This is a really interesting article on women in the US Military Forces. If you enjoy the article, check out the link, and visit the multimedia the NYT offers on the subject.
August 16, 2009
G.I. Jane Breaks the Combat Barrier as War Evolves
By LIZETTE ALVAREZ
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/16/us/16women.html?_r=1&hp
As the convoy rumbled up the road in Iraq, Specialist Veronica Alfaro was struck by the beauty of fireflies dancing in the night. Then she heard the unmistakable pinging of tracer rounds and, in a Baghdad moment, realized the insects were illuminated bullets.
She jumped from behind the wheel of her gun truck, grabbed her medical bag and sprinted 50 yards to a stalled civilian truck. On the way, bullets kicked up dust near her feet. She pulled the badly wounded driver to the ground and got to work.
Despite her best efforts, the driver died, but her heroism that January night last year earned Specialist Alfaro a Bronze Star for valor. She had already received a combat action badge for fending off insurgents as a machine gunner.
“I did everything there,” Ms. Alfaro, 25, said of her time in Iraq. “I gunned. I drove. I ran as a truck commander. And underneath it all, I was a medic.”
Before 2001, America’s military women had rarely seen ground combat. Their jobs kept them mostly away from enemy lines, as military policy dictates.
But the Afghanistan and Iraq wars, often fought in marketplaces and alleyways, have changed that. In both countries, women have repeatedly proved their mettle in combat. The number of high-ranking women and women who command all-male units has climbed considerably along with their status in the military.
“Iraq has advanced the cause of full integration for women in the Army by leaps and bounds,” said Peter R. Mansoor, a retired Army colonel who served as executive officer to Gen. David H. Petraeus while he was the top American commander in Iraq. “They have earned the confidence and respect of male colleagues.”
Their success, widely known in the military, remains largely hidden from public view. In part, this is because their most challenging work is often the result of a quiet circumvention of military policy.
Women are barred from joining combat branches like the infantry, armor, Special Forces and most field artillery units and from doing support jobs while living with those smaller units. Women can lead some male troops into combat as officers, but they cannot serve with them in battle.
Yet, over and over, in Iraq and Afghanistan, Army commanders have resorted to bureaucratic trickery when they needed more soldiers for crucial jobs, like bomb disposal and intelligence. On paper, for instance, women have been “attached” to a combat unit rather than “assigned.”
This quiet change has not come seamlessly — and it has altered military culture on the battlefield in ways large and small. Women need separate bunks and bathrooms. They face sexual discrimination and rape, and counselors and rape kits are now common in war zones. Commanders also confront a new reality: that soldiers have sex, and some will be evacuated because they are pregnant.
Nonetheless, as soldiers in the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, women have done nearly as much in battle as their male counterparts: patrolled streets with machine guns, served as gunners on vehicles, disposed of explosives, and driven trucks down bomb-ridden roads. They have proved indispensable in their ability to interact with and search Iraqi and Afghan women for weapons, a job men cannot do for cultural reasons. The Marine Corps has created revolving units — “lionesses” — dedicated to just this task.
A small number of women have even conducted raids, engaging the enemy directly in total disregard of existing policies.
Many experts, including David W. Barno, a retired lieutenant general who commanded forces in Afghanistan; Dr. Mansoor, who now teaches military history at Ohio State University; and John A. Nagl, a retired lieutenant colonel who helped write the Army’s new counterinsurgency field manual, say it is only a matter of time before regulations that have restricted women’s participation in war will be adjusted to meet the reality forged over the last eight years.
The Marine Corps, which is overwhelmingly male and designed for combat, recently opened two more categories of intelligence jobs to women, recognizing the value of their work in Iraq and Afghanistan. In gradually admitting women to combat, the United States will be catching up to the rest of the world. More than a dozen countries allow women in some or all ground combat occupations. Among those pushing boundaries most aggressively is Canada, which has recruited women for the infantry and sent them to Afghanistan.
But the United States military may well be steps ahead of Congress, where opening ground combat jobs to women has met deep resistance in the past.
Elaine Donnelly, president of the Center for Military Readiness, a group that opposes fully integrating women into the Army, said women were doing these jobs with no debate and no Congressional approval.
“I fault the Pentagon for not being straight with uniformed women,” said Ms. Donnelly, who supported unsuccessful efforts by some in Congress in 2005 to restrict women’s roles in these wars. “It’s an ‘anything goes’ situation.”
Poll numbers, however, show that a majority of the public supports allowing women to do more on the battlefield. Fifty-three percent of the respondents in a New York Times/CBS News poll in July, said they would favor permitting women to “join combat units, where they would be directly involved in the ground fighting.” The successful experiences of military women in Iraq and Afghanistan are being used to bolster the efforts of groups who favor letting gay soldiers serve openly. Those opposed to such change say that permitting service members to state their sexual orientation would disrupt the tight cohesion of a unit and lead to harassment and sexual liaisons — arguments also used against allowing women to serve alongside men. But women in Iraq and Afghanistan have debunked many of those fears.
“They made it work with women, which is more complicated in some ways, with sex-segregated facilities and new physical training standards,” said David Stacy, a lobbyist with the Human Rights Campaign, which works for gay equality. “If the military could make that work with good discipline and order, certainly integrating open service of gay and lesbians is within their capability. ”
From Necessity, Opportunity
No one envisioned that Afghanistan and Iraq would elevate the status of women in the armed forces.
But the Iraq insurgency obliterated conventional battle lines. The fight was on every base and street corner, and as the conflict grew longer and more complicated, the all-volunteer military required more soldiers and a different approach to fighting. Commanders were forced to stretch gender boundaries, or in a few cases, erase them altogether.
“We literally could not have fought this war without women,” said Dr. Nagl, who is now president of the Center for a New American Security, a military research institution in Washington.
Of the two million Americans who have fought in these wars since 2001, more than 220,000 of them, or 11 percent, have been women.
Like men, some women have come home bearing the mental and physical scars of bombs and bullets, loss and killing. Women who are veterans of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars appear to suffer rates of post-traumatic stress disorder comparable to those of men, a recent study showed.
Men still make up the vast majority of the 5,000 war deaths since 2001; nearly 4,000 have been killed by enemy action But 121 women have also died, 66 killed in combat. The rest died in nonhostile action, which includes accidents, illness, suicide and friendly fire. And 620 women have been wounded.
Despite longstanding fears about how the public would react to women coming home in coffins, Americans have responded to their deaths and injuries no differently than to those of male casualties, analysts say. That is a reflection of changing social mores but also a result of the growing number of women — more than 356,000 today — who serve in the armed forces, including the Reserves and the National Guard, 16 percent of the total.
Over all, women say the gains they made in Iraq and Afghanistan have overshadowed the challenges they faced in a combat zone.
“As horrible as this war has been, I fully believe it has given women so many opportunities in the military,” said Linsay Rousseau Burnett, who was one of the first women to serve as a communication specialist with a brigade combat team in Iraq. “Before, they didn’t have the option.”
Although women make up only 6 percent of the top military ranks, these war years have ushered in a series of notable promotions. In 2008, 57 women were serving as generals and admirals in the active-duty military, more than double the number a decade earlier. Last year, Ann E. Dunwoody was the first woman to become a four-star Army general, the highest rank in today’s military and a significant milestone for women. And many more women now lead all-male combat troops into battle.
The Army does not keep complete statistics on the sex of soldiers who receive medals and tracks only active-duty soldiers. But two women have been awarded Silver Stars, one of the military’s highest honors. Many more women have been awarded medals for valor, the statistics show.
To be sure, not all women in the military embrace the idea of going into combat. Like men, a few do what they can to try to get out of deployments. Military women and commanders say some women have timed their pregnancies to avoid deploying or have gotten pregnant in Iraq so they would be sent home. The Army declined to release numbers on how many women have been evacuated from a war zone for pregnancy.
In addition to the dangers, military life is grueling in other ways, especially for mothers juggling parenting and the demands of the military, which require long absences from home. And while the military is doing more to address the threat of sexual harassment and rape, it remains a persistent problem.
Bending Rules, Shifting Views
The rules governing what jobs military women can hold often seem contradictory or muddled. Women, for instance, can serve as machine gunners on Humvees but cannot operate Bradleys, the Army’s armored fighting vehicle. They can work with some long-range artillery but not short-range ones. Women can walk Iraq’s dangerous streets as members of the military police but not as members of the infantry.
And, they can lead combat engineers in war zones as officers, but cannot serve among them. This was the case for Maj. Kellie McCoy, 34, a wisp of an officer who is just over five feet tall. As a captain in 2003 and 2004, she served as the first female engineer company commander in the 82nd Airborne Division and led a platoon of combat engineers in Iraq.
On Sept. 14, 2003, her four-vehicle convoy drove into an ambush. It was attacked by multiple roadside bombs, rocket-propelled grenades and small arms fire. Three soldiers were wounded in the ambush. As one of the wounded stood in the middle of the road, bloody and in shock, Major McCoy ran through enemy fire to get him, discharging her M4 as she led him back to her vehicle. Then, she and the others returned to the “kill zone” to rescue the remaining soldiers. Insurgents shot at them from 15 feet away. But eventually, all 12 soldiers piled into one four-seat Humvee and sped away.
Major McCoy received a Bronze Star for valor and, most important for her, the admiration of her troops. “I think my actions cemented their respect for me,” she wrote in an e-mail message from Iraq. “I worked hard to earn their respect.”
As an officer, Major McCoy’s assignment followed both the letter and the spirit of the regulations.
But in other cases, the rules were bent to get women into combat positions.
In 2004 and 2005, Michael A. Baumann, now a retired lieutenant colonel, commanded 30 enlisted women and 6 female officers as part of a unit patrolling in the Rashid district of Baghdad, an extremely dangerous area at the time.
On paper, he followed military policy. The women were technically assigned to a separate chemical company of the division. In reality, they were core members of his field artillery battalion. Mr. Baumann said the women trained and fought alongside his male soldiers. Everyone from Mr. Baumann’s commanders to the commanding general knew their true function, he said.
“We had to take everybody,” said Mr. Baumann, 46, who wrote a book about his time in Iraq called “Adjust Fire: Transforming to Win in Iraq.” “Nobody could be spared to do something like support.”
Brought up as an old-school Army warrior, Mr. Baumann said he had seriously doubted that women could physically handle infantry duties, citing the weight of the armor and the gear, the heat of Baghdad and the harshness of combat.
“I found out differently,” said Mr. Baumann, now chief financial officer for St. Paul Public Schools in Minnesota. “Not only could they handle it, but in the same way as males. I would go out on patrols every single day with my battalion. I was with them. I was next to them. I saw with my own eyes. I had full trust and confidence in their abilities.”
Mr. Baumann’s experience rings true to many men who have commanded women in Iraq. More than anything, it is seeing women perform under fire that has changed attitudes. But some experts say the hostility toward women in the military was fading on its own. Many young men today have grown up around female athletes, tough sisters and successful women.
As the experience of Iraq and Afghanistan sinks in, some experts and military officers believe that women should be allowed to join all-male combat units in phases (so long as job-specific physical exams are created to test the abilities of men and women).
For New Warfare, New Roles
War is different today, they say. Technology has changed the way some of these jobs are done, making them more mechanized and less strength-dependent. Warfare in Iraq involves a lot more driving than walking.
What is more, not all combat jobs are the same. Handling field artillery or working in Bradleys, for example, are jobs more suited to some women than light infantry duties, which can require carrying heavy packs for miles.
Still, most women in the military express little, if any, desire to join the grueling, testosterone-laden light infantry. But some say they are interested in artillery and armor.
Any change to the policy would require Congressional approval, which lawmakers say is unlikely in the middle of two wars. But women in the military and their allies want their performance in combat to count for something.
“We have to acknowledge it because the military is like any other corporation,” said Representative Loretta Sanchez, Democrat of California and the senior woman on the House Armed Services Committee. “If you are not on the front lines doing what is the main purpose of your existence, then you won’t be viewed as someone who can command.”
Military women said they were encouraged by the words of Representative John M. McHugh, the nominee for Army secretary, who just four years ago supported a failed push in Congress to restrict the role of women in combat zones.
At his Senate hearing in July, Mr. McHugh, Republican of New York, sought to allay concern. “Women in uniform today are not just invaluable,” he said, “they’re irreplaceable.” He added that he would look to expand the number of jobs available to them.
In Mr. Baumann’s view, the reality on the ground long ago outpaced the debate.
“We have crossed that line in Iraq,” he said. “Debate it all you want folks, but the military is going to do what the military needs to do. And they are needing to put women in combat.”
Steven Lee Myers contributed reporting from Baghdad.
16 August 2009
14 August 2009
Ten Letters
Every day, President Obama reads ten hand-picked letters chosen because they can offer him a glimpse of what's on people's minds and in their hearts.
With that in mind, Amnesty International has compiled powerful letters written by 10 influential thinkers – from an exiled poet to a former military interrogator to an esteemed actor and activist – that boldly make the case against torture.
These letters could not come at a more critical time. News reports last weekend stated that Attorney General Eric Holder is considering naming a special prosecutor to look into Bush-era torture. Ever since Obama's first days in office, Amnesty activists and their allies have called on the administration to investigate abuses committed during Bush's tenure and prosecute former officials where warranted.
While we're still obtaining details on the shape of the investigation, it's clear that we're making headway in our fight for accountability.
These ten letters describe what torture does to its victims, how it undermines our spirit, and what it does to a country that lets those who authorized it go unpunished. With your help, we want to make sure that these letters make their way directly to President Obama's desk.
Through Amnesty's Ten Against Torture effort, you can help draw dramatic, high-profile attention to these letters as they reach the White House and help support our call for accountability.
Read the Ten Against Torture letters and send the one you find most moving to President Obama.
Each letter is a passionate plea to President Obama to restore the United States' reputation, respect the rule of law, and act on values and ideals fundamental to the America we believe in.
Please take a moment to read the powerful words of Sister Dianna Ortiz, who has personally suffered the unimaginable pain of torture:
Mr. President, from anonymous graves, voices still cry out. From clandestine prisons, in the midst of indescribable pain, we, my sisters and brothers, beg you to hear. Will you listen to what we alone know of this crime against humanity —what we know from the inside out? Please hear us! Torture does not end with the release from some clandestine prison. It is not something we 'get over.' Simply, "looking forward" is not an option for us.
Read the rest of Sister Ortiz's letter here and send it to President Obama today.
No organization understands better than Amnesty International the power of writing a simple, honest letter.
For nearly 50 years, Amnesty supporters have signed letters to help free political prisoners from jail and bring brutal human rights abuses to an end. Now, by joining in our Ten Against Torture campaign, you can make sure those responsible for the illegal U.S. torture program are brought to justice.
Make sure that President Obama knows that torture has no place in the America we believe in.
With that in mind, Amnesty International has compiled powerful letters written by 10 influential thinkers – from an exiled poet to a former military interrogator to an esteemed actor and activist – that boldly make the case against torture.
These letters could not come at a more critical time. News reports last weekend stated that Attorney General Eric Holder is considering naming a special prosecutor to look into Bush-era torture. Ever since Obama's first days in office, Amnesty activists and their allies have called on the administration to investigate abuses committed during Bush's tenure and prosecute former officials where warranted.
While we're still obtaining details on the shape of the investigation, it's clear that we're making headway in our fight for accountability.
These ten letters describe what torture does to its victims, how it undermines our spirit, and what it does to a country that lets those who authorized it go unpunished. With your help, we want to make sure that these letters make their way directly to President Obama's desk.
Through Amnesty's Ten Against Torture effort, you can help draw dramatic, high-profile attention to these letters as they reach the White House and help support our call for accountability.
Read the Ten Against Torture letters and send the one you find most moving to President Obama.
Each letter is a passionate plea to President Obama to restore the United States' reputation, respect the rule of law, and act on values and ideals fundamental to the America we believe in.
Please take a moment to read the powerful words of Sister Dianna Ortiz, who has personally suffered the unimaginable pain of torture:
Mr. President, from anonymous graves, voices still cry out. From clandestine prisons, in the midst of indescribable pain, we, my sisters and brothers, beg you to hear. Will you listen to what we alone know of this crime against humanity —what we know from the inside out? Please hear us! Torture does not end with the release from some clandestine prison. It is not something we 'get over.' Simply, "looking forward" is not an option for us.
Read the rest of Sister Ortiz's letter here and send it to President Obama today.
No organization understands better than Amnesty International the power of writing a simple, honest letter.
For nearly 50 years, Amnesty supporters have signed letters to help free political prisoners from jail and bring brutal human rights abuses to an end. Now, by joining in our Ten Against Torture campaign, you can make sure those responsible for the illegal U.S. torture program are brought to justice.
Make sure that President Obama knows that torture has no place in the America we believe in.
15 July 2009
Will What We Don't Know (or Care to Know) Hurt Us?
Note for Readers: This article comes from TomDispatch. It is available on-line at http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/175092/are_afghan_lives_worth_anything_
Mourning Michael Jackson, Ignoring the Afghan Dead
By Tom Engelhardt
It was a blast. I'm talking about my daughter's wedding. You don't often see a child of yours quite that happy. I'm no party animal, but I danced my 64-year-old legs off. And I can't claim that, as I walked my daughter to the ceremony, or ate, or talked with friends, or simply sat back and watched the young and energetic enjoy themselves, I thought about those Afghan wedding celebrations where the "blast" isn't metaphorical, where the bride, the groom, the partygoers in the midst of revelry die.
In the two weeks since, however, that's been on my mind -- or rather the lack of interest our world shows in dead civilians from a distant imperial war -- and all because of a passage I stumbled upon in a striking article by journalist Anand Gopal. In "Uprooting an Afghan Village" in the June issue of the Progressive magazine, he writes about Garloch, an Afghan village he visited in the eastern province of Laghman. After destructive American raids, Gopal tells us, many of its desperate inhabitants simply packed up and left for exile in Afghan or Pakistani refugee camps.
One early dawn in August 2008, writes Gopal, American helicopters first descended on Garloch for a six-hour raid:
"The Americans claim there were gunshots as they left. The villagers deny it. Regardless, American bombers swooped by the village just after the soldiers left and dropped a payload on one house. It belonged to Haiji Qadir, a pole-thin, wizened old man who was hosting more than forty relatives for a wedding party. The bomb split the house in two, killing sixteen, including twelve from Qadir's family, and wounding scores more... The malek [chief] went to the province's governor and delivered a stern warning: protect our villagers or we will turn against the Americans."
That passage caught my eye because, to the best of my knowledge, I'm the only person in the U.S. who has tried to keep track of the wedding parties wiped out, in whole or part, by American military action since the Bush administration invaded Afghanistan in November 2001. With Gopal's report from Garloch, that number, by my count, has reached five (only three of which are well documented in print).
The first occurred in December of that invasion year when a B-52 and two B-1B bombers, wielding precision-guided weapons, managed, according to reports, to wipe out 110 out of 112 revelers in another small Afghan village. At least one Iraqi wedding party near the Syrian border was also eviscerated -- by U.S. planes back in 2004. Soon after that slaughter, responding to media inquiries, an American general asked: "How many people go to the middle of the desert... to hold a wedding 80 miles from the nearest civilization?" Later, in what passed for an acknowledgment of the incident, another American general said: "Could there have been a celebration of some type going on?... Certainly. Bad guys have celebrations." Case closed.
Perhaps over the course of an almost eight-year war in Afghanistan, the toll in wedding parties may seem modest: not even one a year! But before we settle for that figure, evidently so low it's not worth a headline in this country, let's keep in mind that there's no reason to believe:
* I've seen every article in English that, in passing, happens to mention an Afghan wedding slaughter -- the one Gopal notes, for instance, seems to have gotten no other coverage; or
* that other wedding slaughters haven't been recorded in languages I can't read; or
* that, in the rural Pashtun backlands, some U.S. attacks on wedding celebrants might not have made it into news reports anywhere.
In fact, no one knows how many weddings -- rare celebratory moments in an Afghan world that, for three decades, has had little to celebrate -- have been taken out by U.S. planes or raids, or a combination of the two.
Turning the Page on the Past
After the Obama administration took office and the new president doubled down the American bet on the Afghan War, there was a certain amount of anxious chatter in the punditocracy (and even in the military) about Afghanistan being "the graveyard of empires." Of course, no one in Washington was going to admit that the U.S. is just such an empire, only that we may suffer the fate of empires past.
When it comes to wedding parties, though, there turn out to be some similarities to the empire under the last Afghan gravestone. The Soviet Union was, of course, defeated in Afghanistan by some of the very jihadists the U.S. is now fighting, thanks to generous support from the CIA, the Saudis, and Pakistan's intelligence services. It withdrew from that country in defeat in 1989, and went over its own cliff in 1991. As it happens, the Russians, too, evidently made it a habit to knock off Afghan wedding parties, though we have no tally of how many or how regularly.
Reviewing a book on the Soviet-Afghan War for the Washington Monthly, Christian Caryl wrote recently:
"One Soviet soldier recalls an instance in 1987 when his unit opened fire on what they took to be a 'mujaheddin caravan.' The Russians soon discovered that they had slaughtered a roving wedding party on its way from one village to another -- a blunder that soon, all too predictably, inspired a series of revenge attacks on the Red Army troops in the area. This undoubtedly sounds wearily familiar to U.S. and NATO planners (and Afghan government officials) struggling to contain the effects from the 'collateral damage' that is often cited today as one of the major sources of the West's political problems in the country."
And, by the way, don't get me started on that gloomy companion rite to the wedding celebration: the funeral. Even I haven't been counting those, but that doesn't mean the U.S. and its allies haven't been knocking off funeral parties in Afghanistan (and recently, via a CIA drone aircraft, in Pakistan as well).
Following almost two weeks in which the U.S. (and global) media went berserk over the death of one man, in which NBC, for instance, devoted all but about five minutes of one of its prime-time half-hour news broadcasts to nothing -- and I mean nothing -- but the death of Michael Jackson, in which the President of the United States sent a condolence letter to the Jackson family (and was faulted for not having moved more quickly), in which 1.6 million people registered for a chance to get one of 17,500 free tickets to his memorial service... well, why go on? Unless you've been competing in isolation in the next round of Survivor, or are somehow without a TV, or possibly any modern means of communication, you simply can't avoid knowing the rest.
You'd have to make a desperate effort not to know that Michael Jackson (until recently excoriated by the media) had died, and you'd have to make a similarly desperate effort to know that we've knocked off one wedding party after another these last years in Afghanistan. One of these deaths -- Jackson's -- really has little to do with us; the others are, or should be, our responsibility, part of an endless war the American people have either supported or not stopped from continuing. And yet one is a screaming global headline; the others go unnoticed.
You'd think there might, in fact, be room for a small headline somewhere. Didn't those brides, grooms, relatives, and revelers deserve at least one modest, collective corner of some front-page or a story on some prime-time news show in return for their needless suffering? You'd think that some president or high official in Washington might have sent a note of condolence to someone, that there might have been a rising tide of criticism about the slow response here in expressing regrets to the families of Afghans who died under our bombs and missiles.
Here's the truth of it, though: When it comes to Afghan lives -- especially if we think, correctly or not, that our safety is involved -- it doesn't matter whether five wedding parties or 50 go down, two funerals or 25. Our media isn't about to focus real attention on the particular form of barbarity involved -- the American air war over Afghanistan which has been a war of and for, not on, terror.
Now, we're embarked on a new moment -- the Obama moment -- in Afghanistan. More than seven-and-a-half years into the war, in a truly American fashion, we're ready to turn the page on the past, to pretend that none of it really happened, to do it "right" this time around. We're finally going to bring the Afghans over to our side.
We're ready to light out for the territories and start all over again. American troops are now moving south in force, deep into the Pashtun (and Taliban) areas of Afghanistan, and their commanders -- a passel of new generals -- are speaking as one from a new script. It's all about conducting a "holistic counterinsurgency campaign," as new Afghan commander General Stanley A. McChrystal put it in Congressional testimony recently. It's all about "hearts and minds"(though that old Vietnam-era phrase has yet to be resuscitated). It's all about, they say, "protecting civilians" rather than killing Taliban guerrillas; it's all about shaping, clearing, holding, building, not just landing, kicking in doors, and taking off again; it's all about new "rules of engagement" in which the air war will be limited, and attacks on the Taliban curbed or called off if it appears that they might endanger civilians (even if that means the guerrillas get away); it's all about reversing the tide of the war so far, about the fact that civilian casualties caused by air attacks and raids have turned large numbers of Afghans against American and NATO troops.
The commander of the Marines just now heading south, Brigadier General Larry Nicholson, typically said this:
"We need to make sure we understand that the reason we're here is not necessarily the enemy. The reason we're here is the people. What won the war in al-Anbar province [Iraq] and what changed the war in al-Anbar was not that the enemy eventually got tired of fighting. It's that the people chose a side, and they chose us... We'll surround that house and we'll wait. And here's the reason: If you drop that house and there's one woman, one child, one family in that house -- you may have killed 20 Taliban, but by killing that woman or that child in that house, you have lost that community. You are dead to them. You are done."
The Value of a Life
As it happens, however, the past matters -- and keep this in mind (it's what the wedding-party-obliteration record tells us): To Americans, an Afghan life isn't worth a red cent, not when the chips are down.
Back in the Vietnam era, General William Westmoreland, interviewed by movie director Peter Davis for his Oscar-winning film Hearts and Minds, famously said: "The Oriental doesn't put the same high price on life as does a Westerner. Life is plentiful. Life is cheap in the Orient."
In those years, there were many in the U.S., including Davis, who insisted very publicly that a Vietnamese life had the same value as an American one. In the years of the Afghan War, Americans -- our media and, by its relative silence, the public as well -- turned Westmoreland's statement into a way of life as well as a way of war. As one perk of that way of life, most Americans have been able to pretend that our war in Afghanistan has nothing to do with us -- and Michael Jackson's death, everything.
So he dies and our world goes mad. An Afghan wedding party, or five of them, are wiped off the face of the Earth and even a shrug is too much effort.
Here's a question then: Will what we don't know (or don't care to know) hurt us? I'm unsure whether the more depressing answer is yes or no. As it happens, I have no answer to that question anyway, only a bit of advice -- not for us, but for Afghans: If, as General McChrystal and other top military figures expect, the Afghan War and its cross-border sibling in Pakistan go on for another three or four or five years or more, no matter what script we're going by, no matter what we say, believe me, we'll call in the planes. So if I were you, I wouldn't celebrate another marriage, not in a group, not in public, and I'd bury my dead very, very privately.
If you gather, after all, we will come.
Tom Engelhardt, co-founder of the American Empire Project, runs the Nation Institute's TomDispatch.com. He is the author of The End of Victory Culture, a history of the Cold War and beyond, as well as of a novel, The Last Days of Publishing. He also edited The World According to TomDispatch: America in the New Age of Empire (Verso, 2008), an alternative history of the mad Bush years.
[Note: I documented as fully as I could the previous Afghan wedding slaughters in "The Wedding Crashers: A Short Till-Death-Do-Us-Part History of Bush's Wars" (July 2008). And here's a selection of TomDispatch pieces on related subjects, if you're interested in reading more: "Slaughter, Lies, and Video in Afghanistan" (September 2008), "What Price Slaughter?" (May 2007), "The Billion-Dollar Gravestone" (May 2006), "Catch 2,200: 9 Propositions on the U.S. Air War for Terror" (May 2006), and former U.S. diplomat John Brown's "Our Indian Wars Are Not Over Yet" (January 2006). You might also visit filmmaker Robert Greenwald's website Rethink Afghanistan.] To view these articles check out Tom's website today!
Copyright 2009 Tom Engelhardt
Mourning Michael Jackson, Ignoring the Afghan Dead
By Tom Engelhardt
It was a blast. I'm talking about my daughter's wedding. You don't often see a child of yours quite that happy. I'm no party animal, but I danced my 64-year-old legs off. And I can't claim that, as I walked my daughter to the ceremony, or ate, or talked with friends, or simply sat back and watched the young and energetic enjoy themselves, I thought about those Afghan wedding celebrations where the "blast" isn't metaphorical, where the bride, the groom, the partygoers in the midst of revelry die.
In the two weeks since, however, that's been on my mind -- or rather the lack of interest our world shows in dead civilians from a distant imperial war -- and all because of a passage I stumbled upon in a striking article by journalist Anand Gopal. In "Uprooting an Afghan Village" in the June issue of the Progressive magazine, he writes about Garloch, an Afghan village he visited in the eastern province of Laghman. After destructive American raids, Gopal tells us, many of its desperate inhabitants simply packed up and left for exile in Afghan or Pakistani refugee camps.
One early dawn in August 2008, writes Gopal, American helicopters first descended on Garloch for a six-hour raid:
"The Americans claim there were gunshots as they left. The villagers deny it. Regardless, American bombers swooped by the village just after the soldiers left and dropped a payload on one house. It belonged to Haiji Qadir, a pole-thin, wizened old man who was hosting more than forty relatives for a wedding party. The bomb split the house in two, killing sixteen, including twelve from Qadir's family, and wounding scores more... The malek [chief] went to the province's governor and delivered a stern warning: protect our villagers or we will turn against the Americans."
That passage caught my eye because, to the best of my knowledge, I'm the only person in the U.S. who has tried to keep track of the wedding parties wiped out, in whole or part, by American military action since the Bush administration invaded Afghanistan in November 2001. With Gopal's report from Garloch, that number, by my count, has reached five (only three of which are well documented in print).
The first occurred in December of that invasion year when a B-52 and two B-1B bombers, wielding precision-guided weapons, managed, according to reports, to wipe out 110 out of 112 revelers in another small Afghan village. At least one Iraqi wedding party near the Syrian border was also eviscerated -- by U.S. planes back in 2004. Soon after that slaughter, responding to media inquiries, an American general asked: "How many people go to the middle of the desert... to hold a wedding 80 miles from the nearest civilization?" Later, in what passed for an acknowledgment of the incident, another American general said: "Could there have been a celebration of some type going on?... Certainly. Bad guys have celebrations." Case closed.
Perhaps over the course of an almost eight-year war in Afghanistan, the toll in wedding parties may seem modest: not even one a year! But before we settle for that figure, evidently so low it's not worth a headline in this country, let's keep in mind that there's no reason to believe:
* I've seen every article in English that, in passing, happens to mention an Afghan wedding slaughter -- the one Gopal notes, for instance, seems to have gotten no other coverage; or
* that other wedding slaughters haven't been recorded in languages I can't read; or
* that, in the rural Pashtun backlands, some U.S. attacks on wedding celebrants might not have made it into news reports anywhere.
In fact, no one knows how many weddings -- rare celebratory moments in an Afghan world that, for three decades, has had little to celebrate -- have been taken out by U.S. planes or raids, or a combination of the two.
Turning the Page on the Past
After the Obama administration took office and the new president doubled down the American bet on the Afghan War, there was a certain amount of anxious chatter in the punditocracy (and even in the military) about Afghanistan being "the graveyard of empires." Of course, no one in Washington was going to admit that the U.S. is just such an empire, only that we may suffer the fate of empires past.
When it comes to wedding parties, though, there turn out to be some similarities to the empire under the last Afghan gravestone. The Soviet Union was, of course, defeated in Afghanistan by some of the very jihadists the U.S. is now fighting, thanks to generous support from the CIA, the Saudis, and Pakistan's intelligence services. It withdrew from that country in defeat in 1989, and went over its own cliff in 1991. As it happens, the Russians, too, evidently made it a habit to knock off Afghan wedding parties, though we have no tally of how many or how regularly.
Reviewing a book on the Soviet-Afghan War for the Washington Monthly, Christian Caryl wrote recently:
"One Soviet soldier recalls an instance in 1987 when his unit opened fire on what they took to be a 'mujaheddin caravan.' The Russians soon discovered that they had slaughtered a roving wedding party on its way from one village to another -- a blunder that soon, all too predictably, inspired a series of revenge attacks on the Red Army troops in the area. This undoubtedly sounds wearily familiar to U.S. and NATO planners (and Afghan government officials) struggling to contain the effects from the 'collateral damage' that is often cited today as one of the major sources of the West's political problems in the country."
And, by the way, don't get me started on that gloomy companion rite to the wedding celebration: the funeral. Even I haven't been counting those, but that doesn't mean the U.S. and its allies haven't been knocking off funeral parties in Afghanistan (and recently, via a CIA drone aircraft, in Pakistan as well).
Following almost two weeks in which the U.S. (and global) media went berserk over the death of one man, in which NBC, for instance, devoted all but about five minutes of one of its prime-time half-hour news broadcasts to nothing -- and I mean nothing -- but the death of Michael Jackson, in which the President of the United States sent a condolence letter to the Jackson family (and was faulted for not having moved more quickly), in which 1.6 million people registered for a chance to get one of 17,500 free tickets to his memorial service... well, why go on? Unless you've been competing in isolation in the next round of Survivor, or are somehow without a TV, or possibly any modern means of communication, you simply can't avoid knowing the rest.
You'd have to make a desperate effort not to know that Michael Jackson (until recently excoriated by the media) had died, and you'd have to make a similarly desperate effort to know that we've knocked off one wedding party after another these last years in Afghanistan. One of these deaths -- Jackson's -- really has little to do with us; the others are, or should be, our responsibility, part of an endless war the American people have either supported or not stopped from continuing. And yet one is a screaming global headline; the others go unnoticed.
You'd think there might, in fact, be room for a small headline somewhere. Didn't those brides, grooms, relatives, and revelers deserve at least one modest, collective corner of some front-page or a story on some prime-time news show in return for their needless suffering? You'd think that some president or high official in Washington might have sent a note of condolence to someone, that there might have been a rising tide of criticism about the slow response here in expressing regrets to the families of Afghans who died under our bombs and missiles.
Here's the truth of it, though: When it comes to Afghan lives -- especially if we think, correctly or not, that our safety is involved -- it doesn't matter whether five wedding parties or 50 go down, two funerals or 25. Our media isn't about to focus real attention on the particular form of barbarity involved -- the American air war over Afghanistan which has been a war of and for, not on, terror.
Now, we're embarked on a new moment -- the Obama moment -- in Afghanistan. More than seven-and-a-half years into the war, in a truly American fashion, we're ready to turn the page on the past, to pretend that none of it really happened, to do it "right" this time around. We're finally going to bring the Afghans over to our side.
We're ready to light out for the territories and start all over again. American troops are now moving south in force, deep into the Pashtun (and Taliban) areas of Afghanistan, and their commanders -- a passel of new generals -- are speaking as one from a new script. It's all about conducting a "holistic counterinsurgency campaign," as new Afghan commander General Stanley A. McChrystal put it in Congressional testimony recently. It's all about "hearts and minds"(though that old Vietnam-era phrase has yet to be resuscitated). It's all about, they say, "protecting civilians" rather than killing Taliban guerrillas; it's all about shaping, clearing, holding, building, not just landing, kicking in doors, and taking off again; it's all about new "rules of engagement" in which the air war will be limited, and attacks on the Taliban curbed or called off if it appears that they might endanger civilians (even if that means the guerrillas get away); it's all about reversing the tide of the war so far, about the fact that civilian casualties caused by air attacks and raids have turned large numbers of Afghans against American and NATO troops.
The commander of the Marines just now heading south, Brigadier General Larry Nicholson, typically said this:
"We need to make sure we understand that the reason we're here is not necessarily the enemy. The reason we're here is the people. What won the war in al-Anbar province [Iraq] and what changed the war in al-Anbar was not that the enemy eventually got tired of fighting. It's that the people chose a side, and they chose us... We'll surround that house and we'll wait. And here's the reason: If you drop that house and there's one woman, one child, one family in that house -- you may have killed 20 Taliban, but by killing that woman or that child in that house, you have lost that community. You are dead to them. You are done."
The Value of a Life
As it happens, however, the past matters -- and keep this in mind (it's what the wedding-party-obliteration record tells us): To Americans, an Afghan life isn't worth a red cent, not when the chips are down.
Back in the Vietnam era, General William Westmoreland, interviewed by movie director Peter Davis for his Oscar-winning film Hearts and Minds, famously said: "The Oriental doesn't put the same high price on life as does a Westerner. Life is plentiful. Life is cheap in the Orient."
In those years, there were many in the U.S., including Davis, who insisted very publicly that a Vietnamese life had the same value as an American one. In the years of the Afghan War, Americans -- our media and, by its relative silence, the public as well -- turned Westmoreland's statement into a way of life as well as a way of war. As one perk of that way of life, most Americans have been able to pretend that our war in Afghanistan has nothing to do with us -- and Michael Jackson's death, everything.
So he dies and our world goes mad. An Afghan wedding party, or five of them, are wiped off the face of the Earth and even a shrug is too much effort.
Here's a question then: Will what we don't know (or don't care to know) hurt us? I'm unsure whether the more depressing answer is yes or no. As it happens, I have no answer to that question anyway, only a bit of advice -- not for us, but for Afghans: If, as General McChrystal and other top military figures expect, the Afghan War and its cross-border sibling in Pakistan go on for another three or four or five years or more, no matter what script we're going by, no matter what we say, believe me, we'll call in the planes. So if I were you, I wouldn't celebrate another marriage, not in a group, not in public, and I'd bury my dead very, very privately.
If you gather, after all, we will come.
Tom Engelhardt, co-founder of the American Empire Project, runs the Nation Institute's TomDispatch.com. He is the author of The End of Victory Culture, a history of the Cold War and beyond, as well as of a novel, The Last Days of Publishing. He also edited The World According to TomDispatch: America in the New Age of Empire (Verso, 2008), an alternative history of the mad Bush years.
[Note: I documented as fully as I could the previous Afghan wedding slaughters in "The Wedding Crashers: A Short Till-Death-Do-Us-Part History of Bush's Wars" (July 2008). And here's a selection of TomDispatch pieces on related subjects, if you're interested in reading more: "Slaughter, Lies, and Video in Afghanistan" (September 2008), "What Price Slaughter?" (May 2007), "The Billion-Dollar Gravestone" (May 2006), "Catch 2,200: 9 Propositions on the U.S. Air War for Terror" (May 2006), and former U.S. diplomat John Brown's "Our Indian Wars Are Not Over Yet" (January 2006). You might also visit filmmaker Robert Greenwald's website Rethink Afghanistan.] To view these articles check out Tom's website today!
Copyright 2009 Tom Engelhardt
Endangered Language Makes a Come Back in Syria
Syrian president Assad has set up an institute to revive interest in the language of Christ
Ian Black in Maaloula, Tuesday 14 April 2009 10.29 BST
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2009/apr/14/aramaic-revival-syria
Ilyana Barqil wears skinny jeans, boots and a fur-lined jacket, handy for keeping out the cold in the Qalamoun mountains north of Damascus. She likes TV quiz shows and American films and enjoys swimming. But this thoroughly modern Syrian teenager is also learning Aramaic, the language spoken by Jesus.
Ilyana, 15, is part of an extraordinary effort to preserve and revive the world's oldest living tongue, still close to what it probably sounded like in Galilee, now in Israel, on the brink of the Christian era.
"In Nazareth when Jesus was born they spoke more or less the same language as we do in Maaloula today," said teacher Imad Reihan, one of the pillars of this picturesque village's Aramaic Language Academy, where Barqil is studying.
"Eli, Eli, lama sabachtani" ("My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me") – Christ's lament on the cross – was famously uttered in Aramaic.
Recognised by Unesco as a "definitely endangered" language, Aramaic is spoken by 7,000 people in Maaloula, dominated by Greek Catholics (Melikites) whose churches and rites long pre-date the arrival of Islam and Arabic. Western Neo-Aramaic, to use its proper linguistic title, is spoken by about 8,000 others in two nearby villages, one now wholly Muslim.
Aramaic's long decline accelerated as the area opened up in the 1920s when the French colonial authorities built a road from Damascus to Aleppo. Television and the internet, and youngsters leaving to work, reduced the number of speakers.
Nowadays, many local men are away driving the huge refrigerated trucks that cross the desert to Saudi Arabia. Still, many old traces remain: in nearby Sidnaya, worshippers at the Church of Our Lady speak Arabic with a distinct Aramaic accent.
But things are definitely looking up. "When I was at school over 30 years ago, we were not allowed to speak Aramaic," said Mukhail Bkheil, standing behind the counter in Abu George's souvenir shop in Maaloula's main square, where buses disgorge tourists visiting the beautiful Church of Mar Takla, an early Christian martyr, in a grotto on the steep cliffside. "Now, thanks to President Assad, we even have an institute teaching it."
Bkheil's party piece is reciting the Lord's Prayer in Aramaic. But he chats freely to friends, underlining the fact that the language is alive and well, not just liturgical.
Saada Sarhan, the language academy administrator, learned Aramaic as a child and is teaching her own children, but often feels social pressure to speak Arabic when non-Aramaic speakers are present. "Otherwise it's rude," she says.
Improbably, Aramaic was given a boost by a Hollywood film, Mel Gibson's controversial Passion of the Christ, released in 2004 before the academy was set up.
Founded by the University of Damascus with government help, its modern premises boast a bank of PCs, new textbooks, a teaching staff of six and 85 students at three different levels.
Elias Taja is another of them: this native Aramaic speaker and retired maths teacher wanted to learn how to write the language. "I talk to my wife and daughter Miladi only in Aramaic though my daughter does sometimes reply in Arabic," he explained over cardamom-flavoured coffee and locally grown pears.
Miladi, 25, recently married a man from Sidnaya who does not speak Aramaic. Taja worries she will not manage to pass it on to her children – his grandchildren.
Syria being Syria, there are political sensitivities, not least because "Arabisation" was a key feature of government education policy after the Ba'ath party came to power in the 1960s.
"In Syria there are a lot of minority groups: Circassians, Armenians, Kurds and Assyrians, so it's a big decision to allow the teaching of other languages in government schools," said Reihan. "But the government is interested in promoting the Aramaic language because it goes back so deep into Syria's history."
Observers say the opening of the Aramaic academy showed a more relaxed and confident attitude by the regime. Scholar George Rizkallah dedicated his 2007 Aramaic textbook to the "great leader and patron of the sciences and education Dr Bashar al-Assad". A large portrait of the president hangs in the principal's office, as in all public buildings in Syria.
Considering the bitter enmity between Syria and Israel, which still occupies the Golan Heights, it is striking that Aramaic letters are so similar to the Hebrew used in rabbinic texts; one reason, perhaps, why the only Aramaic sign in Maaloula is on the academy. "Otherwise people might think some buildings were Israeli settlements," joked one visitor from Damascus.
Linguistic experts say that Syria is doing well in fostering this part of its heritage. "Aramaic is actually pretty healthy in Maaloula," said Professor Geoffrey Kahn, who teaches semitic philology at Cambridge University. "It's the eastern Aramaic dialects in Turkey, Iraq and Iran that are really endangered."
Reihan and colleagues were delighted recently when a Unesco team came to visit and hope for funds to allow them to collect vanishing words into proper dictionaries. The teaching, meanwhile, goes on.
Ilyana started classes last November. "My father speaks Aramaic but my mother doesn't as she's from Lebanon," she said. "I speak OK already but I'm going to carry on as I want to become fluent. I don't know too much about the Aramaic language but I do know that it's ancient."
Ian Black in Maaloula, Tuesday 14 April 2009 10.29 BST
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2009/apr/14/aramaic-revival-syria
Ilyana Barqil wears skinny jeans, boots and a fur-lined jacket, handy for keeping out the cold in the Qalamoun mountains north of Damascus. She likes TV quiz shows and American films and enjoys swimming. But this thoroughly modern Syrian teenager is also learning Aramaic, the language spoken by Jesus.
Ilyana, 15, is part of an extraordinary effort to preserve and revive the world's oldest living tongue, still close to what it probably sounded like in Galilee, now in Israel, on the brink of the Christian era.
"In Nazareth when Jesus was born they spoke more or less the same language as we do in Maaloula today," said teacher Imad Reihan, one of the pillars of this picturesque village's Aramaic Language Academy, where Barqil is studying.
"Eli, Eli, lama sabachtani" ("My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me") – Christ's lament on the cross – was famously uttered in Aramaic.
Recognised by Unesco as a "definitely endangered" language, Aramaic is spoken by 7,000 people in Maaloula, dominated by Greek Catholics (Melikites) whose churches and rites long pre-date the arrival of Islam and Arabic. Western Neo-Aramaic, to use its proper linguistic title, is spoken by about 8,000 others in two nearby villages, one now wholly Muslim.
Aramaic's long decline accelerated as the area opened up in the 1920s when the French colonial authorities built a road from Damascus to Aleppo. Television and the internet, and youngsters leaving to work, reduced the number of speakers.
Nowadays, many local men are away driving the huge refrigerated trucks that cross the desert to Saudi Arabia. Still, many old traces remain: in nearby Sidnaya, worshippers at the Church of Our Lady speak Arabic with a distinct Aramaic accent.
But things are definitely looking up. "When I was at school over 30 years ago, we were not allowed to speak Aramaic," said Mukhail Bkheil, standing behind the counter in Abu George's souvenir shop in Maaloula's main square, where buses disgorge tourists visiting the beautiful Church of Mar Takla, an early Christian martyr, in a grotto on the steep cliffside. "Now, thanks to President Assad, we even have an institute teaching it."
Bkheil's party piece is reciting the Lord's Prayer in Aramaic. But he chats freely to friends, underlining the fact that the language is alive and well, not just liturgical.
Saada Sarhan, the language academy administrator, learned Aramaic as a child and is teaching her own children, but often feels social pressure to speak Arabic when non-Aramaic speakers are present. "Otherwise it's rude," she says.
Improbably, Aramaic was given a boost by a Hollywood film, Mel Gibson's controversial Passion of the Christ, released in 2004 before the academy was set up.
Founded by the University of Damascus with government help, its modern premises boast a bank of PCs, new textbooks, a teaching staff of six and 85 students at three different levels.
Elias Taja is another of them: this native Aramaic speaker and retired maths teacher wanted to learn how to write the language. "I talk to my wife and daughter Miladi only in Aramaic though my daughter does sometimes reply in Arabic," he explained over cardamom-flavoured coffee and locally grown pears.
Miladi, 25, recently married a man from Sidnaya who does not speak Aramaic. Taja worries she will not manage to pass it on to her children – his grandchildren.
Syria being Syria, there are political sensitivities, not least because "Arabisation" was a key feature of government education policy after the Ba'ath party came to power in the 1960s.
"In Syria there are a lot of minority groups: Circassians, Armenians, Kurds and Assyrians, so it's a big decision to allow the teaching of other languages in government schools," said Reihan. "But the government is interested in promoting the Aramaic language because it goes back so deep into Syria's history."
Observers say the opening of the Aramaic academy showed a more relaxed and confident attitude by the regime. Scholar George Rizkallah dedicated his 2007 Aramaic textbook to the "great leader and patron of the sciences and education Dr Bashar al-Assad". A large portrait of the president hangs in the principal's office, as in all public buildings in Syria.
Considering the bitter enmity between Syria and Israel, which still occupies the Golan Heights, it is striking that Aramaic letters are so similar to the Hebrew used in rabbinic texts; one reason, perhaps, why the only Aramaic sign in Maaloula is on the academy. "Otherwise people might think some buildings were Israeli settlements," joked one visitor from Damascus.
Linguistic experts say that Syria is doing well in fostering this part of its heritage. "Aramaic is actually pretty healthy in Maaloula," said Professor Geoffrey Kahn, who teaches semitic philology at Cambridge University. "It's the eastern Aramaic dialects in Turkey, Iraq and Iran that are really endangered."
Reihan and colleagues were delighted recently when a Unesco team came to visit and hope for funds to allow them to collect vanishing words into proper dictionaries. The teaching, meanwhile, goes on.
Ilyana started classes last November. "My father speaks Aramaic but my mother doesn't as she's from Lebanon," she said. "I speak OK already but I'm going to carry on as I want to become fluent. I don't know too much about the Aramaic language but I do know that it's ancient."
A Flash of Memory
By ISSEY MIYAKE
Published: July 13, 2009
Tokyo
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/14/opinion/14miyake.html?_r=1
IN April, President Obama pledged to seek peace and security in a world without nuclear weapons. He called for not simply a reduction, but elimination. His words awakened something buried deeply within me, something about which I have until now been reluctant to discuss.
I realized that I have, perhaps now more than ever, a personal and moral responsibility to speak out as one who survived what Mr. Obama called the “flash of light.”
On Aug. 6, 1945, the first atomic bomb was dropped on my hometown, Hiroshima. I was there, and only 7 years old. When I close my eyes, I still see things no one should ever experience: a bright red light, the black cloud soon after, people running in every direction trying desperately to escape — I remember it all. Within three years, my mother died from radiation exposure.
I have never chosen to share my memories or thoughts of that day. I have tried, albeit unsuccessfully, to put them behind me, preferring to think of things that can be created, not destroyed, and that bring beauty and joy. I gravitated toward the field of clothing design, partly because it is a creative format that is modern and optimistic.
I tried never to be defined by my past. I did not want to be labeled “the designer who survived the atomic bomb,” and therefore I have always avoided questions about Hiroshima. They made me uncomfortable.
But now I realize it is a subject that must be discussed if we are ever to rid the world of nuclear weapons. There is a movement in Hiroshima to invite Mr. Obama to Universal Peace Day on Aug. 6 — the annual commemoration of that fateful day. I hope he will accept. My wish is motivated by a desire not to dwell on the past, but rather to give a sign to the world that the American president’s goal is to work to eliminate nuclear wars in the future.
Last week, Russia and the United States signed an agreement to reduce nuclear arms. This was an important event. However, we are not naïve: no one person or country can stop nuclear warfare. In Japan, we live with the constant threat from our nuclear-armed neighbor North Korea. There are reports of other countries acquiring nuclear technology, too. For there to be any hope of peace, people around the world must add their voices to President Obama’s.
If Mr. Obama could walk across the Peace Bridge in Hiroshima — whose balustrades were designed by the Japanese-American sculptor Isamu Noguchi as a reminder both of his ties to East and West and of what humans do to one another out of hatred — it would be both a real and a symbolic step toward creating a world that knows no fear of nuclear threat. Every step taken is another step closer to world peace.
Issey Miyake is a clothing designer. This article was translated by members of his staff from the Japanese.
Published: July 13, 2009
Tokyo
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/14/opinion/14miyake.html?_r=1
IN April, President Obama pledged to seek peace and security in a world without nuclear weapons. He called for not simply a reduction, but elimination. His words awakened something buried deeply within me, something about which I have until now been reluctant to discuss.
I realized that I have, perhaps now more than ever, a personal and moral responsibility to speak out as one who survived what Mr. Obama called the “flash of light.”
On Aug. 6, 1945, the first atomic bomb was dropped on my hometown, Hiroshima. I was there, and only 7 years old. When I close my eyes, I still see things no one should ever experience: a bright red light, the black cloud soon after, people running in every direction trying desperately to escape — I remember it all. Within three years, my mother died from radiation exposure.
I have never chosen to share my memories or thoughts of that day. I have tried, albeit unsuccessfully, to put them behind me, preferring to think of things that can be created, not destroyed, and that bring beauty and joy. I gravitated toward the field of clothing design, partly because it is a creative format that is modern and optimistic.
I tried never to be defined by my past. I did not want to be labeled “the designer who survived the atomic bomb,” and therefore I have always avoided questions about Hiroshima. They made me uncomfortable.
But now I realize it is a subject that must be discussed if we are ever to rid the world of nuclear weapons. There is a movement in Hiroshima to invite Mr. Obama to Universal Peace Day on Aug. 6 — the annual commemoration of that fateful day. I hope he will accept. My wish is motivated by a desire not to dwell on the past, but rather to give a sign to the world that the American president’s goal is to work to eliminate nuclear wars in the future.
Last week, Russia and the United States signed an agreement to reduce nuclear arms. This was an important event. However, we are not naïve: no one person or country can stop nuclear warfare. In Japan, we live with the constant threat from our nuclear-armed neighbor North Korea. There are reports of other countries acquiring nuclear technology, too. For there to be any hope of peace, people around the world must add their voices to President Obama’s.
If Mr. Obama could walk across the Peace Bridge in Hiroshima — whose balustrades were designed by the Japanese-American sculptor Isamu Noguchi as a reminder both of his ties to East and West and of what humans do to one another out of hatred — it would be both a real and a symbolic step toward creating a world that knows no fear of nuclear threat. Every step taken is another step closer to world peace.
Issey Miyake is a clothing designer. This article was translated by members of his staff from the Japanese.
01 July 2009
Iraq Marks Withdrawal of U.S. Troops From Cities
July 1, 2009
By ALISSA J. RUBIN
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/01/world/middleeast/01iraq.html?hpw
BAGHDAD — Iraq celebrated the withdrawal of American troops from its cities with parades, fireworks and a national holiday on Tuesday as the prime minister trumpeted the country’s sovereignty from American occupation to a wary public.
Even with a deadly car bombing and other mayhem marring the day — the deadline for the American troop pullback under an agreement that took effect Jan. 1 — Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki seized on the occasion to position himself as a proud leader of a country independent at last, looking ahead to the next milestone of parliamentary elections in January.
He made no mention of American troops in a nationally televised speech, even though nearly 130,000 remain in the country; most had already pulled back from Iraq’s cities before Tuesday’s deadline.
The excitement, however, has rung hollow for many Iraqis, who fear that their country’s security forces are not ready to stand alone and who see the government’s claims of independence as overblown.
From Basra in the south to Mosul in the north, Iraqis expressed skepticism about the proclamation of “independence.”
“They will not withdraw to their homes; they will stay here and there so that they can return in emergencies,” said Samir Alwan, 28, the owner of a mini-market in Basra. “So it is not sovereignty, according to my point of view, and I think that the Iraqi Army is only able to secure the south of the country and unable to secure Baghdad and Mosul.”
In a national address, Mr. Maliki focused his praise on Iraqi troops and security forces for their role in fighting the insurgency. “The national united government succeeded in putting down the sectarian war that was threatening the unity and the sovereignty of Iraq,” he said, as if the United States had played no role.
President Obama, who ran for office on a pledge to end the war, marked the occasion with minimal fanfare, declaring it “an important milestone” even as he warned of “difficult days ahead.”
“The Iraqi people are rightly treating this day as cause for celebration,” he said.
The withdrawal did not command its own presidential appearance — Mr. Obama’s brief remarks were delivered at a ceremony honoring entrepreneurs — a contrast with his predecessor, who rarely missed an opportunity to celebrate milestones in Iraq.
Underscoring the insecurity, a suicide bombing in a market in a Kurdish neighborhood of the volatile northern city of Kirkuk killed 33 people, according to the police there. In Baghdad, the American military reported that four United States soldiers were killed in an attack on Monday, evidence of the vulnerability of the troops as they withdraw.
Military experts anticipate more violence in the days ahead.
Mr. Maliki’s effort to capitalize on Iraq’s latent anti-Americanism and to extol the abilities of his troops is a risky strategy. If it turns out that Iraqi troops cannot control the violence, Mr. Maliki will be vulnerable to criticism from rivals — not only if he has to ask the Americans to return but also if he fails to enforce security without them.
Some American commanders have said they were taken aback by Mr. Maliki’s insistence on taking credit for all the security successes in Iraq. However, they also see the importance of having him and Iraqi troops appear strong, especially in the face of insurgent factions intent on destabilizing the government.
Gen. Ray Odierno, the top commander of American troops in Iraq, brushed aside the dismissive tone of public remarks by the country’s leaders about the Americans, saying that Mr. Maliki personally thanked him Monday night and again Tuesday for the sacrifices the American troops had made.
“I do not get these negative comments from the political leaders that are in the government,” he said at a news conference at the American military headquarters at Camp Victory. “In my mind, I frankly don’t worry about those comments because I understand that we are working this together.”
He also played down concerns about security in Iraq’s cities after the withdrawal of most American combat forces, noting that nearly 130,000 troops remained in Iraq. He said the American and Iraqi militaries continued to cooperate on security issues inside and outside the cities.
In most places the transition to the Iraqi forces has gone relatively smoothly, but there have been bumps, reminders of the underlying tensions between the two militaries and the resentment that American soldiers feel as the Iraqis appear eager to push them out the door even though they still want them to be on call.
In Diyala Province, where the Americans closed 11 of 18 bases or outposts before Tuesday’s deadline, the transfers did not go entirely smoothly. An official in Mr. Maliki’s office showed up early at a camp near Baquba and complained that the Americans had not left behind generators and air-conditioners for the Iraqis — something the American commander in the region said had never been part of the agreement. The dispute on Sunday delayed the formal transfer.
“You can’t treat your partners that way,” the commander, Col. Burt K. Thompson of the First Stryker Brigade, 25th Infantry Division, said in Baquba.
For Iraqis, claiming sovereignty is something of a national pastime, with various politicians celebrating different markers: 2004, when the American-led Coalition Provisional Authority handed power to the interim Iraqi government; 2006, when Iraq seated its first constitutionally elected Parliament; and Jan. 1, when the security agreement took effect.
Mr. Maliki seems to be making a conscious effort to cement his image as a strong ruler by using many of the same tools of power as the predecessor he hated so much, Saddam Hussein. He has used the state television network and newspaper to spread nationalist messages, and has used parades and festivals to encourage public pride.
Over the past several days the state television network, Al Iraqiya, not only ran a “Countdown to Sovereignty” clock but also broadcast promotional spots glorifying Iraqi history, culture and people. Its images of the marshes of southern Iraq, the markets of Baghdad, men performing traditional dances and children playing in the mountain meadows of Kurdistan — much of it filmed before the 2003 invasion — presented an image of Iraq completely unfamiliar to most Iraqis, who now live in neighborhoods cordoned off by blast walls and are forced to go through multiple checkpoints every day.
“This is all for the media,” said Amina al-Esadi, a female searcher at the compound of the Islamic Supreme Council of Iraq, a religious Shiite political party.
“Some people are afraid because the Americans have left. Some think it will be better because then the enemies of the Americans will leave Iraq” and the country will be safer, she said.
Steven Lee Myers contributed reporting from Baghdad, Sheryl Gay Stolberg from Washington, and employees of The New York Times from Basra and Diyala Province.
By ALISSA J. RUBIN
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/01/world/middleeast/01iraq.html?hpw
BAGHDAD — Iraq celebrated the withdrawal of American troops from its cities with parades, fireworks and a national holiday on Tuesday as the prime minister trumpeted the country’s sovereignty from American occupation to a wary public.
Even with a deadly car bombing and other mayhem marring the day — the deadline for the American troop pullback under an agreement that took effect Jan. 1 — Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki seized on the occasion to position himself as a proud leader of a country independent at last, looking ahead to the next milestone of parliamentary elections in January.
He made no mention of American troops in a nationally televised speech, even though nearly 130,000 remain in the country; most had already pulled back from Iraq’s cities before Tuesday’s deadline.
The excitement, however, has rung hollow for many Iraqis, who fear that their country’s security forces are not ready to stand alone and who see the government’s claims of independence as overblown.
From Basra in the south to Mosul in the north, Iraqis expressed skepticism about the proclamation of “independence.”
“They will not withdraw to their homes; they will stay here and there so that they can return in emergencies,” said Samir Alwan, 28, the owner of a mini-market in Basra. “So it is not sovereignty, according to my point of view, and I think that the Iraqi Army is only able to secure the south of the country and unable to secure Baghdad and Mosul.”
In a national address, Mr. Maliki focused his praise on Iraqi troops and security forces for their role in fighting the insurgency. “The national united government succeeded in putting down the sectarian war that was threatening the unity and the sovereignty of Iraq,” he said, as if the United States had played no role.
President Obama, who ran for office on a pledge to end the war, marked the occasion with minimal fanfare, declaring it “an important milestone” even as he warned of “difficult days ahead.”
“The Iraqi people are rightly treating this day as cause for celebration,” he said.
The withdrawal did not command its own presidential appearance — Mr. Obama’s brief remarks were delivered at a ceremony honoring entrepreneurs — a contrast with his predecessor, who rarely missed an opportunity to celebrate milestones in Iraq.
Underscoring the insecurity, a suicide bombing in a market in a Kurdish neighborhood of the volatile northern city of Kirkuk killed 33 people, according to the police there. In Baghdad, the American military reported that four United States soldiers were killed in an attack on Monday, evidence of the vulnerability of the troops as they withdraw.
Military experts anticipate more violence in the days ahead.
Mr. Maliki’s effort to capitalize on Iraq’s latent anti-Americanism and to extol the abilities of his troops is a risky strategy. If it turns out that Iraqi troops cannot control the violence, Mr. Maliki will be vulnerable to criticism from rivals — not only if he has to ask the Americans to return but also if he fails to enforce security without them.
Some American commanders have said they were taken aback by Mr. Maliki’s insistence on taking credit for all the security successes in Iraq. However, they also see the importance of having him and Iraqi troops appear strong, especially in the face of insurgent factions intent on destabilizing the government.
Gen. Ray Odierno, the top commander of American troops in Iraq, brushed aside the dismissive tone of public remarks by the country’s leaders about the Americans, saying that Mr. Maliki personally thanked him Monday night and again Tuesday for the sacrifices the American troops had made.
“I do not get these negative comments from the political leaders that are in the government,” he said at a news conference at the American military headquarters at Camp Victory. “In my mind, I frankly don’t worry about those comments because I understand that we are working this together.”
He also played down concerns about security in Iraq’s cities after the withdrawal of most American combat forces, noting that nearly 130,000 troops remained in Iraq. He said the American and Iraqi militaries continued to cooperate on security issues inside and outside the cities.
In most places the transition to the Iraqi forces has gone relatively smoothly, but there have been bumps, reminders of the underlying tensions between the two militaries and the resentment that American soldiers feel as the Iraqis appear eager to push them out the door even though they still want them to be on call.
In Diyala Province, where the Americans closed 11 of 18 bases or outposts before Tuesday’s deadline, the transfers did not go entirely smoothly. An official in Mr. Maliki’s office showed up early at a camp near Baquba and complained that the Americans had not left behind generators and air-conditioners for the Iraqis — something the American commander in the region said had never been part of the agreement. The dispute on Sunday delayed the formal transfer.
“You can’t treat your partners that way,” the commander, Col. Burt K. Thompson of the First Stryker Brigade, 25th Infantry Division, said in Baquba.
For Iraqis, claiming sovereignty is something of a national pastime, with various politicians celebrating different markers: 2004, when the American-led Coalition Provisional Authority handed power to the interim Iraqi government; 2006, when Iraq seated its first constitutionally elected Parliament; and Jan. 1, when the security agreement took effect.
Mr. Maliki seems to be making a conscious effort to cement his image as a strong ruler by using many of the same tools of power as the predecessor he hated so much, Saddam Hussein. He has used the state television network and newspaper to spread nationalist messages, and has used parades and festivals to encourage public pride.
Over the past several days the state television network, Al Iraqiya, not only ran a “Countdown to Sovereignty” clock but also broadcast promotional spots glorifying Iraqi history, culture and people. Its images of the marshes of southern Iraq, the markets of Baghdad, men performing traditional dances and children playing in the mountain meadows of Kurdistan — much of it filmed before the 2003 invasion — presented an image of Iraq completely unfamiliar to most Iraqis, who now live in neighborhoods cordoned off by blast walls and are forced to go through multiple checkpoints every day.
“This is all for the media,” said Amina al-Esadi, a female searcher at the compound of the Islamic Supreme Council of Iraq, a religious Shiite political party.
“Some people are afraid because the Americans have left. Some think it will be better because then the enemies of the Americans will leave Iraq” and the country will be safer, she said.
Steven Lee Myers contributed reporting from Baghdad, Sheryl Gay Stolberg from Washington, and employees of The New York Times from Basra and Diyala Province.
Europe Weighs Withdrawing Ambassadors From Tehran
July 2, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/02/world/middleeast/02iran.html?_r=1&hpBy ALAN COWELL and STEPHEN CASTLE
PARIS — Iran courted new levels of post-election isolation from the European Union on Wednesday as European diplomats pondered whether to withdraw the ambassadors of all 27 members nations in a dispute over the detention of the British Embassy’s local personnel.
European diplomats said that no formal decision to order their envoys home had been taken but that the measure was an option under consideration as the European Union — Iran’s biggest trading partner — tries to work out how to defuse the dispute in a way that would shield other embassies in Tehran from similar action.
Withdrawing all 27 ambassadors would represent a rare and unusually forceful display of European anger at Iran’s behavior, and several diplomats said the European Union would prefer to avoid it. Diplomats in Europe said they could not recall such concerted action by the entire, expanded bloc.
The initial Iranian response seemed characteristically bellicose. A high-ranking military official demanded that the Europeans apologize for interference in Iran’s affairs, which, he said, disqualified European countries from negotiating on the fraught issue of Iran’s nuclear ambitions.
In a statement quoted by the semi-official Fars news agency on Wednesday, Iran’s chief of staff, Hassan Firouzabadi, was quoted as saying that because of the European Union’s “interference” in “the post-election riots, they have lost their qualification to hold nuclear talks with Iran.”
“Before apologizing for their huge mistake,” he said, the European countries have “no right to talk about nuclear negotiations,” according to a Fars report quoted by Reuters.
It was the first sign that Iran might use its post-election dispute to cast further doubt over the stalled nuclear negotiations, buying time to continue a nuclear enrichment program which Tehran says is for peaceful, civilian purposes. Many in the west suspect that Iran is seeking the ability to build nuclear weapons.
Moreover, the statement seemed to add one more layer of complexity to Western assessments of how to deal with Iran.
Since the presidential vote on June 12, members of the European Union have taken a lead in condemning a subsequent violent crackdown on dissenters who have accused the government of manipulating the results to keep the incumbent, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, in power.
The Iranian authorities have especially sought to cast Britain as an instigator of the unrest. They arrested nine local employees of the British Embassy in Tehran over the weekend, though five were released by Monday night. The Iranian authorities accused the local employees of fomenting unrest.
Press TV, a television station financed by the Iranian government, announced that three of the employees were released Wednesday, leaving just one still in custody. That employee, Fars news agency said Wednesday, “had a remarkable role during the recent unrest in managing it behind the scenes.”
As the dispute unfolded, the European Union said it would support Britain, but it has been unclear what form that backing would take.
Carl Bildt, the foreign minister of Sweden, told reporters in Stockholm on Wednesday — the day his country took over the rotating presidency of the European Union — that it was in the interests of both the European Union and Iran to retain full diplomatic ties. But he did not specifically exclude the withdrawal of ambassadors, saying that “from the diplomatic perspective, all options are on the table.”
However, he added that the bloc has “an interest in maintaining full diplomatic relations” with Tehran and that he thought “it would be in Iranian interests that we retain diplomatic courtesies in a situation like this.”
“We are in a dialogue with the Iranian authorities to see if we can sort out the issue,” Mr. Bildt said.
The Swedish prime minister, Fredrik Reinfeldt, said that the European Union had to strike a difficult balance in its relationship with both the Iranian authorities and those protesting for democratic rights. The aim was to do so without polarizing the relationship with Iran and thus offering the government there a pretext for repression by blaming foreign intervention.
In a statement on Sunday, European foreign ministers promised a “strong and collective response” to the diplomatic crisis in Tehran. That led to discussions among senior European diplomats in Brussels on Tuesday. Separate talks among European officials are set to take place in Stockholm on Thursday and Brussels on Friday, a European diplomat said.
European countries have not yet agreed on a course of action, with Germany, Iran’s biggest individual trade partner, and Italy taking a cautious position, while Britain pushes for a tougher and more radical response, the diplomat said on condition of anonymity because of the delicacy of the issue.
Some Europeans believe the Iranians can be persuaded to avert a confrontation by quickly releasing the remaining British Embassy staff member.
But the Iranian response, invoking the question of nuclear negotiations that has dominated the relationship between Iran and the West, has illuminated broader implications for the Obama administration’s avowed hopes for a new dialogue with Iran.
In April, the administration said that it would start participating regularly with other major powers in negotiations with Iran over its nuclear program.
At the time, the decision seemed to be a further step toward the direct engagement with Iran that President Obama had promised. It followed an invitation to Iran to join in a new round of talks, which would include Britain, France, Germany, Russia and China. And it coincided with an unusual expression of conciliation toward the United States by President Ahmadinejad of Iran, who said that his government would welcome talks with the Obama administration, provided that the shift in American policy was “honest.”
In the past, the Bush administration largely shunned the European-led negotiations with Tehran, but, one year ago, it reluctantly sent a senior diplomat to a single round of talks that ended in stalemate.
Later in April, President Ahmadinejad said he was preparing a new proposal to resolve disputes with the West over Iran’s nuclear program, although he did not give details.
But the aftermath of the June 12 presidential election in Iran seems to have reset the clock. President Obama initially sought to refrain from criticism of the Iranian authorities. After he finally expressed outrage at Tehran’s crackdown, Mr. Ahmadinejad demanded an apology and said Mr. Obama was echoing the policies of the Bush administration.
The elections led to weeks of protest that presented the strongest challenge to the authorities in 30 years.
Late Tuesday, an opposition candidate again insisted he would not accept the outcome and challenged the legitimacy of President Ahmadinejad’s re-election. Mehdi Karroubi, a former Parliament speaker who came a distant fourth in the June 12 vote, said on his Web site that he did not recognize the legitimacy of the ballot.
“I will continue my fight using every means and I’m ready to cooperate with pro-reform people and groups,” he said on the site. Mir Hussain Moussavi, the runner-up, on Wednesday also reasserted his claim that the election was illegitimate, Reuters reported. In an apparent sign of the leadership’s edginess after the protests, Mr. Ahmadinejad canceled a planned overseas trip to Libya on Wednesday, news reports said. His government did not explain why.
In another apparent diplomatic upset, the sultan of Oman, Qaboos bin Said, was reported on Wednesday to have postponed indefinitely a visit to Tehran which would have been the first since the fall of the Shah in the 1979 revolution.
Alan Cowell reported from Paris and Stephen Castle from Stockholm. Michael Slackman contributed reporting from Cairo.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/02/world/middleeast/02iran.html?_r=1&hpBy ALAN COWELL and STEPHEN CASTLE
PARIS — Iran courted new levels of post-election isolation from the European Union on Wednesday as European diplomats pondered whether to withdraw the ambassadors of all 27 members nations in a dispute over the detention of the British Embassy’s local personnel.
European diplomats said that no formal decision to order their envoys home had been taken but that the measure was an option under consideration as the European Union — Iran’s biggest trading partner — tries to work out how to defuse the dispute in a way that would shield other embassies in Tehran from similar action.
Withdrawing all 27 ambassadors would represent a rare and unusually forceful display of European anger at Iran’s behavior, and several diplomats said the European Union would prefer to avoid it. Diplomats in Europe said they could not recall such concerted action by the entire, expanded bloc.
The initial Iranian response seemed characteristically bellicose. A high-ranking military official demanded that the Europeans apologize for interference in Iran’s affairs, which, he said, disqualified European countries from negotiating on the fraught issue of Iran’s nuclear ambitions.
In a statement quoted by the semi-official Fars news agency on Wednesday, Iran’s chief of staff, Hassan Firouzabadi, was quoted as saying that because of the European Union’s “interference” in “the post-election riots, they have lost their qualification to hold nuclear talks with Iran.”
“Before apologizing for their huge mistake,” he said, the European countries have “no right to talk about nuclear negotiations,” according to a Fars report quoted by Reuters.
It was the first sign that Iran might use its post-election dispute to cast further doubt over the stalled nuclear negotiations, buying time to continue a nuclear enrichment program which Tehran says is for peaceful, civilian purposes. Many in the west suspect that Iran is seeking the ability to build nuclear weapons.
Moreover, the statement seemed to add one more layer of complexity to Western assessments of how to deal with Iran.
Since the presidential vote on June 12, members of the European Union have taken a lead in condemning a subsequent violent crackdown on dissenters who have accused the government of manipulating the results to keep the incumbent, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, in power.
The Iranian authorities have especially sought to cast Britain as an instigator of the unrest. They arrested nine local employees of the British Embassy in Tehran over the weekend, though five were released by Monday night. The Iranian authorities accused the local employees of fomenting unrest.
Press TV, a television station financed by the Iranian government, announced that three of the employees were released Wednesday, leaving just one still in custody. That employee, Fars news agency said Wednesday, “had a remarkable role during the recent unrest in managing it behind the scenes.”
As the dispute unfolded, the European Union said it would support Britain, but it has been unclear what form that backing would take.
Carl Bildt, the foreign minister of Sweden, told reporters in Stockholm on Wednesday — the day his country took over the rotating presidency of the European Union — that it was in the interests of both the European Union and Iran to retain full diplomatic ties. But he did not specifically exclude the withdrawal of ambassadors, saying that “from the diplomatic perspective, all options are on the table.”
However, he added that the bloc has “an interest in maintaining full diplomatic relations” with Tehran and that he thought “it would be in Iranian interests that we retain diplomatic courtesies in a situation like this.”
“We are in a dialogue with the Iranian authorities to see if we can sort out the issue,” Mr. Bildt said.
The Swedish prime minister, Fredrik Reinfeldt, said that the European Union had to strike a difficult balance in its relationship with both the Iranian authorities and those protesting for democratic rights. The aim was to do so without polarizing the relationship with Iran and thus offering the government there a pretext for repression by blaming foreign intervention.
In a statement on Sunday, European foreign ministers promised a “strong and collective response” to the diplomatic crisis in Tehran. That led to discussions among senior European diplomats in Brussels on Tuesday. Separate talks among European officials are set to take place in Stockholm on Thursday and Brussels on Friday, a European diplomat said.
European countries have not yet agreed on a course of action, with Germany, Iran’s biggest individual trade partner, and Italy taking a cautious position, while Britain pushes for a tougher and more radical response, the diplomat said on condition of anonymity because of the delicacy of the issue.
Some Europeans believe the Iranians can be persuaded to avert a confrontation by quickly releasing the remaining British Embassy staff member.
But the Iranian response, invoking the question of nuclear negotiations that has dominated the relationship between Iran and the West, has illuminated broader implications for the Obama administration’s avowed hopes for a new dialogue with Iran.
In April, the administration said that it would start participating regularly with other major powers in negotiations with Iran over its nuclear program.
At the time, the decision seemed to be a further step toward the direct engagement with Iran that President Obama had promised. It followed an invitation to Iran to join in a new round of talks, which would include Britain, France, Germany, Russia and China. And it coincided with an unusual expression of conciliation toward the United States by President Ahmadinejad of Iran, who said that his government would welcome talks with the Obama administration, provided that the shift in American policy was “honest.”
In the past, the Bush administration largely shunned the European-led negotiations with Tehran, but, one year ago, it reluctantly sent a senior diplomat to a single round of talks that ended in stalemate.
Later in April, President Ahmadinejad said he was preparing a new proposal to resolve disputes with the West over Iran’s nuclear program, although he did not give details.
But the aftermath of the June 12 presidential election in Iran seems to have reset the clock. President Obama initially sought to refrain from criticism of the Iranian authorities. After he finally expressed outrage at Tehran’s crackdown, Mr. Ahmadinejad demanded an apology and said Mr. Obama was echoing the policies of the Bush administration.
The elections led to weeks of protest that presented the strongest challenge to the authorities in 30 years.
Late Tuesday, an opposition candidate again insisted he would not accept the outcome and challenged the legitimacy of President Ahmadinejad’s re-election. Mehdi Karroubi, a former Parliament speaker who came a distant fourth in the June 12 vote, said on his Web site that he did not recognize the legitimacy of the ballot.
“I will continue my fight using every means and I’m ready to cooperate with pro-reform people and groups,” he said on the site. Mir Hussain Moussavi, the runner-up, on Wednesday also reasserted his claim that the election was illegitimate, Reuters reported. In an apparent sign of the leadership’s edginess after the protests, Mr. Ahmadinejad canceled a planned overseas trip to Libya on Wednesday, news reports said. His government did not explain why.
In another apparent diplomatic upset, the sultan of Oman, Qaboos bin Said, was reported on Wednesday to have postponed indefinitely a visit to Tehran which would have been the first since the fall of the Shah in the 1979 revolution.
Alan Cowell reported from Paris and Stephen Castle from Stockholm. Michael Slackman contributed reporting from Cairo.
22 June 2009
Iranian Rally Is Dispersed as Voting Errors Are Admitted
There are 2 articles in this post. After the main news article there is an op-ed piece about the future of Iran's society.
June 23, 2009
By NAZILA FATHI and ALAN COWELL
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/23/world/middleeast/23iran.html?_r=1&hp
TEHRAN — Hours after a warning from the powerful Revolutionary Guards not to return to the streets, about a thousand protesters defiantly gathered in central Tehran on Monday and were quickly dispersed in an overwhelming show of force by police who used clubs and tear gas.
The protesters, far fewer than the numbers who had attended mass rallies last week, turned out despite the warning, on the Guards’ Web site, that they would face a “revolutionary confrontation” if they continued to challenge the results of the June 12 election and their country’s supreme leader, who has pronounced the ballot to be fair.
Even so, Iran’s most senior panel of election monitors, in the most sweeping acknowledgment that the election was flawed, said Monday that the number of votes cast in 50 cities exceeded the actual number of voters, according to a state television report.
The discrepancies could affect some three million ballots of what the government says was 40 million cast, giving the official victory to the incumbent president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.
The authorities insisted that the discrepancies did not violate Iranian law. The Guardian Council, charged with certifying the election, said it was not clear whether they would decisively change the result, which placed Mir Hussein Moussavi — who contends the election was stolen from him — in a distant second.
He has urged his supporters to continue their defiance, but he could face arrest for doing so.
“Moussavi’s calling for illegal protests and issuing provocative statements have been a source of recent unrests in Iran,” Ali Shahrokhi, head of parliament’s judiciary committee, semi-official Fars news agency reported, according to Reuters. “Such criminal acts should be confronted firmly.”
He added: “The ground is paved to legally chase Moussavi.”
Mr. Moussavi, the more moderate of the candidates, used a posting on his Web site Sunday night to urge his supporters to demonstrate peacefully, despite warnings from Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, that no protests of the vote would be allowed.
“Protesting to lies and fraud is your right,” Mr. Moussavi said.
In an apparent response, a Guards statement Monday told protesters to “be prepared for a resolution and revolutionary confrontation with the Guards, Basij and other security forces and disciplinary forces” if they took their protests into a second week, news reports said.
The Basij is a militia accused by the protesters of brutally repressing demonstrations that culminated in a day of bloodshed on Saturday that ended in the deaths of at least 10 protesters, according to the state television.
The Guards told demonstrators Monday to “end the sabotage and rioting activities,” calling their protests a “conspiracy” against Iran. The warning echoed remarks by a Foreign Ministry spokesman who blamed western governments and media for the unrest.
The official result gave Mr. Ahmadinejad 63 percent of the ballots — an 11-million vote advantage — to Mr. Moussavi’s 34 percent. Turnout was put at 85 percent.
At a news conference Monday, Hassan Qashqavi, a Foreign Ministry spokesman, called the turnout a “brilliant gem which is shining on the peak of dignity of the Iranian nation.”
He accused unidentified western powers and news organizations, which are operating under extremely tight official restrictions, of spreading unacceptable “anarchy and vandalism.” But, he said, the outcome of the vote would not be changed. “We will not allow western media to turn this gem into a worthless stone,” he said.
Mr. Qashqavi drew comparisons with American election results.
“No one encouraged the American people to stage a riot” because they disagreed with the re-election of George W. Bush in 2004, he said. Britain’s Foreign Office said Monday that because of the continuing unrest it would evacuate the families of staff members based in Iran. A spokeswoman, who spoke in return for anonymity under civil service rules, said the violence in Tehran “had a significant impact on the families of our staff who have been unable to carry on their lives as normal.”
Quoted earlier by Press TV, Abbas Ali Kadkhodaei, the spokesman for the 12-member Guardian Council denied claims by another losing candidate, Mohsen Rezai, that irregularities had occurred in up to 170 voting districts.
“Statistics provided by the candidates, who claim more than 100 percent of those eligible have cast their ballot in 80 to 170 cities are not accurate — the incident has happened in only 50 cities,” Mr. Kadkhodaei said.
But he said that a voter turnout in excess of the registered voting list was a “normal phenomenon” because people could legally vote in areas other than those in which they were registered. Nonetheless, some analysts in Tehran said, the number of people said to be traveling on election day seemed unusually high.
The news emerged on the English-language Press TV Web site late Sunday as a bitter rift among Iran’s ruling clerics deepened. As increasingly violent protests have swirled through Tehran since the elections, Ayatollah Khamenei has ordered the Guardian Council to investigate the opposition’s allegations of electoral fraud. The council itself has offered a random partial recount of 10 percent of the ballot.
Mr. Kadkhodaei said the Guardian Council could recount votes in areas where irregularities were said by the opposition to have occurred. But “it has yet to be determined whether the possible change in the tally is decisive in the election results.”
The opposition has alleged a total of 646 electoral irregularities and is demanding that the vote be annulled. But in a sermon at Friday prayers last week Ayatollah Khamenei mocked the idea that the huge margin attributed to Mr. Ahmadinejad could have been won through fraud.
On Sunday, the police detained five relatives of Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, a former president who leads two influential councils and openly supported Mr. Moussavi’s election. The relatives, including Mr. Rafsanjani’s daughter, Faezeh Hashemi, were released after several hours.
The developments, coming one day after protests here in the capital and elsewhere were crushed by police officers and militia members using guns, clubs, tear gas and water cannons, suggested that Ayatollah Khamenei was facing entrenched resistance among some members of the elite.
Though rivalries have been part of Iranian politics since the 1979 revolution, analysts said that open factional competition amid a major political crisis could hinder Ayatollah Khamenei’s ability to restore order.
There was no verifiable accounting of the death toll from the bloodshed on Saturday, partly because the government has imposed severe restrictions on news coverage and warned foreign reporters who remained in the country to stay off the streets.
It also ordered the BBC’s longtime correspondent expelled and Newsweek’s correspondent detained.
State television said that 10 people had died in the weekend clashes, while radio reports said 19. The news agency ISNA said 457 people had been arrested.
In the network of Internet postings and Twitter messages that has become the opposition’s major tool for organizing and sharing information, a powerful and vivid new image emerged: a video posted on several Web sites that showed a young woman, called Neda, her face covered in blood. Text posted with the video said she had been shot. It was not possible to verify the authenticity of the video.
The Web site of another reformist candidate, Mehdi Karoubi, referred to her as a martyr who did not “have a weapon in her soft hands or a grenade in her pocket but became a victim by thugs who are supported by a horrifying security apparatus.”
Mr. Moussavi was not seen in public on Sunday but showed no sign of yielding. In his Web posting, he urged followers to “avoid violence in your protest and behave as though you are the parents that have to tolerate your children’s misbehavior at the security forces.”
He also warned the government to “avoid mass arrests, which will only create distance between society and the security forces.”
Nazila Fathi reported from Tehran, and Alan Cowell from London. Michael Slackman contributed reporting from Cairo.
June 23, 2009
Op-Ed Columnist
Iran’s Children of Tomorrow
By ROGER COHEN
TEHRAN — They are known mockingly as the “Joojeh Basiji” — the “chicken Basiji.” These are the militia scarcely old enough to manage more than a feeble beard. Teenagers, brainwashed from early childhood, they have been ferried into the capital in large numbers, given a club and a shield and a helmet and told to go to work.
I saw them throughout downtown Tehran on Sunday, seated in the back of grey pick-ups. I saw them, sporting sleeveless camouflage vests, in clusters on corners, leaning on trees, even lolling shoeless on the grass in the central island of Revolution Square.
They were far from alone in a city in military lockdown. Elite riot police with thigh-length black leg guards, helmeted Revolutionary Guards in green uniforms and rifle-touting snipers composed a panoply of menace. The message to protesters was clear: Gather at your peril.
That threat had already been rammed home Saturday evening, when a student named Neda Agha Soltan was killed by a single shot. Her last moments were captured on video that has gone global. Martyrdom is a powerful force in the world of Shia Islam. Mourning on the 3rd and 7th and 40th days after a death form a galvanizing cycle.
Neda is already another name for the anger smoldering here, whose expression, in my experience, has been bravest, deepest and most vivid among women. She could become Iran’s Marianne.
Tehran, cradled in its mountainous amphitheater, is holding its breath. Sunday was quiet and Monday dawned quiet but between them the defiant cries of “Death to the dictator” and “Allah-u-Akbar” reverberated between high-rises once again.
In this pregnant lull, I keep hearing three questions: Will Mir Hussein Moussavi lead? How powerful are the internal divisions of the revolutionary establishment? And what is the ultimate goal of the uprising? On the answer to them will hinge the outcome of this latest fervid expression of Iran’s centennial quest for pluralistic freedom.
After the shootings Saturday that took several lives, Moussavi seemed absent. The bespectacled revolutionary leader thrust now into defiance was silent. People risking their lives craved guidance. Disappointed in 1999 and 2003 by the legalistic kowtowing of the reformist former president, Mohammad Khatami, they feared resignation redux.
Then, early Monday, Moussavi spoke. “Protesting to lies and fraud is your right,” he said, referring to the preposterous manipulation of the June 12 election and laying down the gauntlet again to the once sacrosanct pronouncements of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the supreme leader invested by the Islamic Revolution with an authority close to the Prophet’s. Last Friday, Khamenei said: “I want everyone to end this sort of action.”
Khamenei also said, “Trust in the Islamic Republic became evident in these elections.”
In fact I believe the loss of trust by millions of Iranians who’d been prepared to tolerate a system they disliked, provided they had a small margin of freedom, constitutes the core political earthquake in Iran. Moderates who once worked the angles are now muttering about making Molotov cocktails and screaming their lungs out after dusk.
Moussavi is trying to calm their rage and coax the multiple security forces to his side. Restraint was the core appeal of his Monday statement. He urged his followers to avoid violence and adopt parental forbearance before the “misbehavior” of security forces — an appropriate reference given all the teenage thugs out there.
I think Moussavi is right to avoid extreme positions even as Khamenei has deliberately radicalized the conflict. He’s right because his moderation fans internal divisions that seem rampant. Any counterrevolutionary stance, at least at this point, would have the opposite effect.
Which brings me to the fight within. On Sunday, I saw Mehdi Hashemi Rafsanjani, the son of the establishment’s embittered éminence grise, Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani. He told me his father, who despises President Mahmoud Adhmadinejad, is fighting a furious rearguard action to have the election annulled by the Guardian Council, the 12-member oversight body that will pronounce this week on the election’s legality.
The ruling had seemed a formality, given Khamenei’s summary dismissal of a recount and the loyalist composition of the body, but the Council is now talking about irregularities in 50 cities and discrepancies that could affect 3 million votes. Out of a total of 40 million votes, that’s a significant number.
There are rumblings from the influential parliamentary speaker, Ali Larijani, who is close to Khamenei but not Ahmadinejad. With Rafsanjani, Khatami and the defeated conservative former Revolutionary Guard leader, Mohsen Rezai, the dissenting front has breadth. Rezai, who officially won 680,000 votes, says more than 900,000 voters have written to him with their ID numbers saying they cast their ballot for him.
The third question — the strategic goal of the uprising — is increasingly fraught. Khamenei said, “The dispute is not between the revolution and the counterrevolution,” and that all four electoral candidates “belong to the system.” He was right, if his words had been spoken the day after the vote.
Ten days on, however, the brutal use of force and his own polarizing speech have drawn many more Iranians toward an absolutist stance. Having wanted their votes counted, they now want wholesale change. If Moussavi wants to prevail, he must keep his followers tactically focused on securing a new election. That’s essential because it’s the one position the opposition within the clerical establishment will go along with.
Whatever happens now, all is changed utterly in Iran. Opacity, a force of the Islamic Republic, has yielded to a riveting transparency in which one side confronts another. The online youth of Iran will not be reconciled to a regime that touts global “ethics” and “justice” while trampling on them at home.
I received this from an anonymous Iranian student: “I will participate in the demonstrations tomorrow. Maybe they will turn violent. Maybe I will be one of the people who is going to be killed. I’m listening to all my favorite music. I even want to dance to a few songs. I always wanted to have very narrow eyebrows. Yes, maybe I will go to the salon before I go tomorrow!”
And she concludes: “I wrote these random sentences for the next generation so that they know we were not just emotional under peer pressure. So they know that we did everything we could to create a better future for them. So they know that our ancestors surrendered to Arabs and Mogols but did not surrender to despotism. This note is dedicated to tomorrow’s children.”
I bow my head to the youth of Iran, the youth that is open-eyed, bold and far stronger and more numerous than the near-beardless vigilantes.
June 23, 2009
By NAZILA FATHI and ALAN COWELL
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/23/world/middleeast/23iran.html?_r=1&hp
TEHRAN — Hours after a warning from the powerful Revolutionary Guards not to return to the streets, about a thousand protesters defiantly gathered in central Tehran on Monday and were quickly dispersed in an overwhelming show of force by police who used clubs and tear gas.
The protesters, far fewer than the numbers who had attended mass rallies last week, turned out despite the warning, on the Guards’ Web site, that they would face a “revolutionary confrontation” if they continued to challenge the results of the June 12 election and their country’s supreme leader, who has pronounced the ballot to be fair.
Even so, Iran’s most senior panel of election monitors, in the most sweeping acknowledgment that the election was flawed, said Monday that the number of votes cast in 50 cities exceeded the actual number of voters, according to a state television report.
The discrepancies could affect some three million ballots of what the government says was 40 million cast, giving the official victory to the incumbent president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.
The authorities insisted that the discrepancies did not violate Iranian law. The Guardian Council, charged with certifying the election, said it was not clear whether they would decisively change the result, which placed Mir Hussein Moussavi — who contends the election was stolen from him — in a distant second.
He has urged his supporters to continue their defiance, but he could face arrest for doing so.
“Moussavi’s calling for illegal protests and issuing provocative statements have been a source of recent unrests in Iran,” Ali Shahrokhi, head of parliament’s judiciary committee, semi-official Fars news agency reported, according to Reuters. “Such criminal acts should be confronted firmly.”
He added: “The ground is paved to legally chase Moussavi.”
Mr. Moussavi, the more moderate of the candidates, used a posting on his Web site Sunday night to urge his supporters to demonstrate peacefully, despite warnings from Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, that no protests of the vote would be allowed.
“Protesting to lies and fraud is your right,” Mr. Moussavi said.
In an apparent response, a Guards statement Monday told protesters to “be prepared for a resolution and revolutionary confrontation with the Guards, Basij and other security forces and disciplinary forces” if they took their protests into a second week, news reports said.
The Basij is a militia accused by the protesters of brutally repressing demonstrations that culminated in a day of bloodshed on Saturday that ended in the deaths of at least 10 protesters, according to the state television.
The Guards told demonstrators Monday to “end the sabotage and rioting activities,” calling their protests a “conspiracy” against Iran. The warning echoed remarks by a Foreign Ministry spokesman who blamed western governments and media for the unrest.
The official result gave Mr. Ahmadinejad 63 percent of the ballots — an 11-million vote advantage — to Mr. Moussavi’s 34 percent. Turnout was put at 85 percent.
At a news conference Monday, Hassan Qashqavi, a Foreign Ministry spokesman, called the turnout a “brilliant gem which is shining on the peak of dignity of the Iranian nation.”
He accused unidentified western powers and news organizations, which are operating under extremely tight official restrictions, of spreading unacceptable “anarchy and vandalism.” But, he said, the outcome of the vote would not be changed. “We will not allow western media to turn this gem into a worthless stone,” he said.
Mr. Qashqavi drew comparisons with American election results.
“No one encouraged the American people to stage a riot” because they disagreed with the re-election of George W. Bush in 2004, he said. Britain’s Foreign Office said Monday that because of the continuing unrest it would evacuate the families of staff members based in Iran. A spokeswoman, who spoke in return for anonymity under civil service rules, said the violence in Tehran “had a significant impact on the families of our staff who have been unable to carry on their lives as normal.”
Quoted earlier by Press TV, Abbas Ali Kadkhodaei, the spokesman for the 12-member Guardian Council denied claims by another losing candidate, Mohsen Rezai, that irregularities had occurred in up to 170 voting districts.
“Statistics provided by the candidates, who claim more than 100 percent of those eligible have cast their ballot in 80 to 170 cities are not accurate — the incident has happened in only 50 cities,” Mr. Kadkhodaei said.
But he said that a voter turnout in excess of the registered voting list was a “normal phenomenon” because people could legally vote in areas other than those in which they were registered. Nonetheless, some analysts in Tehran said, the number of people said to be traveling on election day seemed unusually high.
The news emerged on the English-language Press TV Web site late Sunday as a bitter rift among Iran’s ruling clerics deepened. As increasingly violent protests have swirled through Tehran since the elections, Ayatollah Khamenei has ordered the Guardian Council to investigate the opposition’s allegations of electoral fraud. The council itself has offered a random partial recount of 10 percent of the ballot.
Mr. Kadkhodaei said the Guardian Council could recount votes in areas where irregularities were said by the opposition to have occurred. But “it has yet to be determined whether the possible change in the tally is decisive in the election results.”
The opposition has alleged a total of 646 electoral irregularities and is demanding that the vote be annulled. But in a sermon at Friday prayers last week Ayatollah Khamenei mocked the idea that the huge margin attributed to Mr. Ahmadinejad could have been won through fraud.
On Sunday, the police detained five relatives of Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, a former president who leads two influential councils and openly supported Mr. Moussavi’s election. The relatives, including Mr. Rafsanjani’s daughter, Faezeh Hashemi, were released after several hours.
The developments, coming one day after protests here in the capital and elsewhere were crushed by police officers and militia members using guns, clubs, tear gas and water cannons, suggested that Ayatollah Khamenei was facing entrenched resistance among some members of the elite.
Though rivalries have been part of Iranian politics since the 1979 revolution, analysts said that open factional competition amid a major political crisis could hinder Ayatollah Khamenei’s ability to restore order.
There was no verifiable accounting of the death toll from the bloodshed on Saturday, partly because the government has imposed severe restrictions on news coverage and warned foreign reporters who remained in the country to stay off the streets.
It also ordered the BBC’s longtime correspondent expelled and Newsweek’s correspondent detained.
State television said that 10 people had died in the weekend clashes, while radio reports said 19. The news agency ISNA said 457 people had been arrested.
In the network of Internet postings and Twitter messages that has become the opposition’s major tool for organizing and sharing information, a powerful and vivid new image emerged: a video posted on several Web sites that showed a young woman, called Neda, her face covered in blood. Text posted with the video said she had been shot. It was not possible to verify the authenticity of the video.
The Web site of another reformist candidate, Mehdi Karoubi, referred to her as a martyr who did not “have a weapon in her soft hands or a grenade in her pocket but became a victim by thugs who are supported by a horrifying security apparatus.”
Mr. Moussavi was not seen in public on Sunday but showed no sign of yielding. In his Web posting, he urged followers to “avoid violence in your protest and behave as though you are the parents that have to tolerate your children’s misbehavior at the security forces.”
He also warned the government to “avoid mass arrests, which will only create distance between society and the security forces.”
Nazila Fathi reported from Tehran, and Alan Cowell from London. Michael Slackman contributed reporting from Cairo.
June 23, 2009
Op-Ed Columnist
Iran’s Children of Tomorrow
By ROGER COHEN
TEHRAN — They are known mockingly as the “Joojeh Basiji” — the “chicken Basiji.” These are the militia scarcely old enough to manage more than a feeble beard. Teenagers, brainwashed from early childhood, they have been ferried into the capital in large numbers, given a club and a shield and a helmet and told to go to work.
I saw them throughout downtown Tehran on Sunday, seated in the back of grey pick-ups. I saw them, sporting sleeveless camouflage vests, in clusters on corners, leaning on trees, even lolling shoeless on the grass in the central island of Revolution Square.
They were far from alone in a city in military lockdown. Elite riot police with thigh-length black leg guards, helmeted Revolutionary Guards in green uniforms and rifle-touting snipers composed a panoply of menace. The message to protesters was clear: Gather at your peril.
That threat had already been rammed home Saturday evening, when a student named Neda Agha Soltan was killed by a single shot. Her last moments were captured on video that has gone global. Martyrdom is a powerful force in the world of Shia Islam. Mourning on the 3rd and 7th and 40th days after a death form a galvanizing cycle.
Neda is already another name for the anger smoldering here, whose expression, in my experience, has been bravest, deepest and most vivid among women. She could become Iran’s Marianne.
Tehran, cradled in its mountainous amphitheater, is holding its breath. Sunday was quiet and Monday dawned quiet but between them the defiant cries of “Death to the dictator” and “Allah-u-Akbar” reverberated between high-rises once again.
In this pregnant lull, I keep hearing three questions: Will Mir Hussein Moussavi lead? How powerful are the internal divisions of the revolutionary establishment? And what is the ultimate goal of the uprising? On the answer to them will hinge the outcome of this latest fervid expression of Iran’s centennial quest for pluralistic freedom.
After the shootings Saturday that took several lives, Moussavi seemed absent. The bespectacled revolutionary leader thrust now into defiance was silent. People risking their lives craved guidance. Disappointed in 1999 and 2003 by the legalistic kowtowing of the reformist former president, Mohammad Khatami, they feared resignation redux.
Then, early Monday, Moussavi spoke. “Protesting to lies and fraud is your right,” he said, referring to the preposterous manipulation of the June 12 election and laying down the gauntlet again to the once sacrosanct pronouncements of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the supreme leader invested by the Islamic Revolution with an authority close to the Prophet’s. Last Friday, Khamenei said: “I want everyone to end this sort of action.”
Khamenei also said, “Trust in the Islamic Republic became evident in these elections.”
In fact I believe the loss of trust by millions of Iranians who’d been prepared to tolerate a system they disliked, provided they had a small margin of freedom, constitutes the core political earthquake in Iran. Moderates who once worked the angles are now muttering about making Molotov cocktails and screaming their lungs out after dusk.
Moussavi is trying to calm their rage and coax the multiple security forces to his side. Restraint was the core appeal of his Monday statement. He urged his followers to avoid violence and adopt parental forbearance before the “misbehavior” of security forces — an appropriate reference given all the teenage thugs out there.
I think Moussavi is right to avoid extreme positions even as Khamenei has deliberately radicalized the conflict. He’s right because his moderation fans internal divisions that seem rampant. Any counterrevolutionary stance, at least at this point, would have the opposite effect.
Which brings me to the fight within. On Sunday, I saw Mehdi Hashemi Rafsanjani, the son of the establishment’s embittered éminence grise, Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani. He told me his father, who despises President Mahmoud Adhmadinejad, is fighting a furious rearguard action to have the election annulled by the Guardian Council, the 12-member oversight body that will pronounce this week on the election’s legality.
The ruling had seemed a formality, given Khamenei’s summary dismissal of a recount and the loyalist composition of the body, but the Council is now talking about irregularities in 50 cities and discrepancies that could affect 3 million votes. Out of a total of 40 million votes, that’s a significant number.
There are rumblings from the influential parliamentary speaker, Ali Larijani, who is close to Khamenei but not Ahmadinejad. With Rafsanjani, Khatami and the defeated conservative former Revolutionary Guard leader, Mohsen Rezai, the dissenting front has breadth. Rezai, who officially won 680,000 votes, says more than 900,000 voters have written to him with their ID numbers saying they cast their ballot for him.
The third question — the strategic goal of the uprising — is increasingly fraught. Khamenei said, “The dispute is not between the revolution and the counterrevolution,” and that all four electoral candidates “belong to the system.” He was right, if his words had been spoken the day after the vote.
Ten days on, however, the brutal use of force and his own polarizing speech have drawn many more Iranians toward an absolutist stance. Having wanted their votes counted, they now want wholesale change. If Moussavi wants to prevail, he must keep his followers tactically focused on securing a new election. That’s essential because it’s the one position the opposition within the clerical establishment will go along with.
Whatever happens now, all is changed utterly in Iran. Opacity, a force of the Islamic Republic, has yielded to a riveting transparency in which one side confronts another. The online youth of Iran will not be reconciled to a regime that touts global “ethics” and “justice” while trampling on them at home.
I received this from an anonymous Iranian student: “I will participate in the demonstrations tomorrow. Maybe they will turn violent. Maybe I will be one of the people who is going to be killed. I’m listening to all my favorite music. I even want to dance to a few songs. I always wanted to have very narrow eyebrows. Yes, maybe I will go to the salon before I go tomorrow!”
And she concludes: “I wrote these random sentences for the next generation so that they know we were not just emotional under peer pressure. So they know that we did everything we could to create a better future for them. So they know that our ancestors surrendered to Arabs and Mogols but did not surrender to despotism. This note is dedicated to tomorrow’s children.”
I bow my head to the youth of Iran, the youth that is open-eyed, bold and far stronger and more numerous than the near-beardless vigilantes.
19 June 2009
In New York, Number of Killings Rises With Heat
June 19, 2009
By ANDREW W. LEHREN and AL BAKER
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/19/nyregion/19murder.html?hp
A young boxer was shot dead outside a Bronx bodega at 3:30 a.m. on a Saturday last August. Weeks later, a 59-year-old woman was beaten to death on a Saturday night on the side of a Queens highway. On the last Sunday in September, violence exploded as five men were killed in a spate of shootings and stabbings between midnight and 6 a.m.
Seven homicides in New York City. None connected in any way but this: They happened during the summer months, when the temperatures rise, people hit the streets, and New York becomes a more lethal place.
There were more homicides in September than in any other month last year: 52. Next highest was August, with 51. Variations, of course, exist. There were 48 homicides last March, for instance.
Still, the prime time for murder is clear: summertime. Indeed, it is close to a constant, one hammered home painfully from June to September across the decades. And the breakdown of deadly brutality can get even more specific. September Saturdays around 10 p.m. were the most likely moments for a murder in the city.
The summer spike in killings is just one of several findings unearthed in an analysis by The New York Times of multiyear homicide trends. The information — detailing homicides during the years 2003 to 2008 — was compiled mainly from open-records requests with the New York Police Department, and a searchable database of details on homicides in the city during those years is available online for readers to explore at nytimes.com/nyregion.
Of course, the dominant and most important trend involving murder in New York has been the enormous decline in killings over the last 15 years, to levels not seen since the early 1960s.
Still, hundreds of people are killed every year in the city, and The Times’s findings provide insights about who is killed in New York, as well as who does the killing, where murders occur and why.
Women, for instance, are less likely to be either victims or killers. Those who were killed — at least 73 women were in 2008 — were almost always murdered by someone they knew — boyfriends, husbands or relatives. From 2003 to 2008, the number of women killed each year by strangers was in the single digits — excluding cases in which the police do not know if the killer knew the victim. Last year, as few as eight women died at the hands of strangers.
Brooklyn — as it has since at least 2003 — led all boroughs in the number of homicides last year, with 213. Last year, the 73rd Precinct, which includes the neighborhoods of Ocean Hill and Brownsville, had the largest death toll, 31. The bloodiest block in Brooklyn was in the 77th Precinct, in Crown Heights, bounded by Schenectady Avenue, Sterling Place, Troy Avenue and St. Johns Place. But the borough with the most homicides per capita was the Bronx.
More often than not, the weapon of choice is a firearm. Each year the percentage of people killed by firearms hovers around 60 percent. Though slightly less than in recent years, at least 56 percent of last year’s homicides were committed with these weapons.
Of all the trends to emerge, the time for killing was among the most enduring.
In New York, the trend goes back well before the years covered in the database — at least as far as 1981, according to an analysis of reports by the city medical examiner’s office done by Steven F. Messner, a criminology professor at the State University of New York at Albany. And he believes it stretches back much further than that.
Nationally, in the early 1980s, scientists at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention analyzed a decade’s worth of homicide data across the nation, and found that while suicides peak in the spring, homicides swell between July and September.
A prime reason murder peaks during this time has to do with the routines of people’s lives, according to Professor Messner.
“Homicides vary with social acting,” he said. “It evolves from interactions.”
Summer is when people get together. More specifically, casual drinkers and drug users are more likely to go to bars or parties on weekends and evenings, as opposed to a Tuesday morning. These people in the social mix, flooding the city’s streets and neighborhood bars, feed the peak times for murder, experts say.
And the trend occurs in other cities, in places like Chicago, Boston and Newark, according to criminologists.
Some of the same trends are on display around Christmastime and are believed to be behind the slight increases in murder that occur then, criminologists say.
Thomas D. Nerney, who retired in 2002 as a detective in the New York Police Department’s Major Case Squad, said the patterns were well known within the department.
Assigned as a detective in Brooklyn from 1972 to 1986, he said that on a hot summer night or in the holiday season, a similar set of factors seemed to be behind the killings: a chance to socialize and to drink or use drugs.
He recalled the late 1970s and early ’80s in Brooklyn, when the heavier homicide caseloads seemed to come as neighborhoods got hotter.
“We had so many of them,” Mr. Nerney said. “They would be on rooftops. There might be somebody who lured someone somewhere; you would have a sex-related killing or a revenge killing. Rooftops or backyards.”
The Times analysis, when compared with Professor Messner’s findings from 1981, shows that increasingly, more victims were killed between midnight and 8 a.m. in recent years than in the past.
According to the professor’s study of homicides in Manhattan, 29 percent of the 1,826 victims in 1981 were killed between midnight and 8 a.m. More recently, from 2006 through 2008, 39 percent of all homicide victims were killed during those hours, the Times analysis shows.
Also, as the number of homicides has shrunk, the data shows that more are occurring on weekends. From 2003 to 2008, 36 percent of all victims were killed on Saturday or Sunday, the analysis shows.
Failing to understand the basic connection between time of year and homicide rates can lead law enforcement agencies to faulty conclusions about what is happening in the streets — and it can affect their strategies.
In St. Louis, a 1990s-era gun buyback program begun each fall was thought by some to be behind a drop in violence. But as Richard Rosenfeld, a professor of criminology at the University of Missouri, St. Louis, studied the program’s impact, he found that the annual crime reductions were more attributable to the normal seasonal ebbing in homicide and assaults.
In New York, Vincent Henry, a retired police sergeant who now teaches criminology and who has studied the department’s Compstat program, in which computerized data is used for more efficient policing, said that time was one of many factors in making decisions about staffing and when and how to deploy officers.
But that was not always the case.
In the early 1990s, police managers altered the working hours for various groups of detectives, including those tracking narcotics cases and those seeking to arrest criminals wanted on open warrants.
It seemed to the top officials at the time that too many officers were keeping bankers’ hours — ending their shifts at dusk and taking weekends off — and not working closely enough with counterparts.
Jack Maple, a former police deputy commissioner who helped develop Compstat, wrote a book, “The Crime Fighter,” in which he detailed the issues of the day. He described the shortfall this way: “Unfortunately, the bad guys work around the clock.”
And in the summer months, the bad guys tend to be deadliest.
By ANDREW W. LEHREN and AL BAKER
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/19/nyregion/19murder.html?hp
A young boxer was shot dead outside a Bronx bodega at 3:30 a.m. on a Saturday last August. Weeks later, a 59-year-old woman was beaten to death on a Saturday night on the side of a Queens highway. On the last Sunday in September, violence exploded as five men were killed in a spate of shootings and stabbings between midnight and 6 a.m.
Seven homicides in New York City. None connected in any way but this: They happened during the summer months, when the temperatures rise, people hit the streets, and New York becomes a more lethal place.
There were more homicides in September than in any other month last year: 52. Next highest was August, with 51. Variations, of course, exist. There were 48 homicides last March, for instance.
Still, the prime time for murder is clear: summertime. Indeed, it is close to a constant, one hammered home painfully from June to September across the decades. And the breakdown of deadly brutality can get even more specific. September Saturdays around 10 p.m. were the most likely moments for a murder in the city.
The summer spike in killings is just one of several findings unearthed in an analysis by The New York Times of multiyear homicide trends. The information — detailing homicides during the years 2003 to 2008 — was compiled mainly from open-records requests with the New York Police Department, and a searchable database of details on homicides in the city during those years is available online for readers to explore at nytimes.com/nyregion.
Of course, the dominant and most important trend involving murder in New York has been the enormous decline in killings over the last 15 years, to levels not seen since the early 1960s.
Still, hundreds of people are killed every year in the city, and The Times’s findings provide insights about who is killed in New York, as well as who does the killing, where murders occur and why.
Women, for instance, are less likely to be either victims or killers. Those who were killed — at least 73 women were in 2008 — were almost always murdered by someone they knew — boyfriends, husbands or relatives. From 2003 to 2008, the number of women killed each year by strangers was in the single digits — excluding cases in which the police do not know if the killer knew the victim. Last year, as few as eight women died at the hands of strangers.
Brooklyn — as it has since at least 2003 — led all boroughs in the number of homicides last year, with 213. Last year, the 73rd Precinct, which includes the neighborhoods of Ocean Hill and Brownsville, had the largest death toll, 31. The bloodiest block in Brooklyn was in the 77th Precinct, in Crown Heights, bounded by Schenectady Avenue, Sterling Place, Troy Avenue and St. Johns Place. But the borough with the most homicides per capita was the Bronx.
More often than not, the weapon of choice is a firearm. Each year the percentage of people killed by firearms hovers around 60 percent. Though slightly less than in recent years, at least 56 percent of last year’s homicides were committed with these weapons.
Of all the trends to emerge, the time for killing was among the most enduring.
In New York, the trend goes back well before the years covered in the database — at least as far as 1981, according to an analysis of reports by the city medical examiner’s office done by Steven F. Messner, a criminology professor at the State University of New York at Albany. And he believes it stretches back much further than that.
Nationally, in the early 1980s, scientists at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention analyzed a decade’s worth of homicide data across the nation, and found that while suicides peak in the spring, homicides swell between July and September.
A prime reason murder peaks during this time has to do with the routines of people’s lives, according to Professor Messner.
“Homicides vary with social acting,” he said. “It evolves from interactions.”
Summer is when people get together. More specifically, casual drinkers and drug users are more likely to go to bars or parties on weekends and evenings, as opposed to a Tuesday morning. These people in the social mix, flooding the city’s streets and neighborhood bars, feed the peak times for murder, experts say.
And the trend occurs in other cities, in places like Chicago, Boston and Newark, according to criminologists.
Some of the same trends are on display around Christmastime and are believed to be behind the slight increases in murder that occur then, criminologists say.
Thomas D. Nerney, who retired in 2002 as a detective in the New York Police Department’s Major Case Squad, said the patterns were well known within the department.
Assigned as a detective in Brooklyn from 1972 to 1986, he said that on a hot summer night or in the holiday season, a similar set of factors seemed to be behind the killings: a chance to socialize and to drink or use drugs.
He recalled the late 1970s and early ’80s in Brooklyn, when the heavier homicide caseloads seemed to come as neighborhoods got hotter.
“We had so many of them,” Mr. Nerney said. “They would be on rooftops. There might be somebody who lured someone somewhere; you would have a sex-related killing or a revenge killing. Rooftops or backyards.”
The Times analysis, when compared with Professor Messner’s findings from 1981, shows that increasingly, more victims were killed between midnight and 8 a.m. in recent years than in the past.
According to the professor’s study of homicides in Manhattan, 29 percent of the 1,826 victims in 1981 were killed between midnight and 8 a.m. More recently, from 2006 through 2008, 39 percent of all homicide victims were killed during those hours, the Times analysis shows.
Also, as the number of homicides has shrunk, the data shows that more are occurring on weekends. From 2003 to 2008, 36 percent of all victims were killed on Saturday or Sunday, the analysis shows.
Failing to understand the basic connection between time of year and homicide rates can lead law enforcement agencies to faulty conclusions about what is happening in the streets — and it can affect their strategies.
In St. Louis, a 1990s-era gun buyback program begun each fall was thought by some to be behind a drop in violence. But as Richard Rosenfeld, a professor of criminology at the University of Missouri, St. Louis, studied the program’s impact, he found that the annual crime reductions were more attributable to the normal seasonal ebbing in homicide and assaults.
In New York, Vincent Henry, a retired police sergeant who now teaches criminology and who has studied the department’s Compstat program, in which computerized data is used for more efficient policing, said that time was one of many factors in making decisions about staffing and when and how to deploy officers.
But that was not always the case.
In the early 1990s, police managers altered the working hours for various groups of detectives, including those tracking narcotics cases and those seeking to arrest criminals wanted on open warrants.
It seemed to the top officials at the time that too many officers were keeping bankers’ hours — ending their shifts at dusk and taking weekends off — and not working closely enough with counterparts.
Jack Maple, a former police deputy commissioner who helped develop Compstat, wrote a book, “The Crime Fighter,” in which he detailed the issues of the day. He described the shortfall this way: “Unfortunately, the bad guys work around the clock.”
And in the summer months, the bad guys tend to be deadliest.
Ruling Cleric Warns Iranian Protesters
Below this article are the first hand accounts from readers of the NYT blog,so keep on scrolling for more info!
June 20, 2009
By NAZILA FATHI and ALAN COWELL
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/20/world/middleeast/20iran.html?_r=1&hp
TEHRAN — In his first public response to days of mass protests, Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, sternly warned opposition supporters on Friday to stay off the streets and raised the prospect of violence if the defiant, vast demonstrations continued.
Opposition leaders, he said, will be “responsible for bloodshed and chaos” if they do not stop further rallies.
He said he would never give in to “illegal pressures” and denied their accusations that last week’s presidential election was rigged, praising the officially declared landslide for the incumbent, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, as an “epic moment that became a historic moment.”
He spoke somberly for more than an hour and a half at Friday Prayer to tens of thousands of people at Tehran University, with Mr. Ahmadinejad in attendance. His sermon was broadcast over loudspeakers to throngs in the adjoining streets, and the crowds erupted repeatedly in roars of support. Opposition supporters had spread the word among themselves not to attend.
“Street challenge is not acceptable,” Ayatollah Khamenei said, according to a rendering by the BBC. “This questions the principles of election and democracy.”
There was no immediate response from opposition leaders.
The ominous speech sharply increased the confrontation between Iran’s rulers and supporters of the main opposition candidate, Mir Hussein Moussavi, who have accused the authorities of rigging the vote and called for or encouraged the huge silent marches in Tehran for the last four days. No rally was planned for Friday, and opposition supporters did not appear to be gathering impromptu.
But on Saturday, a group of reformist clerics loyal to the former President Mohammed Khatami planned to demonstrate against the election results, saying they had been given rare official permission. Some news reports, however, said that the gathering had been banned.
Ayatollah Khamenei instructed dissenters to pursue their complaints about the June 12 ballot through legal channels, insisting that the turnout — officially put at 85 percent — showed it to be a reflection of the national will.
Reiterating his Saturday affirmation of the official election results, he said that the participation, as officially reported, had shown “the hand of the Lord of ages supporting such a great development.”
“This is a sign of God’s mercy for this nation. The fate of the country should be decided in ballot boxes, not on the streets,” Ayatollah Khamenei said, framing his position as a commitment to the law and the orderly functioning of government.
“If we break the law, we will have to do it in every election and no election would be immune,” he said. “This is wrong. This is the beginning of dictatorship.”
He said that the margin of victory — 11 million votes — accorded to Mr. Ahmadinejad in the official tally was so big that it could not have been falsified.
“How can 11 million votes be replaced or changed?” he said. “The Islamic Republic would not cheat and would not betray the vote of the people.”
Some Iranians, who spoke in return for anonymity for fear of official reprisals, said the sermon showed that Iran was in the grips of what one person called “an all-or-nothing showdown” between the authorities and reformists.
Iranians had been looking to the ayatollah’s appearance for clues as to whether the authorities were prepared to bend to opposition demands. But he showed no readiness to countenance their demands that the election be annulled or to veer from the line he has taken since he endorsed the vote almost as soon as the results were made known last Saturday.
Ayatollah Khamenei blamed “media belonging to Zionists, evil media” for seeking to show divisions between those who supported the Iranian state and those who did not, while, in fact, the election had shown Iranians to be united in their commitment to the Islamic revolutionary state.
“There are 40 million votes for the revolution, not just 24 million for the chosen president,” he said, referring to the official count that gave Mr. Ahmadinejad more than 60 percent of the ballot.
He said the election “ was a competition among people who believe in the state.”
He also spoke of the religious roots of “our revolutionary society.”
“Despite all the diversions, our people are faithful,” he said, but urged young Iranians to lead more spiritual lives. “The youth are confused. Being away from spirituality has caused confusion. They don’t know what to do.”
He accused what he called arrogant Western powers, particularly Britain and the United States, of showing their hostility to the Iranian Islamic revolution in remarks casting doubt on the election. And he warned them not meddle in Iran’s affairs, accusing them of failing to understand the nature of Iranian society.
The British government, which the supreme leader singled out as the “most treacherous” of the Western powers, responded swiftly, summoning Iran’s ambassador in London to the Foreign Office to complain. Prime Minister Gordon Brown, cautious until now in its comments on the Iranian election, stepped up his public criticism.
“We are with others, including the whole of the European Union unanimously today, in condemning the use of violence, in condemning media suppression,” he told a news conference after a European Union summit in Brussels.
“It is for Iran now to show the world that the elections have been fair...that the repression and the brutality that we have seen in these last few days is not something that is going to be repeated,” Mr. Brown said, Reuters reported.
Throughout the week of protests, Iran’s leaders have offered conciliation, while simultaneously wielding repression.
On Thursday, for instance, the government offered to talk to the opposition, inviting the three losing presidential candidates to meet with the powerful Guardian Council.
But the government’s offers of modest and reluctant concessions have been accompanied by continued arrests of prominent reformers and efforts to stifle the flow of information by limiting Internet access and pressuring reporters to stay off the streets.
It was not clear whether Iran’s government, made up of fractious power centers, was pursuing a calculated strategy or if the moves reflected internal disagreements, or even an uncertainty not apparent in Ayatollah Khamenei’s address.
“Most analysts believe the outreach is just to kill time and extend this while they search for a solution, although there doesn’t seem to be any,” said a political analyst in Tehran, who spoke on the condition of anonymity for fear of reprisal. “This will only be a postponement of the inevitable, which is indeed a brutal crackdown.”
It was not clear what role was being played by a former Iranian president, Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, who supported Mr. Moussavi and is in a power struggle with Ayatollah Khamenei. There were unconfirmed reports Thursday that two of his children had been banned from leaving the country because of their role in helping the protesters.
Ayatollah Khamenei devoted a section of his sermon on Friday to rebutting what he said were accusations of corruption leveled against Mr. Rafsanjani. But, he said, he believed President Ahmadinejad’s approach to foreign and social policy was “closer to what it should be.”
Nazila Fathi reported from Tehran, and Alan Cowell from Paris. Michael Slackman contributed reporting from Cairo, and Neil MacFarquhar and Sharon Otterman from New York.
June 19, 2009, 7:56 am
Friday: Updates on Iran’s Disputed Election
By Robert Mackey
http://thelede.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/06/19/friday-updates-on-irans-disputed-election/
To supplement reporting by New York Times journalists inside Iran on Friday, The Lede will continue to track the aftermath of Iran’s disputed presidential election online, as we have for the last several days. Please refresh this page throughout the day to get the latest updates at the top of your screen (updates are stamped with the time in New York). For an overview of the current situation, read the main news article on our Web site, which will be updated throughout the day.
Readers inside Iran or in touch with people there are encouraged to send us photographs — our address is: pix@nyt.com — or use the comments box below to tell us what you are seeing or hearing.
Update | 11:08 a.m. Since opposition leaders decided to call off a planned protest during Friday prayers, some Iranian bloggers are pointing to video and photographs shot earlier this week to keep their momentum going online. One blogger uploaded this photograph to TwitPic on Friday of a Farsi-language placard the blogger translates as: “First they ignore you, then they ridicule you, then they fight you, then you win. Mahatma Gandhi.”
Other bloggers who seem to be writing from inside Iran point to this video, showing highlights from Mr. Moussavi’s campaign, which has been subtitled for English speakers:
Update | 11:02 a.m. A blogger who seems to be writing from Iran noted in two updates an hour ago on the Twitter feed Oxfordgirl that speculation is widespread that Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, a senior cleric and former president of Iran, may not have appeared at Friday prayers in Tehran because he is working behind the scenes to overturn the election results:
Who not at Friday Prayers: Rafsanjani.
Where is Rafsanjani? He is organising the demise of Ahmadinejad.
Update | 10:52 a.m. In an article for The New Republic earlier this week, Abbas Milani, a professor of Iranian Studies at Stanford University, looked more closely at the power struggle that seems to be unfolding inside Iran’s clerical establishment. Mr. Milani wrote that the country’s Supreme Leader may come to regret throwing his support so firmly behind Mr. Ahmadinejad:
Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei — whose rule has been absolute and whose words have been the law of the land–is facing the most public challenge to his authority. His two decades since succeeding Ayatollah Khomeini have been defined by a tendency to keep his options open, a verbal dexterity that allowed him to skirt tough political positions, and an appearance of impartiality in Iran’s fierce factional feuds. His caution has been the key to his success and survival.
But Khamenei has thrown this caution to the wind by unabashedly favoring Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. Four years ago, his support was instrumental in getting the little-known Ahmadinejad elected president. Even as criticism of the president has been on the rise in the country over the past year, Khamenei reportedly promised Ahmadinejad and his cabinet four more years at the helm.
Mr. Milani added:
What makes this moment different from past incidents of confrontation between the regime and the people is that, this time, many pillars of the regime are part of the opposition. Aside from Mousavi, who was prime minister for eight years, Rafsanjani, former president Mohammad Khatami, former speaker of the parliament Mehdi Karubi, and many other past ministers and undersecretaries are now leading the movement demanding new elections. Moreover, since the demonstrators come from all walks of life, it is more difficult than in the past to accuse them of immaturity or youthful impertinence, or of falling prey to the designs of the “Great Satan.” [...]
The regime still has the capacity to contain the disgruntled demonstrators and maybe even co-opt their leadership. But the majestic power of large peaceful crowds, tasting the joys of victory embodied in acts of civil disobedience, and brought together by the power of technologies beyond the regime’s control, is sure to beget larger, more confident, and more disciplined crowds. When people defied Khamenei’s orders by gathering en masse on Monday, the regime’s armor of invincibility–so central to the regime’s authoritarian control–was cracked. Without it, the regime cannot survive, and reestablishing it can come only at the price of great bloodshed.
Update | 10:23 a.m. On the BBC’s dot.life technology blog, Rory Cellan-Jones posts this interesting look at how, and why, Iran’s Internet service may have been slowed but not stopped entirely.
Update | 9:59 a.m. Not all of our readers support the opposition, or our effort to report on events in Iran. Here is what a reader named Siyamak wrote in the comments thread below after Ayatollah Khamenei’s speech on Friday morning:
I heard Khamenei speak and I liked what he said which I found fair and balanced. Stop interfering with Iran!
Update | 9:55 a.m. One of our readers asks if The Times, by passing on messages about plans for opposition rallies is helping the Iranian authorities to block them. Obviously we have no first-hand knowledge of whether that is the case or not, but there are plenty of reports that suggest that Iran’s government is directly reading (and perhaps even writing) messages posted on Twitter, YouTube and Facebook by bloggers supporting the opposition movement in Iran. We also know that the rallies seem to have been organized, in part, through the use of these social-networking tools. It is also clear that each day some of the first and most powerful news of the rallies has come from the photographs and video posted online by anonymous users of these services.
The larger point, however, is that Iranian bloggers may be posting this information, often in English, on these sites precisely so that they can be easily picked up and reported by news organizations outside the control of Iran’s government. Whatever the thinking is, it is a fact that, given the nature of the Web, no information posted on these Web sites is private, whether it is described or reported on by news organizations or not. What we do know is that the people posting these messages on their anonymous social-networking accounts are making them public by doing so, and that they frequently ask that the messages be passed on. In a sense “re-tweeting” is a kind of reporting.
Importantly, we also have not seen any messages at all from bloggers who appear to be inside Iran asking that their text messages, photographs of video not be reported by news organizations. A reader of The Lede points out that one blogger writing on Twitter, under the alias Oxfordgirl, wrote earlier today in an update: “u can use my name in RTs.”
It would seem likely that if Iran’s opposition bloggers wanted to keep this information secret they would not post it online at all.
With that in mind, here is a message sent to us this morning by one of our readers, who uses the alias gb and says that he has been in touch with his family in Shiraz:
I talked to my mom today about yesterday’s sit-in in Shahe Cheraq.
She said the main problem is that it’s really hard to get the word out about where and they are meeting. She said she really didn’t know where untill an hour before and some people were arriving when the whole thing was ending.
They are going to meet tomorrow in Daneshjoo Square (formerly Alam square).
Here is video and a photograph of that protest on Thursday at the Shah-e-Cheraq shrine in Shiraz.
Update | 9:21 a.m. Since the Supreme Leader again stated on Friday that a partial recount of ballots is all that is required to settle this dispute, while the opposition says the whole process was tainted and demands a new vote, it might be worth looking at who will be doing the recount.
The New Republic pointed out this week that this man, Ayatollah Ahmad Jannati Massah, “leads the Guardian Council, which runs elections and maintains the power to veto any parliamentary action it views as violating Islamic law.”
According to the New Republic’s description of him, it is not hard to understand why the opposition has little faith in a review led by him:
A hard-liner, he has called for America’s destruction multiple times, as well as George W. Bush’s decapitation. He formally endorsed Ahmadinejad, and he will run the Guardian Council’s election recount.
That information comes from a useful slide show on The New Republic’s Web site, which includes photographs and information on some of the key figures in Iran’s complex power structure who may right now be engaged in a struggle for control inside that labyrinth.
Update | 9:16 a.m. Two hours ago the blogger Persiankiwi, who has had consistently good information on the protests this week, reported via Twitter that another opposition rally is planned for Saturday:
Confirmed - Saturday Sea of Green rally - Enghelab Sq - 4pm - Mousavi, Karoubi and Khatami will attend -
Ten minutes ago the same source added:
confirmed - the Gov has refused to issue a permit for Sea of Green march at 4pm on Saturday in Tehran
Update | 9:10 a.m. The same YouTube channel that has the video of the singing at Thursday’s rally in Tehran also includes these two video clips of Mir Hussein Moussavi among his supporters:
Update | 9:07 a.m. As the opposition in Iran tries to remain united, they will point to video like this, apparently shot at Thursday’s mass rally in Tehran’s Imam Khomeni Square, of the crowd singing a patriotic song:
The YouTube user who uploaded this video says that points to this translation of the song’s lyrics on Wikipedia.
Update | 8:58 a.m. In an interview with Foreign policy magazine on Thursday, the Iranian filmmaker Mohsen Makhmalbaf, who is speaking for Mr. Moussavi’s campaign in Europe, made this interesting comparison between the events of 1979 and 2009 on Iran’s streets:
There are some similarities and some differences. In both situations, people were in the streets. In the [earlier] revolution, there were young people in the streets who were not as modern as the people are today. And they were in the streets following the lead of a leader, a mullah — in those times Ayatollah Khomeini. Now, the young people in the streets are more modern: They use SMS; they use the Internet. And they are not being actually led by anyone, but they are connected to each other.
In an e-mail message sent to BBC Persian on Friday, subsequently translated from Farsi and posted online, an anonymous reader of that Web site who says he is one of the opposition protesters in Iran seemed to endorse Mr. Makhmalbaf’s reading:
Whether Mir Hossein Mousavi wants it or not, we will take our vote back. This is a youth movement, it’s our movement and we will not have these men [ie all the politicians] take credit. They are threatening us with violence and they are holding Mir Hossein [Mousavi] responsible. If one drop more blood is shed from anyone, the leader of the nation will be responsible.
Update | 8:54 a.m. Here is what one student in Tehran, identified only as Behrooz, told the BBC in response to Ayatollah Khamenei’s speech on Friday:
We all know that Mr Ahmadinejad did not get 24 million votes. But Ayatollah Khamenei has just repeated that statistic as true. There’s clearly a power struggle going on between Mr [Hashemi] Rafsanjani [a former president and head of an influential body which elects the supreme leader] and Mr Khamenei. I think in the end this can only be good for us, although I think today’s speech makes it more dangerous for us to protest.
We just have to keep the demonstrations so big that they cannot attack us. If the crowd is just 2,000 strong, they can scare us with 200 soldiers. But if we are a million, what can they do?
I don’t think the Guardian Council will agree to a new election. They don’t want to lose prestige. They will agree to a recount which gives the same result.
I voted for Mr [Mehdi] Karroubi because he was the one with the best plan to change this rotten system. Maybe nothing will change for now, but I do think this is the start of some sort of revolution. Hopefully not a destructive one like in 1979. As long as we are in the street, people will know we are not satisfied.
For the moment Mr Rafsanjani is silent, and we don’t know what he’s doing. But he’s a very powerful man. He’s the leader of the Assembly of Experts which selects supreme leader. He brought Khamenei to power, so he will be the one who brings him down.
Another response, on the BBC’s Web site, comes from computer programmer in Mashhad, identified as Arash, who said:
People are being beaten up in Mashhad. There have been no demonstrations in the past two days. People wait until night to go on the roofs and shout “Allahu akbar” ["God is great] to show their support for the opposition. People from here go to Tehran to demonstrate, to be part of the bigger, safer crowds.
Update | 8:42 a.m. In his sermon on Friday, Ayatollah Khamenei attacked what he called attempts by foreign governments to stir up opposition to the election results. He seemed to be saying that reports by foreign media outlets are actually veiled attempts to overthrow his regime. Reporting on what was in part an attack on the corporation itself, the BBC, which maintains an active Farsi-language news service, explained:
He said the election was a “political earthquake” for Iran’s enemies - singling out Great Britain as “the most evil of them” - whom he accused of trying to foment unrest in the country.
“Some of our enemies in different parts of the world intended to depict this absolute victory, this definitive victory, as a doubtful victory,” the Supreme Leader said.
In its own way, the BBC was quick to strike back - passing on reaction to the Supreme Leader’s speech from users of its Web site who claimed to be inside Iran.
Update | 8:38 a.m. In a post on Bits, the New York Times’s technology blog, Miguel Helft reports:
“There is a huge amount of interest about the events in Iran,” said Franz Och, principal scientist at Google, who has been leading the development of Google Translate. “We hope that this tool will improve access to information in Iran and outside,” Mr. Och said in an interview. [...]
In a blog post, Mr. Och warned that the service is not perfect, so mistakes are possible. It is optimized to translate between Persian and English, but Google is working on improving translation between Persian and the other languages in Google Translate.
Update | 8:30 a.m. The automatic translation tool introdcued by Google on Friday was quickly used by supporters of opposition candidate Mir Hussein Moussavi. One hour ago, Mousavi1388, a Twitter feed maintained by opposition supporters, reported:
Mousavi’s official news site GhalamNews in now available in English thanks to @GOOGLE, see http://is.gd/16b2j
In reference to reports from Twitter that we cite, we should note that, after consulting several experts, The Times has decided to include the user names for the Twitter posts that are quoted here and elsewhere on NYTimes.com. We concluded that the user names would better allow readers to judge the source and value of the posts that are quoted. The user names are already publicly available on Twitter and accessible, along with all content created on Twitter, through Twitter’s search index and on any number of third-party search engines.
Update | 8:20 a.m. Iran’s authorities are no doubt hoping that images broadcast on Iranian state television this morning, of the Supreme Leader speaking to a large number of loyal followers at Tehran University — including incumbent President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad — will give many Iranian citizens the impression that the opposition protests are doomed to failure. Largely shut out by state television, and barred from speaking to the foreign press, the opposition will continue to rely on citizen journalists within the movement to get word of its protests out to other Iranians and the world through the Internet.
To that end, their efforts may be aided by the introduction of two new tools from Google and Facebook, announced on Friday. Google has sped up the release of automatic translation software that will help with translations of Internet messages to and from Farsi. On Google’s official blog, the company explained:
Today, we added Persian (Farsi) to Google Translate. This means you can now translate any text from Persian into English and from English into Persian — whether it’s a news story, a website, a blog, an email, a tweet or a Facebook message. The service is available free at http://translate.google.com.
We feel that launching Persian is particularly important now, given ongoing events in Iran. Like YouTube and other services, Google Translate is one more tool that Persian speakers can use to communicate directly to the world, and vice versa — increasing everyone’s access to information.
Pointing to the importance of their social-networking site in Iran, Facebook announced that they have made the entire site available to users who speak no English:
Since the Iranian election last week, people around the world have increasingly been sharing news and information on Facebook about the results and its aftermath. Much of the content created and shared has been in Persian—the native language of Iran—but people have had to navigate the site in English or other languages.
Today we’re making the entire site available in a beta version of Persian, so Persian speakers inside of Iran and around the world can begin using it in their native language.
If your browser is set to Persian, you should automatically see the Persian version of Facebook.
Update | 8:11 a.m. According to a Reuters report, there were tens of thousands “gathered in and around Tehran University to hear Khamenei’s Friday prayer sermon.” The news agency added:
People chanting slogans and holding posters of Khamenei, Ahmadinejad and Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomenei, the father of the 1979 Islamic revolution, packed streets outside the university.
Update | 8:00 a.m. Iran’s Press TV, an English-language satellite channel financed by the Iranian government, reports that the nation’s Supreme Leader made no concessions after days of massive street protests:
Ayatollah Seyyed Ali Khamenei said high turnout in the election, which witnessed more than 40 million Iranians casting their votes, was a great manifestation of people’s solidarity with the Islamic establishment. Addressing Friday prayers congregation, Ayatollah Khamenei said that last Friday’s election indicated a ‘common sense of responsibility’ of the Iranian nation to determine the future of the country. [...]
The Leader said the high voter turnout in the election was a ‘political quake’ for the enemy and a ‘real celebration’ for the friends of the country. “The Islamic Republic of Iran will by no means betray the votes of the nation,” the Leader said, adding the legal system of the election will not allow any ballot rigging in Iran.
Ayatollah Khamenei, however, maintained that the Guardian Council, the body tasked with overseeing the election, would look into the complaints of the candidates who are unhappy with the election results.
The Leader also added that the establishment would never give-in to illegal demands, urging all presidential candidates to pursue their complaints through legal channels. Ayatollah Khamenei called for an end to illegal street protests aimed at reversing the result of the election.
Update | 7:54 a.m. The BBC has this video of Ayatollah Khamenei’s stern rebuke to the protesters on Friday, which was broadcast by Iranian state television.
Update | 7:51 a.m. As Nazila Fathi reports from Tehran, Iran’s ruling cleric took a firm stand against the opposition protests during a televised sermon on Friday:
In his first public response to days of protests, Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, sternly warned opponents Friday to stay off the streets and denied opposition claims that last week’s disputed election was rigged, praising the ballot as an “epic moment that became a historic moment.”
In a somber and lengthy sermon at Friday prayers in Tehran, he called directly for an end to the protests by hundreds of thousands of Iranians demanding a new election.
“Street challenge is not acceptable,” Ayatollah Khamenei said. “This is challenging democracy after the elections.” He said opposition leaders would be “held responsible for chaos” if they did not end the protests.
June 20, 2009
By NAZILA FATHI and ALAN COWELL
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/20/world/middleeast/20iran.html?_r=1&hp
TEHRAN — In his first public response to days of mass protests, Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, sternly warned opposition supporters on Friday to stay off the streets and raised the prospect of violence if the defiant, vast demonstrations continued.
Opposition leaders, he said, will be “responsible for bloodshed and chaos” if they do not stop further rallies.
He said he would never give in to “illegal pressures” and denied their accusations that last week’s presidential election was rigged, praising the officially declared landslide for the incumbent, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, as an “epic moment that became a historic moment.”
He spoke somberly for more than an hour and a half at Friday Prayer to tens of thousands of people at Tehran University, with Mr. Ahmadinejad in attendance. His sermon was broadcast over loudspeakers to throngs in the adjoining streets, and the crowds erupted repeatedly in roars of support. Opposition supporters had spread the word among themselves not to attend.
“Street challenge is not acceptable,” Ayatollah Khamenei said, according to a rendering by the BBC. “This questions the principles of election and democracy.”
There was no immediate response from opposition leaders.
The ominous speech sharply increased the confrontation between Iran’s rulers and supporters of the main opposition candidate, Mir Hussein Moussavi, who have accused the authorities of rigging the vote and called for or encouraged the huge silent marches in Tehran for the last four days. No rally was planned for Friday, and opposition supporters did not appear to be gathering impromptu.
But on Saturday, a group of reformist clerics loyal to the former President Mohammed Khatami planned to demonstrate against the election results, saying they had been given rare official permission. Some news reports, however, said that the gathering had been banned.
Ayatollah Khamenei instructed dissenters to pursue their complaints about the June 12 ballot through legal channels, insisting that the turnout — officially put at 85 percent — showed it to be a reflection of the national will.
Reiterating his Saturday affirmation of the official election results, he said that the participation, as officially reported, had shown “the hand of the Lord of ages supporting such a great development.”
“This is a sign of God’s mercy for this nation. The fate of the country should be decided in ballot boxes, not on the streets,” Ayatollah Khamenei said, framing his position as a commitment to the law and the orderly functioning of government.
“If we break the law, we will have to do it in every election and no election would be immune,” he said. “This is wrong. This is the beginning of dictatorship.”
He said that the margin of victory — 11 million votes — accorded to Mr. Ahmadinejad in the official tally was so big that it could not have been falsified.
“How can 11 million votes be replaced or changed?” he said. “The Islamic Republic would not cheat and would not betray the vote of the people.”
Some Iranians, who spoke in return for anonymity for fear of official reprisals, said the sermon showed that Iran was in the grips of what one person called “an all-or-nothing showdown” between the authorities and reformists.
Iranians had been looking to the ayatollah’s appearance for clues as to whether the authorities were prepared to bend to opposition demands. But he showed no readiness to countenance their demands that the election be annulled or to veer from the line he has taken since he endorsed the vote almost as soon as the results were made known last Saturday.
Ayatollah Khamenei blamed “media belonging to Zionists, evil media” for seeking to show divisions between those who supported the Iranian state and those who did not, while, in fact, the election had shown Iranians to be united in their commitment to the Islamic revolutionary state.
“There are 40 million votes for the revolution, not just 24 million for the chosen president,” he said, referring to the official count that gave Mr. Ahmadinejad more than 60 percent of the ballot.
He said the election “ was a competition among people who believe in the state.”
He also spoke of the religious roots of “our revolutionary society.”
“Despite all the diversions, our people are faithful,” he said, but urged young Iranians to lead more spiritual lives. “The youth are confused. Being away from spirituality has caused confusion. They don’t know what to do.”
He accused what he called arrogant Western powers, particularly Britain and the United States, of showing their hostility to the Iranian Islamic revolution in remarks casting doubt on the election. And he warned them not meddle in Iran’s affairs, accusing them of failing to understand the nature of Iranian society.
The British government, which the supreme leader singled out as the “most treacherous” of the Western powers, responded swiftly, summoning Iran’s ambassador in London to the Foreign Office to complain. Prime Minister Gordon Brown, cautious until now in its comments on the Iranian election, stepped up his public criticism.
“We are with others, including the whole of the European Union unanimously today, in condemning the use of violence, in condemning media suppression,” he told a news conference after a European Union summit in Brussels.
“It is for Iran now to show the world that the elections have been fair...that the repression and the brutality that we have seen in these last few days is not something that is going to be repeated,” Mr. Brown said, Reuters reported.
Throughout the week of protests, Iran’s leaders have offered conciliation, while simultaneously wielding repression.
On Thursday, for instance, the government offered to talk to the opposition, inviting the three losing presidential candidates to meet with the powerful Guardian Council.
But the government’s offers of modest and reluctant concessions have been accompanied by continued arrests of prominent reformers and efforts to stifle the flow of information by limiting Internet access and pressuring reporters to stay off the streets.
It was not clear whether Iran’s government, made up of fractious power centers, was pursuing a calculated strategy or if the moves reflected internal disagreements, or even an uncertainty not apparent in Ayatollah Khamenei’s address.
“Most analysts believe the outreach is just to kill time and extend this while they search for a solution, although there doesn’t seem to be any,” said a political analyst in Tehran, who spoke on the condition of anonymity for fear of reprisal. “This will only be a postponement of the inevitable, which is indeed a brutal crackdown.”
It was not clear what role was being played by a former Iranian president, Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, who supported Mr. Moussavi and is in a power struggle with Ayatollah Khamenei. There were unconfirmed reports Thursday that two of his children had been banned from leaving the country because of their role in helping the protesters.
Ayatollah Khamenei devoted a section of his sermon on Friday to rebutting what he said were accusations of corruption leveled against Mr. Rafsanjani. But, he said, he believed President Ahmadinejad’s approach to foreign and social policy was “closer to what it should be.”
Nazila Fathi reported from Tehran, and Alan Cowell from Paris. Michael Slackman contributed reporting from Cairo, and Neil MacFarquhar and Sharon Otterman from New York.
June 19, 2009, 7:56 am
Friday: Updates on Iran’s Disputed Election
By Robert Mackey
http://thelede.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/06/19/friday-updates-on-irans-disputed-election/
To supplement reporting by New York Times journalists inside Iran on Friday, The Lede will continue to track the aftermath of Iran’s disputed presidential election online, as we have for the last several days. Please refresh this page throughout the day to get the latest updates at the top of your screen (updates are stamped with the time in New York). For an overview of the current situation, read the main news article on our Web site, which will be updated throughout the day.
Readers inside Iran or in touch with people there are encouraged to send us photographs — our address is: pix@nyt.com — or use the comments box below to tell us what you are seeing or hearing.
Update | 11:08 a.m. Since opposition leaders decided to call off a planned protest during Friday prayers, some Iranian bloggers are pointing to video and photographs shot earlier this week to keep their momentum going online. One blogger uploaded this photograph to TwitPic on Friday of a Farsi-language placard the blogger translates as: “First they ignore you, then they ridicule you, then they fight you, then you win. Mahatma Gandhi.”
Other bloggers who seem to be writing from inside Iran point to this video, showing highlights from Mr. Moussavi’s campaign, which has been subtitled for English speakers:
Update | 11:02 a.m. A blogger who seems to be writing from Iran noted in two updates an hour ago on the Twitter feed Oxfordgirl that speculation is widespread that Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, a senior cleric and former president of Iran, may not have appeared at Friday prayers in Tehran because he is working behind the scenes to overturn the election results:
Who not at Friday Prayers: Rafsanjani.
Where is Rafsanjani? He is organising the demise of Ahmadinejad.
Update | 10:52 a.m. In an article for The New Republic earlier this week, Abbas Milani, a professor of Iranian Studies at Stanford University, looked more closely at the power struggle that seems to be unfolding inside Iran’s clerical establishment. Mr. Milani wrote that the country’s Supreme Leader may come to regret throwing his support so firmly behind Mr. Ahmadinejad:
Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei — whose rule has been absolute and whose words have been the law of the land–is facing the most public challenge to his authority. His two decades since succeeding Ayatollah Khomeini have been defined by a tendency to keep his options open, a verbal dexterity that allowed him to skirt tough political positions, and an appearance of impartiality in Iran’s fierce factional feuds. His caution has been the key to his success and survival.
But Khamenei has thrown this caution to the wind by unabashedly favoring Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. Four years ago, his support was instrumental in getting the little-known Ahmadinejad elected president. Even as criticism of the president has been on the rise in the country over the past year, Khamenei reportedly promised Ahmadinejad and his cabinet four more years at the helm.
Mr. Milani added:
What makes this moment different from past incidents of confrontation between the regime and the people is that, this time, many pillars of the regime are part of the opposition. Aside from Mousavi, who was prime minister for eight years, Rafsanjani, former president Mohammad Khatami, former speaker of the parliament Mehdi Karubi, and many other past ministers and undersecretaries are now leading the movement demanding new elections. Moreover, since the demonstrators come from all walks of life, it is more difficult than in the past to accuse them of immaturity or youthful impertinence, or of falling prey to the designs of the “Great Satan.” [...]
The regime still has the capacity to contain the disgruntled demonstrators and maybe even co-opt their leadership. But the majestic power of large peaceful crowds, tasting the joys of victory embodied in acts of civil disobedience, and brought together by the power of technologies beyond the regime’s control, is sure to beget larger, more confident, and more disciplined crowds. When people defied Khamenei’s orders by gathering en masse on Monday, the regime’s armor of invincibility–so central to the regime’s authoritarian control–was cracked. Without it, the regime cannot survive, and reestablishing it can come only at the price of great bloodshed.
Update | 10:23 a.m. On the BBC’s dot.life technology blog, Rory Cellan-Jones posts this interesting look at how, and why, Iran’s Internet service may have been slowed but not stopped entirely.
Update | 9:59 a.m. Not all of our readers support the opposition, or our effort to report on events in Iran. Here is what a reader named Siyamak wrote in the comments thread below after Ayatollah Khamenei’s speech on Friday morning:
I heard Khamenei speak and I liked what he said which I found fair and balanced. Stop interfering with Iran!
Update | 9:55 a.m. One of our readers asks if The Times, by passing on messages about plans for opposition rallies is helping the Iranian authorities to block them. Obviously we have no first-hand knowledge of whether that is the case or not, but there are plenty of reports that suggest that Iran’s government is directly reading (and perhaps even writing) messages posted on Twitter, YouTube and Facebook by bloggers supporting the opposition movement in Iran. We also know that the rallies seem to have been organized, in part, through the use of these social-networking tools. It is also clear that each day some of the first and most powerful news of the rallies has come from the photographs and video posted online by anonymous users of these services.
The larger point, however, is that Iranian bloggers may be posting this information, often in English, on these sites precisely so that they can be easily picked up and reported by news organizations outside the control of Iran’s government. Whatever the thinking is, it is a fact that, given the nature of the Web, no information posted on these Web sites is private, whether it is described or reported on by news organizations or not. What we do know is that the people posting these messages on their anonymous social-networking accounts are making them public by doing so, and that they frequently ask that the messages be passed on. In a sense “re-tweeting” is a kind of reporting.
Importantly, we also have not seen any messages at all from bloggers who appear to be inside Iran asking that their text messages, photographs of video not be reported by news organizations. A reader of The Lede points out that one blogger writing on Twitter, under the alias Oxfordgirl, wrote earlier today in an update: “u can use my name in RTs.”
It would seem likely that if Iran’s opposition bloggers wanted to keep this information secret they would not post it online at all.
With that in mind, here is a message sent to us this morning by one of our readers, who uses the alias gb and says that he has been in touch with his family in Shiraz:
I talked to my mom today about yesterday’s sit-in in Shahe Cheraq.
She said the main problem is that it’s really hard to get the word out about where and they are meeting. She said she really didn’t know where untill an hour before and some people were arriving when the whole thing was ending.
They are going to meet tomorrow in Daneshjoo Square (formerly Alam square).
Here is video and a photograph of that protest on Thursday at the Shah-e-Cheraq shrine in Shiraz.
Update | 9:21 a.m. Since the Supreme Leader again stated on Friday that a partial recount of ballots is all that is required to settle this dispute, while the opposition says the whole process was tainted and demands a new vote, it might be worth looking at who will be doing the recount.
The New Republic pointed out this week that this man, Ayatollah Ahmad Jannati Massah, “leads the Guardian Council, which runs elections and maintains the power to veto any parliamentary action it views as violating Islamic law.”
According to the New Republic’s description of him, it is not hard to understand why the opposition has little faith in a review led by him:
A hard-liner, he has called for America’s destruction multiple times, as well as George W. Bush’s decapitation. He formally endorsed Ahmadinejad, and he will run the Guardian Council’s election recount.
That information comes from a useful slide show on The New Republic’s Web site, which includes photographs and information on some of the key figures in Iran’s complex power structure who may right now be engaged in a struggle for control inside that labyrinth.
Update | 9:16 a.m. Two hours ago the blogger Persiankiwi, who has had consistently good information on the protests this week, reported via Twitter that another opposition rally is planned for Saturday:
Confirmed - Saturday Sea of Green rally - Enghelab Sq - 4pm - Mousavi, Karoubi and Khatami will attend -
Ten minutes ago the same source added:
confirmed - the Gov has refused to issue a permit for Sea of Green march at 4pm on Saturday in Tehran
Update | 9:10 a.m. The same YouTube channel that has the video of the singing at Thursday’s rally in Tehran also includes these two video clips of Mir Hussein Moussavi among his supporters:
Update | 9:07 a.m. As the opposition in Iran tries to remain united, they will point to video like this, apparently shot at Thursday’s mass rally in Tehran’s Imam Khomeni Square, of the crowd singing a patriotic song:
The YouTube user who uploaded this video says that points to this translation of the song’s lyrics on Wikipedia.
Update | 8:58 a.m. In an interview with Foreign policy magazine on Thursday, the Iranian filmmaker Mohsen Makhmalbaf, who is speaking for Mr. Moussavi’s campaign in Europe, made this interesting comparison between the events of 1979 and 2009 on Iran’s streets:
There are some similarities and some differences. In both situations, people were in the streets. In the [earlier] revolution, there were young people in the streets who were not as modern as the people are today. And they were in the streets following the lead of a leader, a mullah — in those times Ayatollah Khomeini. Now, the young people in the streets are more modern: They use SMS; they use the Internet. And they are not being actually led by anyone, but they are connected to each other.
In an e-mail message sent to BBC Persian on Friday, subsequently translated from Farsi and posted online, an anonymous reader of that Web site who says he is one of the opposition protesters in Iran seemed to endorse Mr. Makhmalbaf’s reading:
Whether Mir Hossein Mousavi wants it or not, we will take our vote back. This is a youth movement, it’s our movement and we will not have these men [ie all the politicians] take credit. They are threatening us with violence and they are holding Mir Hossein [Mousavi] responsible. If one drop more blood is shed from anyone, the leader of the nation will be responsible.
Update | 8:54 a.m. Here is what one student in Tehran, identified only as Behrooz, told the BBC in response to Ayatollah Khamenei’s speech on Friday:
We all know that Mr Ahmadinejad did not get 24 million votes. But Ayatollah Khamenei has just repeated that statistic as true. There’s clearly a power struggle going on between Mr [Hashemi] Rafsanjani [a former president and head of an influential body which elects the supreme leader] and Mr Khamenei. I think in the end this can only be good for us, although I think today’s speech makes it more dangerous for us to protest.
We just have to keep the demonstrations so big that they cannot attack us. If the crowd is just 2,000 strong, they can scare us with 200 soldiers. But if we are a million, what can they do?
I don’t think the Guardian Council will agree to a new election. They don’t want to lose prestige. They will agree to a recount which gives the same result.
I voted for Mr [Mehdi] Karroubi because he was the one with the best plan to change this rotten system. Maybe nothing will change for now, but I do think this is the start of some sort of revolution. Hopefully not a destructive one like in 1979. As long as we are in the street, people will know we are not satisfied.
For the moment Mr Rafsanjani is silent, and we don’t know what he’s doing. But he’s a very powerful man. He’s the leader of the Assembly of Experts which selects supreme leader. He brought Khamenei to power, so he will be the one who brings him down.
Another response, on the BBC’s Web site, comes from computer programmer in Mashhad, identified as Arash, who said:
People are being beaten up in Mashhad. There have been no demonstrations in the past two days. People wait until night to go on the roofs and shout “Allahu akbar” ["God is great] to show their support for the opposition. People from here go to Tehran to demonstrate, to be part of the bigger, safer crowds.
Update | 8:42 a.m. In his sermon on Friday, Ayatollah Khamenei attacked what he called attempts by foreign governments to stir up opposition to the election results. He seemed to be saying that reports by foreign media outlets are actually veiled attempts to overthrow his regime. Reporting on what was in part an attack on the corporation itself, the BBC, which maintains an active Farsi-language news service, explained:
He said the election was a “political earthquake” for Iran’s enemies - singling out Great Britain as “the most evil of them” - whom he accused of trying to foment unrest in the country.
“Some of our enemies in different parts of the world intended to depict this absolute victory, this definitive victory, as a doubtful victory,” the Supreme Leader said.
In its own way, the BBC was quick to strike back - passing on reaction to the Supreme Leader’s speech from users of its Web site who claimed to be inside Iran.
Update | 8:38 a.m. In a post on Bits, the New York Times’s technology blog, Miguel Helft reports:
“There is a huge amount of interest about the events in Iran,” said Franz Och, principal scientist at Google, who has been leading the development of Google Translate. “We hope that this tool will improve access to information in Iran and outside,” Mr. Och said in an interview. [...]
In a blog post, Mr. Och warned that the service is not perfect, so mistakes are possible. It is optimized to translate between Persian and English, but Google is working on improving translation between Persian and the other languages in Google Translate.
Update | 8:30 a.m. The automatic translation tool introdcued by Google on Friday was quickly used by supporters of opposition candidate Mir Hussein Moussavi. One hour ago, Mousavi1388, a Twitter feed maintained by opposition supporters, reported:
Mousavi’s official news site GhalamNews in now available in English thanks to @GOOGLE, see http://is.gd/16b2j
In reference to reports from Twitter that we cite, we should note that, after consulting several experts, The Times has decided to include the user names for the Twitter posts that are quoted here and elsewhere on NYTimes.com. We concluded that the user names would better allow readers to judge the source and value of the posts that are quoted. The user names are already publicly available on Twitter and accessible, along with all content created on Twitter, through Twitter’s search index and on any number of third-party search engines.
Update | 8:20 a.m. Iran’s authorities are no doubt hoping that images broadcast on Iranian state television this morning, of the Supreme Leader speaking to a large number of loyal followers at Tehran University — including incumbent President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad — will give many Iranian citizens the impression that the opposition protests are doomed to failure. Largely shut out by state television, and barred from speaking to the foreign press, the opposition will continue to rely on citizen journalists within the movement to get word of its protests out to other Iranians and the world through the Internet.
To that end, their efforts may be aided by the introduction of two new tools from Google and Facebook, announced on Friday. Google has sped up the release of automatic translation software that will help with translations of Internet messages to and from Farsi. On Google’s official blog, the company explained:
Today, we added Persian (Farsi) to Google Translate. This means you can now translate any text from Persian into English and from English into Persian — whether it’s a news story, a website, a blog, an email, a tweet or a Facebook message. The service is available free at http://translate.google.com.
We feel that launching Persian is particularly important now, given ongoing events in Iran. Like YouTube and other services, Google Translate is one more tool that Persian speakers can use to communicate directly to the world, and vice versa — increasing everyone’s access to information.
Pointing to the importance of their social-networking site in Iran, Facebook announced that they have made the entire site available to users who speak no English:
Since the Iranian election last week, people around the world have increasingly been sharing news and information on Facebook about the results and its aftermath. Much of the content created and shared has been in Persian—the native language of Iran—but people have had to navigate the site in English or other languages.
Today we’re making the entire site available in a beta version of Persian, so Persian speakers inside of Iran and around the world can begin using it in their native language.
If your browser is set to Persian, you should automatically see the Persian version of Facebook.
Update | 8:11 a.m. According to a Reuters report, there were tens of thousands “gathered in and around Tehran University to hear Khamenei’s Friday prayer sermon.” The news agency added:
People chanting slogans and holding posters of Khamenei, Ahmadinejad and Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomenei, the father of the 1979 Islamic revolution, packed streets outside the university.
Update | 8:00 a.m. Iran’s Press TV, an English-language satellite channel financed by the Iranian government, reports that the nation’s Supreme Leader made no concessions after days of massive street protests:
Ayatollah Seyyed Ali Khamenei said high turnout in the election, which witnessed more than 40 million Iranians casting their votes, was a great manifestation of people’s solidarity with the Islamic establishment. Addressing Friday prayers congregation, Ayatollah Khamenei said that last Friday’s election indicated a ‘common sense of responsibility’ of the Iranian nation to determine the future of the country. [...]
The Leader said the high voter turnout in the election was a ‘political quake’ for the enemy and a ‘real celebration’ for the friends of the country. “The Islamic Republic of Iran will by no means betray the votes of the nation,” the Leader said, adding the legal system of the election will not allow any ballot rigging in Iran.
Ayatollah Khamenei, however, maintained that the Guardian Council, the body tasked with overseeing the election, would look into the complaints of the candidates who are unhappy with the election results.
The Leader also added that the establishment would never give-in to illegal demands, urging all presidential candidates to pursue their complaints through legal channels. Ayatollah Khamenei called for an end to illegal street protests aimed at reversing the result of the election.
Update | 7:54 a.m. The BBC has this video of Ayatollah Khamenei’s stern rebuke to the protesters on Friday, which was broadcast by Iranian state television.
Update | 7:51 a.m. As Nazila Fathi reports from Tehran, Iran’s ruling cleric took a firm stand against the opposition protests during a televised sermon on Friday:
In his first public response to days of protests, Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, sternly warned opponents Friday to stay off the streets and denied opposition claims that last week’s disputed election was rigged, praising the ballot as an “epic moment that became a historic moment.”
In a somber and lengthy sermon at Friday prayers in Tehran, he called directly for an end to the protests by hundreds of thousands of Iranians demanding a new election.
“Street challenge is not acceptable,” Ayatollah Khamenei said. “This is challenging democracy after the elections.” He said opposition leaders would be “held responsible for chaos” if they did not end the protests.
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