Keeping an Eye on Iran
A New Haven non-profit documents violations abroad.
Just over six thousand miles separate New Haven from
Tehran, the capital of the Islamic Republic of Iran.
Late last year, a new organization—the Iran Human
Rights Documentation Center (IHRDC)—was founded
with the intention of bridging that gap. The Center
may seem like just another entrant into New Haven's
bustling non-profit scene, but it is distinguished by its singular mission: to monitor
human rights abuses in Iran from an office overlooking the New Haven
Green.
It is odd enough that the organization, which has no formal Yale affiliation,
is located in New Haven. That it chose to make its home at 129 Chapel Street only
adds to the Center's enigma. For years, the Chapel Street building’s offering of single-
room offices with rent payable by the month has attracted an unlikely crew of
tenants: solo attorneys, independent financial advisers, the odd parish office. The
Center has the distinction of being the only international human rights organization
in residence. It has clearly not come for the low-budget accommodation: Last year, the IHRDC received one million
dollars in funding from the
U.S. State Department, nearly a
third of the $3.5 million earmarked
for democracy promotion in Iran.
The Center, which is forthright
in its aims (witness the frankness of
its name), reveals on its website
that it is interested in documenting
human rights abuses in Iran solely
since the Islamic revolution of
1979 ushered the current, staunchly
anti-American regime into
power. It’s no surprise, then, that
some Yale students and faculty
members reacted with suspicion to
news of the Center’s opening in
December 2004. They worried that
the Center would merely concern
itself with building a case for U.S.
military intervention in Iran.
Opposition to the government
in Tehran, after all, is a growth
industry. In February, Condoleeza
Rice announced the Bush
Administration’s intention to
expand funding for Iranian democratization
from its paltry $3.5 million
allotment in 2005 to $75 million
this year. With so much money
in the budget, strange things might
happen: A new cadre of Iranian
freedom fighters might emerge
overnight; Dick Cheney might
begin professing grave concern for
Middle Easterners’ rights and safety;
and an Iranian version of
Ahmad Chalabi—the exiled Iraqi
expatriate who famously fed politicians
and journalists information
to support the invasion of his
homeland—might set up shop right
across the Green, here in the heart
of sunny New Haven.
As it happens, few if any of
those events have come to pass.
The IHRDC's founders claim that
their timing, like the Center’s location,
was a fortunate coincidence:
The three Iranian-American
founders—Drs. Ramin Ahmandi,
Payam Akhavan, and Roya
Boroumand—met in New Haven in
2003 and hatched the idea for the
Center soon after. Their one million
dollar grant came in 2004 from
the State Department’s Human
Rights and Democracy Fund,
which distributed over $48 million
last year and cites the entire
“Muslim world” as a regional priority.
According to co-founder
Akhavan, the support they have
received only demonstrates that
not everyone in the U.S. government
is in favor of overt regime
change in Iran. It was the more
“progressive elements” of a diverse
State Department, he posits, that
opted to back the Center’s peaceable
project.
Like the IHRDC’s other supporters,
Akhavan is adamant that
those who scrutinize the present
Iranian government’s human rights
record are not all seeking to justify
an invasive foreign policy, and that
some may wish to document its
abuses for entirely different reasons,
which they claim, are
divorced from politics. “When
there are strong interests at play,
human rights often become instrumentalized
for questionable ends,”
Akhavan acknowledged. The problem
is not “that no one is speaking
about human rights in Iran. The
question is: ‘Is there really a genuine
commitment?’ And: ‘Is there
really an appreciation that a culture
of human rights is not just about
regime change?’”
To overcome the murmurs of
skeptical Yale liberals, the Center
will need to show that any similarity
between its agenda and that of
the Bush administration is purely
coincidental. Once it does that, the
real work can begin.
* * *
Two types of organizations
are already at work documenting
human rights
abuses in the Islamic Republic.
First, there are the behemoth, wellestablished
monitors like Amnesty
International and Human Rights
Watch that research and publicize
human rights abuses in countries
around the world, including Iran.
At the other end of the spectrum,
there are the hundreds of websites,
blogs, and smaller organizations
devoted to denouncing the Iranian
government, including one started
by IHRDC co-founder Roya
Boroumand in 2001. For the first
sort, objectivity is the key to establishing
credibility. Organizations of
the latter type, however, make no
claims of neutrality. The IHRDC
appears destined to keep a foot in
each camp. Though its board is
staffed with well-known human
rights experts, it also plans to rely
on testimony from the four-million-
strong Iranian-American diaspora
to gather and disseminate
information-including accounts
from exiles who make no bones
about their opposition to the
Iranian government.
Yet what really makes the New
Haven Center unique, according to
Executive Director Mora Johnson,
is its narrow focus and legal and
historical expertise. The Center
employs two Iranian historians, as
well as a handful of lawyers who
specialize in human rights. Their goal is to collect documents and
testimony from existing sources
and then to compile reports with a
level of detail that broader organizations
do not have time to include
in theirs. The detailed reports—
and the material on which they are
based—will be published in both
English and Farsi and eventually
made available on a searchable
archives to aid policymakers, journalists,
scholars, and students, both
in Iran and abroad.
The Center’s goal is abstract,
and its success so far is difficult to
gauge. The first reports, due to be
published between May and July,
range in topic from the treatment
of Iran’s Baha’i population in the
1980s to the recent death of
Iranian-Canadian journalist Zahra
Kazemi while in police custody in
Tehran. These are not novel subjects.
But to the Chair of the
Center’s Board of Directors, Yale
Law Professor Owen Fiss, that is
exactly the point: The reports will
take a fresh look at old debates on
topics such as the state repression
of Iran's Baha'i population. Long
available but never closely examined,
the information in a forthcoming
report on the Baha'i should
give form and substance to longheld
suspicions. From these documents,
Fiss explained, “We could
see this wasn’t just vengeance but a
systematic policy to exterminate or
repress the Baha’i... All the world
has known it is uncomfortable for
Baha’i in Iran, but this evidence is
really chilling.”
Fiss added that the difference
between those two levels of understanding
is more than semantic.
Many of the worst state-sponsored
crimes of the last century only
came to light after the fall of the
governments that perpetrated
them. By that time, observers and
politicians around the world could
safely throw up their hands and
claim to have never suspected how
egregious the offenders really
were-and thus did not recognize
how strongly they ought to have
been condemned. Now, in Iran’s
case, Professor Fiss hopes, “That
excuse will no longer be available.”
* * *
On the surface, Iran seems
the last country in need of
this added degree of
scrutiny. The government in
Tehran has one of the most harshly
criticized human rights records
in the world. The country was put
under one of the most far-reaching
sanctions in U.S. history in 1996,
and President Bush has singled it
out for censure in every State of
the Union address since 2002. In
December, the United Nations
General Assembly passed a resolution
condemning Iran’s continued
human rights violations, from the
nation’s use of torture to public
executions and lack of due legal
process.
Yet the IHRDC is not the lone
voice calling for a more thorough
inspection of the country. History
Professor and Iran specialist Abbas
Amanat—who is not affiliated with
the Center—agrees: “Although it
has been done somewhat unprofessionally
by others,” he said recently,
“it has never been done by people
who really know what they’re
doing, and with
proper funding.”
* * *
Professor Abbas
and others
agree that one
of the Center’s
greatest challenges
lies in the
fact that though
Iran does attract
a lot of attention (and censure) in
the foreign policy arena, only a
small portion is focused on the
regime’s human rights abuses.
Concerns about nuclear proliferation,
the stability of Iran’s huge oil
supply, and the country’s alleged
support for terrorist groups all
tend to dominate discussions of
U.S. policy towards the country.
The IHRDC’s attempt to insert
human rights into the debate places
the organization alongside Human
Rights Watch and Amnesty
International in the uphill battle
those established organizations
have waged for decades.
The other overwhelming challenge
for the Center will be to
avoid supporting a particular political
agenda. To maintain neutrality,
Johnson and Fiss both understand
they will need to diversify their
funding base. Presently the majority
of financial backing continues to
come from the U.S. government—
which is no coincidence. European
governments, to which the Center
is also appealing for support, have
never been as strident in their
opposition to Iran. Nor would the
U.S. government likely have been
so generous had the Center been
investigating human rights abuses
in a percieved backwater, like
Cameroon, or ally, like Saudi
Arabia. “If you demonstrate the
human rights abuses of the present
regime [in Iran] and those of the
past, that might have the byproduct
of supporting certain positions the
government takes,” Professor Fiss
acknowledged. “But you can't
help that.”
Still, the IHRDC’s founders
would be hard-pressed to argue
that, at its core, the organization
does not possess a certain animus
for the government in Tehran. Julia
Huang, a Yale sophomore who has
lived in Iran and still visits regularly,
realized this at the Center’s
opening last December. At the
time, she was interested in working
there as a translator or researcher,
but decided against doing so when
she sensed the group’s opinion on
the current government in Iran. “I
just didn't want to associate myself
with a group that was actively trying
to find negative aspects of what
the Iranian government was
doing,” she stated. “It’s hard
enough for me to get visas
into Iran.”
Board members may claim that
this antagonism is the natural
byproduct of general support for
human rights and international law,
but the frequent comparisons they
draw between the Tehran government
and murderous regimes in
South Africa, the Soviet Union,
and even Rwanda do little to support
their claims of political neutrality.
Though they may not advocate
forcible regime change, they
are not averse to strongly condemning
Iran’s government—as
long as it is for the
right reasons.
“The government has a terrible
human rights record,” Johnson
explained.
The concurrence
of this
view with the
political agenda
of the U.S.
government
may not go so
far as to discredit
the organization among
scholars—but it will certainly
restrict the Center’s reach and
appeal to those inside of Iran. The
IHRDC’s staff and board members,
the majority of whom are
Iranian-American, acknowledge
this limitation. Though Johnson
admits their present emphasis is, by
necessity, on witnesses and source
material available outside the country—
information as readily accessible
in New Haven as anywhere
else—they are working with some
activists inside Iran. In this way,
Fiss envisions the office on the
Green as a “bridge of information”
carrying information into and out
of Iran.
Akhavan recalls how his impulse to
establish the Center near Yale was partially
inspired by the University’s prolific
tradition of genocide documentation. The Cambodian Genocide
Documentation project is run through
the Yale Center for International and
Area Studies, and the University’s
library is home to the Fortunoff
Video Archive for Holocaust
Testimonies. Like the IHRDC,
these projects often collect documents
to help create an accurate
historical narrative. “You can't use
them if they don't exist,” explained
English Professor Geoffrey
Hartman, advisor to the Holocaust
Testimonies project.
Professor Fiss offered similar
reasoning. “It’s tricky what you can
do in international human rights
from a law school,” he said. In the
absence of hands-on clinics or
courts, documentation and legal
analysis is the service that scholars
and lawyers can best
provide.
As a former advisor to the special
court in Sierra Leone Johnson
has confidence in the project’s utility.
“The tyrants of today are in the
prisoner’s dock down the road,”
she said, predicting possible future
uses of the Center’s research.
When power finally does change
hands in Iran, a new government
might call for an investigation of
past abuses. And while lawyers like
Fiss tend to doubt that an Iranian
court or international commission
there would accept an outside organization’s
work, it might be useful
to those gathering official evidence.
“You never know where the work
you do today is going to end up,”
Johnson mused.
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