|
USCIRF hearing: Advancing religious freedom and related human rights in Iran: strategies for an effective U.S. Policy
February 21, 2008
By Beth Hearn
A significant degree of creative thinking, as well as a thorough re-examination of U.S. policy, will be required in order to make any progress in improving Iran’s human rights situation. This was the broad consensus at a February 21 hearing of the United States Commission on International Religious Freedom.
Witnesses and committee members emphasized the scale of the problem. Human rights abuses are systematic and they are severe, targeting ethnic and religious minorities, women, and anyone who dares to criticize the regime. General and specific abuses were discussed at length by the speakers.
Iranian activists and dissidents are regularly detained and tortured, executions are a regular event, and Baha’is in particular face extreme hardship. Paul Marshall, Senior Fellow at the Hudson Institute, said of the Baha’i that “most of them are not active democracy promoters; they are active trying-to-stay-alive-until-tomorrow promoters.”
The nature of the repression, and the extremely complex context in which it is placed, means that there is no easy answer to the question of how to advance religious freedom and human rights in Iran. Jeremy Feltman, Principal Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for Near Eastern Affairs and former U.S. Ambassador to Lebanon, emphasized the fact that the lack of a diplomatic presence in Iran necessitates a creative approach.
The current approach, he said, includes issuing statements condemning rights violations, sanctions, working with allies that do have a diplomatic presence, and outreach to the NGO community here in the U.S. and in Iran through a program to fund democracy promotion.
In large part due to the political context in which it is being applied, U.S. policy is not working. Witnesses suggested that much of the Bush administration’s policy has been counterproductive. The human rights situation has worsened considerably over the last few years, and according to Barbara Slavin, Senior Fellow at the United States Institute of Peace, “it is not coincidental that this shift followed President Bush’s designation of Iran as a member of an ‘axis of evil’ in 2002 and his rejection of an Iranian offer for comprehensive negotiations in 2003.”
This definition of Iran as part of an ‘axis of evil’, and the foreign policy surrounding it, humiliated reformists who had advocated stronger ties with the U.S. and played a significant role in the rise to power of conservatives such as President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, she said.
President Bush’s “overtures to ‘the Iranian people,’ when combined with a refusal to acknowledge the legitimacy of the Iranian government, preemptive military action against Iraq and threats of such action against Iran, have convinced Tehran that the Bush administration seeks the violent overthrow of the Iranian regime,” Slavin added.
This image of the United States as threatening Iran, combined with the nuclear issue, plays into the hands of the hardliners. Professor Payam Akhavan, co-founder and board member of the Iran Human Rights Documentation Centre, said that “the obsessive focus on threats posed by “external” enemies is an integral aspect of the political homogenization that justifies repression of “internal” enemies. Authentic indigenous calls for democracy and human rights are transformed into a foreign conspiracy against Islam and Iranian sovereignty.”
It was argued, therefore, that explicit democracy promotion provides further fuel to the Iranian government’s accusations of U.S. interference, providing a pretext for a crackdown on all NGOs and activists. This political context removes the benefits that would otherwise come from democracy promotion programs.
“Any serious effort to promote human rights and religious freedom in Iran must drive a stake through the heart of the myth of externally-orchestrated regime change,” said Suzanne Maloney, Senior Fellow of The Saban Center for Middle East Policy at the Brookings Institution. “The publicity surrounding our democracy program has already helped spark a revived crackdown on Iranian dissidents and activists, and has constrained and undermined the very civil society we hope to support.”
So how can the U.S. move forward in advancing human rights in Iran? Maloney stressed the importance of rejecting the possibility of any military solution, saying that “we simply do not have a viable military option available to us that would generate a better outcome for our interests across the Middle East.” Diplomacy is the only way forward, she said, adding that “to avoid diplomatic interface because of a perceived power imbalance is effectively to consign the countries to permanent antagonism.”
An alternative to the democracy program would be to increase opportunities for Iranians to interact with the rest of the world through exchange programs, scholarships and enhanced access to visas, Maloney suggested. Slavin echoed this suggestion, particularly emphasizing the importance of allowing visas for Iranian journalists.
It is also of great importance to continue to “document and publicize the truth,” said Akhavan. We must ensure human rights abuses in Iran are never ignored.
A new administration combined with the implementation of these proposals may have some effect over the long term, but “short of a wholesale political transformation in Tehran there is no magic formula for settling this rift,” Maloney said. The nature of Iran means that it is very difficult to make any accurate forecast for the future. “Whatever happens next, people in Washington will be the last to predict it,” she said. |
