James Kirchick: Off the Fence

One of the first steps in my engagement with world affairs was a decision to join Amnesty International on the occasion of my Bar Mitzvah. Obliged by my synagogue to tithe a percentage of the gift money I received from friends and relatives, I chose one of the world’s oldest human rights organizations as the recipient of my rather modest, post-entrance-into-manhood cash take. More than that, by becoming a member of the organization I received regular updates from its “Urgent Action Network” alerting me to prisoners of conscience in benighted corners of the world, with instructions as to how I could ease their plight. Sometimes, the task was nothing more than sending a postcard expressing solidarity (this assumed, of course, that said prisoner could actually receive mail). Other times, it involved writing a letter (copying and signing a form letter, to be precise) to some junta functionary or oil despot, “demanding” that so-and-so be set free, or, barring that, treated more humanely. For several years I was a loyal little letter-writer, mailing off a monthly barrage of indignant pleas around the world.

At some point, however, I gave up on the task, and on Amnesty itself. Perhaps it was the poor record I had accumulated as an epistolary teenage freedom fighter, which was almost as bad as my Little League batting average. Or maybe it was the oncoming dread of the college application process and all the busywork it would entail. More significantly, however, my views toward despotism and the ways to deal with it had hardened, and fundamentally changed. For all the self-satisfying talk about the effectiveness of its letter-writing network (buttressed by testimonials from the handful of prisoners Amnesty claims its members have helped free), I knew that my efforts, rote as they were, were doing next to nothing to help these poor people, much less alleviate what I had begun to see as the real problem, that is, totalitarianism itself. My letters, and the letters of countless others, were not changing the immoral political systems and cultures that had led to people being imprisoned for their political views in the first place. This frustration with the whole Amnesty approach to the world played a deep role in the formation of my worldview.

So when an e-mail arrived in my inbox last week informing me of yet another Iranian political prisoner about to face trial, I overlooked it. The friend who sent it to me, a tireless man with long experience in the field of human rights work whose idealism has not made him any less hard-headed about the world, wrote simply that “any publicity would help.” I did a little reading on the prisoner in question, and found myself somewhat ashamed at my helplessness. Her name is Shiva Nazar Ahari, and the first thing I noticed about her was that she is younger than me, born in 1984. Having lived and worked in the United States and now Central Europe, my understanding of human rights activists who put their lives on the line for the freedom of others is limited to the civil rights activists of the 1950s and 1960s and Soviet-era dissidents, all now long in the tooth. Rarely does one come across a twenty-something who has voluntarily put her life on the line (I am deliberately excluding here the men and women of the US military, who do risk their lives for such a cause, but in a way that’s very different, though no less laudable, from the work performed by Shiva Nazar Ahari).

So I felt an instant connection with Shiva in a way that I would not be touched by the fate of even someone just a decade older. We’re contemporaries, Shiva and me, even though I’ll never be nearly as brave as she is. Shiva has been arrested multiple times for a variety of false or trumped-up charges, the first instance being her attendance at a candlelight vigil in Tehran to mourn the victims of 9/11. She was arrested in the aftermath of last year’s botched presidential election and held in confinement for 33 days. Released on $200,000 bail, she was arrested last December on her way to the funeral of the Grand Ayatollah Hossein Ali Montazeri, and is now being tried for producing “anti-regime propaganda” and conspiring with the Mojahedin-e Khalq, an anti-regime terrorist organization. The sentence for such crimes is death, and I’m told there is a real possibility that this woman, a year younger than me, may be put to death for the sort of activity — writing articles, attending rallies — that I take for granted. Her trial is expected to be held next week.

It depresses me to say that I don’t expect any amount of letters from around the world will save her, though of course, increased international attention to her case cannot hurt. I also don’t expect that formal protests from the nongovernmental sector, Western capitals, or even words from the mouth of the president of the United States will convince the Iranian regime that the benefits of releasing her outweigh its costs. As my fellow World Affairs blogger Roya Hakakian notes just a click away, the problem here is the regime, which has used terrorism and jailings such as these since its very inception to advance its goals and punish its enemies. These crimes against humanity will only stop when the regime itself is ended.

So, my friend, here’s the publicity. I only wish it would help.