We need a European approach to supporting democracy in Iran

Timothy Garton Ash, The Guardian:

Rome was not built in a day and Persia will not be changed in a day. As we contemplate our very limited options for influencing that ancient, self-referential and now defiant country, we must be clear that we are in for a long haul. We cannot make Iran peaceful and democratic; we can only help to create conditions in which Iranians themselves might eventually make it so.

Two clocks are ticking in Iran: the nuclear clock and the democracy clock. The strategic objective of western policy must be to slow down the nuclear clock and to speed up the democracy clock. Our problem is that some of the things we might do to slow down the nuclear clock are likely to slow down the democracy clock as well.

Millions of Iranians who are fiercely critical of the country's theocratic regime, and of its wildly ranting president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, also believe that Iran is entitled to civilian nuclear power. Many of them think that it's entitled to nuclear weapons as well. If the west imposes sanctions just on the nuclear issue, without linking them to respect for human rights inside Iran, there will be an anti-western backlash among parts of the population who would otherwise be a force for change. That may well be what Ahmadinejad is counting on. There is method in his madness. READ MORE

Yesterday's report of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) puts the issue of Iran's nuclear programme firmly before the UN security council but, despite American and European pressure, Russia and China are extremely reluctant to bring things to a crunch. The next step in the diplomatic dance will probably be a "presidential statement" from the security council, something well short of a condemnatory resolution and sanctions. Even that may be many weeks in the making.

If the security council does finally "impose meaningful consequences", as the US vice-president, Dick Cheney, put it on Tuesday, the Islamic Republic of Iran can strike back in two ways. First, it can do what it has already promised to do, and let rip with its nuclear enrichment programme, while stoking up a siege mentality at home with a propaganda of patriotic resistance to nefarious British-American imperial diktat. It can also make lots more trouble for the west and its allies in the Middle East by supporting more extreme elements in the Shia south of Iraq, in Hamas and in Hizbullah. Already, Iran's revolutionary guards are busy recruiting candidates for what they call "martyrdom-seeking operations". All this under the banner of leading Islamic resistance to western imperialism.

So as the nuclear diplomacy grinds on, we need to think urgently about the other track: speeding up the democracy clock. At first glance, we seem to have the familiar spectacle of a hard line from Washington and a soft line from Europe. In fact, Washington's line on democracy promotion is more complicated and Europe's is non-existent.

It's true that the same American neocons who talk of bombing Iran will also tell you their preferred option is to foment a revolution to overthrow the mullahs. Brave of them to risk other people's lives. Meanwhile, the Bush administration has announced a budget allocation of $85m to finance satellite television broadcasting to Iran, and other forms of support to civil society and elements of democratic opposition in the country. The senior state department official spearheading this effort is Elizabeth Cheney, the daughter of Dick Cheney - in itself enough to damn her in the eyes of many Europeans. In a recent speech to the Foreign Policy Association, she argued that there are "many similarities and more than a few differences" between what happened in central Europe in the 1980s and the wider Middle East today. The "most direct parallel" she finds with the Solidarity movement in Poland is the role of women as the spearhead for change across the wider Middle East.

Now you may - and I would - question the historical comparison with Solidarity. But you also have to answer these questions: do you think movements for the emancipation of women in the Muslim world are a good thing? Do you think we should be supporting them? If the answer is yes, then why don't you agree with her? Is it just because she's an American called Cheney?

Rather than sitting on the sidelines carping at whatever Washington does, we Europeans should do something better ourselves. Instead of merely expressing (justified) scepticism about an American satellite TV channel for Iran, which will be widely seen there as Bush administration propaganda, we should be urging the British parliament to make money available for a 24-hour BBC satellite television service broadcasting to Iran in Farsi. For the BBC does have real credibility in Iran. Rather than just sniping at Washington's sometimes clumsy efforts at democracy promotion, we should be developing our own.

When I say we, I mean all the member states of the European Union, pooling their resources and know-how. After all, we - not the Americans - have the diplomats, businesspeople and journalists on the ground in Iran. Between our 25 countries, we have a unique body of experience about how democratic states can encourage peaceful change in their less democratic neighbours. In the last decades of the cold war, West Germany tried to do this with its Ostpolitik, and Poland, having been on the receiving end, can help us to learn from the mistakes of that Ostpolitik. Not all the European precedents fit Iran, but some do. For example, we should be weaving a dense web of human contacts between Iranians and freer countries, as we did between the western and eastern halves of a divided Europe.

Our universities should invite their academics and students, who have often been in the vanguard of standing up for free speech and human rights in Iran. Our newspapers and journalism schools should bring over their journalists. Our trades unions should hitch up with their unionists, some of whom have organised major strikes. Our parliaments should establish links with their parliament which, though far from fully democratic, has been giving Ahmadinejad a rough ride.

Writers, artists and filmmakers should be encouraged to travel to and fro, carrying ideas in both directions. Women's movements in Iran, representing half the population systematically discriminated against, should be supported by women's movements in Europe. Iran's Islamic thinkers and jurists, both reformist modernisers and conservatives, should be engaged in dialogue by theologians and scholars from other faith traditions. All this should be done less by our governments than by our own societies, and not just by America and Britain - traditionally distrusted by many Iranians - but by all European countries, working separately and together. We need a European Iranpolitik.

We cannot know in advance which parts of such a catalytic action will have what effects over what period. Certainly we are talking years not months. Iran is not Poland; and when change comes, it will come from Iranians working in a distinctively Iranian way. It may be that the nuclear clock will still tick too fast and the democracy clock too slow. But to work only on the nuclear clock, and not make any systematic attempt to speed up the other, is to condemn ourselves in advance to almost certain failure.

www.timothygartonash.com