Monday
Jan252010
Iran: Listening to Rumours, Whispers, and Shouts
Monday, January 25, 2010 at 7:07 
Of course, there has never been a phase in this post-election conflict which has been one of clarity, even over the basic demand --- expressed in the march of hundreds of thousands on 15 June --- to overturn the result of the Presidential election. This phase, however, has been particularly complex and often confusing, with manoeuvres and statements coming from all directions outside and inside the Iranian establishment.Mehdi Karroubi's Etemade Melli party tried to put out a clear signal yesterday that the fight, both over the election and the direction of the Iranian system, goes on. Using the symbolic event of Karroubi's visit to the family of Ali Reza Beheshti, the detained chief advisor of Mir Hossein Mousavi, the party's Saham News website declared that the regime had been ignoring the rights of people for years and now did not understand the meaning of the arrests of the arrests of "sons and daughters of the Revolution". (Ali Reza Beheshti is the son of the late Ayatollah Mohammad Beheshti, a key figure in the 1979 Revolution who founded Iran's judiciary.) It again cited Karroubi's case on detainee abuses, which he has pressed since July, with the example of Kahrizak Prison. (English-language summary of the statement)
Responding to a hard-line newspaper's claim that Karroubi had been "asleep" and only just woken to realise he had been manipulated by foreign agents, Etemade Melli declared:
Do you want to know who else is asleep and when they should wake up? Hold a free election or give permission for a free and safe gathering for the supporters of Karroubi and Mousavi then watch and see how people will wake you up. So it is necessary that you know that Karroubi is standing firm and confident and has proofs for all his remarks.
Etemade Melli's statement has received surprisingly attention so far outside Iran, however, in part because of the chatter over the country's economic situation. The rumours that Iran's banking sector is on the point of collapse only strengthened on Sunday, fuelled by news of individual cases of bank shutdowns and conflict. Peyke Iran, for example,featured the story of a bank in the Sadeghiyeh district of Tehran, where security forces had to disperse crowds who were demanding (unsuccessfully) the funds from their accounts.
The rumours sit, sometimes eerily, alongside other reports that there is no crisis. An EA source from Tehran reports, for example:
One can still write checks for any amount. Also, most people with bank accounts in Iran now have debit cards, and more and more stores are getting little debit card chargers. I paid my phone bill at the government office last week with my debit card. That is not an economy on the brink.
On the political scene, the biggest distraction was the story that Javad Larijani, a key official in Iran's judiciary and brother of Speaker of Parliament Ali and head of Judiciary Sadegh, had used a racial slur when denouncing Barack Obama. The episode overshadowed the important passages in Larijani's speech where he both praised and criticised Hashemi Rafsanjani, apparently in an effort to get the former President to declare his political position over the Ahmadinejad Government (see yesterday's updates).
Reader Comments (9)
[Background from http://www.persianumpire.com/2010/01/18/ashura-bloody-ashura/" rel="nofollow">Ashura Bloody Ashura, P.Umpire]
[I chose a few bits and pieces to use in a poem]
The whispers and shouts of the people continue in many ways.
On the Ledge of Ashura
Grave are the plots
tortured are many
A Sea was to gather on Enghelab
though, by velayat-e faqih, the experts had said,
it was an expediency,
to run with coffins, steal
bodies from hospitals, and
snatch remains from torture wards
before the Mothers of Mourning could arrive
Grave are the plots
tortured are many
Early in the day, the unreformed
rock-headed savages on motorcycle:
batons, chains, rocks thrown.
Many of us were arrested and beaten and bloody;
crowds broken up, re-formed in a storm like tides
eroding sands, and
many were separated, many
lost in maelstroms
My friend and I
did what we could on Ashura
to reach a path to Revolution
to find a missing 7-year-old child
We turned for Taleghani
with lots of people seeking
parallels to Enghelab
A quest for a street that speaks
a way to Vali-Asr and
onward to Revolution
Evil batons, chains, and rocks.
Running and driven back
we choked on tear gas plumes
Grave are the plots
tortured are many
Back toward Hafez
the bridge was reached
Basiji on the bridge
bombarded us with rocks
West was the tear gas
Eastward the rocks
We ran and took cover
under the bridge where
many were hiding. Three
women in chadors prayed
and a 7-year-old boy asked,
"Is this the bridge of God?"
Didn't some person just recently claim that the IRI isn't racist?
Merci, Doug, for your poem!
Startling news have caught our attention today, but calmness for listening to softer voices will come again. Hafez and his followers will save our nation ...
ba sepase faravan
Arshama
The Javad Larijani story isn't a distraction, that's huge, at least to Americans. It's the kind of story that's not like, "wake people up out of bed or call them back from vacation" important, but important. The media will discover it sooner or later and then there'll be a feeding frenzy, even if right now it's just sitting out there, bleeding slowly into the icy waters of media land.
Well I mean it IS a distraction, but it's not just a tossaway event that will quickly be forgotten.
Doug,
As always beautiful and with great imagery. Thank you for standing with people of Iran.
Bosco,
“Didn’t some person just recently claim that the IRI isn’t racist?”
Yes, someone did but that someone is hallucinating at best.
Arshama,
You're welcome and thanks.
It was interesting to find that all the street names have meanings. To an English speaker it seems like just odd names, but isn't it ironic that in the government's zeal for propaganda, they have posted, in plain sight, signs of their hypocrisy. But I was thinking that although the double-entendre of the word pair (Enghelab, Revolution) in the English poem works well, in translation it might produce duplicates, that is, for the English speaker, "Enghelab" has the primary meaning of a street name and has a secondary meaning of "revolution". But you wouldn't want a translation into Persian that would render the pair as (Revolution,Revolution). It's like the problem of saying in English, "The voice of Neda". If Neda means voice, you might get: "The voice of voice". I don't know... I have no idea how it's handled, unless it's like "Neda herself". So conversely, I suppose, I'm running blind in English reading translations.
Doug
Megan,
You're most welcome. Thanks for your encouragement. I'm never sure if I'm making sense or not; so your compliment is helpful.
Doug