http://www.timesonline.co.uk/middle_east/
http://www.democracynow.org/2009/6/15/iran_in_turmoil_after_disputed_presidential
From
Monday, June 15, 2009
When we go abroad, at the airports they think we are terrorists. It is shameful for us.
The Facebook revolt of Iran's youth isn't over yet
For a few days it seemed Irans long-repressed youth were on the brink of freedom; then came the brutal reality
A young woman in a thigh-length tunic tightly bound with green ribbon danced
down the middle of Tehrans main boulevard last week. She was nominally campaigning by tossing leaflets into cars backed up for miles, but mostly she just gyrated joyously to pop music blasting into the summer night.
Six
young men riding two-up on motorcycles trailed green streamers, hooted and took photos of one another on their mobile phones, then roared off the wrong way through the cars.
Thousands of other young Iranians wove through the traffic jam they had created,
blowing whistles, waving green balloons, throwing campaign handouts into the air like confetti. Tehran had never seen anything like last weeks green wave
Sara Siadatnejad was up until 7am loading her photos and video of the demonstrations onto Facebook.
We were singing, dancing in the streets, boys and girls together. We had never done this before. No one wanted to go home, she said later, sitting in an outdoor cafe and picking at chocolate cake with green-painted fingernails.
It seems people were half dead before and suddenly everyone felt alive.
Half dead because they were brought up in a society patrolled by religious police with the power to beat them for holding hands in the street. Alive because it was the first election in which women played a potent role, demanding an end to the inequalities they endured.
What happens now that the all too brief Tehran spring has been abruptly curtailed by the election result? Thirty years after Irans Islamic revolution, are the conservative male forces that control the country immune to the demands for reform?
The beatings by riot police, closure of universities and clampdown on foreign news websites yesterday, after President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad claimed an overwhelming victory, were targeted at the Facebook generation.
|
http://www.linktv.org/video/2338/no-end-in-sight | Will these women give in? Under Is lamic law as it is enforced in Iran, a womans word counts only half as much as a mans in court; a woman can inherit only half as much as her brother; and while men can divorce easily, a woman who wants a divorce will typically spend three to 10 years in court and automatically lose custody of daughters over the age of seven and sons over two. Changes have to be made, said a 34-year-old political activist who asked to remain anonymous. Her first target would be headscarves, which are mandatory in Iran. The least of the freedoms we need is the ability to choose what to wear. For women this is really an issue. Whenever you go out, you have to be vigilant because the moral police may not think it is appropriate and they may even take you to jail. A womans integrity is judged by the colour of your dress well, isnt that stupid? THE symbol of the demand for reform is not so much Mir Hossein Mousavi, the 67-year-old
Mousavi, an architect and artist who was prime minister during the 1980s, is an uncharismatic figure. His wife, Zahra Rahnavard, is his secret weapon. Tiny and highly articulate, she was the first political wife to appear on the campaign trail with her husband, giving speeches and publicly holding hands. Unsurprisingly, her most fervent supporters are young women. The presidential candidate often put her on as his opening act, seeming unperturbed when the crowds started leaving as soon as she had finished, barely waiting for him to open his mouth. |
Rahnavard was well known in Iran long before her husband for her books, her art and the fact that she was one of the top female academics in the country, rising to chancellor of Alzahra University in Tehran before she was ousted in 1996 by Ahmadinejads cronies.
She was resolutely articulate and fearless when I met her on the day before the election in the mirrored room of the Saba art gallery, a villa in central Tehran where she has an office on the first floor.
The government should not meddle in the issue of the hijab, she said, wearing her own bohemian version of traditional Iranian dress, a full-length chador with a flowered headscarf peeking out, a rose-coloured silk shirt and a kilim handbag made for her by a tribal artist. A turquoise and diamond ring glinted on one of her index fingers.
The hijab should not be forced on anybody. That is a private decision. They should leave young women alone. Our women are mature enough to decide for themselves.
She would also work on ending legal discrimination against women. And, as a writer and academic, she said, Most important to me is the freedom of expression, the freedom of the pen. We have lost four years of freedom of speech [under Ahmadinejad].
She was prepared to take on Tehrans most feared force. We will put an endto these moral police, she said. We believe we should trust our youth.
For four years, the moral police have not only cracked down on any dress or behaviour they deemed unIslamic, but have also closed newspapers, blocked websites and arrested bloggers and human-rights activists.
Rahnavard sees this as a betrayal of the revolution she supported in her youth. She met her husband when, risking arrest by the notorious Savak secret police, both supported the clandestine movement against the shah at university. She fled Iran because it was not safe for Washington, worked in exile for the overthrow of the shah and returned when he fell in 1979.
She says she and Mousavi she often uses the word we when discussing policy, and he calls her his adviser, which is unheard of in Iran believe the values of the original revolution can be translated into a pragmatic programme for modern Iran.
Lets not forget that Iranians embraced the revolution because of its promises of freedom, welfare and escaping the rule of the security forces, she said. We say we want to rebuild Iran on those values, and the youth have flocked to us. Nobody expected this to happen.
Indeed, a week ago a lacklustre election campaign seemed to be heading towards an almost inevitable victory for Ahmadinejad, the diminutive 52-year-old incumbent.
The election jolted into high gear last Monday when Mousavis supporters held hands to form a human chain the length of Vali-asr Street, the main thoroughfare that bisects Tehran from north to south. Most came from the wealthier neighbourhoods of northern Tehran, where plane trees and spacious villas line the avenues and a generation of discontented middle-class children has grown up.
Normally, there is nothing we can do in Tehran, said Sara Siadatnejad. When we get bored, we drive up and down the street, sometimes 100 times in a night. All this frustrated energy was released into the pro-Mousavi demonstration.
We couldnt bear to go home afterwards, Siadatnejad said. Like many young Mousavi supporters, she wore green to a creative extreme, with green eyebrows, a green wash in her dark hair and a green ribbon twisted through shoulder-length curls.
The government didnt quite know what to do as the demonstrations grew bigger. Every night campaigning rapidly mutated into raucous street parties that surged until dawn. Families came out in their cars to see the show, mum and dad in the front seat, kids crammed in the back with a dazed-looking granny staring out of the window.
Friends texted one another to find out where the action was, and Mousavis headquarters relayed campaign messages by text and e-mail. In Iran, the wealthier have access to the internet and satellite television, though officially
satellite dishes are illegal. Poorer Iranians receive all their information from state-controlled TV and radio, which carry government propaganda.
The young were attracted by Mousavis reformist platform. I am supporting Mousavi
because he is a moderate man and he doesnt make big promises, said Artemis, 21, her kohl-lined eyes bright, her jeans fashionably finished off by sequined ballet slippers. Also, his wife being next to him would surely add to his capabilities. This is something new; introduction of this style is itself a revolutionary act on behalf of a statesman. The real goal, however, was to get rid of Ahmadinejad. Death to the dictator, young men and women roared at Mousavi rallies. Death to the government. It was their generations twist on the Iranian revolutions chant, Death to America.
Watching balefully, the authorities did not intervene, but the demonstrators
knew the risk.
Now we are dancing, but if Ahmadinejad wins, they will hang us on this same street! shouted one young man dressed in the ubiquitous green T-shirt that signified support for Mousavi.
Another told me: We will be out on the streets celebrating if Mousavi wins. We will riot if Ahmadinejad steals the election.
Ahmadinejads supporters were also out, waving their symbol,
the Iranian flag. The majority were from the poorer working-class areas of south Tehran, the women wearing the all-enveloping black chador associated with fundamentalist Iran.
A group of shabbily dressed young Ahmadinejad supporters were heckled by
teenagers with gelled hair and green T-shirts, who yelled, Go back to the zoo! The retort from their working-class counterparts: Sissies!
Ferideh, 20, a Mousavi supporter with a Burberry bag and an Herms scarf pushed back to reveal blonde highlights, said: We were at a red light two nights ago, next to an Ahmadinejad car. There were such bitter looks between us, it was as if we were not from the same planet. You can see how extreme they are.
Ahmadinejad, the son of a blacksmith, has a committed following. Even as
president, he portrays himself as a loner fighting for the downtrodden against a corrupt elite. In a televised debate, he took on one of the most powerful clerics in Iran, Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, a former president, accusing him and his sons of corruption.
The presidents opponents accuse him of buying support with infla-tionary subsidies, pay rises and pensions for civil servants, free health-care for
22m and justice shares in state enterprises for the poor. But the beneficiaries love him for it.
Ahmadinejad is a good man, said Mehri Moradi, 38, a school teacher wearing a black chador. He has kept our money from being stolen by the [religious] mafia.
The economy was bad, she said, but Ahmadinejad deserved more time to correct it. He has had only four years. He should get another four years and he
will have more of a chance to succeed.
Mousavis supporters believe that he would be able to turn around Irans faltering economy, battered by low oil prices and Ahmadinejads populist economics. He is credited with successfully running the economy during his time as prime minister from 1981 to 1989, one of Irans toughest eras, as it waged war with Iraq while putting in place a new government to replace the shahs bureaucracy.
Im voting for Mousavi for one reason: to get rid of Ahmadinejad, said Amir Hossein, 28, at the Hos-seinieh Ershad mosque, a polling station. Hes not a bad person, but hes not able to run the economy.
Hossein said he had lost his fiancée because he couldnt buy a house, which in Iran a potential brides family can insist on. I wanted to get married but I couldnt even find a little house for $70,000.
Besides the high unemployment, high inflation and lack of freedom of expression, the main concern of the young is Irans isolation from the West. Say hi to Obama, is a refrain constantly repeated to visiting Americans. They are particularly angry about Ahmadinejads confron-tational international politics, particularly over Israel, and Irans nuclear programme.
All foreigners think Iran is Ahmadinejad, said Siadatnejad, who is a fan of American independent cinema and starts an MA course in film at the University of Tehran in the autumn. When we go abroad, at the airports they think we are terrorists. It is shameful for us.
The paradox is that Ahmadinejad is not only unrepresentative of sophisticated, outward-looking Iranians but also has limited power.
Iran combines democracy with an Islamic theocracy. Although the president elected by Irans 46.2m voters is the public face of the nation, real power lies with Ayatol-lah Khamenei, the supreme leader, who is in charge of foreign policy, the armed forces and the state-owned media.
There are unspoken checks on Khamenei, too. He must be careful to balance public sentiment with the religious Establishment and his parliament; but he has the final say. It can safely be said nobody becomes president without his approval and he rapidly endorsed Ahmadinejads victory yesterday.
Afterwards, as the freshly barricaded interior ministry declared that it would clamp down harshly on street protests, Mousavis young supporters considered their options.
Everyone is really upset and nervous. I myself am thinking of leaving the country because I cannot live under these harsh circumstances for my whole life, said Azadeh, a political activist. We need freedom. This is one of the most important human desires.
Parvin Ardalan, who is trying to get 1m signatures on a petition demanding equal rights for women, said: Now it will be even harder to breathe under this inhuman president. This is certainly bad news for us. The more closed and limited the country becomes, the worse the situation is for women.
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