Iran’s leading human rights activist and its only Nobel Peace Prize winner softened her stance against economic sanctions aimed at the Islamist state — even as she abandoned her defense of its nuclear program.

Shirin Ebadi, a prominent Iranian lawyer now exiled in Atlanta, had been an outspoken critic of the international sanctions. She said they had hurt the Iranian people and were a poor substitute for pressure on the regime of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to restore democracy and freedom.

But at an event Thursday at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, the first Muslim woman Nobel Laureate appeared to give the green light to economic sanctions. She described them as something more benign: international trade law.

”Countries have the right to come up with laws regarding trade in their own country,” Ebadi said through a translator. She compared U.S. limits on trade with Iran to French laws regulating the importation of cheese.

“What has America done? America has limited the work of corporations within its borders,” she said, noting that companies have a choice on whether to operate in the United States or Iran. “Legally, this is not a sanction. This is regulating trade in America. We may not like it, but it’s not sanctions.”

Ebadi declined to give President Obama advice on dealing with Iran. But she signaled approval for Obama by way of a veiled comparison to President George W. Bush, who once authorized military action against Tehran.

“The only thing that I can say is, don’t threaten Iran,” she said. “Iranians don’t like being threatened and fortunately [Obama] has not committed that mistake.”

The activist, known for her work to protect women, children and religious minorities in Iran, also indicated that she’s shifted her views on Iran’s nuclear program, which are the reason for the international sanctions.

Ebadi had previously toed the official line on the Iranian nuclear program — that it is the country’s inalienable, sovereign right. “Aside from being economically justified,” she once said, “it has become a cause of national pride for an old nation with a glorious history. No Iranian government, regardless of its ideology or democratic credentials, would dare to stop” it.

But now she dismisses that sentiment as agitprop.

“The claim that nuclear energy is the national pride of Iran is not true at all, and I don’t accept it. It’s the propaganda of the Ahmadinejad government,” she said. “The people of Iran have so many problems in their daily life they can’t even pay their gas bill. They don’t have time to think about stuff like that.”

Ebadi added that pursuing nuclear power — even for peaceful ends — no longer makes economic sense. And, as the disaster in Japan showed, it poses a threat to human safety because Iran’s nuclear facilities also lie on fault lines susceptible to earthquakes.

“The people of Iran don’t want another Fukushima,” she said, referring to the ruined Japanese power plant.

Read more…

  6:55 pm  |   April 25 2011   |  5 notes