bout de papier, Vol. 27, No. 3 (2013) — Autumn 2013 // Automne 2013, pp. 9–11
Le 1* février 1979, l’ayatollah Khomeini rentrait a Téhéran au bout de 14 ans d’exil, mettant ainsi un terme a deux millénaires de règne monarchique. A son arrivée, les foules partisanes se sont massées a tel point que les routes sont devenues inutilisables et que Khomeini a dû avoir recours à un hélicoptère pour se déplacer. Un an auparavant, lors d’un banquet de la veille du nouvel an télévisé en Iran, le président américain Jimmy Carter avait porté un toast au régime Pahlavi, déclarant : « En raison des grandes qualités de dirigeant du Shah, l’Iran est une ile de stabilité dans l’une des régions du monde les plus troublées. » À peine quelques mois plus tard, toutefois, Carter faisait appel aux diplomates canadiens pour protéger des Américains ayant échappé au régime Khomeini. Ce sauvetage dramatique a été relaté dans le dernier numéro de bout de papier, qui expose les efforts de John Sheardown et souligne le rôle crucial que le Canada a joué dans la crise de la prise d’otages.
Things quickly unravelled for the Shah in his last four months in power. Emboldened by the clergy, protests by the economically and politically important merchants increased in intensity, and the Shah failed to quell them even with the use of force. November 1978 saw 10% of the Iranian population on the streets across the country, a record for any revolution, ever. All were united on a single cause: ridding the country of the Shah. Sensing his defeat, the Shah’s military defected and would no longer fire on protesters, and the thinking turned to a transitional government. These events raise two fundamental questions: How did Khomeini, an eighty-year-old cleric, successfully lead this revolution from afar, and why was the West not more attuned or responsive to the sentiments and suffering Iranian people?
Khomeini’s cunning cannot be understated. According to Charles Kurzman, seven years before the Revolution, Khomeini stressed the need to prepare the groundwork for sweeping change. So for the next seven years “the Islamists founded schools, set up publishing houses, printed journals and distributed thousands of photocopied proclamations all with explicit intent of raising consciousness among the people.” Khomeini’s home in exile during those final months had been France, which offered him both political freedom and advanced technology with which to propagate his revolutionary message. Khomeini promised Iranians to pursue social justice by establishing a religious theocracy, velayat-e fagih, governed by the Shia clergy. But he did more than just push for sweeping political change and radical ideas: his media campaign that relied heavily on audio cassette tapes was a precursor to the social media that was so crucial in organizing the Arab uprisings three decades later. It was a communications strategy that was agile and substantive. It changed the course of Iran’s history.
Khomeini’s capitalization of a technology, the cassette tape, was virtually unprecedented. This tool was the ideal means by which he could safely articulate his blueprint for the future and circumvent the Shah. An underground network of thousands of student supporters and clergy would go to work, smuggling master tapes of Khomeini’s sermons all across Iran, with messages tailored to a particular community’s grievances.
The clever use of new and existing technologies combined with savvy communications was the work of a band of clerics whose ideals have today’s regime, in the words of President Obama, building an “electronic curtain” around a country thirsty to connect to the world. There is an intrinsic value in challenging such an effort, but also a more strategic need to think through the ramifications of a dictatorial theocracy taking 75 million people offline. Canada now has an opportunity to challenge Tehran’s repressive apparatus in a targeted and strategic manner in the service of Iranian democratic governance and a better, freer life for its people.
The September 2012 closure of Canada’s embassy in Iran imposed a need to recast our engagement with that country entirely. It also afforded us the opportunity to project a principled policy premised on the view that the Iranian regime is, in the words of Prime Minister Stephen Harper, the single greatest threat to global peace and security. Canadian policy is simple: Canada will challenge the politically entrenched systems and interests of the Iranian regime, and will distinguish between the regime and the Iranian people, whose universal aspirations — peace, prosperity, freedom and democracy —Canada supports. Through Direct Diplomacy, Canada has the opportunity to use existing and emerging online tools to communicate directly with the people of Iran, bypassing the regime altogether. By engaging in dialogue with the Iranian people directly, we can offer support and information in their struggle for freedom. It is an approach that relies on extensive diaspora and online engagement with Iranians around the world that is then available to inform policy, programming, diplomatic initiatives, and strategic communications.
Shortly after the Embassy closure, we undertook extensive consultation with the Iranian community in Canada, the United States and Europe. Canada is home to over 200,000 Iranians, the second-largest Iranian diaspora outside of the Middle East. Much of this population resides in my own hometown of Richmond Hill, outside Toronto. The Iranian diaspora is most known for being educated, prosperous and fast integrating into the Canadian social fabric. Politically, it is deeply divided and struggling to organize itself.
Direct diplomacy
is partly a reflection of our consultations with the diaspora, who want to contribute to helping their fellow Iranians back home. Our many conversations informed our approach to Iran and sharpened our strategic communications. We have a better sense of what to say to Iranians inside the country, and how to listen. We learned that tone and language really matter to a population that often feels patronized by the international community and even worse, in poorly translated Farsi. So, we developed a Farsi-language website which aims to describe our efforts to the Iranian people in their own language, so that greater numbers could learn first-hand about Canada’s efforts (the website has since been blocked by regime censors).
We have also learned that Canada’s voice matters much more to Iranians and hence to the regime than we had previously thought. I have been told by those who oppose the regime in Iran that Canada’s calls for human rights do not ring hollow; they are interpreted as sincere by Iranians. For years we have been condemning the regime on the international stage for its human rights violations. Human rights activists appreciate Canada’s principled positions because drawing attention to an issue or an individual facing a death sentence is often a matter of life and death and the Iranian regime very occasionally responds to pressure. For the regime, Canada is particularly important because our people-to-people ties are many, and up until just few months ago, exchanges were frequent.
The internet era in Iran
Today’s Iran is overwhelmingly young, urban, and restive. Unemployment is at about 35%, inflation acute, hope for change marginal, and the expression of dissatisfaction systematically and brutally silenced. In Iran, censorship through the state pervades all spheres of life, both public and private.
The majority of media is sourced from censored state channels, and the rest is supplied by foreign radio, such as BBC Persian and Voice of America, which the regime successfully blocks. Iranians’ access to Western television is obtained mainly through illicit satellite dishes on rooftops, cloaked from the authorities with cloth. Yet it is online and through smartphones that Iranians on the street have the potential to connect with each other and to the world, leading to the increasing body of internet content that is critical of the Iranian regime and which counters its propaganda. But it was with this very technology that Iranians recently faced considerable troubles. The agitation that followed Iran’s fraud-ridden 2009 Presidential election both embarrassed Iran’s ultimate decision-maker, Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, and confirmed the need for greater censorship in his eyes.
At senior levels of the regime today, there is debate over how best to censor Iranians in the short-term while the regime’s looming longer-term censorship plans unfold. There are those who want to block access to the entirety of the global internet, and those who favour allowing Iranians only limited access to social media, but with heavy monitoring designed to lead to voluntary self-censorship, a function of a state of fear and suspicion. While the debate persists, the regime has resolved to address the dilemma by relying on a variable punishment schedule. When too many online users start to express themselves, a few of the most visible are rounded up and made an example of. A recent example being the blogger Sattar Beheshti, whose brutal torture and death at the hands of the regime sent a chill throughout Iran’s online community.
Iran’s powerful cyber army is comprised of reportedly thousands of regime officers who monitor online conversations with legislative authority derived from Iran’s Computer Crimes Law, a set of obtuse juridical decrees so vague that it is difficult to know when one is in violation. With considerable arbitrariness and heavy-handedness, Iranians are confronted daily with the choice of self-censorship, or choosing to connect and accept the risks involved. They tend to choose the latter. One of Tehran’s booming trades is the Virtual Private Network (VPN), which allows Iranians access to the internet using public infrastructure. Once online, Iranians commonly use anti-censorship software that allows them to bypass the regime’s filters and access the internet. It is perhaps the assumption that so many more will confront such a dilemma that led former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton to call internet freedom the greatest issue of the 21st century.
Canada cannot afford to ignore Iran’s complex online world. Communicating with Iranians via Twitter, Facebook and emerging digital tools, the internet and social media can become diplomatic tools whose potential we cannot yet fully assess. This was showcased through the inaugural Global Dialogue on the Future of Iran, a partnership between DFATD and the University of Toronto. This initiative brought together a diversity of Iranians from across the globe into a single space in Toronto. Through two days of unscripted discourse, the technology created the opportunity for a deeply politicized community to stand side by side and articulate their own visions for the future of Iran. Using social media and anticensorship tools, these discussions were beamed into Iran. Over 350,000 Iranians inside the country followed the discussion in real-time, and provided their uncensored feedback to the participants in the room. It was an encouraging experiment, and a first.
The potential extends across borders. For people in the region as well, the internet has changed the politics of repression and the possibilities for dissent. Looking to Syria, Iran’s closest Arab ally, we see that cyber activists take grave risks to capture and disseminate footage of human rights violations. The Syrian opposition makes extensive use of social media to communicate and coordinate with the outside world, whilst the Syrian regime deploys advanced capabilities to monitor, track and target cyberspace users, filter and censor internet content, and disseminate disinformation.
In this fog, digital analytics allow us to analyze millions of Twitter conversations to give us a sense of the national mood and permit greater nuance and insight into our messaging. Understanding local conditions can assist us in identifying projects and project partners. Yet we also face the challenge of developing relevant local content, maintaining connectivity in spite of time differences, maintaining agility in order to respond to events quickly, and understanding that communications misunderstandings perhaps are inevitable as online diplomacy may gradually distribute responsibility downward and away from senior officials.
The June election of Hassan Rouhani, a regime insider, has brought hope to millions of Iranians desperate for change. Rouhani faces the seemingly impossible task of squaring a circle: responding to the aspirations of millions, while bowing to a vast apparatus of terror and fear which he helped create. Years ago, the Iranian regime allocated unprecedented financial resources for the implementation of a National Internet Network (NIN) that according to opennet.net:
“combines overlapping techniques of control: internet filtering, reinforced by amore constricted legal environment and efforts to ‘nationalize’ Iranian cyberspace…consistent filtering of social media, international news, non-Shia religions, social and religious taboos, and anything remotely opposed to official government policies…while the creation of the Supreme Council on Cyberspace indicates the Iranian government’s interest in centralizing their approach towards the Internet as well as their view of cyberspace as a larger security concern. Internet censorship in Iran — culminating in the National Information Network — is framed as a way to protect the nation’s unique culture and identity and defend against the so-called onslaught of “Westernization’.”
As the regime considers cyberspace a geopolitical as much as a domestic policy threat, Iranians could eventually be cut off from the global internet, with considerable ramifications for dissent and the country’s political future. We would be wise not to ignore the potential consequences. Governments are on the cusp of seeing what opportunities social media offers, especially in precipitating social and political change. To be sure, the rise of the internet has presented fresh challenges to repressive states. At the same time, it has added to the freedom of expression of millions. Through our efforts, we can hope to tip the balance in favour of universal freedoms and their democratic rights.
Rasta Daei is Senior Policy Advisor (Iran) in the Middle East Bureau at DFATD. He is responsible for helping develop Canada’s Direct Diplomacy strategy on Iran, which incorporates digital tools and social media in diplomacy. From July 2009—May 2012, Rasta was Second Secretary and subsequently Global Security Reporting Program officer at the Embassy of Canada, Kabul. A native Farsi speaker born in Tehran, in Afghanistan he focused primarily on Afghanistan’s peace process.
The personal opinions expressed in this article are those of the author alone, and they do not necessarily represent the policies or views of the Government of Canada.
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Originally published in / Publié à l’origine dans bout de papier, Vol. 27, No. 3 (2013) — Autumn 2013 // Automne 2013, pp. 9–11. Read the rest of this issue / Lire le reste de ce numéro →
