by Ali Reza Eshraghi
News media accounts of reactions from Iran to the recent talks in Geneva remind me of a joke that has gone viral there:
A salesman shows a variety of hearing aids ranging in cost from one to a thousand dollars to a customer, who then asks, “How well does [...]]]>
by Ali Reza Eshraghi
News media accounts of reactions from Iran to the recent talks in Geneva remind me of a joke that has gone viral there:
A salesman shows a variety of hearing aids ranging in cost from one to a thousand dollars to a customer, who then asks, “How well does the one dollar one work?” The salesman responds, “It doesn’t work at all! But, people speak louder when they see you wearing it.”
For the first time, different political factions within the Islamic republic of Iran are in agreement about President Hassan Rouhani’s method for resolving the nuclear issue and negotiating with the United States. But local and international media coverage has focused on Iranian radical groups who have shrunk in size and been marginalized after June’s presidential election. While this group occupies a small space in Iran’s current nuclear discourse, it has been presented as a major actor by the media.
Much of this coverage focuses on Kayhan, the Iranian daily newspaper, and its editor-in-chief, Hossein Shariatmadari, who has openly criticized the Iranian delegates for keeping the details of their negotiations with the P5+1 powers (the United States, Britain, France, Russia and China plus Germany) confidential. For Shariatmadari, this secrecy is an indication that the Iranian delegation is making a bad deal.
Of course, Khayan and Shariatmadari are not the only ones who have criticized Iranian diplomats for keeping things under wraps when it comes to the nuclear issue. In October 2009, when the Saeed Jalili-headed negotiation team was trying to make a deal with the P5+1 in Geneva, Iranian reformist media also complained about the lack of available details on the discussions.
At that time, Mir-Hossein Mousavi, the sidelined candidate of Iran’s 2009 presidential election, accused the negotiators of trading the long-term interests of Iranians for “nothing” in a statement.
And last year — amid rumors of a meeting between Ali Akbar Velayati, a senior aide to Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, with American officials — Kalameh, the flagship website of the opposition Green Movement, demanded that the negotiations be “transparent and [conducted] in front of people.”
Shrinking prominence
This time it’s the hardline Kayhan that has printed the loudest complaints against the confidential negotiations. But things are different now. Not long ago, each time Kayhan started a game of ball, it was immediately picked up and passed around in the Principlist front. Today, no one is willing to play along with the well-known daily.
Indeed, other conservative media outlets affiliated with the Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corp (IRGC) apparently have no problem with the nuclear negotiations remaining confidential. Here is Sobh-e Sadeq, the official IRGC weekly, expressing satisfaction in its post-Geneva talks coverage:
“The Iranian delegation stressed the importance of respecting Iranian nation’s red lines, as well as the need of change in the position of the West from selfishness to a win-win interaction. [Our delegation] would not back down from the nation’s rights.”
Even more surprisingly, the IRGC has absorbed Rouhani’s vocabulary and is talking about a “win-win interaction with the US.” The Javan daily, another media outlet associated with the IRGC, stressed on Monday that the actions of the Rouhani administration “have the permission of the Supreme Leader.” Javan took this a step further by arguing that even if the administration was unsuccessful in the negotiations, Iran would still emerge victorious because it would be obvious that it was the Americans who, contrary to their claims, have no interest in resolving disputes and restoring relations.
Gholam Ali Haddad Adel, the head of the Majlis Principlist faction whose daughter is married to the Supreme Leader’s son, has also supported the confidentiality of the nuclear negotiations. Considered a hardliner, Haddad Adel, who used to favor Kayhan, could have remained silent in this debate. But he has criticized the newspaper for basing its suspicion of Iran’s diplomatic team on what he considers “the words of the Zionist media.”
With such remarks, Haddad Adel is — perhaps unintentionally — paving the road for reformists to launch a more powerful attack against the radicals. Mir-Mahmoud Mousavi, the former Director General of the Foreign Ministry and the brother of Mir-Hossein Mousavi, has also accused Iranian hardliners of using the language of Israeli hardliners. He believes they both “are trying to weaken Iran’s position in the talks.”
The position of Haddad Adel, the IRGC or even Ahmad Khatami, the radical and sometimes callous Tehran Friday Prayers Leader who also said Rouhani’s administration should be trusted, has confused analysts who measure Iranian politics with a who-is-closer-to-the-Supreme-Leader tape. These pundits are uncomfortably surprised each time they come across such perplexing results. The last such surprise occurred during Iran’s 2013 presidential election when Saeed Jalili, Iran’s nuclear negotiator who was touted as a favorite of the Supreme Leader, lost the vote.
After Ahmadinejad
Of course, it’s crucial to observe certain significant developments in Iran’s nuclear and foreign policy discourse that have occurred since Rouhani took office a few months ago. First, Iranian media can now write more openly and include a variety of opinions about their country’s controversial politics. This is why Mohammad Mohajeri, the editor-in-chief of the popular Khabar Online website and former member of the editorial board of Kayhan, reminded Shariatmadari that Jalili’s former negotiating team had tougher restrictions for the press. Before, “the press would get some burnt intelligence and were then told not to even discuss that useless information because of the confidential nature of the talks.” Compare that situation to the present when trying to gauge the level of change. Last week, for the first time, Iran’s Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif took a group of Iranian reporters from various media outlets to Geneva. Each day they were briefed repeatedly by members of the Iranian team.
That the reformist media are not alone in attacking and quibbling with the hardliners is another new development. The moderate and progressive Principlists, in an unwritten division of labor with the reformists, have taken on the task of silencing the radicals themselves. Popular news websites affiliated with the Principlists like Alef, Khabar Online and Tabank have constantly — albeit with a softer tone — criticized Iran’s radicals since the talks in Geneva.
Bijan Moghaddam, the managing director of the widely circulated Jam-e Jam daily and the former political editor of the hardliner Fars News Agency, has warned the radicals that the “Iranian society has banished them” and asked hardliners to voice their criticism logically and “without creating a ruckus and swearing.”
Finally, there is now a visible rhetorical shift in the debate over Iran’s foreign policy. Critics of Rouhani’s diplomacy team do not merely rely on mnemonic tropes and the Islamic Republic’s ideological repertoire in their arguments. They are also invoking Iran’s “national interest” in criticizing the administration’s diplomatic method. Such changes are even visible in Khayan’s tone. For example, the daily recently criticized Rouhani for publically announcing ahead of the Geneva talks that the treasury is empty, saying that such statements would weaken Iran’s negotiating position.
In such an atmosphere, it’s not surprising that critics of the government’s foreign policy claim they are aiding the administration’s negotiating strategy. As a radical commentator recently said in an interview with the Javan daily, “President Rouhani can use the views of those opposing the talks with the US as powerful leverage to haggle with the US.”
Photo: Gholam Ali Haddad Adel greets Hossein Shariatmadari. Credit: Jam News
]]>by Shawn Amoei
In the latest sign of increasing press freedom and Iranian receptivity towards a thaw in relations with the United States, one of Iran’s leading dailies published on Monday an interview with the State Department’s Persian-language spokesman, Alan Eyre. With his photograph emblazoned on the front page [...]]]>
by Shawn Amoei
In the latest sign of increasing press freedom and Iranian receptivity towards a thaw in relations with the United States, one of Iran’s leading dailies published on Monday an interview with the State Department’s Persian-language spokesman, Alan Eyre. With his photograph emblazoned on the front page of Shargh, Eyre’s interview represents the first instance in which a US official has been given such a platform in the Iranian press since the Islamic Republic’s founding 34 years ago.
The unprecedented move appears to be part of a shift in Iran’s political atmosphere, which saw heavy media restrictions during the term of President Hassan Rouhani’s predecessor, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. While Eyre presented the official US line on Iran, the feature was clearly depicted in a positive light with the headline, “Alan Eyre: We Seek the Lifting of Sanctions” alongside a rather sympathetic image of the spokesman. This could be representative of a broader attempt by Iranian media, sanctioned by Iranian officials, to warm up the political mood in Iran toward the possibility of a detente with the United States.
Following is an excerpt from the interview as translated by the Washington Post’s Tehran bureau:
]]>Shargh: How can closer ties between Iran and the U.S. help to resolve the nuclear issue?
Alan Eyre: As Obama and Rouhani remarked, the opposite is correct, that it is solving the nuclear issue that can be an important solution to mending the relations between two countries.
Shargh: What is the U.S. view on the diplomatic approach of the new president?
Alan Eyre: Both the president and Secretary of State strongly believe that there is an opportunity for diplomacy and we hope that the Iranian government uses it. We welcome the change in tone, but as always we say there is a big difference between words and action.
Shargh: To what extent is the U.S. side ready to take trust building steps?
Alan Eyre: The U.S. and P5+1 are ready to answer Iran’s trust-building actions with the same actions. Our suggestions in Almaty, which were not answered, had the same features and we hope that the new government gives a conceptual reply to it.
by Farideh Farhi
As most observers and students of Iranian politics know, paranoia about behind-the-scenes British machinations and interference has a special place in Iranian politics and the Iranian psyche. Dinner conversations about any world event, even in family settings, may easily be peppered with at least one person confidently asserting [...]]]>
by Farideh Farhi
As most observers and students of Iranian politics know, paranoia about behind-the-scenes British machinations and interference has a special place in Iranian politics and the Iranian psyche. Dinner conversations about any world event, even in family settings, may easily be peppered with at least one person confidently asserting that the Brits are behind it all, after all. In fact, the reason the novel Dayi jaan Napolean (My Uncle Napoleon) by Iraj Pezeshkzad (translated into English by Dick Davis) remains popular is precisely because it deliciously captures and lampoons so many cultural reference points, including the obsession with British hands behind Iran’s misfortunes, exemplified by the character that the novel gets its title from.
The book, written in 1973, and popular TV mini-series that were based on it, have been banned in Iran since the Revolution. But now, without exhibiting a trace of irony, Iran’s Intelligence Ministry has decided to resurrect one of the book’s main themes via a public communiqué regarding the reason more than a dozen journalists have been arrested (more will apparently continue to be arrested).
In my previous blog on this topic I had speculated that, given the recent pronouncement of the Prosecutor general and the Judiciary’s spokesperson, Mohseni Eje’i, this move may have come from the Judiciary. But based on information from the horse’s mouth we now know that I was wrong and the arrests resulted from efforts by the Ministry of Intelligence to discover “one of the largest media networks” connected to external “media camps” and were undertaken “in the context of its legal duties and responsibilities to combat any foreign infiltration and interference” by those who want awful things to happen to the “free nation of Iran.”
Furthermore, the Intelligence Ministry feels obligated to make several points clear:
- Because the dossier is “highly sensitive and involves a multitude of security and judicial considerations,” the gathered intelligence regarding the relationship of arrested individuals to “the psychological operation of the UK government” is “completely supported and solid.” So, even without the accused admitting contacts, the fact that organized work was done by foreign media has already been established.
- Given the large number of individuals connected to this media network (from inside and outside the country) and the variety in levels of contact, some of the accused may not even be aware that they have been in contact with a network that has a foreign source. This is why some may be released and more may be arrested. And rest assured that all the noise from various “so-called” human rights organizations connected to the same “arrogant camp” will not have any impact on the resolve of the Intelligence Ministry’s selfless members who are trying to get to the bottom of all this.
- Finally, more information regarding what’s going on will not be available until more information is gathered during the initial stages of interrogation.
So, “solid and supported” information regarding a network of contacts has led to the arrest of individuals who may or may not have been aware of their participation in the alleged crime and, given the potential release of some, may not have even participated in it!
It turns out that the Intelligence Ministry’s “solid and supported” information boils down to the fact that BBC Persian exists and that the Ministry has not been able to stop its reporting of issues related to Iran to viewers inside the country. The rest will be established via the interrogation of individuals who have no access to due process and will probably be prodded into securing their release by admitting their cluelessness in unknowingly helping the “old arrogant power.” The Intelligence Ministry will be vindicated, while hoping that it has created conditions in which Iranians will be leery of talking about what is happening in Iran to anyone lest they be arrested for unknowingly working for a network that eventually finds its way to BBC Persian!
(I had written earlier that if the late Pezeshkzad were alive today, he would probably be wondering if he could have written a better parody. Well, he is still alive, thank goodness, and I hope his great sense of humour extends to me and my blog post as well.)
There is a real conversation to be had regarding the role and impact of Persian-speaking media located outside of Iran that’s funded by citizens or governments of countries that are openly pursuing hostile policies towards the Islamic Republic. But these arrests do not contribute to that conversation. The only thing they show is that close to 35 years after the Islamic Republic asserted its “final independence” from external control and proverbially “slapped the face of arrogant powers” and “cut off their hands”, the Intelligence Ministry is once again full of the likes of Dayi jaan Napoleon and his servant Mash Qassem, both of whom were convinced of British revenge.
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