Category Archives: Iran

The fifth anniversary of the 1999 student uprising in Iran falls on 8 July–18 Tir by the Persian calendar. The constitutional monarchy-oriented Iranian Voice describes the events of that day and offers a photo gallery.

Five years ago the Islamic Regime forces attacked the student dorm on July 8 as students held a peaceful gathering protesting the closure of a popular daily paper. Islamic regime reported one person dead and 34 other injured but the press reported that the number of fatalities and injured was much higher. Some 4,000 demonstrators were said to have been arrested.

The left-oriented Iran National Front, supporters of former Prime Minister Mossadegh–elected in April 1951, deposed by coup d’état on 19 August 1953 (28 Mordad)–posted a long write-up on the first anniversary of the uprising.

Today, we observe the first anniversary of the pro-democracy uprising, which was led by the students and widely supported by the Iranian people that was crushed by the dictatorship. On the night of 18 Tir 1378 (July 8, 1999), after the pro-democracy students had returned to their dormitories from their protest sit-in against the closure of a newspaper, in the middle of night, the forces of repression attacked student dormitories, murdered and beat up our young brave students, and imprisoned the pro-democracy nationalist activists. The forces of tyranny attempted to destroy the opponents of dictatorship, whether the student activists, nationalist activists, or the ordinary people on the streets who have had enough with the ruling dictatorship.

And the right-oriented Activist Chat quotes Human Rights Watch.

“The European Union’s weak response to continuing human rights violations in Iran is deeply disturbing,” said Whitson, “It’s time for the European Union to condemn Iran’s record of persecution and torture and to set real benchmarks that the government must meet.” Human Rights Watch called on the Iranian government to release all political prisoners and effectively prohibit torture immediately.

The Democracy for Iran website based in Germany has a listing of demonstrations around the world on this date. When left, right, and center are agin’ ya, ya gotta be screwing up big time.

In the lead-up to this date, Far Outliers has posted a series of excerpts from V.S. Naipaul’s account of his travels in Iran in 1979-80 and in 1995: on the hanging judge of the revolution, on revolutionary disillusionment, on punishing the bourgeoisie, on revolutionary fashion, and on the revolutionary blame game after things began to go sour. I have no idea how accurate Naipaul’s impressions are, but I suspect they capture a prevailing sense of twin disillusionment with both the Khomeini Revolution and the likely outcomes of either counterrevolution or progressive revolution. On this score, you can count me ‘cautiously pessimistic’.

The final installment follows.

They want to control your way of sitting and your way of talking, Mr. Parvez said. And Tehran at night, in some of its main roads, was like an occupied city, or like a city in a state of insurrection, with Revolutionary Guards and, sometimes, the more feared Basiji volunteers at roadblocks. They were not looking–on these almost personal night hunts–for terrorists so much as for women whose hair was not completely covered. And not so much for weapons as for alcohol or compact discs or cassettes (music was suspect, and women singers were banned).

The people of Tehran could spot these roadblocks before the visitor did. One night, when we passed some people who had been picked up, the lady driving us said it was all a matter of knowing how to talk to the Guards. Once, when she was stopped, she had said, as though really wishing to know, “What is wrong with my hijab [headdress], my son?” And the young man, of simple background, not feeling himself rebuffed or challenged by the lady, but thinking he was being treated correccty, had let her go. Such were the ways of obedience and survival that people had learnt here.

But parallel with this was a feeling that this kind of humiliation couldn’t go on. Though all the capacity for revolution or even protest had been eradicated after forty years of hope and letdown, and people were now simply weary, after all the bloodletting–first of protesters in the Shah’s time, and then of the Shah’s people after the revolution, and the communists, together with the terrible slaughter of the war–there was a feeling now, with that weariness, that something had to snap in Iran. And, almost as part of wishing for that breaking point, stories were being told now that Khomeini had really been foisted on the Iranian people by the great powers; and that certain important mullahs were making their approaches to people to ask for their goodwill when things changed, and the Islamic Republic was abandoned.

That was 9 years ago.

SOURCE: Beyond Belief: Islamic Excursions Among the Converted Peoples (Vintage, 1998), pp. 154-155

UPDATE: Robert Tagorda recorded his experience of the 2003 commemoration in Los Angeles.

My new friend told me that he moved from Tehran to “Irangeles” when he was eight. Since then, he said, he’s been organizing demonstrations, calling CNN and other news organizations regularly to devote more time to the mullahs’ atrocities, and distributing videos of women stoned to death. He accepted that his 72,000 brothers and sisters in the area couldn’t all be there with us, though it troubled him a little to think that the “majority of the silent” would likely be the first to enjoy a free Iran. When I asked him if his group ever approached the antiwar students at nearby UCLA, he only questioned why they didn’t speak out when Iraq fought his people. When I asked him if President Bush should intervene, he flatly said “no”: Iranians themselves are ready to take back their country….

I left with mixed feelings, but my optimism prevailed. In 1986, at the age of nine, I immigrated from the Philippines as the People Power Revolution brought democracy. Sue me for believing that Iranians can do the same.

Pejman Yousefzadeh (Pejmanesque) has much more.

No one I met spoke of any kind of revolution as a possibility. That idea, so loved by Iranians of an earlier generation, had been spoilt now, as in the old USSR; revolution was a word that had been taken over by the religious state. No one ever spoke of the possibility of political action. There were no means, and no leaders in sight. No new ideas could be floated. The apparatus of control was complete. The actual rulers, though their photographs appeared everywhere, were far away; government here, as someone said, was “occult.” And still, in the general inanition, there was a feeling that something was about to happen. It made people nervous.

One afternoon, as we were driving up into the mountains above Tehran, Mehrdad, after seeming to say that people had learned how to live with the restrictions, abruptly said the opposite. He said, “Everybody is frightened. I am frightened. My father and mother are frightened.” (Poor father, again.) “They are not sure what the future will bring for them or for us, their children. They are not so worried for me. I am an adult now and can look after myself. But my brother is very young. The eight years or so he has to live before he becomes an adult are going to be very dangerous years.”

With this insecurity, certain fantasies had taken hold. The most extraordinary was that Khomeini had been a British or European agent. I had heard it first from Mr. Parvez, and had thought it part of his paranoia. But then I had heard it from many other people. There had been a meeting in the French West Indian island of Guadeloupe, according to this story, and the Powers had decided to foist Khomeini on the Iranian people. The Iranians were simple people; they could be persuaded by skilled propaganda to demonstrate for anything; people had joined the demonstrations against the Shah not out of conviction, but simply to do what everybody else was doing. The establishing of an Islamic state in Iran was an anti-Islamic plot by the Powers, to teach Muslims a lesson, and especially to punish the people of Iran. And, as if answering those fantasies, there were even signs of the faith being questioned in certain aspects.

Mr. Parvez had said, “The war [against Iraq] was fought in the name of Islam. It was a blessing in disguise. Without the war people wouldn’t have got so fed up with Islam.” That had seemed extreme. But then I had detected wisps and shadows of religious uncertainty in some people’s conversation. Just as–in these fantasies issuing out of a people stretched to the limit by revolution, war, financial stringency, and the religious state–it was said that Iranians were not really responsible for the Iranian revolution, so I heard that Iranians were not really responsible for the more dramatic aspects of the Shia faith. The bloody scourgings of Mohurram, the mourning month: the idea was really imported from Europe, from the Catholics; it had nothing to do with the original faith.

I talked about this to Mehrdad. He said, “It’s something habitual. Our enemies are always responsible. Blaming others, not ourselves.”

SOURCE: Beyond Belief: Islamic Excursions Among the Converted Peoples (Vintage, 1998), pp. 226-227

PAYDAR, GROWING UP in poverty in the poor northwest, was possessed by the idea of revolution From an early age, he was tormented by what he saw every day and every night of the suffering of his widowed mother. She stitched clothes and made socks and stockings for a living. and often sat at her machine until two in the morning.

In time Paydar joined the Tudeh communist party. The Tudeh hoped to ride to power on the back of the religious movement, and in the early days of the revolution it was the policy of the party to adopt an Islamic camouflage. That was easy enough: the themes of justice and punishment and the wickedness of rulers were common to both ideologies. But the Tudeh party destroyed itself. It gave a Soviet-style apparatus to the Islamic revolution. and then it was destroyed by that apparatus.

Ali, in his provincial factory-shed jail in 1980 and 1981, had seen the beginning of the roundup of the left. Though the enraged communists in the political section of Ali’s jail were still threatening to hang Ali outside his house when they came to power, their day in Iran was really over. Two years later, in 1983, the Tudeh party was formally outlawed by the government. And two years after that. Paydar, who was in hiding, like the surviving members of the party, was hunted down and taken away to a jail outside Tehran.

Paydar didn’t know then in what part of the country the jail was; he didn’t know now. For two months, as he calculated, he was kept in something like a hole, without a window, “without a speck of light,” and questioned. And it was in that darkness and intense solitude, that disconnectedness from things–at first in the hole, and then in a cell with fourteen others, where he spent a further year–that he began to think dispassionately about the idea of revolution that had driven him for so much of his adult life. And he arrived at an understanding–especially painful in the circumstances–of why he had been wrong, and “why revolutions are doomed to fail.”

“I thought that people are much too complicated in their nature to be led in a simple fashion, with a few slogans. Inside ourselves we are full of greed, love, fear, hatred. We all carry our own history and past. So when we come to make a revolution we bring with ourselves all these factors in different proportions. Revolutions have always disregarded all these individual differences.”

So, in the jail, he had rejected the idea of revolution. It had been his great support, the equivalent of religion; and no other idea quite so vital had come to him afterwards. He was like a man in whom something had been extinguished. He was a big man from the northwest. It was possible to imagine him full of fire. Now he was strangely pacific; his suffering, old and new, was always there to make him watch his moods, consider his words, and make him take the edge off passion or complaint. He was trying now–exposed as he was, and liable to be picked up again at any time–to make a cause out of his privacy, his family life; though day-to-day life was hard, and in the economic mess of revolutionary Iran, and with the decline of the currency, the value of his earnings as a teacher went down and down.

SOURCE: Beyond Belief: Islamic Excursions Among the Converted Peoples (Vintage, 1998), pp. 179-180

WHEN I WENT TO TEHRAN in August 1979, Ayatollah Khalkhalli, the hanging judge of the revolution, was a star. The Islamic Revolutionary Court in Shariati Street was sitting almost round the clock, as Ali had said. People were being killed all the time in Evin Prison and trucks were taking away the bodies through the blue gates at night.

There was nothing secretive or abashed about this killing. Some revolutionary official was keeping count, and regularly in the Tehran Times there was an update. In the beginning the counting was to show how clement the revolution was; later, when the killing became too much, the counting stopped. In those early days official photographs were taken of people before they were killed and after they were killed–killed and, as it were, filed away, naked on the sliding mortuary slab, in the giant filing cabinet of the morgue. These pictures were on sale in the streets.

Ayatollah Khalkhalli, the ruler of the Islamic Revolutionary Court, was open to the press. He was giving many boastful interviews. I went with an interpreter to see him in Qom. It was Ramadan, the fasting month; and Qom was where the ayatollah had temporarily retired to fast and pray. It was August and very hot in the desert. When we got to Qom we had to wait for more than five hours until the ayatollah had finished his prayers and broken his fast. This was at nine in the evening. We found him then sitting on the floor of the verandah of his modest house, at the center of a little court also sitting on the floor: his guards, some Iranian admirers, and a respectful, formally dressed African couple (the man in a light gray suit, the woman in a chiffon-like, sari-like garment) who were visiting.

The ayatollah was white and bald and very short, a clerical gnome, messily attired. He liked, perhaps because of his small size, to clown. His jokes were about executions, and then his court threw themselves about with laughter. He also liked–and this mannerism might have come with his hanging duties–abruptly to stop clowning and for no reason to frown and grow severe.

He was from Azerbaijan in the northwest. He said he was the son of a farmer and as a boy he had been a shepherd. So, going by what Ali had said, Khalkhalli would have been just the kind of village boy for whom, fifty years or so before, the theological schools had offered the only way out: a room, food, and a little money. But Khalkhalli had almost nothing to say about his early life. All he said, with a choking, wide-throated laugh, was that he knew how to cut off a sheep’s head; and this was like another joke about executions, something for his little court. Perhaps, because he had never learned how to process or meditate on his experience, never having read widely enough or thought hard enough, his experience had simply gone by, and much of it had even been lost to him. Perhaps the thirty-five years (as he said) of theological studies in Qom had rotted his mind, pushed reality far away, given him only rules, and now with the revolution sunk him in righteousness and vanity. He was interested only in the present, his authority and reputation, and in his executioner’s work.

He said, “The mullahs are going to rule now. We are going to have ten thousand years of the Islamic Republic. The Marxists are going to go on with their Lenin. We are going to go on in the way of Khomeini.”

Revolution as blood and punishment, religion as blood and punishment: in Khalkhalli’s mind the two ideas seemed to have become one.

And, in fact, that double idea, of blood, fitted revolutionary Iran. Behzad, my interpreter, was a communist, and the son of a communist father. Behzad was twenty-four; with all his Iranian graces, his scientific education, and his social ambitions, he had his own dream of blood. His hero was Stalin. Behzad said, “What he did in Russia we have to do in Iran. We too have to do a lot of killing. A lot.”

SOURCE: Beyond Belief: Islamic Excursions Among the Converted Peoples (Vintage, 1998), pp. 200-201

The Argus has a fascinating post on the EU’s efforts to shut down Armenia’s Chernobyl-style nuclear power plant. (In addition to reactor design problems, Armenia is in a region prone to major earthquakes.)

The EU, true to form, dealt with the problem in the only way it knows how – it threw money at it. It agreed an aid package for which, in return, the Armenian government had to work to close the plant before the end of its lifespan in 2016. An alternative source of energy is available – the EU money was meant to go towards funding a gas pipeline from Iran. The trouble is, Armenia doesn’t seem to want to/doesn’t seem able to set a date.

So why isn’t Armenia playing ball? Why won’t it set a date and relieve the EU of its money? Basically, because the Iranians are not a particularly reliable partner for a country that has massive energy security issues. Armenia is a primarily Christian country; Iran isn’t. Although Iran supported Armenia in its war with Islamic Azerbaijan, the Armenian government remains suspicious that Iran’s friendship is one of convenience, and may not last into the long term. What if Iran were to shift its allegiance in any future conflict between Armenia and Azerbaijan? What if a future conflict in Iran were to cut off supplies? With no nuclear power, Armenia would find itself in dire straits. Already fearing that Azerbaijani oil-wealth will embolden it in Nagorno-Karabakh, Armenia must secure its future energy supplies. Without them, its position relative to Azerbaijan will only get weaker.

The EU thinks that by withdrawing the aid money it is going to be able to effectively bully Armenia into making a decision. Once it realizes that 100 million Euros are slipping out of its grasp, Armenia will back down. After all, it will have to close the Metsamor plant sometime – it might as well get paid for doing so. But I think it underestimates how important this issue is to Armenia. It simply cannot do without a reliable energy supply and is so desperate it may well consider extending the plant’s lifespan to ensure it….

Already 25% of Armenia’s electricity comes from hydro power, and there is plenty of scope for expanding that – in fact new plants are already being built. The EU itself is over-reliant on imported energy and taking steps to diversify its supply. It would be a shame if it didn’t apply the lessons it has learnt to other countries in a similar position.

I’d like to pay tribute here to the multitude of Iranian bloggers (aka Weblogestan) many of whom will be blogging their phony elections instead of voting on February 20, thanks in no small measure to pioneer and blogfather Hossein Derakhshan (aka Hoder), born in Tehran, but resident in Toronto since December 2000.

And I’d like to pay equal tribute to the smaller but growing numbers of Iraqi bloggers, pioneered by Salam Pax before the invasion and many blogfathered by Zeyad afterwards, who have been recording the successes and failures of both the occupation and the international media.

Here’s a sense of how revolutionary the message of the new medium has become in Iran, from Persianblogger‘s recent essay about Weblogestan:

The final example I will discuss is Hossein Derakhshan, the person who sparked off the vulgarity debate in the first place with his piece about the inherent contradictions between Islam and human rights. The work of Derakhshan, or Hoder, is a prime example of defiance against the cultural hegemony of the Iranian intellectual class. He can even be seen as trying to establish a new kind of cultural hegemony in the blogosphere; one that values self-expression, individualism, and even hedonism against any kind of traditional authority [15] . As far as language is concerned, Hoder says his blog is the “scratchpad of my mind” (2003b) and his language “is consciously messy” (2003a). He prefers to spend his time writing a new entry instead of going back over what he has already written to correct possible grammatical or spelling mistakes (ibid). Additionally, he has no qualms about coining new terms (like donbaalak for trackback, and linkdooni for linkdump – both blog-related terms) without feeling any need to consult a linguistic authority, and is especially good at putting carnivalesque twists on familiar expressions, like “aytiollaahi” [16] , which combines “IT” (information technology) and “hezbollaahi” and refers mockingly to religious conservative technocrats, and “fakhr-ol internet hazrateh muvebel taaip (saad)” [17] , which both expresses extreme devotion for MovableType (a prominent blogging tool) and pokes fun at the Prophet Muhammad (or his devotees at least) by making use of a popular phrase that is used to praise him. Interestingly enough, Hoder does not share the same attitude towards the English language as he does towards Persian. Being an undergraduate student at the University of Toronto, he has bemoaned several times the difficulties of writing essays in English, and he once linked to an online resource with guidelines on writing well in English, which he described as “very useful”. Hoder’s approach to cultural hegemony, then, is highly differentiated between Persian and English speech communities: whereas he directly assaults authority in the former, he feels a need to assimilate in the latter.

UPDATE: Click here for English translations of live election reports from Persian blogs.