100,000 Throng Streets of Tehran, Protester Shot to Death
VOA says Mir-Hosain Mousavi, the opposition candidate who says the Iranian election was stolen, held that supposedly forbidden and cancelled rally in Tehran after all. And an estimated 100,000 protesters showed up, thronging the streets.
Near an HQ of the paramilitary Basij pro-regime militia, shots rang out, leaving a protester dead and panicking the crowd.
The problem with shooting protesters in Iran is that there will be a funeral, which will be another occasion for protest; and then a memorial service (more protest) and then a 40-day memorial (more protest). If more protesters are shot at these commemorations of the fallen, there will be memorials and protests around them, too. This thing could grow.
End/ (Not Continued)
posted by Juan Cole @ 6/15/2009 02:09:00 PM
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17 Comments:
About "funerals and more protests". I remember well that about 3 years ago a very pro-USA imperialism Russian paper wrote about the same - as in Iran Azarbayjan people would do it - protest on funerals and so on and it would be the end of Iran "regime".
"Colour revolutions" (really - Western imperialsm founded coups) are not every time sucessful, and when they do - just look to Ukraine, Georgia, Serbia and so on...
Of course, prof. Cole does not believe that people could be class-based in politics, even though he itself is the best example of such behaviour
Novelist Doug Adams wrote that the job of his fictional president was to distract from the actual exercise of power.
I would be interested to hear Prof Cole's take on this Indian diplomats' analysis, which poses the election as as a major crisis in a long-simmering Rafsanjani-Khameini rivalry.
'Rafsanjani's gambit backfires'
By M K Bhadrakumar
http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Middle_East/KF16Ak05.html
Problem with shooting at protesters is also the fact that you can kill them :) Just a minor point you excluded in your otherwise excellent analysis :)
I suspect this has been a case of provocation ... given that eye witnesses say the protest was by and large peaceful and that the guards wew there but just watching, i suspect the ORDERS were to not shoot anyone ... this must have been an isolated case of a lune ... but it's interesting to see how things will develop ... i somehow think Mousavi and Khamenei have made some form of a deal and that today's rally was the pressure release valve ...
There are liveblogs of events in Iran that readers may find useful. They are at the Guardian, The Lede (NYTimes), and the Huffington Post. I've also been making regular updates here:
http://www.rabble.ca/blogs/bloggers/nima-maleki/2009/06/iran-post-election-news-regularly-updated
Not only that, the name of the dear protester will become a rallying cry, and the outrage of the shooting will be another focal point of the revolution that is brewing.
Ya Haqq!
From what I can see of the pictures taken http://www.boston.com/bigpicture/2009/06/irans_disputed_election.html (see picture 38), I'd say there were quite a bit more than 100K at the protest.
what do you make of this.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/06/14/AR2009061401757.html?wprss=rss_opinions
Sounds like a scaled down version of the G20 protests in London.
The Persians will have to fight for their liberty like everyone else has and good luck to them.
Some pictures from Monday's demonstration are posted here,
http://www.ghalamnews.ir/news-21136.aspx
Site is in persian but pictures speak for themselves. Btw, these people don't look like north tehranies to me!
Juan, I have been following your site SEVERAL times a day for well over a year now. Your work is the BEST analysis of the Middle East I know of. PLEASE - keep up the good work.
What is going on in Iran now is MORE IMPORTANT than most anything else going on in the world - IT IS CRUCIAL YOU continue to tell us your thoughts and GUIDE us to articles and commentaries that YOU THINK will be IMPORTANT to OUR understanding of the situation.
If this means you don't get any sleep for the next few months - tough - even sleepy you can lead us to kernels of knowledge that will help us TRULY understand this important and fascinating part of the world.
There is a constant conflation by some of "Iranian" and "Persian." Roughly half of Iran's population are not Aryan, and come from different ethnic groups. So, "Iranian" and "Persian" are not the same thing. One can be fully "Iranian" without being "Persian" (i.e. Aryan). Mousavi himself is Iranian Azeri.
Where is Ayatullah Sistani?
He single handedly undermined the Bush-Cheney-Rumsfeld plan to fix iraq's first post-Saddam "caucus" system by calling for a direct vote in 2004.
He is still an Iranian citizen, no?
Maybe he fears reprisal from Khamenei should this eventually die down?
Does he know something we all don't?
With a one sentence fatwa he can bring ahmedinejad's government to its end.
It would be very interesting if Sistani enetered this fray....
Lets stay tuned...
You can feel events taking on a momentum of their own ala People Power in the Philipines. Cable news is useless, as usual. Thanks for providing these updates.
Anonymous wrote: "Roughly half of Iran's population are not Aryan, and come from different ethnic groups"
Assuming that by "Aryan" Anonymous means "a speaker of an Indo-Iranian language" (though the term, for obvious reasons, is no longer used by linguists), then "Aryans" form about 70-75% of Iran's population. Among the "different (i.e. non-Persian) ethnic groups" of Iran are Gilakis, Mazanderanis, Kurds, Lurs, Baluchis, Talyshis and Bakhtiaris, all of whom are of Iranic origin and speak languages more or less closely related to Persian.
Of course Anonymous is right that Iranian (by nationality) and Persian (by speech) are not the same thing, any more than American (by nationality) and English (by speech) are the same thing, but then neither are Persian and "Aryan" the same thing -- the latter being comparable to "Germanic", which includes speakers of English, Dutch, German, Danish, Swedish, and Norwegian. On the other hand, Persian is the dominant language of Iran (used by many people who might self-identify as something other than Persian) and Persian culture is dominant and pervasive in Iran. So the distinction, while useful in some cases, is less useful or even confusing in others.
Mylegacy who is so like Iran that agree to grant it its right (how nice) and said NOT A WORD about monitoring very real Israel nukes, now said that Iranian elections "is MORE IMPORTANT than most anything else going on in the world"
Yes, sure, more than ongoing USA war crimes, more than ongoing Israel war crimes, more than Saudi Aravia being OK WITHOUT any elections, more than revolution in Venecuela.
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