Colony.” While there, she made no secret of her support for the opposition movement at the festival, wearing a scarf of the opposition’s trademark green and appearing without the head scarf that is mandatory for Iranian women, even when they are outside the country.
She said she decided to apply for refugee status after hearing from friends that she faced arrest if she returned.
Her father reacted angrily and said that he was unaware of his daughter’s trip to Germany and that she had been tricked.
“I believe she has been tricked by the country’s enemies and has become a tool for propaganda,” Mr. Kalhor told the Mehr news agency. “As a father, I advise her not take a path that has no return and not become an instrument in the hands of the enemy.”
Ms. Kalhor brushed aside her father’s claims, saying she had no other choice.

Iranian awarded Dutch human rights 'Tulip'
November, 9 2009

By Perro de Jong

The Radio Netherland

Shadi Sadr has helped Iranian women with free legal assistance and has started a campaign against stoning. She's been awarded one of the foremost Dutch human rights prizes, the Human Rights Tulip. But not before experiencing the regime's violence against women first-hand.
"They beat me and forced me to go with them", Shadi Sadr tells Dutch radio. She was detained last July in the wake of popular protests against president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, and brought to the notorious Evin Prison in Tehran. Her interrogators knew exactly who she was.
In 2004, Sadr had founded Raahi: an organisation for women in legal trouble. Because Iranian women have few rights and even less independent access to funds, they're often helpless in court. Raahi offered them free legal assistance, until the authorities closed it down.
Stoning
More recently, Sadr made even more enemies within the regime.
She began a campaign "to defend women who are sentenced to stoning", she says. Because the victims of this traditional - and in the eyes of many barbaric - form of punishment are almost never men.
When she was detained in July, her interrogators at Evin Prison accused her of being controlled by foreign powers out to overthrow president Ahmadinejad.
But unlike many of the protesters who'd taken to the streets the month before to demonstrate against the president's disputed re-election, Sadr was released after eleven days without being tortured.
Struggle
Since her release - thanks, she believes, to international pressure on Tehran - Shadi Sadr has been living in Germany.
The Dutch government has awarded her the Human Rights Tulip for her "extraordinary courage". But, she says, it's not just her struggle that's being recognized in this way.
She dedicates the award - which she received from Dutch foreign minister Maxime Verhagen in The Hague - to "all the people in Iran who fight every day to get their rights." Despite the fact that the protests against the president's re-election were crushed, she remains optimistic.
"The gaps between the government and the people are increasing day by day", she says. "No government can survive such a gap for a long time, so either the government will solve the problem with the people. Or the people will solve the problem themselves."
Projects
The Human Rights Tulip comes with a stipend of 10,000 euros. In addition, it includes funding of up to 100,000 euros for projects proposed by the winner, to further promote her or his cause.

Iran's opposition steers challenge toward the top
By Brian Murphy

The Associated Press

November 11, 2009
DUBAI, United Arab Emirates — Just minutes before anti-riot police charged opposition marchers in Tehran last week, a new chant bubbled up from the crowd: "Death to Nobody."
It was more than just a play on the "Death to America" slogans that are staples of Iran's political life. The cries give a sense of how much the protest movement has evolved since the raw outrage of last summer.
The demonstrations have moved beyond narrow attacks on President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and his disputed re-election in June. They are now drifting toward a blanket challenge of the Islamic leadership's right to rule.
"It's gone from anti-Ahmadinejad to more of anti-regime in general," said Mustafa Alani, a regional analyst at the Gulf Research Center in Dubai. "That's an important shift."
And here lies the protesters' strength, but also their potential unraveling, some experts say.
An overall challenge to the powers of non-elected clerics — headed by Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei — could provide the big picture goal to sustain the demonstrations for years. But it also carries risks. Top among them: alienating the opposition leadership, who remain still loyal to the Islamic system, and bringing even harsher crackdowns by authorities who can justify use of violence to protect the status quo.
The two senior figures in the opposition, Mir Hossein Mousavi and Mahdi Karroubi, have repeatedly said they do not seek to overthrow the ruling clerics. Since July, authorities have put on trial more than 100 pro-reform figures accused of being part of a plot to topple this religious hierarchy.
Mousavi and Karroubi's reluctance could leave room for more militant opposition leaders to emerge in the future.
The protests last week coincided with state-run rallies marking the 30th anniversary of the takeover of the U.S. Embassy in Tehran. The timing, like the shouts of "Death to Nobody," were a symbolic challenge to one of the ideological pillars of the regime — the anti-U.S. fervor of the 1979 Islamic Revolution that toppled the pro-American shah.
Just blocks away from the opposition marches, the pro-government demonstrators were bellowing the standard beat of "Death to America" to mark the Nov. 4 embassy seizure.
Many pro-reform marchers still wore the green colors of Mousavi, who claims he is the rightful winner of the June 12 presidential election.
But much of the protesters' defiance went beyond Mousavi's complaints over the election and the subsequent crackdown and targeted Khamenei in acts that were almost unthinkable before the postelection meltdown. Protesters tore up or trampled images of the supreme leader, whose most ardent backers believe is answerable only to God.
Demonstrators also called on President Barack Obama to pick a side, in apparent frustration with White House efforts for direct talks with Iran's leaders. "Obama, Obama, you are either with them, or with us," they chanted.
The opposition leaders were not among the crowd. Reformist web sites say hard-line vigilantes kept Mousavi from leaving his office. Karroubi was overcome by tear gas and left before riot police moved in, according to his Web site.
More than 100 people were detained, including several journalists, but most were later released.
Karroubi later denounced the "very ugly" tactics of police, which he claimed included attacking women. Mousavi issued a statement calling for the rights of all Iranians to be respected. But there was nothing to suggest they would follow the protesters' lead in hardening their stance against Iran's political system.
After security forces crushed that massive protests that erupted after the election, opposition groups in recent months have used major state-backed events to stage rival rallies.
The next test could come Dec. 7, which marks the death of three students in 1953 during protests of a visit by then-Vice President Richard Nixon for talks with the shah.
Reform groups appear focused on trying to build a credible turnout for the next marches after just several thousand joined last week's protests.
Some reformist Web sites have urged students to stay off campus on the days of future marches so they can't be blocked from joining by security forces. Many other sites are carrying one of the new symbols of the opposition: a green-hued drawing of a young woman wearing a headscarf and thrusting up her fist in protest.
"The long-term crisis for the government isn't over," said Alireza Nader, an analyst of Iranian affairs at the RAND Corp. in Washington.
Still, authorities must be careful about how hard they push back or else they risk a backlash. The government crackdown so far "has been very violent but measured in some ways," Nader said. But if authorities carry out threats to arrest Mousavi and Karroubi, "this could fan the flames," he said.
Some high-level officials have offered talks with the opposition as a way to keep the tensions from spilling over to recurring cycles of protests and violence.
The former chief of the judiciary and close ally of Khamenei, Ayatollah Mahmoud Shahroudi, was quoted Monday in Iranian newspapers as calling the postelection rifts a "family dispute" that can be worked out through dialogue.
But Meir Javedanfar, an Iran analyst based in Israel, said Khamenei "sees the reformist movement as a threat" and aims to "stifle its growth and, if he can, to completely suffocate them."
But the greater the pressure, the more risk he could rally people around the protests.
"Khamenei's actions could actually strengthen the reformist movement," he said.

Neda 'was ready to die for cause' in Iran
November 15, 2009

Agance France Presse
An Iranian killed in protests over President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's reelection in June was willing to be "shot in the heart" for her cause, her boyfriend said in an interview Sunday.
The killing of Neda Agha-Soltan on June 20 came to symbolise the public uprising against Ahmadinejad's victory earlier that month in presidential elections against Mir Hossein Mousavi which the opposition says were rigged.
A graphic Internet video of her bleeding to death was seen around the world and triggered an outcry over the sometimes brutal crackdown on demonstrators.
Her boyfriend Caspian Makan -- who was jailed in Iran following her death but is now reportedly in hiding in an unidentified Middle Eastern city -- told the Observer that Neda was committed to helping overthrow Ahmadinejad.
"Neda was present at the front line of the protests from the very first day," Makan said in comments quoted by the paper.
"She was a natural leader and attracted many (protestors) to her side. I think that is why she was shot.
"The Iranian state and its security officials did not want her, they wanted to extinguish her."
He also recalled her saying: "If I get shot in the heart or arrested, it's not important because we are all responsible for our future."
In another interview, Makan told the BBC that he had been worried about her getting involved in the protest. She apparently told him: "Even if we'd had a child, I'd carry my child to these demos on my back.
"That's when I realised I couldn't prevent her from going... she was only thinking of her goal -- democracy and freedom for Iranians."
Some Iranian hardliners claim Neda's killing was staged to damage Ahmadinejad's government and seek to divert the blame from Islamist vigilantes cracking down on protestors.