| In 2002, a popular Iranian professor and disabled veteran of the Iran-Iraq war said something controversial, in calling for an Islamic Protestantism, while criticizing the clergy for corruption and the use of torture.
Aghajari was sentenced to death. This proved to be extremely unpopular and the student-originated protests lasted for weeks, spreading beyond Tehran and including people from many walks of life.
The protests had begun to be coordinated through a call-in program on the US-sponsored Radio Azadi (Freedom), a Farsi-language version of Radio Free Europe.
Jackson Diehl reported on the shutdown of Radio Azadi at the height of the protests in the Washington Post, but they don't preserve their online archives that far back, so I can only share with you the paragraphs I quoted from him at the time on my old blog: |
"After an Iranian court sentenced the reformist academic Hashem Aghajari to death last month, the largest and most sustained student demonstrations in years erupted in Tehran. As they grew, day after day, U.S.-operated Radio Azadi, or Radio Freedom, was their favorite medium. Every day, student leaders would call by cellphone from the roiling campuses to the radio's headquarters in Prague and narrate the latest developments live. Each night the radio would broadcast a roundtable discussion, patching together students and journalists in Tehran with exiled opposition leaders to discuss where the reform movement was going. So instrumental to the rebellion-in-the-making did the radio become that pro-regime counter-demonstrators recently held up a placard reading "Who does Radio Azadi talk to?" -- a taunt taken by the station's staff as a badge of honor.
The protest movement, now five weeks old, rolls on, spreading from students to workers and from Tehran to other cities. Some see parallels to the popular movements that overthrew the Communist regimes of Europe in 1989 -- with a big dose of help from U.S.-sponsored Radio Free Europe. In this case, however, the tottering dictatorship has gotten a big break: Two weeks ago, Radio Freedom abruptly disappeared from the air. Iranians were no longer able to hear firsthand reports of the protests. Instead, after two weeks of virtual silence, the broadcasts are being replaced with tunes from Jennifer Lopez, Whitney Houston et al.
How did the mullahs pull off this well-timed lobotomy? They didn't: The U.S. government, in the form of the Broadcasting Board of Governors, did it. In an act that mixes Hollywood arrogance with astounding ignorance of Iranian reality, the board has silenced the most effective opposition radio station in Iran at a time of unprecedented ferment. In its place, at three times the expense, the United States now will supply Iran's revolutionary students with a diet of pop music -- on the theory that this better advances U.S. interests. ..."
The move was so obviously boneheaded, and so clearly hurt a genuine and spontaneous grassroots movement, that even Jesse Helms criticized the Bush administration over it.
Without some means of coordinating their protests, dissent was quickly mopped up. Ayatollah Khamenei insisted that the death sentence be reviewed. This didn't go so well at first, but Aghajari was eventually sentenced to a prison term and released in August of 2004.
It isn't clear, however, that the protests this time will be so easy to quell. For one thing, there's Twitter. For another, Khamenei's offer of a recount isn't going over well with protestors who are now demanding a new election.
This photo of a protest in Esfahan was posted to Twitpic today, and it's, well, wow. (Via @tommatzzie on Twitter.)
If history will repeat, I guess we'll know soon enough.
How can we help Iranians this time? Fortunately, there're a couple things that I think pass my own "very little" test:
First, via dr anonymous in Quick Hits, you can ask Congress to resist calls to take any aggressive action or enact further sanctions. In short, take some responsibility for the prime means in which our foreign policy has previously crippled reform efforts and allowed dissenters to be branded as enemies of the state.
Second, as we retweeted on @openleft today, if you have a Twitter account, you can help hide protestors by changing your Twitter location to Tehran, time +3:30 GMT, which it happens to be very easy to do. You can also, if you're retweeting information from what you suspect may be Iranian sources, replace their usernames with [redacted].
PS - If you're not on Twitter, why not? And no, 'it's buggy, frequently crashes, and doesn't do proper archiving,' isn't a good excuse. |
