By Karim Sadjadpour
The Washington Post, 19 Sept 2011 – The media circus generated by Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s annual visit to the U.N. General Assembly in New York is a source of great frustration for many Iranians, who wish Western journalists would ask tougher questions about Ahmadinejad’s domestic practices. The following questions are culled from Iranian democracy and human rights activists who don’t have a chance to query the president directly:
Your boss, Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, was selected by a few dozen clerics more than 20 years ago. Do you believe that he as his office has asserted is the prophet’s representative on Earth?
Nongovernmental organizations, including Transparency International, Freedom House and the World Bank, have said that Iran’s rates of corruption, economic malaise and repression during your tenure are higher than those of Hosni Mubarak’s Egypt and Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali’s Tunisia. Are you confident you won’t share their fate?
Iran’s closest ally since the 1979 revolution, Syria, has brutally killed more than 2,600 citizens this year including children who were protesting for greater political freedoms. How do you reconcile your country’s close friendship with Bashar al-Assad’s regime, given your claim to stand for justice and the oppressed?
The anti-government protests in Iran on June 15, 2009, were significantly larger than any protests in the Middle East this year, yet you referred to the protesters as dust and dirt. Do you regret using that term?
In leaked diplomatic cables, a senior Iraqi tribal leader asserted that your government has provided him and other Iraqi official’s short-term marriages with Iranian women in order to garner influence. Does Iran use prostitution as a form of statecraft?
During your presidency Iran has had the highest per capita execution rate in the world, including recent public executions and executions of people accused of being homosexual. Are you proud of this record?
Ali Vakili Rad, who was convicted by the French in 1991 for the brutal stabbing death of 77-year-old Iranian democracy activist Shapour Bakhtiar in Paris, was given an official hero’s welcome at the Tehran airport upon his release from prison last year. Why does your government glorify assassins?
The writer is an associate at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.