ISTANBUL, Turkey — For a foreign correspondent, private life always seems to take a back seat to work. Though I have conveniently solved the problem by effectively abolishing my own private life, these Christmas holidays have been a particularly trying time as Iran’s crisis — a story I have covered since its first stages in June — reaches melting point.
First came the death of Grand Ayatollah Ali Montazeri, unleashing crowds into the streets for a funeral of high drama. Then, ordinary townfolk took it into their own hands to interrupt a public hanging, pelt the police with stones and rescue the criminals who were already dangling from their nooses. Finally, there was Sunday’s extraordinary scenes, as demonstrators and riot police fought each other in the streets in pitched battles in the most widespread, violent and bloody demonstrations since this crisis began last summer.
Ashura is a major religious festival. Its 40 days of mourning for the death of a grandson of the Prophet resemble Easter in their commemoration of a violent death. Mourners sacrifice sheep in memory of the foundational event in Shiism and decorate streets and mosques with bloodstained banners. This year, it overlapped with the Christmas and New Year’s holidays.
Thankfully, one of the side-effects of hardly having a personal life is that most of my friends are byproducts of my vocation: covering the Middle East. Which is why yesterday I was joined by an Iranian guest in an obsessive huddle as we tracked news coming out of Iran.
We both wished more than anything else that we could be there. But the sheer torrent of information pouring out of websites — opposition and government-aligned — created an impression of being very intimate with the crowds and smoke pouring out of burning police vehicles into Tehran’s high-altitude atmosphere.
Thousands of people surged through Tehran’s leafy boulevards. Unlike the last six months, when people passively stood aside to receive beatings at the hands of pro-government forces, this time protesters reacted. They reached out to hit the Basiji militiamen, stoned anti-riot policemen and claimed shields, helmets and even batons from demoralized law enforcement officers. Although the police had the right to fire, and at least eight demonstrators died in alleged shootings, there was no news of some of the booty snatched from the police including firearms.
My guest and I tuned in to the major news networks every hour on the hour. But bereft of correspondents on the ground in Tehran, BBC World, al-Jazeera English and CNN disappointed with their coverage. Press TV, the Iranian government’s English-language proposition for round-the-clock news coverage, was screening a documentary on Ashura in Africa. The Persian-language channels were broadcasting wall-to-wall, black-clad mourners beating their breasts within the walls of government-sanctioned mourning centers.
The Arabic channels were even more disappointing: though they have active bureaus in Tehran and correspondents on the ground, they were too busy commemorating the first anniversary since the Israeli invasion of Gaza last year yesterday to look at their neighbour across the Persian Gulf.
So it was back to news sites and Facebook, by far the best tailor-made news source at hand. A bewildering torrent of information streamed down my Facebook homepage, announcing moment-by-moment updates from demonstrators in Tehran and other cities. The most professional news source for the Green Movement was Rahesabz (Green Path) (rahesabz.net/) which was the victim of repeated cyber-attacks and down for much of the day; the editor of the reformist site Parlemannews had just been arrested; and the offices of the newspaper Etemad were raided and its computers confiscated.
But out on the streets, every demonstrator wielded their camera-enabled cellphones to turn themselves into individual news sources. If the Islamic Republic was going to ban or jail foreign journalists, the thinking went, then they were on their own in getting out news of the demonstrations.
Verification was our greatest concern. How did we know that we were seeing really came from Tehran on Sunday, Dec. 27? Some attempts were easily recognizable as frauds: one particularly impressive image of demonstrators attacking the police were illuminated by warm summer rays rather than the grayish sharpness of winter sunlight. The demonstrators wore T-shirts while the police were in their summer uniforms. Another image — shot from above and showing demonstrators surrounding a unit of riot police and pelting it with rocks — was possibly not taken in Iran: the shields and helmets were unfamiliar and the colour of the painted kerb was different from Tehran’s light green.
But the scenes unfolding over cellphone videos meticulously labelled and dated as they were uploaded spoke for themselves. And most of the material moving across our screens was genuine and verified by people we had added to our networks because we trusted them. Several times during the day we spoke to sources in Tehran who described what they were seeing with their own eyes: fires, overturned vehicles, hovering helicopters and the tragedy of humankind unfolding on the streets.
What a captivating spectacle it was. Demonstrators demonstrated that their campaign is not so much mere political opposition to a particular government as a generational and cultural sea shift of astonishing proportions. Signs of this began appearing early on in the day as the first grainy feeds trickled in over an Iranian Internet network that the government had slowed down to a crawl.
Despite the government banning the street-processions known as dasteh, for the first time in my life I saw crowds of Ashura mourners lifting their hands in the traditional gesture of striking oneself in penance, only to lower them without touching their breasts. This symbolic rejection of the Islamic Republic echoed earlier incidents when demonstrators subverted regime sanctioned slogans calling for Death to America and Israel into calling for the end of Russia and China, some of the Islamic Republic’s closest allies.
Entire boulevards resounded to an ear-splitting sound, as if mobile teams of blacksmiths had set up shop. A closer look revealed demonstrators serenading those dragging trash cans and felled street signs into barricades by rhythmically knocking rocks against any available metal surface: lamp-posts, railings, public phone boxes and the pedestrian walking grilles breaching the that carry ice flow from the mountains surrounding Tehran to the South. This eery soundtrack played over young men wearing gas-masks rolling smoking trash cans into battle while others, headscarfs covering their faces, smashed masonry and tore off pieces of pavement to use as projectiles against the regime.
So that was how I spent my own holidays. Perhaps my guest did not enjoy a typical Greek Christmas, but together we witnessed something far more important: the outpouring of one of the most epic cultural shifts in the history of Iran.
http://www.globalpost.com/notebook/middle-east/091228/iran-protests