Persian Letters

Is Jennifer Lopez the long-sought solution to the Iranian nuclear crisis?

And can she improve the deteriorating human rights situation in the Islamic republic?

We shouldn’t discount the power of music and some Latin hip shaking, but one U.S.-based advocacy group has something else in mind.

United Against Nuclear Iran (UANI) is a group that says it is working to prevent Iran from "fulfilling its ambition to obtain nuclear weapons" -- a charge Iranian officials have repeatedly rejected.

It has now called on Jennifer Lopez to end her partnership with the car manufacturer Fiat, if the company refuses to terminate its business with Iran.

UANI claims a Fiat subsidiary, Iveco, sells and distributes trucks in Iran, which the group says have been used by the regime to transport ballistic missiles and stage public executions.

UANI also says Fiat is reportedly planning to expand its presence in Iran by opening a luxury Maserati dealership in Tehran.

The group launched its campaign against Fiat last year and called on the company to end its business in Iran.

Fiat has apparently not been listening, with the group now turning to the pop diva to use her influence.

In a letter, UANI's president has asked Lopez, the face of Fiat, to either use her position to make the carmaker change its "irresponsible" policies toward Iran or cut her ties to the company.

"[B]y endorsing Fiat, you are serving as spokesperson for a company that freely does business with a regime that is developing an illegal nuclear weapons program, financing and sponsoring terrorist groups including Al-Qaeda, has killed American and NATO soldiers and is recognized as one of the world's leading human rights violators," the letter says, before making the following plea:


The singer has not yet publicly responded to the letter.

-- Golnaz Esfandiari

On August 31, RFE/RL spoke to Mary Pendleton, Washington’s first ambassador in Chisinau (1992-1995), on the sidelines of an event at the National Endowment for Democracy called "Moldova’s Transition: 20 Years of Challenges and Successes."

She told RFE/RL that the pace of democratic reform in the tiny country has fallen short of initial expectations, at least partially due to early Western hope for post-Soviet countries that outstripped reality.

"[Moldova] fell short of everybody's expectations because everybody's expectations were unreasonable -- unrealistic," she said.

"We all expected it to move along a lot faster than it did, for everything to be resolved quickly, and we never expected in 1992 that the Transnistria problem would still be there.

"We never expected that with all the work they did to get their legal system into place that there would be such serious problems with corruption and trafficking of people. The laws are there -- it’s just a matter of enforcing them and strengthening the system."

On August 31, 1989, Moldova’s Supreme Soviet passed a law allowing for the use of Latin script for the Romanian language -- a linguistic precursor of more profound changes to come.

But even this change, Pendleton recalls, came more slowly than she had expected.

As late as 1992, she says, the National Opera’s program used Cyrillic script.

“Even until 1993, I would get menus in Cyrillic -- but that was because many didn’t yet have typewriters with Latin letters,” says the ambassador.

One of Pendleton’s favorite anecdotes from independent Moldova’s nascent years involves the U.S. government’s efforts to buy its embassy property -- no easy task in the early days of privatization:

"[Moldovan President Mircea Snegur] called me up one day and said, 'OK madam ambassador, you can go and buy your property.' So I called the mayor [of Chisinau] and talked to him about it and he said, 'Oh no, you can't do this. You're not a physical person.' I didn't know what that meant -- I thought I was pretty human, you know!

He said, 'You're not buying it for yourself, you're buying it on behalf of your government, so you're a non-physical person. So you have to go back to the parliament and tell them to do an amendment [to the new property ownership laws] to include non-physical persons’ -- which we did, and ultimately they did. In August 1995, two weeks before I left Moldova, we were able to complete the purchase. It was important not only for us but also for the Moldovans, because it gave them the money to buy their own embassy property in the United States."

Pendleton says she’s optimistic that further democratic reform is coming to Moldova, but adds that even 20 years after independence, the pace of that change still leaves some Western observers impatient.

-- Richard Solash