Kia ora tatou,
I am grateful to PEN and the Society of Authors for inviting me to be part of protesting the suppression of freedom of speech in Iran. We are joining people around the world who are saddened and appalled by the news of repression in that country.
The most important principle of human rights is the idea of universality: that if we believe in and stick up for rights like freedom of speech for ourselves, then we should acknowledge and stick up for them for other people, whoever they are and wherever they live. This is the simple and powerful principle underlying why New Zealand writers should care about other writers, even in far away countries like Iran.
In doing this, and doing it wholeheartedly, I do not want to be a hypocrit or to be naive. Unfortunately, international discussion about human rights is full of hypocrisy and double standards.
In the case of Iran, two different things are going on. First, there is real and shocking suppression of public opposition and freedom of speech. But at the same time we are naive if we ignore the obvious fact that some criticism of Iran and media attention on its government’s actions are part of an American-funded campaign of destabilisation — a campaign that is not aimed at protecting the freedoms of Iranian people but at advancing US interests. Indeed, some of the current repression may actually be the result of Iran being, in effect, a country at war, just as New Zealand and other western countries have curtailed their own citizen’s freedoms when they are at war.
All this puts an independent person in a difficult position. We want to be able to support the people of Iran — but we need to do this without unwittingly being part of a propaganda campaign that could ultimately harm the people we want to support.
We must also not lose sight of the universal nature of human rights. While we focus Iran today, we should spare a thought for the writers and citizens in countries like Saudi Arabia and Jordan and Egypt and elsewhere with western-backed governments where writers and critics languish in prison without media attention in part because the governments are western backed.
With these thoughts in mind, I would like to spend a few minutes today talking about Iran from the perspective of how our country, and other countries, share responsibility for the events there. Like all political and human rights issues, the starting point should be looking at the context and history.
A hundred years of troubles in Iran began when oil was discovered in May 1908, the first commercial scale oil reserves found in the Middle East. They were developed by the British government-backed Anglo-Persian Oil Company, later renamed British Petroleum or BP, with the vast majority of the profits going back to Britain and not to the Iranian people and the local workers living in squalid conditions.
After 40 years of this, in the early 1950s, the elected prime minister of Iran, himself an author and a liberal, secular politician, responded to years of public unhappiness by planning to buy out the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company and nationalise the industry. Britain responded aggressively, orchestrating an economic boycott of Iran and threatening invasion. Declassified US government documents describe how in 1952-53 the CIA launched a concerted propaganda campaign against the Iranian government including paying people to protest violently in the streets. In August 1953 tanks bombarded the presidential palace in a CIA-backed coup and the hereditary Shah of Iran was installed as leader. He canceled the constitution and over time increasingly ruled as a dictator. The oil flowed again but it became illegal to criticise the government or belong to opposition groups, the secret police thrived and prisons filled with political prisoners. New Zealand had friendly relations with the Shah and avoided criticism of his human rights record.
In 1979 widespread opposition to the Shah culminated in the Iranian Revolution. For the thirty years since then a state of cold war (and sometimes open warfare) has existed between the US and Iran. The US backed Iraq’s invasion of Iran in the year following the revolution as punishment for deposing the US-friendly Shah. The ghastly Iran-Iraq War led to 100,000s of deaths, including conscripts and civilians. Saddam Hussein’s government used chemical weapons against the Iranians with no criticism from the west and in fact with western companies supplying the ingredients.
More recently, in 2002, US President Bush declared Iran part of an Axis of Evil and, as soon as the initial Iraq invasion was over, the US began talking about Iran being next. In recent years Iran has faced a continual threat of military attack and continual orchestrated propaganda, while once again the CIA has spent $100 of millions on a full-on destabilisation campaign within the country — which has presumably contributed to and been used to justify internal repression in the face of the external threats.
As in the earlier decades, New Zealand has generally sided with the Anglo-American position, diplomatically, militarily and by being quick to join in criticism of Iran but never criticising the US and British for interfering in this sovereign country and undermining its institutions and human rights. For this reason — for our government’s selective morality and for its siding with the powerful against a small country simply because of its good and bad fortune of having oil — our country shares responsibility for the political situation in Iran that has been created, in a large part, by this hundred years of foreign interference.
New Zealand prides itself for being a country that stands up for human rights and sometimes this is justifiable pride. However, as I said, the basis of human rights is that they are not applied in a selective or partisan way but universally. We can only criticise the current Iranian government’s human rights record if we are willing to judge all other countries, including our own country and our government’s allies, by the same standards.
So there are two ways that we can support our fellow writers and other citizens in Iran. The first, and the reason we are here today, is to use our freedom of speech to express our opposition to the suppression of freedoms they are suffering. The other, equally important, way is to be willing to use our freedom of speech to criticise “our side”, the western governments that have installed repressive and compliant governments throughout much of the Middle East and seek to do the same in Iran. By doing both we can hope to succeed in promoting human rights, while not getting caught up in the selective morality of big power politics.