OVER the weekend, I had a chat with Shirin Ebadi (pictured), Iran's Nobel-prize-winning campaigner for women's rights and democracy. I'd met her before, but a few things she said this time round surprised me. 

First and foremost, she thinks that America has been focused far too much on nuclear policy. She wouldn't say, or even speculate, whether the West was right to suspect weapon-building. (She said this is impossible to know because of the secretive nature of the regime.) But she doesn't think that that is the key issue; the struggle for democracy is. 

She asked me if people in America even cared about human rights in Iran. I'm not usually surprised by questions from interviewees, but this did take me aback. She didn't seem aware that certain news outlets and blogs had covered the greens with near-obsession. I told her so, but said that from the White House's point of view,  the dilemma was balancing nuclear discussions with the government you do have against the hope for a new regime you one day might get. She, in reply, was 100% certain that the democratic movement in Iran would eventually succeed—but the trick is that she could not say when. It would depend on the American relationship, the nuclear negotiations, the price of oil, and Russia and China's role, she said. She supports sanctions like those that would deny visas to the Revolutionary Guards and other regime figures, and confiscate their foreign holdings. But she opposes sanctions that would hit the population as a whole (presumably including refined petroleum sanctions, though she did not mention them by name).

Ms Ebadi repeatedly compared the green movement to the struggle for black civil rights in America, and was convinced it would triumph in the same way. I asked if the leaderlessness of the movement (she doesn't consider Mir Hosein Mousavi or Mehdi Karroubi its leader) was a strength or a weakness; she thought it a strength, since leaders can be imprisoned or intimidated. I pointed out that the black movement had a world-famous (indeed Nobel-winning) leader; she countered that it continued on without him. I thought the analogy inexact; could the movement have gathered the strength it did without Martin Luther King?

Perhaps the most interesting point from the perspective of American policy is that she simply does not think this government can or will negotiate nuclear issues in good faith with America. Mahnaz Afkhami, another women's-rights campaigner working with Ms Ebadi and joining our interview, noted that anti-Americanism is one of the few claims on legitimacy the government has left. This is why neither of them thought the Americans should waste time talking about nukes when the government can never agree, and why America should instead focus on supporting the greens. 

Ms Ebadi has been out of Iran since the day before the election, when she came to Spain for a conference. After the election, people began telling her it would be better not to come back, and she has stayed away ever since. She says "all of my phone calls are being tapped", but hinted that there were ways she could communicate nonetheless.  Her husband and one child are still in Iran; the other daughter is studying in Atlanta. 

Hm, an exiled, charismatic and tough-as-nails (but modest) leader, communicating with followers at home waiting for the right time to return to Iran. While we've discussed Europe in 1989 as an analogy for Iran these days, could Iran itself in 1979 offer parallels too? Ms Ebadi is no Ayatollah Khomeini in a dozen different ways; but she is patient, clever and brave, and Iran's protests aren't going away just because of the fizzle on Revolution Day. Watch this space.

(Photo credit: AFP)