Ahmadinejad and the future of blogs in Iran; an interview

Sueddeutsche Zeitung's youth e-zine, Jetzt.de, interviewed me via email last week and thanks to great questions that Michael Moorstedt asked, it's turned out, I guess, to be a useful interview: Iranische Opposition ist im Netz (Jetzt.de)

And here is an English version of it. Does anyone want to publish it somewhere? Feel free to use it anywhere you like after giving credit to Jetzt.de and letting me know:

Particularly young people avoided the presidential elections in Iran earlier this year. Is Boycott the proper form of protest?

Boycott is useful when there is absolutely no chance for change. Only then it could be a form of protest. But in the recent presidential elections, there were at least three pro-reform candidates. Boycott in that situation only deprived the pro-reform candidates from the youth and middle-class vote, but it didn’t affect the conservatives' vote.

Boycott, eventually, only helped conservatives to win the election, while the turnout, on the other hand, was high enough for the regime to claim legitimacy.

What could be the appropriate form of reaction to Ahmadinedschads’ recent and continuing Provocations against Israel and the “western Civilization”?

I’d suggest the western media to ignore him. Nobody in Iran takes his words seriously. They are just words with no action to back them up. He’s done that since the first day he started work as the Mayor of Tehran.

He has a self-appreciative and pretentious style of doing things and keeps lying and exaggerating about his success.

There is a video circulating among the Iranians on CD and on the web in which he describes how he was protected by a ring of light while he was speaking at the UN and how everyone was so mesmerised by his performance and speech that were not even blinking.

He’s a self-absorbed man, desperate for attention and the western media should take that into account.

Since he replaced Ayatollah Khomeini, the main issues in Iran's foreign policy has been set by the supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. So it makes sense to think as long as he hasn't embraced Ahmadinejad's radical rhetoric against Israel in action, nothing is going to change. I still see no sign of support by Khamenei for Ahmadinejad.

Do you think that his “comments” can be seen as tool to divert the peoples’ attention from the immanent Problems in Iran problems like the high unemployment rate?

Absolutely. He is an inexperienced politician, especially in foreign policy, pushed by some of the revolutionary guard commander, with the backing of a radical Ayatollah, Mesbah Yazdi, to run for president.

He managed to get elected mainly based on his populist agenda and simplistic economic promises such as "bringing the oil income on people's dinner table" and of course the fact that he was a non-cleric, simple-looking young facing Hashemi Rafsanjani, an extremely unpopular cleric, seen as a significant part of the establishment.

Beating Rafsanjani was not that difficult. My old aunt could've become president, had she been allowed to run as a woman!

Do you actually think that blogs have the ability to somehow change a political system as authorical as it is at time in Iran?

Yes, but not directly. Masoud Behnoud, a veteran journalist and a blogger once wrote if blogs were around during the revolution and the war, things would've turned out differently.

I think the most important function that blogs have in Iran right now is the public sphere they've created, referring to Habermas' concept. Blogs are now this unique space in which a relatively equal, interactive and collective debate could happen out of the government's control, and among a very influential group of people who are, sociologically speaking, reference groups for a lot of people around them.

Can the Iranian Blogosphere count as a realistic reflection for the common opinion of young Iranians?

I believe so. Mainly because higher education in Iran is still free and therefore open even to the lower class. A lot of these bloggers are introduced to the concept of blogs in their computer labs and update them from there.

Internet access cards and internet cafes are also widely available in even small cities in Iran because they make sense economically.

There are now 7.5 million internet users in Iran and it is estimated there are over 700 thousand blogs written by Iranians. I can even say that reading or writing blogs is one of the biggest motives for Iranians for paying for Internet access – obviously after porn. According to a blogger, young people now chat less and blog more.

*Nasrin Alavi wrote in her book “We are Iran”, that you were among the first who wrote a weblog in Persian plus giving a short “how to do a weblog”. Do you somehow feel like an Idol?*

Maybe Internet evangelist is better title. I've spent the past seven years introducing and promoting liberating technologies such as internet, email, blogs, photoblogs, podcasts, etc. Before leaving for Canada in Dec. 2000, I was writing a daily column called "Internet" in the most popular reformist newspaper, titled "Asr-e Azadegan", which was eventually shut down after a few months.

I'm still getting emails from people who had no idea what internet was at the time and were just collecting the column to read when they got access to the Internet. I was writing, in a simple and casual language -- language of my generation -- about how Internet could improve people's daily lives. Our newspaper was the first one which started to mention columnists' email addresses due to my persistence and my readers still remember how in my column I was nagging about the fact that some of them were not getting it at the time. Now they all not only have emails, but also they are savvy bloggers. Ask the famous satirist Ebrahim Nabavi .

I did the same thing for blogs. I dedicated the first year of my high-speed Internet access – which obviously happened in Canada where I immigrated to – introducing and promoting blogs.

I made a lot of blogs for people, spent tens of hours helping them with the technical issues, dragged a number of famous journalists to do it in order to give more credibility to it, kept a huge list of all Persian bloggers by the time manually and then later created a website to list them automatically with the help of a friend, etc. And I kept introducing new tools and technologies such as RSS feeds, blogrolls, It's really unfair to say I've only written an instruction.

Its main URL (hoder.com) is filtered or blocked for Iranians in Iran by the government. But I've bought some other domain names such as hoder.us, hoder.info, editormyself.com, h0der.com etc. and many people access it through these addresses. But the thing is that it's very difficult to inform the readers about these new domain names. Because if they were too public, the officials would find it and filter it. If it's not public enough, people can't use them.

So it's a very interesting virtual partisanship which invoices a lot of psychological tricks. Such as using 0 (Zero) instead of Os so it still looks like the old address and the official think they've already filtered it. Lots of such small tricks.

However, other than the average of six, seven thousand readers who visit my blog everyday, I have over 11,000 subscribers to the blog through email; which is incredible. Email is the last thing they can block or control and in countries like Iran and China, I believe, email is the best way to get around internet censorship. My nightmare is to lose this extremely valuable list.

When was your last time in Iran? What kind of reactions did you get there on your work?

It was last June, during the presidential election. It was one the most exciting times in my life. First of all, it was the most interesting election campaign I'd ever seen. All candidates had become reformists and were desperately appealing to the youth. Even Ahmadinejad, who was the most conservative one, had sent his cultural advisor to Iranian TV to promote his open attitude about social and cultural freedoms. A relatively free and relaxed environment was created for about a month because the regime needed a high turn out.

But it was a shocking experience for me, personally. The shock happened when on the first day of my arrival, after having breakfast with my family, whom I had not seen for more than two years, I went to the University of Tehran in front of which a small protest was organized by women activists against the unequal gender rights in the constitution.

As soon as I hit the opposite sidewalk, where people were watching the protest, a few people said hello to me and I had no idea who they were. Some of them later introduced themselves and I remembered them based on their blogs. But there were couple I still don't know who they were.

The most positive reaction, though, was from the reformists politicians whom I'd followed for years but never had a chance to meet. But when a friend of mine, Hanif Mazrooie, a blogger himself, took me to the reformist candidates headquarter, I was really surprised by first of all, the fact that many of them, including the top strategists and leaders, knew me by my face, and secondly, were so nice and friendly with me.

As if they all had read my blog and knew about my supportive positions. They allowed me to take photos and videos and let me wander in everywhere in the building. They trusted me even without seeing me once. All because of my blog and that is wonderful.

In October 2004 the Iranian government released new laws concerning the treatment of “cyber-dissidents.” Due to this, many bloggers began to write their posts using synonyms. Does this somehow affect the credibility of their articles?

Not necessarily. The credibility issue is only important when blogs want to do original reporting, which is quite rare. Usually they produce opinion and narratives to which the issue of reliability and credibility do not really apply.

For example, when Zeitoon, an anonymous but extremely popular female blogger talks about her conversation with a few older women in a Tehran swimming pool, it doesn't matter who she is. But when she tries to report about some event or incident that's happened around her, it's important for us to know who she is.

However, in the virtual world, trust is more important than identity. You can trust someone without really knowing him or her, based on his or her blogs etc.

Nowadays weblogs as well are subject of governmental censorship. Various Bloggers became prosecuted and imprisoned. Is there a need for, and if yes, what could be alternative possibilities for political participation?

I actually see internet as an alternative way to get involved in politics. There are numerous technologies or tools or media, available via internet, which could be used in different ways. For example blogs are great to distribute information, create understanding and build public discourses.

They are also useful to organize big numbers of people. Wikis, on the other hand, are great to produce consensual concepts or opinions. Mailing-lists are useful to mobilize, raise funds, and limited debates. So blogs are only part of an alternative way for political participation that internet provides as a whole.

The German Philosopher Jürgen Habermas once asked: “Is an explosive device in the heads of all these well educated young people, especially the young women, which the Ayatollah regime has to be afraid of more than everything else?” Do you think that the fundamentalists are afraid?

I totally agree. The change in social value system among the young generation is very promising. They are much more self-expressive, tolerant, confident and individualistic than their parents, especially the young women.

However, unemployment, dysfunctional economy, limited social and political freedoms and a lot of other problems has created a wide-spread sense of despair which is manifested by apathy, particularly among the young men.

Women, because of the extremely motivating cause of fighting for equal gender rights, are less apathetic, though.

I have witnessed, the majority of young men of Arabic decent in Internet cafe's looking at porn and using their hands to block the view of any adults present. The native Spanish/French youth don't seem to be that interested. Maybe the good here is that sex will be de-mystified and cannot be used to as a tool by unethical older men.

"Boycott, eventually, only helped conservatives to win the election, while the turnout, on the other hand, was high enough for the regime to claim legitimacy."

Is that what really happened? I recall talk of a boycott, I remember thinking please, please, don't be so stupid, don't boycott.

"He’s a self-absorbed man, desperate for attention and the western media should take that into account."

The same could be said about Hoder.

There was a boycott. Please understand that Ahmadinejad was Selected by the regime, not elected by the people. It didn't matter how many or how few people voted, as far as who would win.

Is that what really happened? I recall talk of a boycott, I remember thinking please, please, don't be so stupid, don't boycott.

1) A clerical committee has to approve all candidates, and it bumped hundreds of "reformers" off the ballot.

2) A clerical committee can veto any legislation, and had hamstrung the previous “reformist” president and the reform parties for the last few years.

3) “Reformers” have always been in a very difficult position as they can be accused of “treason” and “collaboration with the enemy” if they question the way the Mullahs exercise police and security power outside of legislative oversight in the name of “Protecting the Revolution.”

All this makes for a pretty discouraging situation for the “reformists”.

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