Mohsen Sazegara

Iranian politician

Mohsen Sazegara (محسن سازگارا; born 5 January 1955) is an Iranian journalist and pro democracy political activist. He was the founder of IRGC (Iran Revolutionary Guard Corps) after the revolution in 1979. He held several offices in the Government of Mir Hossein Mousavi. He applied to become a candidate for President of Iran in the 2001 election but was declined. His reformist policies clashed with the Supreme Leader, Ali Khamenei, eventually resulting in his arrest in early 2003. Following his release in August 2003, he moved to the United Kingdom for medical attention. He currently resides in the United States.

In the late 1970s, Sazegara was an undergraduate student at both Sharif University of Technology in Iran and the Illinois Institute of Technology, during which time he was a leader of the student movement against the Shah. During the 1979 revolution, he returned to Iran and served as a founder of the Revolutionary Guard Corps and the managing director of the National Radio of Iran (1979–1981).

Sazegara earned his master's degree in history at Shahid Beheshti University in Iran, and went on to complete his doctoral thesis on religious intellectuals and the Islamic revolution at the University of London 1996. Believing that reform would be impossible with the current Iranian Constitution, he launched a campaign to hold a referendum on the constitution. His drive to amend the constitution gained strong support among many students. In 2001, Dr. Sazegara became a presidential candidate; however, his candidacy was refused by the Guardian Council, reportedly because his opinions were "not congruent with the wishes of the Guardian Council and the Supreme Leader."

On Tuesday, February 18, 2003, Sazegara was arrested by the Ministry of Intelligence, and held for five days, during which he protested by hunger strike. His arrest was protested by the journalism associations the World Association of Newspapers and the World Editors Forum, which together represent over 18,000 publications in 100 countries. Amnesty International named him a prisoner of conscience and called for his immediate release. Later that same year, he was arrested again on June 15, this time with his eldest son Vahid Sazegara, on the order of Tehran's Public Prosecutor Saeed Mortazavi. Vahid Sazegara was released July 9, but Mohsen Sazegara went on to spend 114 days in custody and 79 days on a hunger strike, during which he lost almost 50 pounds of his body weight. This was especially troubling, since Sazegara suffers from severe heart problems, having had two heart operations within the previous few years. After his release from Evin Prison, he left Iran to seek medical attention in the United Kingdom.

In the United Kingdom he called for a referendum and launched an Internet petition, on which he gained the signatures of over 35,000 people. In March 2005, he left the UK to attend to a job opportunity in the United States at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy as a visiting scholar. Following a six month term, he left the Washington Institute for Near East Policy for Yale University's Center for International and Area Studies. By the end of the educational year he left Yale University to work at Harvard University as a researcher on Iran. As of February 2010, Sazegara has been "preaching" a "message of nonviolent action on a nightly basis," through videos calling on Iranian dissidents to avoid fragmentation and unite behind former presidential candidate Mir Hossein Mousavi. As of 2010, he was a visiting fellow at the George W. Bush Institute at Southern Methodist University in Dallas, Texas. Sazegara is a devout Muslim, and advocates for a separation of religion and state in Iran.