‘It is not possible to organise in Iran’: jailed activist warns of totalitarianism after Mahsa Amini protests
The majority of Iranians wish for a “normal life and for a government similar to the governments based on the liberal democratic system”, one of Iran’s most prominent political activists has said, as he prepares to start a six-year jail sentence, leaving his wife and threeyear-old daughter behind.
Majid Tavakoli’s incarceration is part of the extraordinary crackdown that the Iranian regime has imposed on dissent as a result of protests sparked by the death of Mahsa Amini in police custody after she was arrested for wearing the hijab improperly. The first anniversary of Amini’s death falls on Saturday, and the regime is taking every step to prevent protests, including with patrols outside the Amini family home.
Tavakoli is unusual because he is critical of reformists working inside the system and the communist left. He has been in and out of prison since his 20s. Nazanin Boniadi, the BritishIranian actor and human rights campaigner, describes him as “a man of courage and conviction who has become an even more prominent voice inside the country over the past year”.
He is open about the pain of the imminent rupture from his family. “It is very distressing to be away from them. There is a lot of love in our family. We are very dependent and attached to each other. It is painful to remember this distance every moment.”
Asked if writing and speaking as he did was worth it, he says: “Without tangible results it is hard to say it is. Under normal circumstances, the government could only sentence me to one year in prison for my collection of writings and opinions. However, the special circumstances after the 2022 protests created an environment where they added the charge of collusion, which meant organised collective action with others.”
Authorities subsequently charged him, he says, “without considering the documents and evidence”, and the sentence is heavy.
“But my family and I are aware of the difficult choices we have made. We know that in this era sticking to the truth has many consequences,” he says.
“The text of the court order says that because I want to establish a liberal government and system, I will be punished. Liberals have been attacked many times before by the authorities, yet the general desire of Iranian society is for a normal life and for a government similar to the governments based on the liberal democratic system. The government does not want this thinking to have any representatives inside Iran.”
In recent years the Iranian public’s “perception of power and government has changed” he said. “The government’s inability to solve problems, persistent structural discriminations, the intensification of exploitation, the harmfulness of bad laws, has created a more progressive society.”
Now, the public are disillusioned with elections condemned by international observers as rigged and have “moved towards disobedience and various forms of civil struggle”.
But he admits the protests were flawed, given the difficulty of organising opposition movements in Iran, and suggests there should have been more momentum and help from abroad. “If a specific political change is to bear fruit, there needs to be some kind of organisation and leadership. I think it is not possible to organise inside Iran. Even creating an effective political solidarity is impossible. It is not possible to create such movements and organisations without the government’s knowledge.
“As a result the protests, based on the accumulation of anger and disgust in the society, lacked a political focus for change.
“Inside the country due to repression and censorship it was not possible to form this force, and it should have formed abroad.”
He says he feared that people “outside the country did not have a clear picture of the events inside the country and on the streets”.
“Part of the opposition has reduced the society’s demand to the struggle against the compulsory hijab. They didn’t even recognise the roots of the struggle with hijab and the direction of that struggle.”
No serious attempt was made to create divisions within government, he said. “There were even no resignations of government officials and agents at the provincial and district levels.”
Although technology in the form of satellite TV and social media has broadened access to information, it has also given a tool to the state. “Unfortunately, technology has also contributed to repression … Monitoring and control has become intense. They have the necessary financial resources and
motivation. The government can now do far more with telecommunications monitoring and surveillance cameras. It can impose financial penalties – closing bank accounts and other transactions. The manipulation of truth and consciousness has also changed. In other words, this technology has led us to face more control and propaganda instead of suppression and censorship.”
He insists Iranian people want change “that does not require weapons”. “They expect the political elites and political forces to reduce and even eliminate the possibilities of such a risk,” he says.
Above all, he does not think the west understands what Iran has become. “A totalitarian government is established here. Maybe because this is a modern totalitarianism, it has not come to the attention of the west. That is to say, because the structures of repression and censorship have given way to the structures of control and propaganda, the observers do not notice it. Or maybe they are deceived because of the promotion of a permitted opposition within modern totalitarianism.”
He also questions whether the west has a viable strategy to promote a liberal movement in Iran, saying foreign officials say they are concerned about human rights, but in reality focus on restraining Iran on issues such as nuclear file, missiles and armed regional groups.
So is there any cause for hope a year after the protests? “The discourse of personal responsibility, which is a liberal theory for empowering individuals in an era of totalitarianism, has had an advance in the past years,” he says. This rise in people’s sense of personal duty, he says, has led to more Iranians concluding that they cannot ignore the blatant wrongs inflicted by the regime. “Society in general has become very sensitive to those that belittle, normalise or abet wrong doing. That is an advance.”
Thanksgiving, Nabor formally gave Valenzuela her resignation letter, writing it was her “greatest professional honor to serve in this role”.
During her last week, she received an outpouring of support from her subordinates and her bosses. “You’re the best boss I ever had,” one person texted her. “You have changed us all for the better,” wrote another.
“We love you lots,” Richer wrote, “and you’ll always be our family.”
County records show her last day was 9 December. Far from hiding, she simply took a different job.
We the People would falsely paint this routine departure as part of a cover-up.
•••
The first time anyone said Nabor’s name at a public meeting was in late January of 2023. The legislative session had begun and Busch, one of the leaders of We the People AZ Alliance, was invited to speak on 23 January to the Senate elections committee, chaired by state senator Wendy Rogers.
She told the senators that the math “just doesn’t add up”. County workers, she claimed, approved signatures much too quickly for the process to be legitimate.
That day, the America Project contributed $120,000 to We the People, according to campaign finance records. The organization and Byrne had already contributed $132,000, amounting to more than half the money the PAC has raised since January 2021. Busch and Robinson have paid themselves about $80,000 of that, and about $11,000 went to Chris Handsel – the group’s data and technology director, who helped analyze data for Lake’s case.
Busch was back for more on 30 January, and this time she told senators that temporary county election workers – witnesses for Lake in her trial – told Lake’s lawyer that county officials had put pressure on them to approve signatures they had already rejected. Busch did not offer evidence to support this claim.
Then she named Nabor.
She said her organization’s attorney had asked the county attorney’s office to depose Nabor in mid-December of 2022, but that Nabor had resigned from the county “the day after our attorney followed up on the deposition request”. That was false.
Nabor gave her written resignation on 25 November and her last day was 9 December. The first time Blehm asked to speak to Nabor was on 20 December, when he approached a county attorney, Joseph La Rue, during ballot inspection for Lake’s initial election contest trial. Blehm followed up in writing in midJanuary, according to emails Blehm sent to the county as well as La Rue’s account of the requests.
To this day, no one has contacted Nabor to depose her or ask her for a witness statement, Ryan said.
Two days after the committee hearing, on 1 February, a social media account that appears to be associated with Lake’s campaign posted the video of Busch speaking and wrote that Nabor was “nowhere to be found”.
The next day, Jordan Conradson – a writer for conspiracy website the Gateway Pundit who once posed in a photo as part of the Lake team, including Busch – published a story: “WTH? Maricopa County Assistant Election Director Disappeared After Deposition Request Regarding Fraudulent
Signature Verification.”
•••
On 3 February 2023, the day after the Gateway Pundit published the story, a Gab user posted Nabor’s address. Another responded, “BANG BANG!” That’s the night Nabor woke up to banging on her front door.
The recorder’s office would eventually report the Gab post with her address on it to the FBI. Ryan said he has also reported other threats Nabor received to law enforcement agencies.
Blehm, the lawyer for both Kari Lake and We the People who was sanctioned for one claim made in the Lake case, has repeatedly posted about Nabor on X, the social media site formerly known as Twitter, and Telegram. In one post, on 4 February, he asked people to contact him “with any information leading to her whereabouts”. In another, in April, he posted two photos of Nabor and said that “she cannot be located”. In another, he wrote that it “takes a corrosive substance to wash away the corruption Celia Nabor and her cohorts brought to signature verification in order to overthrow a presidential election”.
By early May, the harassment had died down a bit. However, the reprieve was short-lived.
That month, Kari Lake got a new trial for her initial election contest, which had used We the People’s research to claim tens of thousands of signatures were fraudulent.
In court, Lake used new data We the People had acquired from a records request to claim signature verification was done too quickly to tell whether the signatures were real, and also brought forward the threetemporaryemployees who worked under Nabor.
The first former employee to testify mentioned Nabor’s name, and said she felt pressure to approve signatures she had already rejected. She, and other employees, would contradict this claim when they also testified they’d repeatedly been instructed to exercise caution when approving signatures.
The judge dismissed the case, but that didn’t matter much for Nabor. •••
Nabor declined to talk for this story, saying she wanted to move on and not stir up more intimidation. Her attorney, Ryan, who said he volunteered to help her after seeing the threats she was facing, denied she put pressure on anyone to approve fraudulent signatures for Hobbs. He said there would be no way for employees reviewing voter signatures to even know who the signees had voted for at the verification process – workers review the image of the ballot envelope before the ballot is opened.
Ryan said that Nabor is honorable, ethical and hard-working, and “the only thing she is guilty of is doing her job to the best of her ability”. Nabor has been terrorized by the threats, he said. After the February door-knocking disturbance, she decided to move elsewhere to try to protect herself.
He wants those persecuting her to face consequences.
The US Department of Justice in a news conference in Phoenix a few weeks ago renewed its commitment to prosecuting threats against election officials, updating its tally to 12 charges brought in federal cases.
After hearing this, Ryan sent the threats against Nabor to the department for review.
He is hoping that the focus now moves on.But it might not.
On 14 February, We the People filed a request for every text message and email Nabor had sent as she helped manage early voting for the 2020 and 2022 election cycle. In response, the organization has so far received more than 3,400 pages showing her texts and emails and the county isn’t done responding. It’s unclear what We the People plans to do with the messages.
Related court cases also linger. The one We the People filed over its records request for worker names and discipline records has not yet had a hearing.
In another lawsuit, Lake claims that the county should release a copy of all mail-in ballot envelopes from the midterm election. The county says the voter signatures are confidential under state law.
A judge recently granted a trial for the case.
It begins on Thursday.
This article is part of US Democracy Day, a nationwide collaborative on 15 September, the International Day of Democracy, in which news organizations cover how democracy works and the threats it faces. To learn more, visit usdemocracyday.org
Researchers Thy Vo, Matt Dempseyand Hank Stephenson contributed to this report
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