Sometimes a celebration should be considered first as a celebration.
After months of reporting on tension and conflict, it was a pleasure to watch the joy of Iranians on Chahrshanbeh Suri, the eve of Iranian New Year celebration of the renewal of fire. Although there was a heavy security presence in main streets and squares, this did not — as The Washington Post reported — “block traditional celebrations”.
Instead, on side streets and outside residences across Iran, people gathered to set off firecrackers, sing, dance, and jump over the small fires which hark back to Zoroastrian tradition. An EA reader eagerly wrote us, “Our family live in a provincial town. It was rocking tonight with the sound of fireworks! Cud be heard in every part of the town :-)” Even in Press TV’s state-sanitised video of events, there is the pleasure of an elderly woman gingerly skipping in her long dress over a few inches of flame.
Within days of President Obama’s inauguration last January, I began writing of a military attempt to “bump him” on three fronts: preventing the closure of Guantanamo Bay, getting more troops in Afghanistan, and delaying the withdrawal of US forces from Iraq.
Well, the commanders, backed by key individuals in the Executive and the complications of Congress, succeeded on the first two matters. And, days before Iraq’s national elections, they are pressing again on the third. General Raymond Odierno, the commander of US forces in Iraq and a man who (a la General David Petraeus) has learned how to work the press, started telling favoured reporters that Obama’s August date for removal of most combat troops might not be tenable. Prominent columnists like Thomas Friedman and Thomas Ricks soon rolled out the arguments for sticking around.
In contrast to last year, this is not yet a head-on clash with the President; Odierno and his allies, possibly including Petraeus, now head of the US Central Command for the region, are working around him through media channels. But it does set up a challenge for Obama, especially if expected political complications with the elections occur: does he again give way on policy to his military brass?
2145 GMT: Political Prisoner Watch. An activist reports that Layla Tavasoli and Mohamad Naeimpour of the Freedom Movement of Iran have been released from Evin Prison.
2130 GMT: Rafsanjani Watch. Another sign of the “conservative” push for changes within the system. The brother of former President Hashemi Rafsanjani, Mohammad Hashemi Rafsanjani, has told Khabar Online that the Expediency Council will seek to remove “ambiguities” in Iran’s election law. At the same time, Mohammad Rafsanjani denied that the Expediency Council will seek to remove the Guardian Council’s monitoring of elections.
1840 GMT: WaPo’ed (definition: “declaring an opposition movement dead without evidence and with dubious motives). Just a quick note to folks at The Washington Post: in the past 72 hours, you have distorted a piece by your own Iran correspondent to portray the demise of the Green movement on 22 Bahman and you have run an Associated Press report which declares from thin air:
ut an understanding of the complexities of Iraq’s political system and the manoevures, media interest relies on a dramatic episode, such as the US Government’s current allegation that two members of the Supervisory Board — former US favourite Ahmad Chalabi and Ali Faisal al-Lami — have ties to Iran. (They do have links, but this is merely a pretext for the Americans to try and alter the Board’s activities.)
The immediate core of the dispute is the Shia-dominated Board’s disqualification of numerous Sunni candidates, including leaders of Sunni parties, on the grounds of connections to Saddam Hussein’s Ba’ath Party. Ranj Alaaldin outlines the conflict and its significance in an article for The Guardian:
Iraq’s national elections will go ahead in a few weeks’ time without one
of the most prominent Sunni politicians in the country. Salah al-Mutlaq,
who had been seeking to stand as part of Ayad Allawi’s recently formed
Iraqi National Movement (INM), had his appeal rejected on Friday. The
decision was made after judges, as a result of an outcry among the great
and powerful of Iraq’s political actors, reversed their earlier,
US-sponsored decision to postpone the appeals process until after the
elections.
Fierce critics of the ban on candidates formerly tied to the Ba’ath party
have called it a sectarian, pre-election tactic on the part of the Shia
parties – particularly the largely sectarian and Iranian-backed Iraqi
National Alliance, which also happens to have its own electoral candidates
2325 GMT: That’s it for today. We’ll be back at 0600 GMT. Look forward to seeing you then.
2315 GMT: What’s Your Punchline? Looking for a joke to end the evening. Here’s the set-up line, courtesy of Press TV: “A senior Iranian commander has announced that the country has developed a new system to distract missiles.”
2310 GMT: On the Labour Front. Mansour Osanloo, the leader of the Tehran bus drivers union, has been transferred to Solitary Ward Number 1 in Gohardasht Prison, also known as the “doghouse”.
2225 GMT: Taking Away Karroubi’s Protection? In an interview with Radio Farda, Mohammad Taghi Karroubi, Mehdi Karroubi’s son, says that several former Revolutionary Guards, wartime commanders, and family members of martyrs who had volunteered for protect Mehdi Karroubi on 22 Bahman have been called in for questioning and have not yet gone home. He says that they have probably been arrested. Read the rest of this entry »
On Sunday, Palestinian Authority leader Mahmoud Abbas, in an interview with The Guardian, said that Israel’s continued activity in the West Bank was leading to a “one-state solution“.
Abbas also said he would be prepared to resume full face-to-face peace negotiations if Israel froze all settlement construction for three months and accepted its June 1967 borders as the basis for land swaps. “These are not preconditions, they are requirements in the road map. If they are not prepared to do that, it means they don’t want a political solution,” Abbas explained.
Palestinian Prime Minister Salam Fayyad then jumped in. He said that, unless Israel shows that it is rolling back its occupation (referring to continuing settlements), there will be no peace, which is the “only path to security for Israel”. Fayyad added:
What is required is negotiations based on settled principles… We need to begin to see things that suggest to our people that indeed the occupation is on its way to being rolled back.
If settlements continue, the political question is how confident can we be that once relaunched, the political process will be able to deliver on permanent status issues.
Hat-tip to Gearóid Ó Cuinn and Saoirse Roche, who brought out this story in The Guardian of London:
I think it’s fair to say that a few people in Iran are passionate about football. And, throughout the post-election crisis, a lot of them have been matching up that passion to protests: Green wristbands, chants inside and outside stadiums, conversion of the Red and Blue of Iran’s top club teams (Persepolis and Esteghlal) to Green.
Earlier this month, however, the fans found a new, mischievous way to make their point. The “90″ show (named after the 90 minutes of a football match) had one of those universal phone-ins with the chance of winning a prize: “What caused the recent decline of the Iranian national football team?”
Like most phone-ins, there was one clearly right answer — “(a) Management” — amidst clearly wrong ones. “(C) The best generation of players had left the team” was for football morons, since all nine members of Iran’s 2006 World Cup squad are still in prime form.
Except it didn’t go that way. Green supporters passed on a text message urging people to vote for “C”, which in 1 1/2 hours racked up 1.1 million votes out of a record total of 1.85 million phone-ins.
Since the late 19th century, almost every generation of Iranians has seen at least one major upheaval or revolution. The first revolution for democracy in the Middle East took place in Iran in 1905, at a time when European countries (excepting the UK) were under various forms of dictatorship. No country has experienced so much constant turmoil and political unrest in the past century as Iran.
Besides the current demand for democracy in Iran, however, there has always been the demand for independence. Iranians have an ingrained sensitivity about the independence of their country, traceable far back even in the epic mythical tales of ancient Iran.
In Shahnameh (or Book of the Kings), for example, the legendary warrior hero Rustam is the defender of Iran’s independence. We should not presume that these are just stories created to pass spare time in tea houses. There is rather a principle which, a thousand years ago, transformed the unknown philosopher-poet Ferdusii into a national love affair and turned a warrior into a legendary hero. It still affects the Iranian psyche today.
Sometimes a celebration should be considered first as a celebration.
Entries (RSS)