Timothy Garton Ash: Don't Forget the Iranians Who Have Gone Up Against the Regime
[Timothy Garton Ash, a contributing editor to Opinion, is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution and professorof European studies at Oxford University.]
Do not forget Iran. Remember Neda. If there are green-clad protests in Tehran this weekend — to mark the first anniversary of the election that President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad stole — they will doubtless again be crushed with casual brutality by the thugs of the Basij militia, the secret police and the Revolutionary Guard.
Faced with violent repression, the green movement is a long way down — but not out. Iran will never again be the country it was before the election of June 12, 2009. In the great demonstration three days later, everything was changed. In the subsequent repression, a terrible beauty was born. The historical process may take years, but one day, as the economy worsens and discontent spreads to more sections of society, the movement will be back in force, though perhaps in a different form. Eventually, there will be statues in Iran of Neda Agha-Soltan — the young woman shot dead in one of the early mass demonstrations — and other memorials to the martyrs of this struggle for freedom.
We should also never forget that this is a self-generated movement from within a Muslim society, dedicated to transforming the contemporary world's longest-running and still most formidable Islamist regime into something very different....
Iran will be liberated by the Iranians, not by us. But at the margins, there are a few things we can do from outside. First, do no harm. We must examine every step we take on the nuclear issue to make sure it does not actually damage the internal movement for change. Second, keep open the lines of communication and information, so Iranians inside and outside the country can tell each other what is happening there. Work should be redoubled on Internet firewall circumvention technologies, so all Iranians have online access to films like "For Neda," as well as their own homemade citizen journalism. Third, our leaders should say much more clearly that our policy is also a response to the brutal repression inside Iran. We care about their rights, not just about our security.
Last but not least, we must always remember what has happened over the last year, and help Iranians to do the same. What all tyrants want is for their own people and the outside world to forget. The Czech writer Milan Kundera once famously observed that "the struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting." For man, read also woman. Mohsen, and his mother.
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Do not forget Iran. Remember Neda. If there are green-clad protests in Tehran this weekend — to mark the first anniversary of the election that President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad stole — they will doubtless again be crushed with casual brutality by the thugs of the Basij militia, the secret police and the Revolutionary Guard.
Faced with violent repression, the green movement is a long way down — but not out. Iran will never again be the country it was before the election of June 12, 2009. In the great demonstration three days later, everything was changed. In the subsequent repression, a terrible beauty was born. The historical process may take years, but one day, as the economy worsens and discontent spreads to more sections of society, the movement will be back in force, though perhaps in a different form. Eventually, there will be statues in Iran of Neda Agha-Soltan — the young woman shot dead in one of the early mass demonstrations — and other memorials to the martyrs of this struggle for freedom.
We should also never forget that this is a self-generated movement from within a Muslim society, dedicated to transforming the contemporary world's longest-running and still most formidable Islamist regime into something very different....
Iran will be liberated by the Iranians, not by us. But at the margins, there are a few things we can do from outside. First, do no harm. We must examine every step we take on the nuclear issue to make sure it does not actually damage the internal movement for change. Second, keep open the lines of communication and information, so Iranians inside and outside the country can tell each other what is happening there. Work should be redoubled on Internet firewall circumvention technologies, so all Iranians have online access to films like "For Neda," as well as their own homemade citizen journalism. Third, our leaders should say much more clearly that our policy is also a response to the brutal repression inside Iran. We care about their rights, not just about our security.
Last but not least, we must always remember what has happened over the last year, and help Iranians to do the same. What all tyrants want is for their own people and the outside world to forget. The Czech writer Milan Kundera once famously observed that "the struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting." For man, read also woman. Mohsen, and his mother.