Mir Hossein Mousavi at the July 17th Friday Prayers

I have not been updating as frequently as I would have liked to. One reason is that I can barely find time to follow the news, since I actually have a full-time job in the real world .

Also I have written so much about the Iranian elections here that I am actually not sure what other sort of stuff I want to write here. I guess I’ll figure out in time.

What intrigued me to write now is the footage that has come from today’s Friday prayers (FP). It is just awesome. After the government refused to issue permits for gatherings of the Green movement supporters [which is our constitutional right, btw], and cracked down so violently, particularly after Khamenei’s Friday prayer sermon on June 19th that resulted in at least 20 deaths on the 20th (including Neda), there seemed to be no hope for peaceful gatherings. The atmosphere was that of martial law.

Mousavi repeatedly suggested in his statements that people be creative and try to find new ways for peaceful protests. There were/are various ideas releasing green balloons in the air at a particular hour, exhausting the power system by plugging irons and high-consumption electric appliances whenever AN speaks on TV, spraying green paint on walls, … but still none of these had the effect of the huge silent protests.

The next idea was participation in the Friday prayers. There is always one unifying prayer site in each city and Friday prayers are unique in Iran (in comparison with the rest of the Muslim world, as far as I know) since they have a vary political atmosphere to them, each city’s Imam(s) is(are) appointed by the supreme leader himself . Usually, only very pro-government people and typical basiji-like types go to Friday prayers, another sad example of how religious symbols are exploited by the Islamic Republic. There are 4 or 5 Imams for the Tehran Friday prayers and they have turns circulating between them. This week after postponing Rafsanjani’s turn two or three times, he was finally given a chance to lead the prayers, and of course, give the sermon. From the very beginning that this was announced talks of the Greens attending these prayers also started. There was fear that Rafsanjani, although being severely attacked by the AN clan, would have reached some sort of compromise with them, and thus may end up “betraying” us after we have made an effort to show up. There was also a high probability of being cracked down again (yes, even at the prayers), particularly since The final general consensus was that people should show up if Mousavi [and Karroubi] himself plans to come, and this is officially announced.

Eventually in a very short, yet remarkable statement on Wendnesday, which is worthy of another post in itself, he announced that he would come. He wrote that it is actually he who is responding to the people’s invitation, not the other way around. Anyhow, today we witnessed the largest gathering at Friday prayers in the history of Iran (link in Persian). Hashemi indeed served us right and defended our right to protest and criticized the turn of events, including the current government and the Guardian Council. He called for the release of the prisoners and empathy with the injured and families of the dead, said that nothing has come to an end and that the current situation can be described as a crisis. He also referred to some examples from the revolution and the prophet’s (pbuh) life, emphasizing the importance of people’s votes and the crucial role of unity. More of what he said can be found here.

The number of attendee’s was estimated to be at least a million. The outstanding point is that we actually managed to take a gathering that has always been a place to show their power for the hardliners into our hands and there was nothing that they could do about it. They were so afraid of what may happen that they did not even let some reporters from hardline news agencies (e.g. Fars News) to cover the event. Still there as been a constant stream of amateur videos and pictures coming out all day. There are some reports of people booing the “national” TV (IRIB) crew.

In the live radio broadcasting today, the slogans that are shouted by the people at crucial points of the sermon where actually censored this time, instead of being fully covered as a show of power, because people were shouting unconventional slogans in support of the Green movement. In one place where Hashemi spoke against the crackdown on protesters in China, a stance which the official government refuses to take due to their close ties with China, there were shouts of “Death to China”, as opposed to the usual “Death to …” slogans against America, Israel, and sometimes (like now, depending on the political circumstances) England. It was so load that it was still recognizable although they had turned down the volume in the radio broadcasting. This is unprecedented.

A particular video (you can see it below) that was most remarkable shows a group of people in the streets before the sermons start, moving towards the FP venue (it is usually held in Tehran University, which has a special area for FP whioc usually fills up and people overflow into the surrounding streets). The guy who always leads slogans in Friday prayers and official government gatherings (a.k.a. slogan minister (SM) ) is shouting the traditional lines, but people reply there own cleverely chosen similar ones instead. It is interesting that they do this so naturally, it’s actually funny. It is 40 seconds long, but he sound has been recorded for less than 30 second, and this is a rough translation of what they say:

SM: death to England
people: death to Russia

SM: the blood in our veins is a present [sacrifice] for our leader [khamenei]
people: the blood in our veins is a present [sacrifice] for our people

The FP gathering turned into a rally afterwards, that is still going on as I write this, there are unconfirmed reports of people moving towards the IRIB headquarters, Evin prison, and the Interior Ministry. There were confirmed reports of teargas being used even during the sermons/prayers, and of course the plain-clothes forces and basij would not keep quiet on such a day! I hope it can have a relatively happy ending.

Shadi Sadr

There has already been this awful news of Shadi Sadr, a prominent lawyer and women’s rights activist being basically kidnapped in an extremely violent manner (dragging her into a car, beating her, and yanking her manteu and hijab off when she resisted and refused to go wtih them) by the plain clothes forces while she was on her way to the FP today. She is one of the Iranian feminists that I have the most respect for because she is not into the “business” of human rights and women’s rights and really helps real people. I hope she is safe and will be released soon, she also has a young daughter.

Mahdi Karroubi, after an attack that resulted in his turban falling off, at the Jul 17th Friday Prayers

Hashemi’s statements show that there is a tough battle going on between the different figures in power behind the scenes (e.g. between Hashemi, Khamenei, other high ranking clerics, AN’s clan), and it also means that there is still a long way before the end of this. A friend pointed out something that I find very true: Rafsanjani actually took the role that would have naturally been expected from the supreme leader. He took the tone of someone who cares about the revolution and wants to solve the crisis as opposed the stance of Khamenei who irresponsibly erased the question instead of attempting to solve it, threated and initiated violence.

Zahra Rahnavard at the Jul 17th Friday Prayers

There was news last Wednesday night that 70 University professors were arrested after a private meeting with Mousavi (see here and here). There were quite a few of my professors and those I knew among them, but fortunately all but four of them were freed the next day. The name of one or two of these [still detained] was announced, which I knew, but not very closely. I’ve just heard that another one may be one of my advisors who I worked with and was very close to. It makes perfect sense because he was one of the most politically active professors in the university and a reformist, but I am still not sure about the news. Not that it was not already a disaster, but hearing news like this about someone you know and care about personally makes it feel so much more real all of a sudden.

I’ll update this if the news is not confirmed.

Update: Confirmed. He is still in prison. A committee of the professors have been working for their release as well as detained students’ release. Students also had a sit-in demanding their release today [Wednesday, July 1].

Update 2: He has been released one or two days ago, thank god. [Saturday, Juli 4]

This is a peice by Slavoj Žižek on the current affairs in Iran. I found his insight to be rare, if not unique for someone who has not lived in nor is an expert on Iran. It was actually  quite surprising for me and some other Iranians I had feedback from how precise and well-informed he was. Some of points about the Western interpretations of what’s going on were previously brought up here, some in the comments (like the particularly cool bit about the Leftist supporters of Ahmadinejad), but he writes it so concisely.

I am copying it from here, from which I quote: “[...] sent to us by Ali Alizadeh who writes, ‘Apparently the mainstream media has not shown interest in publishing it. Hope that the blogsphere can counteract their tendency.’ The piece is copy-right free and you should feel free to republish this on your own blog.”

When an authoritarian regime approaches its final crisis, its dissolution as a rule follows two steps. Before its actual collapse, a mysterious rupture takes place: all of a sudden people know that the game is over, they are simply no longer afraid. It is not only that the regime loses its legitimacy, its exercise of power itself is perceived as an impotent panic reaction. We all know the classic scene from cartoons: the cat reaches a precipice, but it goes on walking, ignoring the fact that there is no ground under its feet; it starts to fall only when it looks down and notices the abyss. When it loses its authority, the regime is like a cat above the precipice: in order to fall, it only has to be reminded to look down…

The Daily Show has sent a representative to Iran right before the elections. In the link below he has entertaining interviews with two of the arrested politicians I’ve mentioned before, Ebrahim yazdi and Mohammad-Ali Abtahi, as well as the documentary filmmaker and Newsweek correspondent, Maziar Bahari (also detained now) right before the election. Enjoy.
http://www.thedailyshow.com/video/index.jhtml?videoId=230712&title=jason-jones-behind-the-veil

PS. It’s also pretty funny how they use the worn out cliche “behind the veil”.

I have mentioned this in the comments before, but I’ll put it here too. This is a website where we (a rather big group of translators of which I am one of) post news and all kind of other articles translated from Persian:

http://tehranbroadcast.com/

It is run by the managers of balatarin, a sort of Persian version of digg.

Also, there has been (unconfirmed, but from generally reliable people) going around that Hajjarian, who I wrote about in the previous post, has a very bad general health condition, was taken to the Evin prison clinic, but needs to be taken to a real hospital. I do not know whether they have done that … please keep him, as well as all the other prisoners, in your prayers/well wishes.

This one is not new: I’m so terribly worried.

I should have written about those killed and injured in the recent protests, particularly on Saturday, it was so awful, I was in a state of shock. I guess everyone has already seen the video of Neda’s death, as a symbol of the brutality going on in Iran right now. I wish all of them peace.

In the last couple of days there have not been large protests, just small ones here and there, again oppressed by the militia and riot police. The presence of military forces in the streets has increased, turning some of the beautiful parks and stadiums into makeshift military camps/headquarters. However, it is not the case that everything is over, there is definitely a power battle going on behind the scenes. I have a post coming up about that, but right now I want to voice some concerns about a few of the detained political figures.

Ebrahim Yazdi

There are an unknown number of protesters and students arrested. Their general effort is to try to make them confess to planning riots and vandalizing, getting orders from foreigners or the disgusting Mojaheidin-e Khalgh terrorists that are referred to in Iran as the Monafeghin (the hypocrytes). They show the videos of the confessions of some that they manage to force into this on the “national” television. There may be actually some thugs among the people, but the majority of those I have seen is just ridiculous confessions, that we have seen many of in Iran in the recent years, and nobody believes anymore, including one in which a woman who confessed she and her son, under the influence of the BBC (as if it’s some sort of drug), had intended to use a grenade “that they had kept since the Iran-Iraq war” [at least 20 years ago] in (source, in Persian) in one of the protests. I don’t want to get started on the Iranian national television’s actions, it is past propaganda, it is a collection of shameless lies and brainwashing.

Hajjarian with Khatami

Anyway, there are also many political figures arrested in the recent coup, some of which I’ve mentioned before here. is widely believed that a few of the detained reformist figures are being under extreme pressure to confess that they had planned the recent protests, or “riots” as they like to put it, in an effort to organize a “green revolution” in the style of the “velvet revolutions” of the past few years, something that some leaders of the Islamic Republic have a phobia of. We know that they can be very brutal in their jails, and that the detained have obviously been denied their rights to lawyers, visitors, any sort of contact with their families … some of the families do not even know where they are (Ahmad Zeydabadi has been reported by his wife to be basically kidnapped from his home they don’t even know who it was that took him, this is the fate of many).

The ones that are particularly said to be under pressure, and it seems that the goal is to blame it mostly on them are mostly members of the Participation Front, Mostafa Tajzadeh, Abdollah Ramezanzadeh, and Mohsen Aminzadeh, and Mohammad-Ali Abtahi, Vice President for Legal and Parliamentary Affairs of former president Khatami. God knows what they will be willing to do in order to get “confessions” from them. It’s just so stupid since everybody who has been to the rallies has says that they were not really planned ahead, only a time and venue had been announced ear-to-ear, email-to-email and the politicians were actually surprised by the number of people showing up.

What actually worries me most of all is the status of two other detainees that are also definitely under extreme pressure right now. One is Saeed Hajjarian one of the masterminds of the Iranian reform movement whose ideas were so dangerous for some that they assassinated him in 2000. He was shot in the head, the bullet miraculously went through his jaw and lodged in his neck, he survived, but permanent damage was done to parts of his brain and nervous system. He has problems with his movements, uses a wheelchair or walker, has trouble speaking, … he should constantly be under physiotherapy and other sorts of medical care. Not only is he being denied this in prison, but he is probably under mental and physical torture too.

The other person I am particularly concerned about is Ebrahim Yazdi. He is a great man, was the foreign minister in Mehdi Bazargan’s government, the first after the revolution that was basically forced into resignation after 9 months (when the American embassy was attacked) because they were too calm and intelligent for the extreme revolutionary environment of those days. He has continued his civil activities all these years in Iran, although their party was branded “illegal” early on, they get a share of arrests, accusations, and insults no matter what is going on Iran. He is 78 years old now and has previously suffered from prostate cancer. He was detained from a hospital where he was either under observation or conducting some medical examinations. I have enormous respect for this man, and am very worried about him.

Amnesty international has also reported on these arrests here.

I am waiting for ayatollah Khamenei to start his sermons at the Tehran Friday prayers right now.

Listening to any rhetoric from them, AN, anything from the Iranian state tv, … these days makes me sick, physically and psychologically. This speech will have a great impact on what course the events will take from now on, I really wish we would at least hear a change of tone today, but am not that hopeful. So I hope it would not be as I anticipate it. What I want to share now is how I feel right now.

Listening to this sort of rhetoric humiliates you, it’s lying to your face, making everything look upside-down. It not only disregards your intelligence, but you dignity. Now I feel that there is a blow on the way, and I have to take it, I prefer to listen than to remain guessing. It’s like knowing that someone will rape you, and that there will be nothing that you can do, you just have to take it.

I fight these feelings and overcome them each time, we will be persistent on what we want. We are not just taking it anymore, we are making our voices heard. But frankly it still doesn’t help me very much to not feel like this right now. I just have one question:

Isn’t making someone feel like this a crime?

I contacted some people that were at the demonstrations. One group started at around 4pm at Haft-e Tir square, down Karimkhan street, Valiasr square, Keshavarz boulevard, down Kargar street, and then Enghelab square. It took a total of three hours. But when they contacted friends who had gone back to Haft-e Tir because they had left their car there, they reported that there were still people coming from Hafte-tir even at around 8pm. I have marked the route in light green in the map below for those who are not familiar with Tehran, it is something between 4 and 5 kilometers. Another person said that some people had gone towards the Tehran University dormitory complex (Kuy-e Daneshgah) (which was scene of a bloody attack a few day ago), the route that they have probably taken is branched off in the map in a darker green. There seems to have been people in many of the other streets in the area as well.

I also talked with someone who had spent more that three hours on top of Karimkhan bridge (seen in the video below), in order to have an estimate of the number of people participating in the demonstration. Calculating the number of people that passed by per minute, the estimation was that around 1.5 million people had passed by that very point, this is not considering the huge number of people that had entered the route from other perpendicular alleys after that, which could have been half that amount. This particular person was also pretty active in the 1979 revolution and believed that this demonstration was twice as big as any demonstration in those days. There has been NO account of violence that I have heard of, and people have not been chanting any slogans, just holding their hands up with signs of victory, and some holding posters, amazingly quiet.

Somehow there is a widespread awareness of how to handle this among everybody, something that I also saw here at the protests in The Hague. The demands are clear, protesting the election outcome, asking for another free and fair election, and preventing the country from turning into a totalitarian dictatorship. Anybody saying anything outside this framework is promptly quietened by the crowd, so as to not give an excuse to brand them as being after a “velvet-revolution”. Nothing against the supreme leader, the Islamic republic itself, no insults to anybody, even AN.  One of the demonstrators today said that the campaign officials that loosely monitored the demonstrations would make sure nothing like that would get through, and nobody would object. This is not because we have no problem with the current system, but because we don’t want another revolution, not to mention foreign involvement in our country. We want to go back to the state before AN, or even before the elections, then we would be back to ground zero and would need hard work to make whatever changes we want from within.

I am basically worried to death and have my heart in my throat the whole time each of these rallies is going on, waiting to hear some bad news (like what happened on Monday). This is particularly heightened when I happen to listen to the rhetoric from the Iranian state television, they try to portray these protesters as thugs, rioters, and trouble-makers. They don’t sound as if they want to compromise, that they may want to suppress all these people or that they may have some other worse, more complicated plans. I pray to god that it may not be so.

But I am mostly hopeful. If we gain nothing else, we have already shown our courage, persistence, and maturity to the world. A dictator will not have a cahnce to rule for too long over such people. I am proud of our people.

There has been more peaceful protests today, probably stll going on righ now. This photo is from Theran 5:25 pm local time, Karimkhan bridge (via Facebook).

Also since yesterday evening, people in Iran are also having problems in accessing their emails, yahoo messenger which we normally use for chat and voicechat did not work for a few people I was trying to contact, I also heard from multiple sources that they could either not access their inboxes at all or could only recieve, but not send messages.

I have wanted take a closer look at the provincial outcomes ever since they were announced, but just don’t find any time, but this is making the rounds:

Iran Does Have Some Fishy Numbers

I am also adding this to the first post about cheating:

Faulty Election Data

And a quick update: guess you have heard that there is a ban on reporters covering the rallies, now all footage is coming from citizen journalists, through the web. Wish them the best. There is another rally planned for today, Wednesday, 5 PM, at Hafte-e Tir square, if everything goes right.