It's the UK Times newspaper person of the year, not Time Magazine, which chose Ben Bernake. The Times' person of the year, Neda Soltan, is the face of Iran's revolution. This from the Times:
Neda Soltan was not political. She did not vote in the Iranian presidential election on June 12. The young student was appalled, however, by the way that the regime shamelessly rigged the result and reinstalled Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. Ignoring the pleas of her family, she went with her music teacher eight days later to join a huge opposition demonstration in Tehran.
Ms Soltan, 26, had no idea just how big a footprint she would leave. Hours after leaving home, she was indeed shot, by a government militiaman, as she and other demonstrators chanted: “Death to the dictator.”
Arash Hejazi, a doctor standing near by, remembers her looking down in surprise as blood gushed from her chest. She collapsed. More blood spewed from her mouth. As she lay dying on the pavement, her life ebbing out of her, “I felt she was trying to ask a question. Why?” said Dr Hejazi, who tried to save her life. Why had an election that generated so much excitement ended with a government that claims to champion the highest moral values, the finest Islamic principles, butchering its own youth? . . .
There is much more in the Times article, including the furious efforts of the regime to erase the reality and memory of Neda. The regime is embodiment of evil. The Times could not have made a better choice. The video below is the now iconic clip of Neda's last moments on this earth.
The Iranian demonstrators of 1979, whose children are demonstrating today, would not have dreamt that the turban was simply going replace the crown and that Iran would go from one repression to another. However, it is not the labelling of a state as "Islamic" that makes it just or unjust, but its structures: does it have sufficient checks and balances between the branches of government, is the leader accountable and replaceable by the people freely; are the people sovereign or the clerics?
I was going towards Baharestan with my friend. This was everyone, not just supporters of one candidate or another. All of my friends, they were going to Baharestan to express our opposition to these killings and demanding freedom. The black-clad police stopped everyone. They emptied the buses that were taking people there and let the private cars go on. We went on until Ferdowsi then all of a sudden some 500 people with clubs came out of [undecipherable] mosque and they started beating everyone.
They tried to beat everyone on Saadi bridge and throwing them off of the bridge…. And everyone also on the sidewalks. They beat a woman so savagely that she was drenched in blood and her husband, who was watching the scene, he just fainted. I also saw people shooting, I mean the security forces shooting on people, on Lalezar. Of course were afraid….
They were beating people like hell. It was a massacre. They were trying to beat people so they would die. They were cursing — saying very bad words to everyone. They were beating old men. And this was exactly a massacre. You should stop this. You should stop this. You should help the people of Iran who demand freedom. You should help us.
And this from a medical student working in an Iranian hospital translated from farsi and posted at The Guardian.
only want to speak about what I have witnessed. I am a medical student. There was chaos at the trauma section in one of our main hospitals. Although by decree, all riot-related injuries were supposed to be sent to military hospitals, all other hospitals were filled to the rim. Last night, nine people died at our hospital and another 28 had gunshot wounds. All hospital employees were crying till dawn. They (government) removed the dead bodies on back of trucks, before we were even able to get their names or other information. What can you even say to the people who don't even respect the dead. No one was allowed to speak to the wounded or get any information from them. This morning the faculty and the students protested by gathering at the lobby of the hospital where they were confronted by plain cloths anti-riot militia, who in turn closed off the hospital and imprisoned the staff.
The extent of injuries are so grave, that despite being one of the most staffed emergency rooms, they've asked everyone to stay and help--I'm sure it will even be worst tonight. What can anyone say in face of all these atrocities? What can you say to the family of the 13 year-old boy who died from gunshots and whose dead body then disappeared?
This issue is not about cheating (election) anymore. This is not about stealing votes anymore. The issue is about a vast injustice inflected on the people. They've put a baton in the hand of every 13-14 year old to smash the faces of "the bunches who are less than dirt" (government is calling the people who are uprising dried-up torn and weeds). This is what sickens me from dealing with these issues. And from those who shut their eyes and close their ears and claim the riots are in opposition of the government and presidency!! No! The people's complaint is against the egregious injustices committed against the people.
As this woman indicates, part of the modus operandi of the government is to try to prevent the people whom they have slaughtered from becoming martyrs, with people coallescing around their graves. The dead are carted off and buried, the bodies not returned to their families, and memorials are outlawed. In the case of Neda Agha-Soltan, murdered while standing in the street at a protest on Saturday, it has gone even beyond that, with her family forcibly removed and no longer contactable:
Neighbours said that her family no longer lives in the four-floor apartment building on Meshkini Street, in eastern Tehran, having been forced to move since she was killed. The police did not hand the body back to her family, her funeral was cancelled, she was buried without letting her family know and the government banned mourning ceremonies at mosques, the neighbours said.
It appears Iran's regime continues its brutal crackdown making large scale use of hired thugs. This from the Guardian:
Newspaper Roozonline has an interview (in Persian) with one of the young plainclothes militiamen who have been beating protesters.
UPDATE: Robert says the man is paid 2m rial per day, which would be about £1220 for ten days of work. A hefty fee, even by UK standards. A reader writes: "You can imagine what that kind of money means to a villager from Khorasan".
The Guardian's Robert Tait sends this synopsis:
The man, who has come from a small town in the eastern province of Khorasan and has never been in Tehran before, says he is being paid 2m rial (£122) to assault protestors with a heavy wooden stave. He says the money is the main incentive as it will enable him to get married and may even enable him to afford more than one wife. Leadership of the volunteers has been provided by a man known only as "Hajji", who has instructed his men to "beat the counter-revolutionaries so hard that they won't be able to stand up". The volunteers, most of them from far-flung provinces such as Khuzestan, Arak and Mazandaran, are being kept in hostel accommodation, reportedly in east Tehran. Other volunteers, he says, have been brought from Lebanon, where the Iranian regime has strong allies in the Hezbollah movement. They are said to be more highly-paid than their Iranian counterparts and are put up in hotels. The last piece of information seems to confirm the suspicion of many Iranians that foreign security personnel are being used to suppress the demonstrators. For all his talk of the legal process, this interview provides a key insight into where Iran's supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, believes the true source of his legitimacy rests.
Clashes occurred throughout Iran, with possibly the largest being in front of Iran's Parliament building. Hundreds of basij, the theocracy's nazi style "brown-shirt" army of thugs, attacked protestors throughout the day and sped into action whenever groups of ten or more people were seen.
It is now night in Iran and, in what must be the most ironic twist to this revolt, people are acting in the same fashion that Ayatollah Khomeini, father of this theocracy, told Iranians to do three decades ago as a sign of their desire to overthrow the regime. Cries of “Allahu Akbar!” are being shouted throughout Tehran “with deafening intensity.”
A final look at today, with police clubbing men and women on the streets, though no protest is apparent:
Violent protests in Iran are now entering into their ninth day. The mid-level cleric cum Supreme Guide Khameini's decisions to approve of - if not initiate - massive election fraud in support of Ahmedinejad and then bet the legitimacy of the theocracy on the election results is now causing or exacerbating multiple faultlines. Those faultlines are spinning out from the center like the strands of spider's web.
Khameini's decision has pitted the regime against the Iranian populace and has horrified those with a vested interest in seeing the theocracy survive. And indeed, as those that took part in the 1979 revolution surely realize, if the regime does not survive, there is a good chance they will not survive long afterwards.
There are numerous reports that Khameini's decision has split the IRGC and members of Iran's security apparatus. Yesterday, Michael Ledeen wrote about "cracks in the regime’s instruments of repression," noting reports that "many [IRGC] commanders" have refused to carry out orders. Further, he reprints an extraordinary appeal from several former IRGC soldiers who, on their farsi blog, accuse the regime and the IRGC of having become wholly corrupt and "calling on their brethren to defect, and join the revolution." This is perhaps the most critical of all the faultlines, for if the security apparatus fails, there can be no doubt that the theocracy will be swept away soon after.
CNN is reporting this morning that Ali Larinjani, the Speaker of Iran's Parliament, has taken the extraordinary step of publicly criticizing, on Iran's official news stations, "some members" of the Guardian Council for "sid[ing] with a certain presidential candidate." He thus implies that there was in fact fraud in the election and corruption at the highest levels of government. This is no doubt the tip of the iceberg amongst the many senior officials who are feeling the stress from the threat to the viability of the regime that Khameini has created. It is not clear, though, what if anything the senior officials could do to effect this situation short of a coup, replacing Khameini and the majority of the Guardian Council, then allowing for another election with the hopes that, one, the protests die out and two, the regime survives. All of those events seem to have next to no chance of coming to fruition, but they do indicate a very serious split in the apparatus of government itself.
Another fault line that has today opened up considerably is that between the Khameini-Ahmedinejad axis and the Mousavi-Rafsanjani axis. Rafsanjani is a deeply corrupt Ayatollah, a former President, a member of the Guardian Council, an enemy of Khameini and the wealthiest person in Iran. Ahmedinejad has made of Rafsanjani the public symbol of corruption that he promised to clean up. Rafsanjani has followers throughout Iran, and it was likely he that bankrolled Mousavi's run for the Presidency, if for no other reason than out of survival instinct. You can read a detailed explanation of the byzantine maneuvering of these two axises from Reul Marc Gerecht. Although this fault line long existed, the stakes were upped considerably during the campaign. But today the were upped to existential levels when Rafsanjani's daughter, his grand daughter and two other relatives were arrested by Iranian police, ostensibly for protesting the election. Clearly this is a thug like move to neuter Rafsanjani.
And yet another faultline appears to be among the Shia clerical class whose spiritual home is in Qom. (I mention that because you will often hear the leadership of Iran's clerical class identified in shorthand by reference to Qom.) The very existence of a theocracy in Iran has been opposed by many Shia clerics, most notably Grand Ayatollah Montazeri, because it violates the ancient Shia tradition of keeping politics seperate from religion. Beyond that, there is clearly discontent brewing at Qom over Khameini's handling of this situation. This from Ali M Ansari, Head of Iranian Studies, University of St Andrews:
Indeed, five senior clerics have protested, with varying degrees of severity, at the manner in which the elections were conducted and the violence that followed. Ayatollah Montazeri, the former heir to Khomeini, who was pushed aside following political disputes, has been the most explicit in his condemnation of the elections. . . .
Neither Ayatollah Ali Khamenei nor Ahmadinejad are popular in Qom. The latter's unorthodox millenarian views are regarded with contempt by most senior clergy, while Khamenei has never been accepted as a scholar of note. The clerics may bide their time, but their intervention, which may come sooner rather than later - especially if violence spreads - could be decisive.
What do all these faultlines mean? There is a famous poem by Yeats, The Second Coming, apropos to that question. As Yeats wrote:
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold; Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world, The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere The ceremony of innocence is drowned . . .
As we watch the faultlines in Iranian society become ever more pronounced, it is clear the center cannot hold. The only question is what will follow the anarchy. In 1979, Iranians revolted against the Shah, expecting freedom. What they got instead was a regime every bit as repressive and corrupt as the Shah's. Let us wish them better fortune this time, for everyone's sake.
The work of a basij sniper during today's protests. A young girl, unarmed, shot through the heart in the middle of Tehran's streets, her father crying in anguish as he watches her die . . .
The theocracy is truly evil. They have no morality. They act throughout the world, spreading terrorism at whatever the cost in blood. And now, it is turned inward. God help the Iranian people. For their benefit and ours, this regime must end.
Update: This girl is being identified by CNN as "Neda." As CNN reports, this horrific video has gone viral and is rapidly becoming the horrific icon of the revolution. Rest in peace, Neda.
Posts
