Iranian state television aired a documentary Wednesday using statements by detained Iranian American scholars to make a case that Washington was plotting to foment a velvet revolution in the country. The programme, called “In the Name of Democracy,” showed extensive video, apparently heavily edited, of academics Haleh Esfandiari and Kian Tajbakhsh. They have been held for more than two months without access to legal counsel in Tehran’s Evin prison, home to Iran’s most famous political prisoners as well as common criminals. The 50-minute documentary, apparently assembled to suggest a US-backed attempt to bring down Iran’s clerical government, is filled with fragmented and seemingly mundane descriptions of the scholars’ professional lives and is interspersed with video of the “colour” revolutions that toppled governments in the former Soviet bloc.
Esfandiari, 67, of the Washington-based Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, described her day-to-day activities as director of a programme that brings together scholars, policymakers and journalists from the Middle East and the West. “Anyone who was invited from Iran to deliver a speech at a highly reputed center like the Wilson center could attract many listeners, including policymakers,” she said.
“The main objective in communicating with these groups was to know key ones in order to invite them for lectures and place them in the vast network.” The Iranian government alleges that the Bush administration, which has spoken often in favour of “regime change” in Tehran, is trying to use Iran’s once-vibrant constellation of civil society organisations to pursue its foreign policy objectives.
But at least a few Iranian viewers were unimpressed with the documentary’s purported evidence. “I could not understand ... the relationships between Ukraine, Georgia, Serbia, the so- called velvet revolutions with the Iranian situation and these three poor detainees,” said a Tehran woman who spoke on condition that her name not be used. The second detainee, Tajbakhsh, summarised his work for philanthropist George Soros’ Open Society Institute, a New York-based think tank that promotes democracy.