Students of communication at the University of Havana. Coursera was recently forced to suspend service in Iran, Sudan and Cuba. Credit: Jorge Luis Baños/IPS

By Bryant Harris
WASHINGTON, Jan 29 2014 (IPS)

Even as the United States and European Union begin to lift some sanctions on Iran, U.S. law continues to prohibit some businesses that provide non-controversial services, such as online education, from operating in Iran and other countries.

Coursera, a California-based company that works with top-tier universities around the world to provide free online university-level classes to millions of students, has recently suspended service in Iran, Sudan and Cuba. "When you have something like an embargo, which is so large and overreaching, you can’t really fine tune it to include certain things and not include other things." -- Lisa Ndecky Llanos

“The interpretation of the export control regulations in the context of [massive open online courses] has been ambiguous up until now and we had been operating under one interpretation of the law,” Coursera wrote in a statement to its participating faculty on Tuesday.

“Last week, Coursera received definitive guidance indicating that access to the course experience is considered a service, and all services are highly restricted by export controls.”

Because the U.S. government’s strict interpretation of services includes functions as far-reaching as the grading of assignments and the operation of discussion forums, Coursera has had to cease operations in certain countries or face legal repercussions.

While the U.S. Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC), the body of the Treasury Department responsible for implementing sanctions, does not comment on specific licences, it points to licensing exemptions for educational purposes.

“OFAC has a favourable licensing policy to authorise U.S. persons to engage in certain targeted educational, cultural and sports exchange programmes,” a Treasury spokesperson told IPS. “Of course, under a favourable licensing policy, U.S. persons need to come in and seek a license – without that, we cannot act.”

Coursera has stated that it remains committed to taking action to operate in Iran, Sudan, and Cuba once more.

“Coursera is working very closely with the U.S. Department of State and Office of Foreign Assets Control to secure permissions to reinstate site access for students in sanctioned countries,” Coursera wrote on Tuesday in a blog update concerning the issue. “The Department of State and Coursera are aligned in our goals and we are working tirelessly to ensure that blockage is not permanent.”

While Coursera initially interrupted its service in Syria as well, the State Department later informed the company that OFAC had a general license in place in Syria for institutions working to increase access to education. Since then, Coursera has restored access to its classes for Syrian students.

However, unlike in Syria, OFAC sanctions programmes on Iran, Sudan and Cuba, do not have a general educational license exemption. Nonetheless, Coursera remains committed to operating in those countries again.

Disenfranchising Iranians

Coursera is not the first education programme that has been adversely affected by U.S. sanctions. Educational Testing Service (ETS) was prohibited from administering the TOEFL test, an English proficiency exam that non-native English speakers have to pass in order to enter most American universities, in Iran in 2010.

Because TOEFL qualifies as an education programme, ETS was eligible to apply for an exemption with OFAC. But it could only do so after considerable difficulty, including finding a bank able to legally facilitate financial transactions with Iran.

“So-called exemptions on sanctions are extremely cumbersome,” Jamal Abdi, the policy director of the National Iranian American Council, a non-profit advocacy group, told IPS. “Iranian students have really been hit by these sanctions, particularly Iranian students who want to study abroad.”

Rather than navigate OFAC’s bureaucratic maze to apply for exemptions and risk potential criminal persecution, businesses often opt instead for blanket discrimination against Iranians. Recently, TCF Bank terminated the accounts of Iranian students studying at the University of Minnesota over fear of violating sanctions.

“The cost of violating sanctions is well known to these companies, so they tend to be extremely cautious,” Abdi said. “But the cost of violating civil rights is not known to them and they cast a wide net in disenfranchising Iranians.”

In 2012, Apple refused to sell products to people speaking Persian in their stores, citing the U.S. embargo on doing business in Iran.

But Abdi said Apple experienced public backlash for this decision. “The company has changed its policies as a result,” he noted, “even if they deny that was the reason.”

U.S. interests

In addition to hindering access to education, some analysts and legal experts argue that the sanctions actively undermine U.S. interests around the world.

Ebrahim Afsah, an associate professor in international law at the University of Copenhagen, teaches a Coursera class called Constitutional Struggles in the Muslim World, which has thousands of participants worldwide, especially in the Middle East and North Africa.

Afsah says he was particularly upset when he learned about the effect of U.S. sanctions on access to his course.

“I don’t think there’s a conceivable scenario where this could harm U.S. interests, so I don’t think it’s a very wise way of forming legislation – and it’s certainly counterproductive,” Afsah told IPS.

Afsah believes that courses such as his serve as valuable tools for students living in Middle Eastern countries, particularly those with rigid state control over educational systems. He says the course allow students to openly engage in debate and to learn about their peers in other countries in a less polemical atmosphere.

“My course in particular has done a good job bringing these people together and making these people aware of some of the problems they encounter, not least the sectarian divide between Sunnis and Shias, which we’ve had some very good discussion on,” Afsah said.

As the U.S. seeks to contain a rapidly spiralling conflict between Sunnis and Shias in Iraq, Syria and Lebanon, fostering increased intellectual understanding between people in the region is essential to combating the very sectarian agendas the U.S. government seeks to contain.

Lisa Ndecky Llanos, of the Centre for Democracy in the Americas, a Washington-based think tank, attributes Coursera’s closure in these countries to the far-reaching nature of overzealous embargos.

“This situation with Coursera is a way of showing that when you have something like an embargo, which is so large and overreaching, you can’t really fine tune it to include certain things and not include other things,” Ndecky Llanos told IPS.

Although sanctions on Cuba are ostensibly intended to force President Raul Castro to implement government reforms, the side effects of the sanctions run counter to stated U.S. interests, she said.

“The stated U.S. policy is that they want to enable Cubans to access information and be a part of a global community, but in this instance the policy is doing the exact opposite of that,” Ndecky Llanos said.

“U.S. sanctions have really isolated Cuba and the Cuban people. That’s not the intention of the sanctions but it’s the result, and it’s harming Cubans not to have access to sites like this and, in the grander scheme, quick Internet access and telephone services.”

Western tech companies are often confused as to what type of digital products they are actually allowed to unblock in sanctioned countries. Credit: Zofeen Ebrahim/IPS

By Ramy Srour
WASHINGTON, Dec 6 2013 (IPS)

Aliakbar Mousavi is a former member of the Iranian parliament and an internet freedom and human rights advocate now living in Washington, DC. In 2006, he was arrested and jailed by the Iranian government for urging human rights reforms.

But the authorities are not the only ones to shoulder blame for quelling dissent, he says. Mousavi told IPS that the U.S. sanctions imposed on Tehran over its nuclear programme are also stifling freedom of expression in his country. “There is really no reason why U.S. sanctions should be inadvertently doing the work of oppressive governments.” -- Danielle Kehl

“People in Iran are suffering because of technology-related sanctions. After the 2009 revolution, Iranians were being arrested and had their private e-mails and information exposed,” he said.

The problem, activists say, is that even though the U.S. government has recently created some exceptions to protect the flow of information in sanctioned countries, regulations are still unclear.

This has led to a situation in which U.S. and other Western tech companies are confused as to what type of digital products they are actually allowed to unblock in sanctioned countries.

“One of my friends, who is also an influential person in Iran, was jailed and accused of conspiring against the regime,” Mousavi said. “After they arrested him, they got hold of his e-mails and showed them to him. He simply couldn’t deny their accusations, even though his e-mails were private.”

Mousavi said that those e-mails came from a Yahoo account. After these incidents, together with a group of Iranian activists, he tried to convince Yahoo to protect their personal information from the Iranian government at the time.

After nearly three years of exhortations, he said, Yahoo’s new president took charge and the company agreed to put in place new protections. At the same time, he noted, Iranians are still finding it difficult to open e-mail accounts because of sanctions still in place.

Last month, Iran and a group of six world powers that includes the U.S. struck an interim nuclear deal to ease sanctions on the Iranian government in return for a partial freeze of nuclear activities.

However, looking at the broader picture, experts here are urging the U.S. government to better protect internet freedoms when it imposes sanctions on countries with questionable human rights records, such as Iran.

“There is really no reason why U.S. sanctions should be inadvertently doing the work of oppressive governments,” Danielle Kehl, a researcher at the New America Foundation (NAF), a non-partisan think tank here, said Thursday at the launch of a new report that criticises some aspects of the U.S. sanctions approach in Iran and beyond.

Kehl points to how unclear sanctions regulations have curtailed the ability of ordinary citizens to share and access information over the internet in countries where U.S. sanctions are in place.

“Expression that seems most threatening to the state is not political manifestos on democracy, but exposés on the foibles and corruption of leaders,” Suzanne Nossel, the executive director of the PEN American Centre, an advocacy group advancing free expression, told IPS.

“This reality is much more troubling under repressive regimes like those in Syria, Iran and North Korea, where people can be killed or jailed for speaking out.”

Chilling effect

“We’re still seeing a chilling effect caused by these sanctions,” Jamal Abdi, policy director at the National Iranian American Council (NIAC), an advocacy group here, told IPS. And the recent exemptions the U.S. government has put forward to protect internet freedom in sanctioned Iran haven’t been enough, he said.

“Companies that could be taking advantage [of the exemptions] aren’t doing so, because they see it as too perilous because of all the risks, and as generally not being in their economic interest,” he said.

According to the report, the problem is that “the lack of legal clarity and fear of political or economic repercussions often discourage American companies from attempting to export their products to sanctioned countries.”

“Some specific examples include Google apps, mobile apps, Skype credit, or antivirus programmes such as McAfee and AVG,” the NAF’s Kehl told IPS.

Although the U.S. government currently imposes comprehensive sanctions on a set of different countries, including Cuba, North Korea, Sudan and Syria, much of the discussion has focused on Iran, partially because of the recent nuclear deal and the country’s history of stifling freedom of expression.

“Sanctions regulations in some cases effectively aid repressive regimes that seek to control access to information within their borders,” the report argues.

Lack of clarity

In recent years, the U.S. government and Congress have enacted some legislation and regulations that would facilitate the provision of technology in sanctioned countries.

In May 2013, the U.S. Treasury Department published a new license that allows companies to export software and services to Iran that are “incident to the exchange of personal communications over the internet, such as instant messaging, chat and e-mail … sharing of photos and movies, web browsing, and blogging.”

Although the license (known as General License D) does grant greater internet freedoms for Iranians, experts note a continued lack of clarity, especially when it comes to the difference between an exemption and an authorisation.

“Congress needs to show more flexibility in the way it issues exemptions, because that will leave more room for executive agencies … to issue adequate safeguard regulations such as General License D,” Kehl told IPS.

And this flexibility, activists say, should leave more room for ordinary citizens to conduct basic financial transactions.

“Remember that simply authorising a product doesn’t mean that people can actually use it,” Mousavi told IPS.

“So far, Iranians have been able to use free software but can’t use most of the important ones – like antivirus and security programmes – that come with a payment, because these companies are still not allowed to process payments coming from Iranian accounts.”

“What we need,” he continued, “are more clarifications and executive orders coming from the U.S.” that would allow ordinary Iranians to express themselves freely.

While the U.S. and Iranian heads of state have yet to meet, the 68^th session of the United Nations General Assembly may mark a new era between the two countries.

After more than 30 years of frozen US-Iran relations, President Barack Obama announced Tuesday during his address to the world body that Secretary of State John Kerry would be directly involved in talks over Iran’s nuclear programme.“As Javad [Zarif] has said, now is the time to stop behaving like carpet merchants." -- William Luers of the Iran Project

Obama’s announcement comes on the heels of Iranian President Hassan Rouhani’s decision earlier this month to move Iran’s nuclear negotiating file from the Supreme National Security Council to its Foreign Ministry headed by Kerry’s counterpart, Mohammad Javad Zarif.

Kerry and Zarif are scheduled to meet on Thursday, EU foreign policy chief Catherine Ashton announced on Monday, adding that Zarif and the P5+1 (the U.S., Britain, France, China and Russia plus Germany) would meet in Geneva in October.

The Kerry-Zarif meeting would be the highest-level formal encounter of the two countries since the 1979 U.N. General Assembly when then Secretary of State Cyrus Vance met with Provisional Foreign Minister Ibrahim Yazdi seven months after the Islamic Revolution, according to Columbia University Professor Gary Sick.

“It’s very important if what Obama said meant that Kerry will be negotiating with Zarif directly and permanently,” Iran expert Trita Parsi told IPS.

“The U.S. would then be investing more in the diplomatic process, which means more political will and a greater cost of failure, and that is exactly what we need to overcome the political obstacles,” said the president of the National Iranian American Council.

The “mistrust” between the U.S. and Iran “has deep roots”, Obama said before acknowledging the U.S. role in “overthrowing an Iranian government” as part of U.S. “interference” in Iranian affairs.

Iran’s new president, Hassan Rouhani, addresses the general debate of the sixty-eighth session of the General Assembly. Credit: UN Photo/Sarah Fretwell

He went on to cite some of Washington’s own grievances, including the 1979 Iranian takeover of the U.S. embassy in Tehran and Iran threatening Israel “with destruction”.

But in a speech that emphasised the importance of pursuing diplomacy before resorting to force in securing U.S. interests, Obama’s message on Iran was clear.

“We should be able to achieve a resolution that respects the rights of the Iranian people, while giving the world confidence that the Iranian programme is peaceful,” he said.

“The fascinating thing is that he’s talking to multiple audiences and re-explaining to Americans why negotiating with Iran is the way to go,” Heather Hurlburt, a former speechwriter for President Bill Clinton, told IPS.

“We are not seeking regime change and we respect the right of the Iranian people to access peaceful nuclear energy.  Instead, we insist that the Iranian government meet its responsibilities under the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty and U.N. Security Council resolutions,” said Obama.

“He’s signaling to Iran that we’re prepared for mutual rights and mutual respect at a moment when the Iranians seem more ready to hear that than in past and he’s signaling how we see that piece of the puzzle fitting in with other regional issues,” noted Hurlburt, who heads the DC-based National Security Network.

While Zarif listened to Obama’s morning address in the General Assembly auditorium, no U.S. delegate was visible during Rouhani’s afternoon speech.

For Iran’s part, Rouhani did not attend a lunch hosted by U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki-moon at which Obama was present. Iran also reportedly rejected a U.S. offer for an encounter earlier in the day.

But some experts suggest that too much attention has been placed on an Obama-Rouhani meeting.

“Expectations are already high on both sides but if nothing concrete is ready, a meeting without something solid would be damaging for each president,” William Luers, a former senior U.S. official and ambassador, told IPS in an email.

“As Javad [Zarif] has said, now is the time to stop behaving like ‘carpet merchants’,” said the director of the prominent Iran Project.

“Zarif and Kerry are as good a pair as we could ask for to find out whether diplomacy can succeed. We all believe it can. The handshakes can wait,” he said.

“The important development is that both sides appear to be serious at pursuing direct talks at a high level, and the important issue is whether those talks will make substantive progress,” international relations expert Stephen Walt told IPS.

“A brief meeting between Obama and Rouhani would have been stagecraft, but not statecraft,” said the Harvard Kennedy Professor.

During his speech, Iran’s president spoke strongly against foreign military intervention in the Middle East, particularly in Syria, and against the rounds of sanctions that have been imposed on Iran.

“Unjust sanctions, as manifestation of structural violence, are intrinsically inhumane and against peace. And contrary to the claims of those who pursue and impose them, it is not the states and the political elite that are targeted, but rather, it is the common people who are victimised,” he said.

“Rouhani had the delicate task of delivering a speech that addresses multiple audiences, and the first part of his speech, especially the part about the sanctions, was addressing a domestic hardline audience,” Yasmin Alem, a senior fellow at the Atlantic Council, told IPS.

“The second part was about Iran’s commitment to constructive dialogue and its willingness to negotiate and reach a settlement,” said the Iran expert.

“Iran seeks constructive engagement with other countries based on mutual respect and common interest, and within the same framework does not seek to increase tensions with the United States,” said the Iranian president, adding that he “listened carefully” to Obama’s speech.

“Commensurate with the political will of the leadership in the United States and hoping that they will refrain from following the short-sighted interest of warmongering pressure groups, we can arrive at a framework to manage our differences,” said the recently elected centrist cleric, who served as a nuclear negotiator under reformist president Mohammad Khatami.

“It was interesting to hear him to talk about how we can ‘manage’ relations,” Alem told IPS.

“Iran is still a long way from establishing normal relations with the U.S. and this echoes Obama’s words this morning in saying all that is down the road,” said Alem.

“It’s a good sign that both leaders are clear about the situation and on the same page,” she said.

For the first time in many months, supporters of intensified diplomatic engagement with Iran appear to be gaining strength here.

Following last month’s surprise election of Hassan Rouhani – widely considered the most moderate of a field of six candidates – as the Islamic Republic’s next president, the possibility of a deal over Iran’s nuclear programme has become more widely accepted.“There’s clearly an understanding forming in Congress about the stakes involved in these negotiations.” -- Joel Rubin of the Ploughshares Fund

That was reflected most dramatically this week by the fact that 131 members of the hawkish, Republican-led House of Representatives – including a majority of House Democrats – signed a letter to President Barack Obama urging him to “reinvigorat(e) U.S. efforts to secure a negotiated nuclear agreement”.

The letter, whose signatories included 17 Republicans, suggested that Washington should be prepared to relax bilateral and multilateral sanctions against Iran in exchange for “significant and verifiable concessions” at the negotiating table. It also implicitly warned against adding new sanctions at such a sensitive moment.

“We must also be careful not to pre-empt this potential opportunity by engaging in actions that delegitimize the newly elected president and weaken his standing relative to hardliners within the regime who oppose his professed ‘policy of reconciliation and peace’,” the letter stated.

Remarkably, most of the signatories – who together made up nearly a third of the House’s 435 members – signed on to the letter after a particularly bellicose appearance by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on a widely-viewed public-affairs television programme last Sunday in which he urged Washington to increase pressure, including threats of military action, against Tehran and called Rouhani a “wolf in sheep’s clothing”.

The American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), the powerful vanguard of the Israel lobby in Washington, took no public position on the letter. However, the group, which generally promotes the policies of the Israeli government, made clear that they would prefer that lawmakers not sign it, according to knowledgeable sources.

“This is critical because it shows that there is a strong and bipartisan constituency even in the U.S. Congress, which has been one of the most inflexible elements in the U.S. government, that understands there is a historic opportunity before us and wishes to ensure that we do our utmost to explore it,” Trita Parsi, the president of the National Iranian American Council (NIAC), told IPS.

“Letters of this kind almost never get more than 30 signatures, and this one got well over that number, including some senior members and important Republicans, as well. It tells us that things are changing,” he added.

Heather Hurlburt, executive director of the National Security Network (NSN), echoed that assessment. “The willingness of 131 members to sign this letter reflects a bipartisan expert consensus that’s been emerging over the last eight months or so that negotiations need space and focus to succeed,” she said. “That consensus has been strengthened by the election results in Iran.”

The latest developments came as senior U.S. officials met their counterparts in the so-called P5+1 (U.S., France, Britain, Russia, China plus Germany) in Brussels in anticipation of a new round of negotiations over Iran’s nuclear programme that is likely to take place in September, at least one month after Rouhani takes office Aug. 4.

Created in 2006, the P5+1’s last meeting with Tehran took place in April in Almaty, Kazakhstan. The group reportedly tabled an offer to ease sanctions on Iran’s trade in gold and other precious metals and its petrochemical exports as a confidence-building measure (CBM) in exchange for Tehran’s suspending its 20-percent enrichment of uranium and transferring its existing stockpile out of the country.

U.S. officials have told reporters that Iran has not yet formally responded to the offer and that therefore Washington is not yet prepared to modify the package. At the same time, the officials said Tehran should not see it as a “take-it-or-leave-it” proposal and that if it wanted a more comprehensive deal, the P5+1 would be prepared to discuss it.

Earlier this week, 29 former senior U.S. experts and foreign diplomats, including some with experience in negotiating with Iran, sent their own letter to Obama.

It urged him to show greater flexibility, a point on which three of the signatories, former U.S. Ambs. Thomas Pickering and William Luers, as well as a top nuclear-arms expert, Jim Walsh of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, elaborated in an essay in this week’s New York Review of Books.

“The United States is the dominant world power and, ‘negotiating from strength,’ should take the initiative and communicate directly with the new (Iranian) leadership,” said the essay, which included a detailed, step-by-step plan for reciprocal concessions leading to a final agreement on Iran’s nuclear programme.

Among other recommendations, it called for Obama to send a brief, private message of congratulations to Rouhani on the latter’s inauguration; suggest, via friendly states, that the two meet personally, “perhaps as early as during the September UN General Assembly,” and, parallel to those steps, establish “regular, even routine, bilateral discussions” on regional issues, “perhaps beginning with Iraq and Afghanistan (and even Syria).”

The latest developments appear to substantially reduce the chances that Congress will enact new unilateral sanctions against Iran before the end of the summer, and possibly the end of the year, according to sources on Capitol Hill.

Until this week, it was considered a foregone conclusion that the House would pass a tough new package designed to tighten existing sanctions and impose a de facto oil embargo against Iran before its August recess. The leadership in the Democratic-led Senate has indicated it has no plans to act before September, if then.

The widely respected Capitol Hill CQ Roll Call newspaper reported Friday that new economic penalties against Tehran are unlikely until the end of the year “at the earliest” and that “the slowdown …is starting to worry hawks on Capitol Hill and in Israel.”

“There’s clearly an understanding forming in Congress about the stakes involved in these negotiations,” said Joel Rubin, director of policy and government affairs at the Ploughshares Fund, a California-based global-security foundation.

“What this means is that for bills to go forward, there will need to be clarity about whether the negotiation track has serious potential, and those discussions will intensify in the fall, so there will be hesitation by many in Congress to get too far ahead of the administration,” he added.

Moreover, the fact that 131 House members signed the just-released letter could persuade the House Republican leadership to put off a vote on the pending package, according to sources on Capitol Hill.

They said the leadership, which works closely with AIPAC on Iran-related legislation, prefers to win by overwhelming margins – often approaching unanimity — on such bills, and that the possibility of substantial division suggested by the letter may act as a deterrent.

“Public support in Congress for engaging Iran at the negotiating table has grown markedly since Rouhani’s election,” according to Dylan Williams, director of government affairs for J Street, a “pro-Israel, pro-peace” group.

“This letter sends a clear signal – both here and overseas – that there exists a politically viable path to resolving concerns over Iran’s nuclear programme through diplomacy,” he added, noting that among the signers were 22 members of the foreign affairs and armed services committees.

Earlier this month, all but one of the 46 members of the House Foreign Affairs Committee signed a letter to Obama urging him to increase pressure on Iran through enhanced sanctions despite Rouhani’s election.

*Jim Lobe’s blog on U.S. foreign policy can be read at http://www.lobelog.com.