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Sanam Hi, welcome to If You Were In Charge, with me, Sanam Naraghi Anderlini. This is a special edition of the podcast, foreshadowing what is coming forward in our next season, which is going to be a new format called If We Were In Charge, with my dear friend, Kavita Ramdas, who has also joined me today. But today's episode is particularly special because we are turning the mic, so to speak, and Kavita is hosting for a conversation about Iran, and I will be trying to give her the answers that I can. (.)
Kavita Ramdas Thank you so much for inviting me to join you, Sanam, and I'm excited that we're going to have a chance to work together more in the future. It seemed to me really important to be able to hear from you directly. I'd love to begin with your telling us a little bit about yourself. I think many of our listeners may not know that your family and your history in Iran is a long and deep one, and that your personal ties as well as your own sense of your activism as a peace wager and a women's rights activist lies also inside Iran in many ways. Could you begin by telling us a little bit about why the current issues where over 2,000 people by the regime's own admission have now been killed, there have been thousands of people on the streets, it is a moment of deep unrest and violence, which is often hard for us to understand. So tell us a little bit about yourself and why I felt it was important to hear your voice on this at this moment. (.)
Sanam Thank you, Kavita. (.) So just before I get into myself, because I think it's important that we have the focus on what's going on in Iran. The reports right now are that the ones that I trust and the Federation, International Federation for Human Rights, has just issued a statement saying that it's estimated that between 2,000 and possibly 6,000 people have been killed and something between 10,000 and 15,000 have been arrested. And I read another report that came from, again, another trusted human rights organization. It was an eyewitness from a doctor in Iran talking about what they'd seen from the hospital standpoint. So he was referencing Isfahan in Tehran and saying that the levels of vandalism that they'd seen to public infrastructure, you know, street lights and so forth, it was very similar in the two cities. And the slogans were very similar. So there is something around, is there a planned kind of vandalism and agitators that have joined the legitimate protesters? So that's something that is important to just bear in mind. The other thing that, from the violation standpoint, was that in this report, he said that, you know, before Thursday last week, they were using pellet guns, which is what they used during the Women in Life Freedom Movement. And, you know, they shoot people's eyes and so forth. It's horrific. But Thursday night, when the internet went down, according, again, to this one report that I was reading, which comes from a trusted source, live ammunition was used. And they are seeing different types of injuries. And also that there was more of a securitization of the victims and the injured that came into hospitals. And so there was a significant shift in the form of violence and the levels of injuries and so forth. Again, it's very hard to know because the communication is shut down and it's been limited in terms of what we're hearing. Now the phone lines are beginning to open, I think. And I recently heard one relative and they're going to work in the morning. So it's neither the craziness that we're, you know, hearing in some of the Western media nor necessarily calm. It's a very strange in-between space. And I think those of us in the diaspora, and this is coming back to myself and your question, I left when I was 11 years old. It was meant to be a 10-day trip and it turned out to be 45 years. We saw the revolution. It was like a storm. It's like a tsunami that was building up. My parents stayed. My father was, had been in the, was a director in the oil company. And he was subsequently banned from travel for seven years. I didn't see him for seven years. One uncle who was minister of environment, he was jailed for a number of years. Two other uncles who were in prison for a number of years. And then systematic expropriation of property and so forth. So this is, this is not a regime that I have any empathy or sympathy for. You know, and I think about the trauma that each of us feels. As Iranians, we're not very good at talking about the emotions of all this. You know, it's as if, it's as if your life suddenly stopped in 1978, 79 and you froze and another life opened. And when these protests happen, whether it's this year or Women in Life Freedom or 2009, all of us, it's as if all of a sudden your button's been pressed and you're suddenly somehow back in that moment of 1978, 79.
Kavita Ramdas It's a constant re-triggering almost.
Sanam It's, yeah. And then the history goes back. I mean, it's not just that it's this. It's 79 happened in part because in 1953, Mossadegh, who was my mother's cousin. So again, there's a family kind of issue a lot along these, you know, when you talk about the history and how people are rooted. But Mossadegh, who was the prime minister who tried to bring back the 1906 constitutional constitution that we have, nationalized oil and was ousted by a mix of British and CIA coups, basically. So 1953 to 1979 is only 26 years. And then they put in place a sort of fake monarchy, don't they? The Pallavi regime, you know, Reza Shah was put in place by the British. The Shah's father was put in place by the British. And then when he, when World War II, you know, rumblings and there was, there's, there was a sense that he might be slightly sympathetic to the German agenda. He was sidelined. And then the young Shah was put in place. And to begin with, before 1953, you know, things were open. I remember my father was a young man and he would say, you know, it was sort of under the British protectorate, if you want, after the war. And things, it was, life was, you know, relatively open. Post-1953, when the Shah left and then it was returned by the Americans, then it became systematically more repressive. You know, one-party system. And then I remember as a child, they changed the year. And so we went from an Islam, from a traditional Islamic calendar to all of a sudden, you know, from 13 and whatever, you know, 50, 55 to 23, 35. It was, it really felt weird at the time. And now we look back to that era with this sort of Gauzy nostalgia. And for, you know, I'm the first one to say for people like me and my family, I had the most extraordinary childhood. (.) But things were not necessarily okay for the majority of the population. There were other things going on politically and economically and so forth. You know, the revolution was not imposed on Iran. (.) I remember, you know, as a child, we went to watch the protests and there were 48 different political factions on the streets.
Kavita Ramdas Yes, from communists to Islamists.
Sanam To nationalists, to Islamists. Now, again, when I look at what's going on now, two things come to mind. One is that when the Shah left, everybody was united against the Shah. Now, lesson number one, there was no vision of the day after. Everybody's united against what they were for, what they were against. But what are we for? (..) Again, fast forward 45 years. What is it that we are for? And it becomes almost like a food fight of, you know, different factions and voices.
Kavita Ramdas Sanam, you've mentioned a couple of your family connections to this really long and extraordinary history in Iran. But you're also someone who's worked with peace wagers in different parts of the world for many years now in your role as the founder of ICANN. And I'd love you to talk a little bit about this current moment, both from the perspective of the personal history that you bring, but also for many of our listeners in the West to understand a little bit of how this current moment has been triggered by a set of more recent events, including what is often referred to in shorthand as the nuclear deal between the West and Iran. You have also mentioned when people are on the streets, it's because they're hurting in certain ways. And can you tell us a little bit more about what has been made? What has put people in a position where they're hurting so much that they would take a risk in going up against a regime that is not known for its, as you said earlier, not known for its kindness or its mercy necessarily to people who oppose it?
Sanam So I think the first thing I would say is that the Islamists, these guys, won back in 79 because they were organized and ruthless. (.) They had committees, they had the mosques, they were able to channel information, but they were also extremely ruthless. (.) And their attitude systematically over the years seems to be that if you're not with me, then you're against me. And the resistance that you're seeing right now from the public is not new. It has been going on for 47 years. And actually, women have been leading this resistance in all sorts of ways because the first people they targeted were women. They first co-opted women to come out in support of them, saying, when we have an Islamic society, it's going to be moral and just and you're going to have your place in it. And then the first thing they did was they suspended personal status laws and degraded women into second-class citizens and then imposed the hijab. And women have been fighting it. And frankly, they have been winning using feminist tactics. And we can come to that. I think that's a really important thing. So they're ruthless. They're exclusionary. And we have a history of public protests. Again, it goes back 100 years. It goes back to the 1906 constitutional revolution. So the language that the public knows how to use is to come out into the streets and to risk, right? And often to put their lives at risk. They put their lives at risk. And what we've seen is that, you know, I remember in 19, so you have the revolution, then you have the war and they... Remind us again, what years are the Iran-Iraq war? It was 1980 to 88.
Kavita Ramdas And it was devastating on both sides, but especially for Iran. Millions of people died, my recollection.
Sanam Yeah, they say about a million people died. Chemical weapons were used against Iranians. The entire world, world powers, were against Iran. There's a book called The Man Without a Gun, and it's a UN envoy. And he was sent out to do some negotiations in the 1980s. And he was the one who actually informed me about the struggle that the Iranian government was having to get the Security Council back then to acknowledge that the war was initiated by Iraq. So imagine, you know, Saddam is vilified, you know, later on in our history. But at the time, they sided with Saddam. Europeans and the US. The only countries that did not, ironically, were Israel and Syria. So it's very complicated what happens, right? Fascinating history. Yeah. So the opposition has been regular. In 1999, it was students. They came out and there was a crackdown. But after every crackdown, the regime, it has a degree of elasticity. It's not a monolith. It is really a coalition of people who were, in a way, slightly socially lefty, but conservative and Islamist, and then the hardcore Islamist types. And you see this dialogue or this argument within them regularly. You know, if you listen to people like Zarif, or even Pazeshkian, who's now the president, (.) you know, setting aside the regime that they represent, which is a problem for many people. But if you just listen to what they have to say, they're not being unreasonable. But it's as if they're having an argument with their own government. And it's because the system of governments, like the Revolutionary Guard that we were talking about earlier, they are under the control of Khamenei, the supreme leader. He's like the religious node. So it's different nodes of power. And the kind of, there's a, it gives them a level of resilience. And then, like an organism, the minute they feel threatened, they unite. I don't say this, I don't say this because I support them. That's not the issue for me. The issue is that from a peacebuilder standpoint and a mediation standpoint, you need to know your actors. You need to know the, understand the dynamics of what the entities are.
Kavita Ramdas And I think you, I think what you're reminding us of here is that you cannot reduce any regime to a monolith. You cannot pretend, Iran has a long and sophisticated civilization. And regardless of what religion has dominated in Iran over the years, that civilizational basis is the same. And I think that it is true to, for a good understanding and why maybe this regime has survived is that it hasn't been inflexible. It has been a regime which has created spaces of some kind, as you said, in response to the people, often just enough to let a little bit of steam off. But if we look at what's happening now, Sanam, tell me what you see is different. Because you're, you're very accurately describing that there is a long and a storied history of resistance, often led by women, which is also often not understood sufficiently, and not women necessarily only protesting for their own rights, but often for the rights of others. But what's different with this moment? You were, you and I were talking before the show started about recent reports you've been getting, trusted reports on the ground. Tell us a little bit about what you've been hearing, because, of course, it's been so hard with the internet down. I'd love to hear a little bit of, you know, where we're at at this moment and what you see as connected and what you see as different in this moment.
Sanam The protests are a result of a sort of an economic crisis. It is, there has been a policy of maximum pressure, which has tanked the currency. It is now affecting those who import and export. An external policy. Yeah, of course, from the international community and, you know, the U.S. and others. I mean, Iran is the most sanctioned country in history. And the principle is that, oh, you know, if you sanction enough, then the government will respond because they care about the well-being of their people. Well, not really necessarily. Actually, what we've seen in Iran is that by sanctioning the ordinary people, you end up empowering (..) those that are closest to the regime and the kind of the more, let's say, obscure elements of the market. Because the more a country is involved and part of the global system, the more there has to be financial transparency. And we've shut all that down. So it's been, you know, sanctions have been heavy. And it's been, you know, the currency has really been struggling. And, of course, they bombed heavily in June. This time around, it was the merchants and the bazaar, you know, the bazaaris, as we call them, that came out.
Kavita Ramdas So the shopkeepers, the merchants, the tradespeople. So, you know, a core piece of Iran's maybe informal economy, really, because we haven't been able to survive. And formal and informal.
Sanam And a core pillar of those who have historically supported the regime and the revolution, they come out in protest. Typically, there's a degree of repression from the state. (.) Now, what we see very quickly is that from the diaspora, people start saying, yes, go out into the streets. You know, this is, this is, we're with you, including the Shah's son, who's in Virginia. Really trying to say, go out there, you know, go on Thursday night, go do this, go do, like directives from outside. This is then matched, unfortunately, with statements on Twitter from Israeli officials and Pompeo from the states saying, we're with you, Mossad is walking the streets with you. //S01: Really?//
Kavita Ramdas Statements saying Mossad is walking the streets with you?
Sanam Yeah, yeah, is there with you. Yeah, absolutely. //S00: Fascinating.// So, you know, again, not to, not to side with, it's, it's really kind of saying, okay, let's look at the story.
Kavita Ramdas I mean, what you're, what you're telling us is that we have to be willing to understand that there are far more layers to this onion than appears apparent on the face of it.
Sanam You have a government that was bombed nine months ago. You, and then you go back a few years, you go back to the signing of the nuclear deal, which was their way of coming forward and trying to, you know, have some. Make amends. Amends with the West. That was torn up by Trump in, in 2016. (.) Since then, they've had the economic pressures. There's been incredible propaganda, very sophisticated propaganda being broadcast into Iran, funded by Saudis and Israel, which has been a messaging of nostalgia about the Shah's time as well. So, so you've got 10 years of these stories of the past and so forth. So, and then, and then you have this diaspora group, the Shah and other. Make Iran great again. Make Iran great again. Exactly. The culmination is, is kind of this, this moment that people are protesting. They are, they cannot stand what the regime is doing. They can't stand the mismanagement, the corruption, the pressures. They're out on the streets. Then you have these outside voices saying, we're with you, we're with you and go do this and go do that. The regime, it's paranoia. I mean, it's been paranoid about, about how much infiltration there is. Of course. They are ruthless as well. Again, you've got to know your, your entity that you're dealing with. They shut down the internet. And from, again, from what we're hearing from the human rights reports and others, they unleash the revolutionary guard onto the, onto the public. Street protesters. Onto the street protesters. The International Federation of Human Rights is saying between two and 6,000 people possibly killed 10,000 to 15,000 arrested. Others are giving higher numbers, but the, you know, I, I, I think it's important from the outside to, to be, to also be cautious about whether we're inflaming or escalating or what, what is it that we're doing? And it's, as a person in the diaspora, it's really hard because to me, my, I, I really believe the core principle, the first principle has to be do no harm. I'm sitting in London. I'm not there. What, either I should say nothing or I should, I believe we should be echoing what the people are saying and what the people want. And what we saw six months ago was that the people do not want to be bombed. And when the bombs came. Right. They were united against the outside force. So I think, I think these are important markers to think about. And frankly, I find the hypocrisy of some of the Western voices extraordinary. There was silence when residential areas were being hit and civilians were being killed six months ago by those bombs. The European Union, the British government, whatever, nobody was saying anything about it. And now all of a sudden they care about human life. So there are no good guys. Yeah. What we need to figure out is the people of Iran have been pushing and pulling and challenging the regime and changing, changing their own society, changing their own political space. They've been doing it. They've been paying a high price. How do we enable that? And I don't think that military intervention is the answer, frankly. I think that's going to take us to a whole other place, which from my work, I can tell from other countries.
Kavita Ramdas I think you've brought us to a place where I'm going to ask the obvious question, which is what then should we do? And from your perspective, as somebody who's been waging peace for decades, what's a radical idea that shouldn't be so radical in terms of what we could do now? What should we do now? It seems extraordinarily important to put the people, we the people, the Iranian people in a place where their voices can be heard. And yet you've just described how many conflicting positions there are, even perhaps within Iran and definitely in the diaspora outside. Maybe one of your radical ideas is that there shouldn't be external military intervention and that Iranians should be allowed at least the space to figure this out by themselves. But I'd love to hear what you would like to see.
Sanam It would make me sad to think that being against external military intervention is a radical idea these days. But for sure, I would like to stand by that one. And unfortunately, it is becoming increasingly radical to take that position. It's becoming radical. (.) And it's, you know, the reason why I'm against it is that we've seen it in Libya, we've seen it in Syria, we've seen it in Iraq. You come in with military intervention and you create the opening for others to come in. So already people are saying, oh, the Iranian government has brought in Iraqi militias. They may well have done, right? But it's not just Iraqi militias. There's also ISIS. There's also criminal organizations. We saw this in Syria. We've seen it in Libya. Libya now has two governments. You know, under the responsibility to protect agenda, NATO bombed, got rid of Gaddafi, and the country is a mess. So from a professional standpoint, I'm trying to set aside my emotions and look at it dispassionately. And I'm like, you know, nowhere else has this worked. So we in our country have to be careful about it. Radical idea, which I will be shot for, metaphorically, is I would love to see people commit to the simple notion of we will talk, we will not shoot. We will talk, we will not shoot. Why do I say that? Because this regime, when they came into power, their attitude was that people like us were no longer part of the country. We had to leave. (.) I remember one of their biggest thinkers came to Washington. He became a dissident, of course, afterwards. And he was talking about the Islamic ummah and how, you know, when you have an Islamic society, everybody is equal as Muslims. And I put my hand up and I said, as women, we're not equal. And his response to me, and this is circa 2015 or something, in D.C. was, if you don't like it, you can leave. My mother is happy in Iran. So this attitude that if you're not with us, you have to leave.
Kavita Ramdas Which is what we're hearing again, echoes of right now at this moment in the United States. If you don't agree with what we're doing, then leave. Go back to the country you're from.
Sanam Exactly. And the issue is that whether we like it or not, we are a diverse society, ethnically, religiously, et cetera. Politically, politically, we are diverse. And if you want a democracy, you have to be able to sit and accept, not just tolerate, but accept that there's going to be differences of opinion, that there's going to be a rule of law under which we all, you know, live equally, rules of the game and so forth. So, you know, a lot of people are focused on what is dividing everyone, you know. There's a pro-monarchy, and then there's the MEK, and then there's the lefties, and then, you know, oh, they'll accuse me of being pro-regime.
Kavita Ramdas So how would they begin the talking, Sanam? These different factions, these different, so if the radical idea was don't shoot, talk, do you see some slivers of hope of people who might be able to either hold that space or encourage people to come together? And of course, all of this is predicated on not having external intervention, because as you said, the second that happens, then you lose that space for it to be a space. Or could external intervention help the talking?
Sanam So, point number one, I would say at this point, if you're in the diaspora, don't go out there with slogans of death to this and death to that. I remember as a child going to these demonstrations and to watch one of the most major ones, and all these factions, and one group started saying death to the Shah, and everybody said, no, no death. And yet, 47 years, the world has heard Iranians say death to America, death to this, death. And it's now being mirrored by the diaspora, by those who were hurt by this regime, that are now shouting the same thing back. Enough of the death, too. //S01: Yes.// I don't care whether, in Farsi, margbar means down with. I'm like, can we talk about women, life, freedom? What was beautiful about women, life, freedom was life. It was for something. It was for something. And it was women, life, freedom, zandigi, azadi, marg, mihan, abadi, men, nation, development. It was for stuff. If you listen to the songs that came out, it was for things. So there's a feminist element to when women are at the lead of it. It was nonviolent. They maintained it as nonviolence. It was a different language. And the regime cracked down. But they really backed down. I mean, women are walking around without the hijab right now. And symbolically, that's very important in terms of a regime that identified its Islamic-ness by how it controls its women. So I would like the death two-cent statements just to stop because it's painful and it's scary. And then the second part, you know, the question of who can start a dialogue. Well, everybody has responsibility. The regime and those factions within the regime have responsibility. They don't need to send out thugs and goons to shoot people. You know, you don't need to do that. You can call for a dialogue. You can have a dialogue in your own, in your space. You can start dialogues at local levels and so forth. There's been a lot of decentralization going on. And these are things that people don't talk about. But people have been electing local councils. And use the infrastructure of governance to provide spaces for dialogues and for peace committees.
Kavita Ramdas So what you're saying is, despite the tightness of the regime at one level, at sort of the national level, they've actually created some democratic space for citizen participation at very local levels, which is also something, as you said, people don't know.
Sanam Yeah, local. And, you know, in parliament, you know, they have their variations. It's been a push-pull, you know, that exists there. But the level of and quality of discourse is actually quite sophisticated. The question is, one of the issues, is that are they willing to engage the public? You know, in 2009, when Ahmadinejad did the electoral coup and took over, he called the public dust, dirt and dust. (.) You don't call your own public dirt and dust. //S01: It's your own children.//
Kavita Ramdas No, no.
Sanam So they have a huge responsibility in how they engage the public right now and how they're going to apologize and how they're going to step back from the shooting and targeting ordinary people. And do you have any hope for that, Sanam?
Kavita Ramdas Do you see any signs in which you think from either past history or from that, that would make you think that anyone in the regime might be giving this counsel? There might be voices that are saying, look, you know, we can't just shoot down 4,000 people in our streets. This is going to backfire on us.
Sanam As I said, it's a radical idea that shouldn't be radical. So there's a reason why it's. But what I would also like to see from the diaspora side, right, is that this maximalist rhetoric is also toned down. And I think the distinction, the distinction that you can be anti a regime, but actually what unites us all is that we are pro our country and pro our people. And I would even hazard the guess, or certainly from their rhetoric, this is a generation of leaders or people who are in power who fought eight years of the Iran-Iraq war to defend their country, right? So I actually think that if the framing were to be, we all love Iran and we all care about Iran, and maybe we start with what do we all have in common? Is it football or is it pomegranates? I don't know. But there is something deeply, (..) deeply kind of rooted in a sense of nationhood that is separate from the state. (..) We're 2,500 years old. We have had bad states galore. And if you look at it, if you look at our poetry going back to the 10th century, to the 12th century, endless stories about bad governance, endless stories about, you know, so it's not new. And endless stories about people wanting to come and take pieces of our country and fighting back the Arabs or fighting back the British and the Russians. And what keeps it together is that sense of, sort of, the word patriotism makes it sound masculine, but that sense of love of country. And that, I think, should be the starting point for everyone. Is it going to happen? (.) You know, I wish, I wish that we, I wish that the guys who are standing there in Iran looking at the future and the ones that are outside, and I wish everybody would just for a moment imagine the future that they want, (.) imagine the future that they're afraid of, and use that as the factor of going and figuring out what we should be doing now.
Kavita Ramdas Yes, yes. So our podcast is called If You Were In Charge. (.) Talk to me a little bit about if you were in charge. What would be the few things that you would try to focus on immediately, both to get this current violence to stop, but also then to be able to build towards a future, as you said, where Iranian people are free and have the ability to build on this extraordinary, probably one of the most highly sophisticated and certainly most poetic civilization to ever have been on the planet and one that really should be shared with more people and that so few people know about because Iran has now just been painted to be this sort of center axis of evil, really. So if you were in charge, Sanam Naraghi, Anderlini, tell us. (.)
Sanam Oh boy. So I think different levels. So on the one hand, I think first of all, I would want to acknowledge how much pain and trauma is driving various actions and to try and de-escalate. I think it's really important to de-escalate the violence. (..) We don't want to have, you know, the language of war and then that becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. And one of the things that I think is really important is to focus on the people that have been harmed, right? There was a doctor from Shiraz who'd managed to post a recording and he said, we need medics. We need medical assistance. We need medical teams to come in and neurosurgeons. I would love to be able to have, you know, whether it's directly with the Iranian government or through Oman or any of Switzerland, send doctors to help people.
Kavita Ramdas Yes.
Sanam Send medical. Focus on the humanitarian support that is needed there. Secondly, everybody is disputing how many people have been killed, who's killed them, who's done the vandalism, who's in charge, you know, that cloud of uncertainty. (.) And imagine if there was a willingness to have an independent investigation team, again, from trusted sources, from trusted countries, going in to say, what happened? Let's put a pause button. Let's see what was the violence. Were there infiltrators? Were there outsiders? And frankly, you know, if there is Israeli or other involvement, back off. Because they're not for the public. They're not for the Iranian people. You know, who are you really for? So these would be some of the things, the humanitarian side, the acknowledging of the pain and the fear and the trauma and allowing people to bury their children if you've killed them. Like, leave them alone. Let them grieve. But don't keep doing this to people. And then the second kind of more big picture is really thinking about transformation and not getting hung up on this regime must go and that regime must come in. It's really about what is, what does, what's the structure? What is the vision of the future that allows everybody to feel that it's their homeland? And acknowledge, as I say, that there are, there is a diversity and we need some kind of a national dialogue and a national reconciliation and a sense of that future vision. And the country has many problems. At the end of the day, it's affecting our collective children. And I say this, you know, my children are here. But when I look at that country and I think of the education and one of the most educated countries in the world, the girls are making the majority of university students. The talent is extraordinary. And this talent was grounded in the years of the Pahlavi regime and so forth. They get a lot of credit for what they did around modernization. But it's also continued. And it's continued.
Kavita Ramdas Yes, I mean, interestingly, I think one of the things people forget about this regime is that unlike the Taliban, they never forbade women from being educated. And in fact... Well, they couldn't. Exactly. (..)
Sanam The resistance that you talked about at the beginning. Yeah.
Kavita Ramdas But I think it is important to realize because there's often a description of Iranian women as though they were all subjugated and oppressed and voiceless. And I thought, well, you know, you clearly haven't met Iranian women. in 1993, my parents were in Iran for an official visit with the Indian Navy. And my mother said she had been told by everybody, oh, you shouldn't go, you know, you'll have to cover yourself. You'll have to... And she said, I arrive. And this young woman strides in to meet them. She's wearing a chador and then she whips it off and she's wearing a uniform. And she's going to be their pilot for the 10 days that she... That my parents... She was a Navy pilot and she was pilot for the 10 days that my parents were in Iran. And my mother said, I have never met such an extraordinary group of professional women as I did in Iran.
Sanam So this also is true. This... This... Exactly. This is also true. And this is... This is what emerged under this regime, right? And it's because the women demanded it. And it's because... I always say we're an aspirational society. You know, you're not just happy where you are. You want to be the... The doorman wants to be the chairman, right? That's why Iranians actually have done so well in America. It's that sense of just going ahead. And the people that are demonstrating now and what they want is not your... What they would call West-toxified elite of the past. It's their own kids. (.) It's... In fact, they probably look at somebody like me and say, you don't have your hair dyed blonde and, gosh, you're so conservative and traditional, right? So it's... There's such a paradox. But it's that drive and aspiration for being part of the world, pluralism, openness, open to new ideas. It's always... It's always been there. And I don't think you can repress that. And so, yes, they've been... I have a very funny story. When they gave women the vote many years ago, I think it was 50 years or 60 years, on my father's side, one of my relatives... The husband had come home and he said to his wife, what do you think now? You know, you're equal. You know, you have equal rights to me. And her answer had said... She looked at him and said, don't you ever, ever think that you are equal to me? So, you know, when you say strong women, (.) it's... You know, we have so many of these stories across people's families of women who have been in charge. I mean, the 1906, you know, constitutional revolution and the tobacco strikes, women were there.
Kavita Ramdas That's right.
Sanam So, yeah, they won't let it. The Iranian women are not going to give up on this and they have brought the men and women life freedom was extraordinary because men stood alongside women.
Kavita Ramdas Yes, and understood that their own liberation was wrapped up with the liberation of women.
Sanam Yeah. And so, I would also, maybe what I would do is I would, you know, let the women, let the women of Iran, imagine a Iran Women's Summit. deciding the future of the country. That, you know, imagine that. Yeah. So, so these are some of the, these are just ideas. This is just fantasy, but yeah.
Kavita Ramdas Oh, (.) that would be extraordinary. (.) Despite what we're seeing, despite all this extraordinary suffering and pain and loss of life, what gives you hope at this moment, Sanam?
Sanam It's very hard because it's, we're speaking at a moment where anything could happen. There could be military escalation, there could be more violence. It's, I hope that one day I am wrong about how external military intervention can come in and bring you democracy. It would be, I would love to think that it works. It hasn't worked. So, so I, you know, will, I'm cautious. But what gives me hope genuinely is that we keep seeing (.) Iranians push this rock and erode it from within. It is regime change from within and it has changed over these last 40 years. It has changed in its mentality, it's changed in their own homes. As I say, the democratic mindset or the sense of responsibility and self-empowerment that people have are things that have happened. Now, the last 10 years of economic devastation have made people incredibly depressed and hopeless. So, I would also like to think that if we're going to be, you know, the humanitarian side, I would like, I wish we would open the doors a bit. You know, some people are saying, the embassies, I think the more light you shine, the more interaction you have, the more you give people the ability to live normal lives and thrive, they will change things. Yeah. And yet,
Kavita Ramdas Sanam, we're just hearing breaking news that the U.S. has evacuated personnel from Qatari air bases and I guess it would be crazy of us not to think about what might happen in the case of military intervention after this recording. I just wanted to give you a chance to respond if you thought that there was (..) anything, any of us, I know you've talked about the Iranian diaspora not doing certain things, but are there things all of us as citizens could be doing, citizens of the world could be doing if in fact this escalates and there is U.S. military intervention. What can we be doing to make sure that the vision that you laid out and our ability to support Iranian voices and the Iranian people at this time were something like that to happen? We need to hold on to hope, but we also need to be clear-eyed about what we might be up against.
Sanam I think it's important that we don't let it go dark, that we can get information out, whether that means having Starlink and communications or, as I say, don't close down embassies, you know, try and get media in if possible, but don't let it go dark. You know, in this fight between (..) the Islamic Republic of Iran, which is a state and the United States or whoever it is, (..) let's be mindful that they're all willing to sacrifice to the last Iranian life. we're going to start hearing about, you know, casualties or collateral damage and this dehumanization of people, which is, which gets, happens in, we've seen it in Yemen and Sudan and Palestine and Gaza and so forth. (.) Let's not get radicalized in our anger and in our frustration and somehow think that bombs and violence is going to solve the problem, even if this, it's done through violence, whatever it is, there's going to have to be dialogue. There's going to have to be, people are going to have to sit down at some point and sort it out through negotiations. And so, whose child are we sacrificing? (.) How many children are we sacrificing? These are the questions that I think anybody who is now advocating for military intervention or is perpetrating military intervention from the Iranian side on their own people, (..) whose child are you doing that to? Are you going to, would you do that to your own child? take some responsibility. Power comes with responsibility and everybody should be thinking more about what responsibility they have to those people. Yeah, and the people, people and country, not the anger against the state which clouds so much of the way
Kavita Ramdas the thinking has been done. (.) Well, Sanam, you have given us so much to think about and you also have reminded us of why we can have hope and if I may, I can say that just speaking to you and being reminded again of the very long and very deep reservoir of history and tradition and civilization and poetry that Iranians of all stripes and colors and shades and whether they're diaspora or whatever class they are in Iran can draw on does give me some hope. It gives me the hope that we might be able to find the words Iranians have never lacked for words so maybe they can use those words those beautiful words to also build from here going forward. Thank you so much and I appreciate you being willing to be interviewed on your own podcast.
Sanam Thanks, Kavita and yeah, thinking about the depth of humanity that's the reservoir we have to tap into. //S01: Absolutely.// This, I think, as I said, is like the prologue to our next set of podcasts. it's so nice to have the conversations with you and to be able to co-host the next series that we have decided to call If We Were In Charge not that you and I would be in charge but the idea of We The People what happens when we give We The People the chance. I think it's (.) going to be interesting and I hope our audience or our listeners can tune in on Apple and Spotify and everywhere else that they get their podcasts from. So, thank you very much. Thank you and I'm looking forward to it.