Iran's day of destiny
Fisk witnesses the courage of one million protesters who ignored threats,
guns and bloodshed to demand freedom in Iran
By Robert Fisk
The Independent(UK): Tuesday, 16 June 2009
It was Iran's day of destiny and day of courage. A million of its people
marched from Engelob Square to Azadi Square - from the Square of Revolution
to the Square of Freedom - beneath the eyes of Tehran's brutal riot police.
The crowds were singing and shouting and laughing and abusing their
"President" as "dust".
Mirhossein Mousavi was among them, riding atop a car amid the exhaust smoke
and heat, unsmiling, stunned, unaware that so epic a demonstration could
blossom amid the hopelessness of Iran's post-election bloodshed. He may have
officially lost last Friday's election, but yesterday was his electoral
victory parade through the streets of his capital. It ended, inevitably, in
gunfire and blood.
Not since the 1979 Iranian Revolution have massed protesters gathered in
such numbers, or with such overwhelming popularity, through the boulevards
of this torrid, despairing city. They jostled and pushed and crowded through
narrow lanes to reach the main highway and then found riot police in steel
helmets and batons lined on each side. The people ignored them all. And the
cops, horribly outnumbered by these tens of thousands, smiled sheepishly
and - to our astonishment - nodded their heads towards the men and women
demanding freedom. Who would have believed the government had banned this
march?
The protesters' bravery was all the more staggering because many had already
learned of the savage killing of five Iranians on the campus of Tehran
University, done to death - according to students - by pistol-firing Basiji
militiamen. When I reached the gates of the college yesterday morning, many
students were weeping behind the iron fence of the campus, shouting
"massacre" and throwing a black cloth across the mesh. That was when the
riot police returned and charged into the university grounds once more.
At times, Mousavi's victory march threatened to crush us amid walls of
chanting men and women. They fell into the storm drains and stumbled over
broken trees and tried to keep pace with his vehicle, vast streamers of
green linen strung out in front of their political leader's car. They sang
in unison, over and over, the same words: "Tanks, guns, Basiji, you have no
effect now." As the government's helicopters roared overhead, these
thousands looked upwards and bayed above the clatter of rotor blades: "Where
is my vote?" Clichés come easily during such titanic days, but this was
truly a historic moment.
Would it change the arrogance of power which Mahmoud Ahmadinejad
demonstrated so rashly just a day earlier, when he loftily invited the
opposition - there were reported to be huge crowds protesting on the streets
of other Iranian cities yesterday - to be his "friends", while talking
ominously of the "red light" through which Mousavi had driven. Ahmadinejad
claimed a 66 per cent victory at the polls, giving Mousavi scarcely 33 per
cent. No wonder the crowds yesterday were also singing - and I mean actually
singing in chorus - "They have stolen our vote and now they are using it
against us."
A heavy and benevolent dust fell over us all as we trekked the great highway
towards the fearful pyramid of concrete which the Shah once built to honour
his father and which the 1979 revolutionaries re-named Freedom Square.
Behind us, among the stragglers, stones began to burst on to the road as
Basijis besieged the Sharif University (they seem to have something against
colleges of further education these days) and one man collapsed on the road,
his face covered in blood. But on the great mass of people moved, waving
their green flags and shouting in joy at the thousands of Iranians who stood
along the rooftops.
On the right, they all saw an old people's home and out on to the balcony
came the aged and the crippled who must have remembered the reign of the
loathed Shah, perhaps even his creepy father, Reza Khan. A woman who must
have been 90 waved a green handkerchief and an even older man emerged on the
narrow balcony and waved his crutch in the air. The thousands below them
shrieked back their joy at this ancient man.
Walking beside this vast flood of humanity, a strange fearlessness possessed
us all. Who would dare attack them now? What government could deny a people
of this size and determination? Dangerous questions.
By dusk, the Basiji were being chased by hundreds of protesters in the west
of the city but shooting was crackling around the suburbs after dark. Those
who were fatally too late in leaving Azadi, were fired on by the Basiji. One
dead, thousands in panic, we heard behind us.
After every day of sunlight, there usually comes a perilous darkness and
perhaps it was prefigured by the strange grey cloud that approached us all
as we drew closer to Azadi Square yesterday afternoon. Many of the thousands
of people around me noticed it and, burned by the afternoon sun, seemed to
walk faster to embrace its shade. Then it rained, it poured, it soaked us.
There is a faint rainy season in mid-summer Tehran but it had arrived early,
sunlight arcing through the clouds like the horizon in a Biblical painting.
Moin, a student of chemical engineering at Tehran University - the same
campus where blood had been shed just a few hours before - was walking
beside me and singing in Persian as the rain pelted down. I asked him to
translate.
"It's a poem by Sohrab Sepehri, one of our modern poets," he said. Could
this be real, I asked myself? Do they really sing poems in Tehran when they
are trying to change history? Here is what he was singing:
"We should go under the rain.
We should wash our eyes,
And we should see the world in a different way."
He grinned at me and at his two student friends. "The next line is about
making love to a woman in the rain, but that doesn't seem very suitable
here." We all agreed. Our feet hurt. We were still tripping over manhole
covers and kerbstones hidden beneath men's feet and women's chadors. For
this was not just the trendy, young, sunglassed ladies of north Tehran. The
poor were here, too, the street workers and middle-aged ladies in full
chador. A very few held babies on their shoulders or children by the arm,
talking to them from time to time, trying to explain the significance of
this day to a mind that would not remember it in the years to come that they
were here on this day of days.
The vast Azadi monument appeared through the grey light like a spaceship -
we had been walking for four miles - and Moin and his friends spent an hour
squeezing through a body of humanity so dense that my chest was about to be
crushed. Around the monument, the Shah had long ago built a grassed rampart.
We struggled to its height and there, suddenly, was the breathtaking nature
of it all. Readers who have seen the film Atonement will remember the scene
where the British hero-soldier climbs a sand-dune and suddenly beholds those
thousands on the beaches of Dunkirk. This was no less awesome.
Amid the great basin of grass and concrete that surrounds the monument were
a thousand souls, moving and swaying and singing in the new post-rain
sunlight. There must have been at least a million, and - here one struggles
for a metaphor - it was like a vast animal, a great heaving beast that
breathed and roared and moved sluggishly beneath that monstrous arrow of
concrete. Moin and his friends lay on the grass, smoking cigarettes. They
asked each other if the Supreme Leader would understand what this meant for
Iran. "He's got to hold the elections again," one of Moin's friends told
him. They looked at me. Don't ask a foreigner, I said. Because I'm not so
sure that the fathers of the 1979 revolution will look so kindly upon this
self-evident demand for freedom.
True, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the Supreme Leader - how antiquated that title
sounded yesterday - had agreed to enquire into the election results, perhaps
to look over a polling statistic or two. But Ahmadinejad, despite his
obtuseness and his unending smile, is a tough guy in a tough clerical
environment. His glorious predecessor, Hojatolislam Mohamed Khatami, was
somewhere down there amid the crowds, along with Mousavi and Mousavi's wife
Zahra Rahnavard, but they could not protect these people.
Government is not about good guys and bad guys. It is about power, state and
political power - they are not the same - and unless those wanly smiling
riot police move across to the opposition, the weapons of the Islamic
Republic remain in the hands of Ahmadinejad's administration and his
spiritual protectors. As, no doubt, we shall soon see.
***
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
June 16, 2009
1:34 PM
CONTACT: Congressman Dennis Kucinich
Nathan White (202)225-5871
Made in America - War
WASHINGTON - June 16 - Congressman Dennis Kucinich (D-OH) today made
the following statement against the war supplemental on the House floor:
"We are destroying our nation's moral and fiscal integrity with this
war supplemental. Instead of ending wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, and
Pakistan now by appropriating only enough money to bring our troops
home, Congress abdicates its constitutional authority, defers to the
president, and asks for a report. That's right, all we are asking for
is a report on when the president will end the war.
"There is also money for the IMF, presumably to bail out private
European banks. Billions for the IMF so they can force low and middle
income nations to cut jobs, wages, health care and retirement
security, just like corporate America does to our constituents.
"And there's money to incentivize the purchase of more cars, not
necessarily from U.S. manufacturers because a 'Buy America' mandate
was not allowed.
"Another $106 billion dollars and all we get is a lousy war. Pretty
soon that is going to be about the only thing made in America - war.
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