Defusing the Bomb
The explosive device in this instance being mass protests within Iran against the illegitimacy of its recent presidential elections. The people are restive, they have reacted spontaneously to the injustice of a warped election whose legitimacy has been elevated into a national emergency, and which justification for its outcome has been lauded as a sacred victory for the country by its Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. Who duly warned leaders of the demonstrations that they would be held responsible for any violence.That would be violence unleashed by the administration against its people. That would be the beatings, lashings, outright murder of protesters at the hands of the country's Revolutionary guard Corps., and the Basiji, both well known and lauded for their tender tolerance of dissenters. What appears to have enraged the Islamic Republic of Iran's leaders is their insistence of the role of international plotters subverting the public's trust in their infallible leaders through a "non-military velvet revolution".
Get that? There was no intention on the part of the protesters and their leaders to mount a violent offensive against the offensive regime that pulled the delicate fabric of their presumed democratic election out from under them. They wished merely to convey to their leaders their disappointment, their dissatisfaction with the outcome, insisting that the parody of democratic action be recognized for what it was; a troubling farce. Offering the soft resistance of their mortality against the hard insistence of a regime that revokes their mortality.
The dissenters will not be silenced, and they present as an utterly unacceptable distraction and irritation to the ruling elite in Iran who are determined that these ongoing protests will not be tolerated. Those who have been arrested and interrogated and who have confessed to their betrayal of the values of their religion and their country will pay a steep price. That is, those who will survive the torture they've been exposed to, and that certainly excludes those who have already expired under questioning "of disease, not torture".
The head of the political office of the Revolutionary Guard Corps has given orders to the judiciary: "These individuals should be prosecuted, punished and tried as traitors", naming failed presidential contenders Mirhossein Mousavi, Mehdi Karroubi and former president Mohammad Khatami. These are powerful people - politically and socially - within Iranian society, particularly Mr. Khatami, but no matter; the Revolutionary Guard speak for the Supreme Leader - or is it the reverse?
The protesters stand accused of having become violent during the protests, of having "attacked several places and killed many people", according to the commander of the voluntary Basiji paramilitary force. Pardon? The protesters did that? And here the world was under the impression that it was the Basiji who whipped and beat and murdered. How wrong can you get, trusting cellphone on-site photographs distributed through the Internet?
It is the young of Iran who are restive, who reach for a more meaningful existence. Of whom failed presidential candidate Mehdi Karroubi said "I heard accounts of boys and girls being violently raped in prison." The man must be delirious; such atrocities could never take place within the legal and just system of the Islamic Republic of Iran.
Labels: Human Rights, Political Realities, Religion, Troublespots
posted by Pieface @ Monday, August 10, 2009
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