Iran: An Eyewitness on 13 Aban "Protest An Inseparable Part of People's Lives"

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My only disagreement with this e-mail from an EA source is the assertion, "Nothing left to say." As we see the unfolding outcomes of the marches of last week, the writer has a lot of importance to say:

I know that you are completely informed of all the news about 13th Aban demonstrations and there is nothing left to say but these are the important things that I have noticed.

First, the brilliant presence of women not only as the demonstrators, but as a safeguard to keep the men protected, they stood in front of the groups of demonstrators to impede the government forces to beat the men and this was the reason that this time the detainees are mostly women.

Second, the government forces enjoyed using a new tactic this time in which they hid themselves among the demonstrators, and from there they tried to beat people, in order to show that these are protesters who were fighting amongst themselves.

Third, the behaviour of the government forces were like 18th of Tir [9 July of this year] and 30th of Khordad [20 June], extreme brutality, with the only difference that at least they did not kill anyone. The protesters were surprised for they thought that everything would be like [the relatively peaceful occasion on] Qods Day.

Fourth, although lots of people were injured (even one of my colleagues), they are not without hope. It seems that protest has become an inevitable and inseparable part of people's lives. They live, they work, they laugh, and they do all the routine things of life, but at the bottom of it they wait for an opportunity to protest.

Fifth, those who participate in these protests are very mature. As long as the government did not suppress them brutally, they are silent and just say the mottoes which represent peace and calmness. At the moment that the security forces begin to crack down with all their force and instruments, then the mottoes and actions of protesters become extreme too, because they have no other choice to save their lives.

Sixth, the general belief of the protesters is that this movement is like a marathon, so those who are participating in it should have strong will, perseverance, patience, and tirelessness. They can not be hopeless and they should be happy patient till the result comes true.

Iran: Josh Shahryar on Fictions & Realities of "Revolution"

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First of all, I must say that I admire and respect Roger Cohen. He has a been a vital asset for the international community in discerning truth from fiction when it came to the ongoing crisis in Iran. However, his recent article in The New York Times angered me not because it is ridiculously flawed – it is not – but because I did not expect Cohen to be so shallow in thought on protest and "revolution".

In his article, Cohen asks a question that confounded me:

In 1989, the revolutionary year, the Tiananmen Square massacre happened in Beijing and, five months later, the division of Europe ended with the fall of the Wall in Berlin. Could it have been otherwise? Might China have opened to greater democracy while European uprisings were shot down?

We cannot know any more than we know what lies on the road not taken or what a pregnant glance exchanged but never explored might have yielded.

Well, I respectfully beg to differ on the comparison between Eastern Europe and China. We do know: the respective outcomes of the movements in 1989 could not have been otherwise. For what Mr. Cohen fails to mention is that the political situations in China and Eastern Europe were worlds apart.

The Eastern Bloc, along with the USSR, was economically feeble, with rampant problems plaguing it for decades. The governments had lost trust to the point where 99% of the people of Poland voted for the anti-communist Solidarity party in the 1989 elections. At the same time, authoritarianism had waned considerably in the region.

Eastern Europe had been steadily opening up its approach to popular dissent among its citizens. Glasnost and perestroika, Gorbachev’s policies that radically opened up Soviet society, had been in effect for years. The USSR had relaxed its intervention in the internal affairs of Eastern European countries, and governments were more ready for peaceful negotiations than for massacres.

This was not the case in the People’s Republic of China in 1989. The country’s political elite had been strengthened by the West so that China could be used as a pawn against the USSR in the Cold War. Domestic policy was pretty much the same as it was under Chairman Mao.

Furthermore, the West was not really that interested in negotiations with the Chinese over human rights issues as they were in the case of Eastern Europe, and China’s government was not being pounded as much as its less fortunate Communist counterparts by internal problems. While the Eastern European economy had gone from relatively good to very bad, the Chinese economy had improved significantly since Mao’s disastrous utopian schemes.

These differences are the key to understanding why the 1989 revolutionary wave failed in China and succeeded in Eastern Europe. Yet, to go further and to arrive at the heart of Cohen's analysis and our discussion, both these revolutionary waves are inapplicable in the current Iranian situation. Unlike Eastern Europe, the Greens do not form an almost uniform majority of the populace, but unlike China, their numbers are much higher and they are distributed across the country more uniformly.

The position of the Iranian Government is neither absolutely safe nor absolutely vulnerable like Eastern Europe 1989. There is growing dissent among former members of the government and the elite's clerics. Finally, the Government’s policies on access to information are neither open like those during the Eastern European uprisings nor utterly closed like those in China. Although pro-Green media have been largely blacked out now, before the protests the anti-establishment faction of the population had relatively good access to news and analysis.

Given these circumstances, the best way to describe the situation in Iran is that of stalemate. The government cannot possibly attempt to repeat the Tiananmen Square suppression of 1989 because it could bring undesired results. It would alienate the already-raging opposition clerics, politicians within the government who are sympathetic to Greens, and supporters of the government within the population. This could prove disastrous.

The Greens, on the other hand, do not have a quick victory in sight. Even if Mir Hossein Mousavi marched his supporters and took over government buildings, the Revolutionary Guard would step in and massacre them. The idea that three million protesters are unstoppable because no one can halt millions is naïve.

There is an old fable in Persian: If 20 sparrows are perched on a tree and you shoot one, how many sparrows remain? The answer is none. You don’t have to kill a million people to scatter two million. You only need to kill a thousand or so, and the government of Iran seems to have the power to do so if it is pushed too far too soon.

So, for now, both sides are reluctant to escalate the situation further because neither is prepared or ready to strike a killer blow. Tomorrow’s 13 Aban protests throughout Iran will be yet another replay of strategies. The protesters will attempt to isolate the government further, and the government will attempt to emerge with minimal casualties inflicted upon the populace and minimal damage to its grip on power. Both sides will likely retire after the showdown to prepare for forthcoming rounds. Unlike China and Eastern Europe in 1989, we are in for a very long haul.

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UPDATE 1030 GMT: Interestingly Daragahi is now singing a somewhat different tune on Twitter, quoting a "Tehran analyst": "Youth seem determined 2 show up for 13 Aban. May not be huge number but significant and agile walk of youth will turn up. Numbers will be enough to make BBC Persian and VOA other news agencies [notice]. The way every official is warning the young [against gathering is going to be counterproductive."

Again, with apologies in advance, I am reacting to an article in a US newspaper about the Green movement in Iran.

I do not want to do this. It is only 24 hours since I wrote about themisinformation and (in my opinion, misplaced) priorities of Jackson Diehl's opinion piece in The Washington Post. And the focus, not only for 13 Aban but on every day, should be on what is happening in Iran rather than the diversions of the "Western" media.

However, this morning there is an analysis by Borzou Daragahi in the Los Angeles Times which is so partial, so distorting, so wrong that it verges on sabotage of the demands, aspirations, and ideas of the Green movement.

Daragahi, who has been one of the best journalists writing for a US newspaper on Iran, initially offers a straightforward "Iran Students Carry on Protests", depicting university demonstrations over the last week. In the sub-headline, however, there is an ominous sign of the real point of the article: "In the West, some analysts have begun to discount the opposition movement's power."

And so the piece dissolves into unsupported soundbites. Mark Fowler, "a former CIA analyst who now heads Persia House, a service run by the Booz Allen Hamilton consulting firm in Washington", declares:

Our view is that the regime has largely neutralized the opposition. It seems to us that they have pretty much decapitated the opposition in terms of leadership. I don't think the government is particularly worried about it.

And then, just to put the boot in if anyone was holding on to faith in the Green movement, Fowler pronouces, "Mousavi is not a liberal per se. When he was prime minister, he would have made the conservatives and the hard-liners proud." Like Jackson Diehl yesterday, Daragahi then invokes last month's visit to the Washington Institute of Near East Policy by Ataollah Mohajerani, "a confidant of opposition figure Mehdi Karroubi [who] refused to distance himself from Ahmadinejad's nuclear policies", as a high-profile representative of the internal opposition.

Daragahi twists the knife further by citing the articles of former US officials Flynt Leverett and Hillary Mann Leverett, calling on the Obama administration "to abide by the results of Iran's election and to engage with Tehran's current leadership". What Daragahi does not mention is that the Leveretts' initial proclamation of the legitimacy of the Ahmadinejad victory, offered within days of 12 June in an article with the University of Tehran's Seyed Mohammad Marandi, has been challenged by a wide range of analysts, let alone by the Green movement.

It should be noted that Daragahi also quotes the opinion of Gary Sick, another former US official, that some U.S. foreign policy hawks "regard any 'reform' movement in Iran as a distraction from further sanctions and the outright U.S.-Iran hostility that they favor as a way of clarifying and simplifying U.S. policy choices in the region". But, given that Daragahi has already portrayed Fowler and the Leveretts as neutral, objective experts rather than "hawks" --- and along the way questioned the credentials and strength of the internal call for reform and justice --- Sick's comment is no more than a whistle in the anti-Green wind.

Of course, Mark Fowler and the Leveretts should be free to express their opinions. But it would be useful if those opinions were supported, in a one-sided article, by some semblance of evidence. And it might have occurred to Daragahi to consult an expert source inside Iran --- despite the regime's determined efforts to shut down any notion of a live opposition, those analyses come out day after day --- or an analyst whose primary contacts are not with officials within the Iranian Government or economic elite.

At the end of the day, however, this considered approach is not Daragahi's because --- like Jackson Diehl --- his primary attention is not on the desires, concerns, hopes within the Islamic Republic: "Iran's nuclear program remains a top Washington priority. And few U.S. officials expect the opposition to cause any shift by the Iranian government on nuclear policy in the next year, a critical period in which many fear Tehran could move dramatically closer to gaining the capacity to build an atomic bomb."

Which is fine. It's not my concern, however, and I dare say that it is not the primary thought for those who are on the frontline, rather than filing from a bureau in Beirut (or writing in a living room in Birmingham, England). So it would be appreciated if Daragahi simply said, "Nukes First, Nukes First", rather than trashing the opposition movement to fulfil that agenda.

However, let me close with the positive rather than the negative. Having provoked disbelief and then anger, Daragahi ultimately --- and unwittingly --- gives hope and raises a smile. For there, four paragraphs from the end of his piece, is the line:

"The Iranian government itself has yet to write off the protest movement."

Quite right, because the Iranian government might have better information than a Mark Fowler and his consultancy or the Leveretts and their quest for engagement. And here, from another group with pretty good information, is the sentence that could be added:

"The protest movement has yet to write itself off."

It is less than 24 hours to 13 Aban.