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Free Thinker
"The regime's biggest weakness is human rights. This is the issue on which it loses face with its people," says Akbar Ganji, released in March after six years in jail.
(By Bruno Vincent -- Getty Images)
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"Khamenei must go," Ganji wrote boldly.
In his second manifesto, Ganji outlined a strategy to end theocratic rule through massive civil disobedience and election boycotts. He charged that Iran's elections were "fraudulent" because of "forged ballots" and "orders given from above" to add votes to bolster turnout and the regime's seeming legitimacy.
Invoking the civil disobedience campaigns of Mahatma Gandhi and Nelson Mandela, he called on student activists and intellectuals to ignore court summonses for opposition activity that, under Article 500 of Iran's penal code, makes them liable to three to 12 months in prison.
"Citizens must break this law," he wrote. "If this law is broken extensively, the regime will not be able to send many people to jail for expressing their opposition. . . . The uneven path to freedom will be opened by our efforts. Freedom is not free."
He also blasted reformers for timidity and for selling out, because they have been willing to adapt Iran's theocracy rather than abandon it. Reform is no longer viable, Ganji wrote.
Throughout his writing, Ganji quotes Socrates and Immanuel Kant, John Stuart Mill and Alexis de Tocqueville, Thomas Paine, Baudelaire and Montesquieu.
In accepting his National Press Club Award last month, Ganji said he reports "in order to instigate protest." And he cited Albert Camus' "The Plague," a tale of disease's devastating toll that is often interpreted as a metaphor for repression's deadly impact -- a tale that he applies to his country and others.
"I am with you here today in order to bear witness on behalf of the fallen victims of the plague of violence," he said.
"It recognizes no boundaries," the diminutive writer warned. "One day, incarnated as Stalin, it ran over the vast territories of Russia, one day as Hitler it tormented the people of Germany, the Jews and other people. . . . One day as Mussolini it wreaked devastation on the beautiful landscape of Italy, and another day as bin Laden it wrought havoc on the United States."
Ganji continues his protests wherever he goes. In New York last month, he held a symbolic three-day hunger strike in front of U.N. headquarters to demand that Iran release its political prisoners. Small hunger strikes were conducted simultaneously in 18 cities around the world. "We tried to bring the world's attention to the broad human rights violations in Iran today," Ganji explained. To do nothing, he argues, is to share responsibility for the status quo.
But some Iranian analysts wonder about Ganji's relevance in the face of an increasingly hard-line regime.
"Ganji probably represents the loudest and most courageous voice of dissent in Iran, but it's not necessarily a pragmatic or effective one," said Hadi Semati, a Tehran University professor now at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars. "His combative and aggressive ideas on reform may not be in tune with the broader popular mood. The economic situation and the problems of everyday life and people are their priorities."
