Ganji was speaking at the National Press Club Newsmaker press conference, May 10, while he was in town to accept the Cato Institute $500,000 Milton Friedman Prize later in the week. The award is for his work in resisting dictatorship and advancing democracy.
“Yesterday, in Iran, five political prisoners were executed,” was the first sentence uttered by Ganji, speaking through an interpreter. In his talk, Ganji laid bare the moral depravity of Iran’s fundamentalist regime and jihad Islamism.
“The regime fights vigorously against dissent, especially in areas of religious thinking.”
“In the past few years, over 100 [Iranian] journalists have been shut down,” said Ganji, who said that journalists are a special target of President Mahmoud Ahmadenijad’s regime because they report on its activities. “Journalists can spend months to several years in jail.”
“Anyone merely accused officially of acting against state interests is barred from working as a journalist for the rest of their life,” Ganji said.
Ganji said that the Iranian regime routinely conducts illegal detentions. “By their own admission, in the disturbances last year, four prisoners have died under torture in jail. Again by their own admission, about 70 individuals connected with the Green movement protesting the elections were shot to death,” Ganji said.
To illustrate life under the theocratic regime, Ganji spoke of a law sanctioned by the state whereby if a person is perceived in some respect—which he didn’t define—as a enemy of Islam, then his “blood can be shed.” Ganji said, “People have actually been murdered under this law. The murderer is acquitted if he can prove that the person he killed is one whose blood can be shed.”
Becomes Critic of the Iranian Theocracy
Ganji knows first hand about the repressive nature of this regime. From 2001 to 2006, he was held in the Evin Prison in Tehran, much of it in solitary confinement. To protest his conditions he went on hunger strike for more than seventy days (not consecutive) from which he nearly died.
In the “Road to Democracy in Iran,” the only English book available of Ganji’s writings, he says he was nearly murdered when someone had just entered his cell in the middle of the night and was about to kill him. The plot was foiled by Ganji yelling so that the other prisoners would be witness to his death.
Ganji became a target of the regime by becoming Iran’s most accomplished investigative journalist.
He wrote a collection of essays on the financial corruption of the Rafsanjanis—a prominent family in Iran. And he implicated high government officials in the murder of intellectual opponents of the regime in a series of articles called Serial Murders. His published writings together with the writings smuggled out of prison, and his defiance of his mistreatment through long hunger strikes won him international acclaim that eventually led to his release and freedom out of Iran after he served his 6 year sentence.
Ganji wasn’t always a regime critic. He began as an anti-Shah activist and Revolutionary Guard member, who supported the 1979 Revolution and its leader Ayatollah Khomeini. But when he saw the tyranny and special privileges of the regime rulers, he turned against religious fundamentalism, and its intolerance and repression.
He said in “Road to Democracy” that he remains a Muslim while wholeheartedly supporting democratic movement reforms. His writings have been about reconciling Islam with modern thinking, rationalism, democracy and the rule of law.
“Fundamentalist readings of Islam are inimical to the democratic process… It embraces the use of violence in establishing a society ruled by divine law, Shari,” Ganji writes. He opposes the creation of a state based on Shari and Islamic jurisprudence, whereby the “religion and the clergy intercede in every aspect of social life.”
He sees replacing this political structure with secular democracy as the only way to end the discrimination against ethnic and religious minorities, women, and various life styles
Pre-conditions for a Democratic Iran
Ganji said that discrimination against women in Iran is greater than any other group while, at the same time, Iran has a “very strong feminist movement.”
“This is one of the paradoxes of our country.” 60 or 70 percent of the graduates of the universities are women. And, women dominance is found in the student movement and the labor movement.
“In all the terrorism around the world, no Iranian would be participating,” Ganji said to emphasize how Iran psyche is different from its neighbors.
Iran has a “fundamentalist dictatorial government at the top and a society whose thinking is far ahead of other societies nearby in the Middle East.” Ganji asserted that if free elections were held in other countries of the Middle East, the fundamentalists will win. But if they were held in Iran, the “modern, democratic forces will win.”
“That is why we have the pre-conditions for democratic progress in Iran,” he concluded.
The regime leaders know they lack legitimacy from the people, so they claim legitimacy from God, which no one accepts, Ganji said.
Unfortunately, Ganji says the policies of the Western countries have been misguided, working to the benefit of the dictatorial regimes and to the detriment of the democratic movement in the Middle East.
“What we want is punishment of the regime, not punishment of the people. Economic sanctions are a punishment of the people.”
The Western governments have put all their focus on the nuclear security issue. But this is the wrong approach because it provides support for the regime rulers, according to Ganji. The Green movement is hurt by the West sanctions and military invasions which are used by the dictatorial regime as a pretext to continue its hold on power.
Ganji said that President Obama at least has not made military threats, which is an improvement over President Bush.
Ganji said the Western governments need to raise the issues of the regime’s human rights violations. Then it punishes the regime, not the people. The Security Council has the resources and basis for charges of ‘crimes against humanity’ to take Iran to The Hague where the International Criminal Court resides, as it did with Sudan’s President Omar Bashir.
Western media has also played into the hands of the regime. President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad always raises two issues: “The Holocaust does not exist and Israel must be destroyed.” He consciously takes the most extreme positions to control the interviews.
“No one challenges him on the [human rights] conditions at home,” said Ganji.
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