The experience of Hossein Alizadeh, a former Iranian diplomat based in Finland, raised questions over whether a regime that cheats its own people can be trusted to keep an international agreement, Sohrab Ahmari wrote in his profile (Google link) of the former diplomat Friday in The Wall Street Journal.
Remembering the rigged elections that returned Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to power in 2009, Alizadeh explained that “Iran doesn’t have free and fair elections.” He described how he witnessed the fixing of the results and the negation of the democratic process in real time, and how that experience led to his disillusionment with the regime and eventual defection to the West.
State-run TV showed throngs of people voting, and the Islamic Republic had invited foreign journalists to report on an election that was supposed to reaffirm the regime’s legitimacy. Then, at noon Helsinki time, a classified telex arrived from Tehran. “To all diplomatic representatives of the Islamic Republic of Iran,” it read. “Refrain from giving any interviews to the press.”
“That was the first hammer blow that came down on my head,” Mr. Alizadeh says. He hid the telex, which he keeps to this day. A little later, another telex: “Under no circumstances should you disclose voter-participation numbers at your polling station.”
The theft had begun. “I was furious,” Mr. Alizadeh says. “Because in the minds of those people I was the agent of the fraud.” The regime soon announced that Mr. Ahmadinejad was leading all other candidates by far. It was a little after midnight, when it should have been impossible to know the results in a country that still counts votes by hand. “The world came crashing down on my head,” Mr. Alizadeh says.
The aborted Green Movement wasn’t simply an expression of disapproval of Ahmadinejad, but also of his sponsor, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. As Alizadeh put it, “The people knew that by setting aside Ahmadinejad they were rejecting Khamenei.”
What hit Alizadeh particularly hard was when Iranian citizens voting at the Finnish embassy, where he worked, told him, “Mr. Alizadeh, our trust is in your hands,” leading him to feel that he had betrayed their trust. Alizadeh also pointed out that Iran’s current president, Hassan Rouhani, who was elected two years ago as a “moderate,” endorsed the crackdown on the Green Movement. Movement leaders Mir Hossein Mousavi and Mehdi Karroubi remain under house arrest more than six years later.
Over the course of his diplomatic career, Alizadeh was taught by an up and coming foreign ministry official named Mohammad Javad Zarif, who is now Iran’s foreign minister and lead nuclear negotiator. Earlier this year, Zarif claimed in an interview that “We do not jail people for their opinions.”
[Photo: GREENUNITY4IRAN / YouTube ]