By: The Guardian, June 25, 2009
Bloody clashes broke out in Tehran yesterday as Iran’s supreme leader said he would not yield to pressure over the disputed election. The renewed confrontation took place in Baharestan Square, near parliament, where hundreds of protesters faced off against several thousand riot police and other security personnel.
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Brainstorming Iran: An x-ray of immediate history
By: Al Giordano, Narconews, June 23, 2009
Last night, I instigated a sit-down skull session with seven colleagues that are closely following the situation in Iran, with, between them, encyclopedic knowledge (and lived experience) of the history civil resistance movements in Iran and around the world, to see if we could agree on an objective set of facts to describe what is happening and brainstorm on what might happen next.
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How Iran betrayed its young
By: Massoumeh Torfeh, The Guardian, June 23, 2009
The gruesome footage of the young girl, Neda, who fell to the ground during Saturday’s protest march in Tehran – her face covered in blood and her eyes still gazing at friends shocked by her instant death – was probably the most horrendous single image out of Iran since the 12 June elections. The footage, now authenticated by Neda’s fiance, encapsulates in less than one minute the brutality of a regime that cannot tolerate dissent even from the young.
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Iranian legislative panel hints at legal action against Mousavi
By: Thomas Erdbrink, The Guardian, June 23, 2009
The Iranian parliament’s judiciary committee raised the possibility Monday of legal action against opposition leader Mir Hossein Mousavi, while government forces violently dispersed a crowd protesting alleged fraud in the June 12 presidential election. After state news media took aim at Mousavi on Sunday, accusing him of supporting an illegal mass movement, the head of the parliamentary judiciary committee suggested that the former prime minister was criminally liable for the recent unrest.
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Iran election annulment ruled out
By: BBC News, June 23, 2009
Iran’s legislative body, the Guardian Council, has said there were no major polling irregularities in the 12 June election and ruled out an annulment. Opposition supporters called for the vote to be set aside and the elections re-run amid claims of vote tampering. Iran has also condemned UN chief Ban Ki-moon for “meddling” in its affairs.
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Iran: Ahmadinejad to be sworn in as president by August
By: Mark Tran and Julian Borger, The Guardian, June 23, 2009
Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the winner of Iran’s disputed presidential election, is to be sworn in by mid-August, Iranian media reported today after the authorities ruled out an annulment of the result. IRNA, the official Iranian news agency, said Ahmadinejad, who won a “closely contested and disputed 10th presidential election”, would be sworn in before parliament between 26 July and 19 August.
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In a death seen around the world, a symbol of Iranian protests
By: Nazila Fathi, NY Times, June 22, 2009
It was hot in the car, so the young woman and her singing instructor got out for a breath of fresh air on a quiet side street not far from the antigovernment protests they had ventured out to attend. A gunshot rang out, and the woman, Neda Agha-Soltan, fell to the ground. “It burned me,” she said before she died.
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How Neda Soltani became the face of Iran’s struggle
By: Robert Tait and Matthew Weaver, The Guardian, June 22, 2009
Shortly after 5pm on Saturday ¬afternoon, Hamed, an Iranian asylum seeker in the ¬Netherlands, took a frantic call from a friend in Tehran. “A girl has just been killed right next to me,” the friend said. It had all ¬happened quickly. A young woman, chatting on her mobile phone, had been shot in the chest. She faded before a doctor, who was on the scene, could do anything to help.
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Web pries lid of Iranian censorship
By: Brian Stelter and Brad Stone, NY Times, June 22, 2009
Shortly after Neda Agha-Soltan bled her life out on the Tehran pavement, the man whose 40-second video of her death has ricocheted around the world made a somber calculation in what has become the cat-and-mouse game of evading Iran’s censors. He knew that the government had been blocking Web sites like YouTube and Facebook. Trying to send the video there could have exposed him and his family.
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Iran uprising more than spontaneous
By: Darab Ganji and Robert Jordan, Dallas Morning News, June 22, 2009
Despite attempts to shield the increasing brutality through an international media blackout, the world is witnessing the Iranian people heroically and courageously defying the authority and ruthlessness of Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei and the Islamic Republic system. Iranians are expanding their nonviolent demonstrations and expressing legitimate demands for freedom and human rights, despite violent and indiscriminate suppression attempts by the mullah regime’s Basij militia and thugs.
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Tech giants deny helping Iran eavesdrop
By: Declan McCullagh, CNET News, June 22, 2009
A joint venture of Siemens AG and Nokia Corp., two large European technology firms, is denying reports that Iran uses its Web-monitoring technology to censor and spy on its citizens’ online activities. Nokia Siemens Networks said Monday that it has sold telecommunications systems to the Iranian government but that any built-in monitoring technology was for voice communications and not the Internet.
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Iranian rally is dispersed as voting errors are admitted
By: Nazila Faghi and Alan Cowell, NY Times, June 22, 2009
Hours after a warning from the powerful Revolutionary Guards not to return to the streets, about a thousand protesters defiantly gathered in central Tehran on Monday and were quickly dispersed in an overwhelming show of force by police who used clubs and tear gas.
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Video: Examining footage from Iran
By: BBC News, June 22, 2009
BBC Persian TV’s Rana Rahimpour takes a look at some of the videos of demonstrations in Iran that have been sent in to the BBC. All of the footage is said to be from Saturday, when pro-reformist protesters clashed with riot police on the streets of Tehran. Iranian state television has reported that 10 people were killed in the violence.
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Struggling to be heard in Iran
By: David Batty and Saeed Kamali Dehghan, The Guardian, June 22, 2009
Social media networks, such as Twitter, dominated foreign media coverage of the disputed presidential election in Iran and its aftermath. But for many news organisations, it was the unusually repressive reporting restrictions that were most notable. Ben de Pear, the foreign editor of Channel 4 News, says the mainstream media have been grappling with tougher reporting restrictions in Iran than they faced during last year’s Zimbabwean elections.
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Citizen media and the Iranian protests
By: Mary Joyce, DigiActive, June 22, 2009
One the big stories with regard to digital activism in Iran has been the use of citizen media to disseminate information about the protests. The picture above, from the front page of today’s New York Times is putatively an image of the daughter of reformist cleric Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, but could just as easily be an illustration of the new media environment: no less than eight cell phones and digital cameras are recording the event.
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Without US help, Iranians learn to stand on their own
By: Trudy Rubin. Philadelphia Inquirer, June 21, 2009
The ongoing drama in Iran marks a turning point in Middle East history – precisely because the United States has chosen, so far, not to intervene. The Republican politicians charging President Obama with failing to defend Iranian “freedom” have totally missed the significance of what happened last week in Tehran.
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Unrest in Iran sharply deepens rift among clerics
By: Nazila Fathi and Michael Slackman, NY Times, June 21, 2009
A bitter rift among Iran’s ruling clerics deepened Sunday over the disputed presidential election that has convulsed Tehran in the worst violence in 30 years, with the government trying to link the defiant loser to terrorists and detaining relatives of his powerful backer, a founder of the Islamic republic.
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Obama: Iran must stop ‘violent and unjust actions’
By: VOA News, June 21, 2009
U.S. President Barack Obama has urged Iran’s government to “stop all violent and unjust actions against its own people.” In his strongest response to Iran’s post-election unrest, Mr. Obama said the Iranian government must understand that the world is watching. He called on Iran to “govern through consent, not coercion.”
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Iran: Young woman describes beating at hands of paramilitary
By: CNN, June 21, 2009
A 19-year-old woman who was wounded by Iranian paramilitary forces with clubs escaped with her camera and shared her photos with CNN — after tricking a paramilitary soldier into thinking she had given him the images on a disk. The woman — whose identity is being withheld by CNN — said Sunday that on the previous day “the streets were full of guards and policemen.” “They were hitting everyone, and everywhere was fire because of the tear gas they throw at us,” she said.
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Newsweek journalist ‘detained without charge’ in Iran
By: CNN, June 21, 2009
A Canadian working for Newsweek magazine in the Iranian capital was “detained without charge” by Iranian authorities Sunday, the magazine said in a statement. Maziar Bahari has not been heard from since Sunday morning, Newsweek said. A journalist and filmmaker, Bahari has been living in Iran and covering the country for the past decade, according to the statement.
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Boycott Iran’s oil immediately
By: Raymond J. Learsy, Huffington Post, June 21, 2009
The outrage we are witnessing on television and over the airwaves is an abomination to all fair minded people. To see the street beatings of innocents, the shooting of demonstrators, the silent march of millions has exposed the emptiness and extremism of the governing mullahs. The loser, Mir Hussein Moussavi, fired back at his accusers on Sunday night in a posting on his Web site, calling on his own supporters to demonstrate peacefully despite stern warnings from Iran’s top leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, that no protests of the vote would be allowed.
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Iran: Bullets and barrels
By: Thomas L. Friedman, NY Times, June 20, 2009
The popular uprising unfolding in Iran right now really is remarkable. It is the rarest of rare things – more rare than snow in Saudi Arabia, more unlikely than finding a ham sandwich at the Wailing Wall, more unusual than water-skiing in the Sahara. It is a popular uprising in a Middle Eastern oil state.
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Iran: The power of plenty
By: Jack DuVall, The New Republic, June 20, 2009
The panoramic view on Thursday of more than a million Iranians filling the streets of Tehran, on the sixth straight day of swelling popular demonstrations against the Iranian regime’s mangled election and ensuing street violence, has been an undeniable inspiration to the tens of millions who’ve seen it. But posting a photograph on a wall in an office in New York, or watching a few YouTubes in an apartment in Paris, doesn’t begin to convey what the protesters have accomplished by creating such unprecedented new public space in Iran, and how much they’ve altered the psychological and political reality on the ground.
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UN experts protest Iran arrests
By: Human Rights Tribune, June 20, 2009
Five independent United Nations experts have voiced their grave concern about the use of excessive police force, arbitrary arrests and killings during the past week in the Islamic Republic of Iran. This also seriously hampers freedom of expression and assembly and the situation of human rights defenders in the country.
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Iran: A regime’s fate and its ‘foreign interventionist Kool-Aid’
By: Alexandra Zavis, LA Times, June 20, 2009
Lots of observers are weighing in today on this week’s dramatic protests in Iran. Fareed Zakaria, an author and foreign affairs analyst who hosts a news show on CNN, says a “fatal wound” has been delivered to the Iranian regime’s ideology. Jack DuVall, founding director of the International Center on Nonviolent Conflict, writes today for The New Republic about the “power of plenty.”
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After Khamenei’s sermon, intense realism in Iran
By: Steve Aquino, Mother Jones, June 19, 2009
In his first public sermon since last Friday’s presidential election, Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, issued a stark warning to the opposition leaders who are disputing Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s re-election: halt the protests or be “responsible for bloodshed and chaos.”
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Iran: Podcast – Advice for Iranian protesters
By: Radio Netherlands Worldwide, June 19, 2009
A disputed election, hundreds of thousands of people in the streets, and a real risk of a violent crackdown. Belgrade in October 2000 was ripe for revolution, and Ivan Marovic was one of the protesters making it all happen. As a member of the Otpor! (“Resistance”) student movement, Marovic sought to throw Slobodan Milosevic from power. Listen as Ivan Marovic explains how he and his fellow organizers slowly converted low-level police officers to decide not to take sides, and his advice for today’s protesters in Iran.
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Iran: Pondering a popular revolution?
By: Mark N. Katz, EurasiaNet, June 19, 2009
Many analysts in the West have expressed the opinion that Iranian hardliners will eventually suppress ongoing demonstrations in Tehran and elsewhere. Given this likelihood, they add, the best course of action for the United States is not to do anything that alienates either Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei or President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, and thus do nothing that might jeopardize US-Iranian rapprochement possibilities. But recent developments in Tehran suggest that a genuine, popular revolution may be taking root that could dramatically alter Iran’s political landscape.
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Iran: The start of the end game in Tehran
By: EurasiaNet, June 19, 2009
It would appear that Iran’s political crisis is entering the end-game phase. Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei appeared to slam the door June 19 on any chance of a political compromise. In a sermon at Tehran University, he resolutely defended the integrity of the country’s rigged presidential election result, and threatened protesters with retribution. The only way now open for Iran to resolve the presidential election controversy is through a test of strength. The harsh tone of Ayatollah Khamenei’s sermon suggests that hardliners are prepared to resort to force in order to defend Iran’s theocracy.
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Iranian elections, information sharing and Twitter
By: Kate Brodock, DigiActive, June 19, 2009
Earlier this week, amidst travel and trying really hard to work, I followed the events of what was happening in Iran post-election. I followed it all on Twitter. There are many comments I could make on the events, but I wanted to highlight something that will be important for how information and participation happens in the months and years to come. The fact is, we are all becoming a larger part of the information dissemination mechanisms that were once reserved for formal media channels.
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Iran: Green silent protest movement in photos
By: Hamid Tehrani, Global Voices, June 18, 2009
Protesters all over Iran continue their demonstrations against the June 12 presidential election result that declared Mahmoud Ahmadinejad the winner. Supporters of Ahmadinejad’s challenger, Mir Hussein Mousavi, and many Iranians who profess to believe in “change” continue to use the colour green as the symbol of their movement. Mousavi and Mehdi Karoubi, the other reformist candidate, have asked people to stay calm and protest peacefully.
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