1. Global protests over Iranian crackdown: “Protesters in dozens of cities worldwide on Saturday demanded the release of hundreds of detainees in Iran who were arrested in the bloody aftermath of the Islamic republic’s disputed presidential election. Saturday’s global day of action across about 100 cities in six continents was organized by United For Iran and supported by several human rights groups, including Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International and Reporters Without Borders. In London, England, protesters waved green flags and wore green wristbands — the color is symbolic of the opposition movement in Iran. The British protesters outside the Iranian Embassy in London wanted to show solidarity for those Iranians ‘who feel too intimidated, too fearful’ to go back out on the streets to protest, reported CNN Correspondent Paula Newton.”
2. Iran vice-president ‘sacked’: “Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the Iranian president, has bowed to pressure and dismissed Esfandiar Rahim Mashaie, his choice for the key post of first vice president, Iranian media has reported. The decision on Friday came after Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Iran’s supreme leader, ordered Ahmadinejad to reverse his decision regarding Mashaie who had been under fire for comments he made last year in which he was quoted as saying Iranians could be friends with anyone, including Israelis.” [You know these are troubling times when Khamenei is intervening in politics as much as he has been doing lately.]
3. Googoosh and Akbar Ganji make common cause: Read the story here. Watch the video here.
4. Iran accused of ‘Zionist’ tactics: “A letter to Intelligence Minister Gholamhossein Mohseni-Ejei posted on Mr Karroubi’s website says that “women were attacked with clubs and beaten and thrown in the gutters” during the protests. ‘This is more painful in comparison to crimes committed by the Zionists against the oppressed people of Palestine… The Zionist aggressors have some reservations when it comes to confronting women.'”
5. Closing Ranks Behind Ahmadinejad: “High-ranking clerics from both sides of Iran’s political spectrum stepped up sharp warnings against each other’s camps, while hard-liners continued to simmer over the appointment of a controversial aide to the inner circle of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. But a majority of the Assembly of Experts, a powerful committee that oversees the office of Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, issued a statement today declaring support for him and Ahmadinejad’s presidency, a blow for moderate cleric Ayatollah Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, who is a supporter of the opposition camp and hoped to rally clerical support against hard-liners.”
6. Russian Planes Kill: “A passenger plane burst into flames and skidded off the runway as it was landing in a northeastern city, killing 17 people, said the state news agency. Footage from PressTV showed the front end of the plane had been sheared off, leaving mangled wreckage where the cockpit had once been. The Russian-made Ilyushin plane from the privately owned Aria Airlines was carrying 153 passengers and flew from the capital Tehran to the northeastern city of Mashhad, 600 miles (1,000km) away. On 15 July, another Iranian passenger plane crashed soon after take off, killing 168 people on board.”
The ongoing events in Iran and Honduras are considered similar to some extent by experts around the world. The similarity refers to the time gap (16 days), electoral reason, and foreign meddling.
During the riots in Iran –and even now- when I was reading the political analyses, I found something interesting which I noted before here in my blog. Actually if I could divide the political commentators on Iran, I will say they are two groups: politicians and journalists.
http://anamideast.blogspot.com/2009/07/iran-is-not-honduras.html
By politicians I mean officials and those decision makers who are fully aware of the conditions in Iran. They know the power structure in Iran and have a 30-year experience on Iran issues. For these politicians, Iran is changed from a ‘good guy’ to a ‘bad guy’ in February 1979. They are quite familiar with the Iranian democracy and the electoral system. So there is a question: why are they calling Iran election a fraud? The answer is quite clear: they are called enemies, and what is expected from and enemy is everything except friendship. During the 30 years -after the Iranian 1979 revolution- western countries –esp. the USA- are determined to perform a regime change in the country by all means; something which was quite unsuccessful, and even with a boomerang effect.
In the second category, by journalists I mean the reporters, correspondents, bloggers and political commentators and generally those with an interest in news and political issues who are affected by western mass media and the propaganda by the so-called ‘world powers’. They normally do not have a clear-cut image from Iran and its power structure and usually view Iran from the window of governors and mass media, who are manipulating the true image of opposition countries in favor of imperial powers.
All in all, the imperial powers and those who are affected by them, lack some knowledge on Iran, its power structure, its democracy, religion, interest of its people and the union of its people against foreign meddlers; something which is constantly being ignored. Americans my have a clear image of a country called ‘Honduras’ due to their long presence in that country and interfering in other Latin American countries from their bases in there, but the should bear in mind that Iranians overthrew them some 30 years ago by evicting Shah out of their country. Therefore, Americans do lack much of the knowledge on Iran and they are still learning from Iran after 30 years.
Even before the election, reform activist Ali Reza Alavi Tabar offered a sombre assessment:
I joke with my students that they are bourgeois revolutionaries. They want to change the government but they’re afraid of confrontation. I’m against bloodshed, but a crowd of 500 basij shouldn’t be able to intimidate a group of 5,000 students. I tell them when I was seventeen revolting against the Shah, I figured myself Che Guevara in the Sierra Madre. We were ready to sacrifice ourselves for the cause, for Islam. But they are not organised and are too easily discouraged. They thought by gathering a few thousand people and chanting slogans and honking the horns of their cars they could bring down the government. I tell them, “you need to organise a crowd of 100,000 people to remove the mayor [of Tehran], 1 million to remove the president, and 10 million to remove the Supreme Leader. Are you ready to do that?”
For now, the movement is decidedly against a revolution. But revolutions do not announce their arrival in advance. Rather, a contention builds up to a point where protestors find themselves capturing barracks or opening prison-gates, and adversaries in a desperate rush to cross borders. This depends as much on the dynamics of the contention as how the adversaries behave. Today, the protestors clearly want a reform, not a revolution. But the future will tell if the regime will not turn these reformers into revolutionaries.