Iranian nuclear test blogger speaks out

I have been talking to Seyed Ali Pourtabatabaei, a journalist from Qom who says he originally wrote the hypothetical piece in April on what would happen if Iran conducted its first nuclear test, which caused quite a stir after it was republished by Gerdab, a website run by Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC).

The piece did indeed appear first on his website Kheyzaranonline, (English version here) which is dedicated mostly to Mahdism, messianic Shia Islam which has a growing following in Iran and counts President Ahmadinejad among its adherents. Pourtabatabaei speaks pretty good English (which I have tidied only slightly below) and was amiable and chatty throughout a thirty minute Skype conversation. This is what he had to say:

I wrote that blog out of anger that Iran does not have a nuclear weapon. I think sanctions will just continue until the end of days, and they make us so angry. We don't need nuclear weapons otherwise, but if we are going to have these sanctions, we should do a nuclear test to bring them to an end.

I asked how a nuclear test would end sanctions, and it emerged that what he meant was that if Iran was going to be under sanctions anyway, it might as well have a bomb and get some respect, and provide a counter-balance to the Israeli arsenal. He would view it as a regrettable necessity, as he believes nuclear weapons are ultimately futile.

Pourtabatabaei portrayed these as the views of many ordinary Iranians of all political colours. He described himself as a reformist, who supports the Islamic Republic while being a critic of the current regime.

So how did his blog end up on Gerdab, a website run by the IRGC's cyber-security wing? This is his account:

Gerdab was firstly an IRGC project to clean the Persian web of porn. After that was done, it just became a site that collects links to what it thinks is good content. There was a university student I know working for Gerdab and he read my blog and liked it and put in a link to it. He has to put up five links a day to get paid in his job. I don't think Gerdab management knew anything about it. Now they have some more rules.

Pourtabatabaei did not go into details, but the authorities have communicated their displeasure to him. Beyond that, he has not been punished in any way.

After our conversation, I saw the picture above on Kheyzaran's Flickr site, showing Pourtabatabaei and an IRGC general, Hassan Firouzabadi. I emailed him to ask him about it and he said it was taken at a conference on Mahdism, of which Firouzabadi is also a follower. Pourtabatabaei wrote:

Because we are working in religious fields in Qom, we have nice relations with governmental and military people in Iran but these relations are in a special way and it's not political.

I found Pourtabatabaei to be very credible. He described an Iranian reality in which political and religious allegiances cut across each other and do not always fit in neat categories. The "five-links-a-day" explanation for the Gerdab connection also seems to be me plausible (the cock-up theory of history at work) in which case I clearly jumped to conclusions prematurely on the IRGC role. I was also only half-right at best in saying there was a taboo in Iran over talking about nuclear weapons. This is what Pourtabatabaei said:

In the media and in formal situations there are rules against saying such things. But in Iran, in our blogs, we speak about them freely. Many people think this way. Many people in Iran think we already have a nuclear weapon, because of what they hear at Friday prayers. It is a wish: we would be stronger in our region - strong like Israel or like India and Pakistan. If we had a nuclear weapon there would be a balance.

Source: guardian.co.uk