A key Iranian dissident tells
Newsmax he was stunned when he heard President Barack
Obama tell reporters that, despite government's brutal
crackdown in Tehran, the Islamic Republic has time to
regain “legitimacy” in the eyes of the Iranian
people.
“I was hoping President Obama
would lead the world and start a boycott of Iranian
oil,” said former presidential candidate and
opposition activist Mohsen Sazegara. “This is the best
way to save the lives of the Iranian people.”
Instead, Sazegara told Newsmax,
he listened to Obama’s news conference on Tuesday with
a sense of disbelief.
It's "not too late for the
Iranian government to see there is a peaceful path that
leads to legitimacy in the eyes of the Iranian
people,” Obama told reporters when asked for his
reaction to the violence in Iran.
Sazegara, who was involved in
the reform movement in the 1990s but eventually left
Iran after the reformist government jailed him, said he
listened to Obama with a sense of “deep, deep, deep
regret. I never expected President Obama to say
something like that.”
“I had been expecting Obama
to say we promise the people of Iran we won’t deal or
negotiate with any government that does not represent
the majority of the people in Iran. I had expected him
to be very clear.”
For two years, Sazegara has had
a weekly televised commentary on the Persian Service of
Voice of America, which VOA polling shows is the most
widely respected and listened to segment in its lineup.
When reports began to emerge
from Iran of massive demonstrations 10 days ago,
Sazegara began getting 1,400 e-mails a day from inside
Iran, begging him to appear more regularly to comment on
events.
“I was a window into Iran
from the outside,” he said. With the crackdown on
protest leaders — about 800 of Sazegara’s friends
and former colleagues are now in jail — the Voice of
America was a key conduit for getting information from
inside Iran to the West, and vice versa.
Sazegara went to VOA editor
Alex Belida, who initially agreed to put him on air. But
after consulting with a Persian-speaking deputy, Belida
called him back to say no.
The de facto banning of
Sazegara from the VOA airwaves is not the first time
Persian-speaking editors at VOA have attempted to
suppress information that might be embarrassing to the
hard-line government in Tehran.
On Saturday, for
example, sources in Iran emailed VOA and Sazegara
dramatic video footage that showed the brutal
cold-blooded murder of a young Iranian woman in Tehran.
The deputy editor
of the Farsi service, Ali
Sajadi, refused to
air it, saying it was too graphic.
But when overseas media,
including the BBC’s Farsi service, aired the footage,
Sajadi allowed broadcasters to show a short segment of
the footage, which has now become famous around the
world.
During Obama's news conference
today, he described the slaying of the young woman, Neda
Soltani, as “a problem.”
And last week, when top aides
to presidential candidate Mir Hossein Mousavi received a
standing ovation from the European Parliament in
Strasbourg, VOA refused to give the event coverage on
its broadcasts into Iran.
Protesters in
Tehran have begun holding up signs in English, asking
the United States to increase sanctions on the Iranian
regime and to condemn the Islamic Republic.
“Obama claims to
be like President Lincoln,” Sazegara said. “Then he
should uphold the principles of Lincoln.”
Instead, during his news
conference, the president reiterated his fears that the
U.S. would become a “tool” in the hands of the
regime, who would blame the CIA for orchestrating the
demonstrations, Sazegara said.
“But that is already
happening,” Sazegara said. “Keyhan daily, which is
the organ of the leader, ran a huge front page story
recently saying that the U.S. had allocated a $400
million budget to support riots in Iran. And I’ve been
receiving reports from inside Iran that the regime is
planning to stage televised confessions of people they
have tortured with hot irons in prison to get them to
say they’ve been paid by the United States.”
Sazegara told Newsmax he plans
to write an open letter to Congress that it appears to
be the “policy of President of Obama” to prevent
Voice of America from airing broadcasters who are close
to the pro-democracy protesters inside Iran.
Two months ago, Sazegara spoke
with State Department Iran desk officers and urged them
to focus more closely on Iranian human rights abuses and
to support European efforts to monitor the presidential
election to ensure that it was fair.
“They told me that was the
policy of Bush, and that they were going for engagement
first, and would only talk about human rights and
freedom later,” Sazegara said.
Sazegara, who was tortured
during long months in Iranian prisons in the late 1990s,
warned the State Department that it was making “a
bigger mistake than during the 1953 coup."
“Now the Iranian
people love you,” he said. “But if you make this
kind of mistake, that could turn to hatred.”
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