In the bulk of e-mail messages filled with films, pictures, and articles from and about Iran I have chosen three pictures from the last two weeks to try to throw light on the cause and the content of the ongoing revolt in the country. All three are examples of what is called “citizen journalism”–what has been deployed immediately after the ban on professional journalism and the expulsion of foreign reporters in the wake of the public protests related to accusations of election fraud last June.
The first one is from a public execution in the south eastern town of Sirjan, when the crowd disrupt the procedure by attacking the guards and cutting off the ropes from which the two victims, still alive, have been hanging. The cut off rope is on the right hand side of the picture and helping hands are reaching out to the prostrate, covered body of one of the victims that is being carried to safety.
Public executions by hanging or stoning have been part of the project of the Islamic Republic to normalise violence and brutalise the population. Since 1979 the implementation of Sharia law has reduced the concept of justice to retribution, or an-eye-for-an eye. Small theft is punished by cutting off the hand of the thief, and if one has caused the loss of an eye his eye will be gorged out. Murder is considered a familial rather than a social crime, and if the “owners of the blood,” i.e. the family of the victim, refuse to settle by taking blood money (the sum of which is set by the state) they are asked by the Sharia judge to kick the stool on which the person condemned to hanging, with the noose round his neck, is standing.
The picture of the saving of the hanging victims is the visible statement of a group of people who have refused to adjust to the cruelty of the law of retribution.
The second picture from December 27in Tehran is that of a woman with a white breathing mask as protection against tear gas with traces of blood on her face, defiantly holding her fingers out to the camera with a V sign. Her posture is typical of millions of Iranian women who have populated the streets of big cities over the last six months. They have been on the fore front of protest demonstrations, confronting the riot police or diverting their attention from the men they are about to arrest. Their reaction can only be understood against the background of thirty years of humiliation and disenfranchisement. They have been subjected to the daily insult and control of compulsory veil and sexual segregation in public places. These women have been asked to accept to live together with three other co-wives that the law allows their husbands to marry. Moreover, the man, according to Shiite law, is allowed to marry an indefinite number of “temporary” wives against payment provided that a paid mullah is present to sanction the liaison. If the woman, however, chooses to love outside marriage she is liable to being stoned to death. She is considered marriageable at the age of nine, and if she decides to leave her husband she receives no alimony and loses the custody of her children. She cannot travel or enter employment without the written consent of her male guardian or her husband. If she is killed her blood money is half that of a man, her share of inheritance is half that of her brother, and her testimony counts for half that of a male witness. It should therefore not come as a surprise if these women have come to the conclusion that they have nothing to lose and everything to gain from living under a modern, secular state.
The third picture, also from December 27, is that of a young man holding a light pole to deliver a harder blow to a riot police who is trying to escape the chasing crowd. In his rage is unleashed the answer to thirty years of political oppression, economic deprivation, and social and individual humiliation. The clerical elite and their allies have monopolised power, wealth, and the mass media, depriving the rest of the people not only of free political and artistic expression, but of expression of taste and choice in small matters of daily life such as listening to music, the choice of food and drink, the right to wear a T shirt with a message or a picture, or take the hand of a girl you love when walking the street. If you are a homosexual you are hanged even if you are a minor. You have witnessed the drop in your income to the level that has produced the tens of thousands of street children, hundreds of thousands of prostitutes, and millions of heroin or opium addicts. No wonder, then, the zeal that motivates citizen journalism at the risk to one’s life.
Thirty years of superficial reporting of the Iranian situation by the Western press has neglected the build-up to the present momentum. Even now, presenting the alleged election fraud as the cause of the revolt rather than the ignition key to the expression of three decades of accumulated frustration leaves the public outside Iran quite perplexed. Election fraud, not uncommon even in Western democracies, cannot explain the outpour of energy that we are witnessing. Western politicians, including Swedish ones, alarmed by the prospect of a radical political change in Iran that would inevitably affect the entire region and their own adjustments to the existing regimes, condone the superficial reporting and refuse to go beyond the condemnation of human rights over the last six months. In this they find themselves in the company of the reformist faction of the Iranian power structure that lost the June election.
The surprise element in the Iranian situation defies the wisdom of Western media, trained to focus on the power structure at the top. The extreme form of control that the Islamic Republic has tried to impose has boomeranged in a way that this type of reportage finds difficult to explain. The peculiar form of the ongoing resistance without centralised leadership appears to have followed the example of the women’s movement over the last three years. The internet and the network form of organisation that it is implementing perfectly fit this diffuse form of political activity.
There is no way of predicting the outcome of the ongoing popular movement. However, any possible compromise at the top, bringing one or the other faction of the existing system to power, even with the blessing of the West, will have to grapple with the minimum demand of the separation of religion from the state as reflected in the slogans of various groups of demonstrators. No government with a constitution based on Sharia law can get round such a demand.
