Asia Times article from 2006.
When the invitation to attend a human-rights workshop in Dubai in the United Arab Emirates came, it was a complete surprise for Nilofar, an attractive Iranian woman in her early 30s who works for an international organization in Tehran and claims to be apolitical.
[...]
In class, the Serbian instructors organized role-playing games in which the participants would assume the personas of characters such an Iranian woman or a Shi’ite cleric. Throughout these exercises in empathy and psychology, stress was laid on the importance of ridiculing the political elite as an effective tool of demythologizing them in the eyes of the people.
“They taught us what methods they used in Serbia to bring down Milosevic,” Nilofar said. “They taught us some of them so we could choose the best one to bring down the regime, but they didn’t mention directly bringing down the regime – they just taught us what they had done in their own country.”
Cyrus Safdari, an independent Iranian analyst, said: “As I gather, the idea was to fund and train activists to be agents provocateurs along the lines of the Otpor movement in Serbia. Their job was to utilize various techniques, such as anti-government graffiti etc, to embolden the student movement and provoke a general government crackdown, which could then be used as a pretext to ’spark’ a mass uprising in Iran that appeared to be spontaneous and indigenous.”
[...]
Safdari added that the inspiration for the workshops such as the one in Dubai may find provenance in one of the right-wing Washington think-tanks that has a proven track record of providing inspiration for Bush administration policy initiatives in the Middle East.
As for the funding, he believes that it may come “only indirectly from the US government … I’m not sure if that meant the project belonged to some ‘political entrepreneurs’ acting independently of the US government, or if these are just standard measures intended to create plausible deniability”.
Hmmm. This could explain Paul Wolfowitz’ commentary, as well as other neocon “support” of the protesters.
July 4, 2009 at 10:40 pm
Whatever the spark for the dissent, I wish the best for the people of Iran, especially the women who have watched their rights being cut back over the last 30 years.
Not that the neocon “supporters” give a shit about the women of Iran. Still, sometimes nefarious beginnings can lead to good results. Let’s hope that this will be an instance of it.