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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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Added Najmeh Bozorgmehr, a visiting fellow at the Brookings Institution's Saban Center for Middle East Policy: "He's brave, but maybe too brave.
"He speaks for radical reformists who seem to be marginalized in today's Iran. Ahmadinejad's agenda is now dominant in Iran."
Yet analysts also agree that there is no one with wider appeal among the opposition -- even though Ganji does not see himself as a leader.
"No other dissident has emerged in the last 27 years, since the revolution, who has the respect of all the disparate elements of Iranian society, from Revolutionary Guardsmen and basij [volunteers], senior clergy and religious intellectuals, to the secular and religious middle class within Iran and the strong Iranian exile communities in Europe and North America," said Karim Sadjadpour, Iran analyst for the Crisis Group, an independent nonpartisan organization committed to preventing conflict and based in Brussels. "The fact that Ganji is held in such high esteem by all of these disparate actors is really quite remarkable."
At a time when many intellectuals and dissidents are opting for temporary jobs abroad or low profiles at home, Ganji plans to return to Tehran soon to make more noise.
"My place is inside Iran. I have to go back and struggle from inside," he said.
During his last trip abroad in 2000 for a conference in Berlin, Ganji was warned that he would be arrested if he returned. "I went back, was arrested, and I don't regret it," he said.
"I told them from the beginning that it's a two-side cost," he added. "They imprison me and I pay the cost. But when I talk about them, they also pay a cost. And when they imprisoned me for six years, the cost was higher to them."
