Opinion: Iran's Green Movement Needs Cyberspace Support

(June 10) -- On Saturday, demonstrations will take place in more than two dozen cities across the world to mark the anniversary of Iran's disputed presidential election.

Tehran, however, is likely to be relatively quiet. In the year since Mahmoud Ahmadinejad won a fraud-tainted victory over Mir Hossein Moussavi, the Iranian government has managed to squelch large-scale street demonstrations through arrests, executions and the massive mobilization of security forces.

But it hasn't been able to entirely choke off cyberspace. The U.S. is partly to thank for this, but it could be doing much more to promote Internet freedom in Iran.

In the year since the disputed election, Internet and cell phone technology have become to Iran's current democracy movement what the telegraph and cassette tapes were to previous political upheavals: the Constitutional Revolution of 1905-1911 and the Islamic Revolution of 1978-1979.

Reform leaders manage to meet supporters in small groups and post anti-regime statements and music on opposition websites. Protesters have become adept at staging "flash" demonstrations, catching the authorities unprepared.

For example, a May 10 unannounced visit by Ahmadinejad to Tehran's Shahid Beheshti University sparked a protest march by hundreds of students. Kurds staged a sweeping one-day strike in Iran's Kurdistan region May 13 following the execution of five Kurdish activists.


In a roundabout fashion, videos of these protests are sent into cyberspace for posting on social network sites and transmission back into Iran via the Persian service of the BBC and the Voice of America. Iran Davar Ardalan, an Iranian-American journalist, says it takes on average three days for a story about a localized opposition event to boomerang back to Iran, be picked up by cabdrivers and spread to the rest of society.

In recent days, the 40 percent of Iranians who have access to satellite television have also been able to watch, on the Voice of America, a new HBO documentary on last year's events.

The film, "For Neda," to be shown in the United States on June 14, recounts the life and death of Neda Agha-Soltan, the young woman who has become the icon of the Green Movement in Iran. Bystanders with cell phones captured the scene as she was shot during a protest on June 20, 2009, and collapsed on the ground, with ribbons of blood streaming across her face. The video went viral and became the shot seen around the world.

Neda typifies the children of Iran's 1979 revolution, which has sown the seeds of its eventual demise by educating young people, particularly women. More than 80 percent of Iran's 70 million people are literate, 70 percent of the population is under 30 and more than 60 percent of university students are female. That makes Iran riper for democracy than most other countries in its region.

But the Green Movement lacks organization and will take time to succeed against a tough and increasingly militarized Iranian system. And while the U.S. cannot and should not try to engineer regime change in Iran as it did so fecklessly in Iraq, it can provide tools for Iranian democracy advocates to communicate with each other and the outside world more effectively.

Michael Posner, assistant secretary of state for democracy, human rights and labor, told me recently that support for human rights in Iran is "a huge priority" for the Obama administration. But he acknowledged that the administration still hasn't fully allocated the $5 million in Internet freedom grant money Congress appropriated last fiscal year.

Legislation for the current fiscal year sets aside $30 million for this purpose. If the Obama administration really cares about promoting human rights in Iran, it will expedite this spending.

That could help small startups like Censorship Research Center. Two young Californians there -- Austin Heap and Daniel Colascione -- invented a program called "Haystack" that lets Iranians evade government Internet filters. It's free to Iranians but costs their company about three cents a day per user. The U.S. has lifted export controls that blocked Haystack from being provided to the Iranian market. So far, however, Colascione says, his center hasn't received any U.S. funds, and "we're having trouble paying our server bill."

To deal with Iran, the Obama administration needs a sophisticated mix of tools: sanctions, engagement and outreach to the Iranian people to support their peaceful efforts to achieve their legitimate rights.