Iranians are using Twitter to advise on what internet portals to use to circumvent government filters, writes ELAINE BYRNE
' HEY YOU, out there on the road/ Always doing what you're told,/ Can you help me?"
Pink Floyd's Hey Youis the first track on the third side of their album, The Wall, released in 1979, the same year as the Iranian revolution. This famous lyric was Yasaman's message on her social network facebook on Saturday, the same day that Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was re-elected for a second term as Iran's president.
In the video of the song, the lyric denotes the point when the riot police appear in a dark and menacing manner. The song is asking for help because of the madness that raw isolation has created.
Yasaman is an Iranian friend from Tehran and since Saturday she has posted shocking YouTube clips of police randomly beating protesters senseless with truncheons. In one clip, a dozen police clothed entirely in black with their faces masked are filmed from a rooftop violently kicking a young man lying motionless on the ground. In another, members of the army indiscriminately strike with their batons women waiting at a bus stop.
Other clips record men on motorbikes with baton-wielding passengers driving at speed into protest marches, creating crowd stampedes and wild panic. Such scenes are so intensely depicted and personally witnessed by Mary Fitzgerald in her recent Irish Timesreports from Tehran.
The young people secretly recording these distressing pictures are doing so at great personal risk. In most cases the scenes are uploaded to the internet in real time, within minutes after they were taped.
Technology is generating a revolution.
Seventy per cent of Iranians are under 30 and are overwhelmingly urban. They have embraced the internet and text messages as a means to politically mobilise and communicate in the autocratic Islamic Republic.
Despite government blockades of facebook and the main cellular phone network cut, Iranians are using Twitter to advise on what internet portals to use in order to circumvent government filters.
The BBC blamed Iranian heavy electronic interference which jammed TV and radio services on Sunday. Yet the images of revolution are still finding their way through. The latest now are of bloodied students in their dormitories and burning streets.
The state may control election results but it can no longer manipulate public opinion.
Yasaman is a typical Iranian 27-year-old. Poised and strikingly beautiful, she attracts immediate male attention when she visits Europe. She says it’s easier to pretend to be Mediterranean than entertain recurring discussions about western assumptions of Iranian backwardness. Although deeply proud of her country, like many of her contemporaries she is acutely frustrated by Iran’s stifled politics.
Her father is a well-known academic in Tehran’s leading university. The content of his university courses must be preapproved and he can only teach abstract theories of concepts without any practical application, which Yasaman describes as meaningless.
Educated during the secular regime of the pre-1979 revolution shah of Iran, her father knew that Iranian universities would not stimulate an independent learning environment for Yasaman. Instead, he gave his ambitions to her.
University professors barely make ends meet. For years he has struggled on his meagre salary and made enormous sacrifices in order to finance a third-level European education for his daughter. Sometimes revolutions can take a generation.
In his first press conference since his election, Ahmadinejad causally compared the protesters’ fury to “the passions after a soccer match”. He went on to say that the “margin between my votes and the others is too much and no one can question it”. Yet more than 100 reformist leaders had been arrested over the weekend.
Writing in yesterday's Irish Times, Ali Ansari attributes Ahmadinejad's protestations about the free and fair nature of the elections as "the standard rhetoric of the autocratic populist the world over". Iran perhaps shares some of Belarus's electoral experiences.
I was an election monitor with the Organisation for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE) at the 2006 Belarus presidential elections. A particular memory was standing beside government officials in their offices as they tallied the results from the city districts. They weren’t that good at adding, and when this was pointed out, they decided it would be easier to concentrate on the task behind closed doors.
The authoritarian president, Alexander Lukashenko, declared the elections free and fair, an opinion the OSCE did not share. Reformist leaders were subsequently imprisoned.
Students protested for days in sub-zero temperatures. And after a while the western media’s focus faded and the momentum for reform dissipated.
Young Iranians believe that the West does not care. CNN’s focus on Ahmadinejad’s victory speech on Saturday and their initial scepticism about the scale of the protests especially exercised Iranian twitters and bloggers.
As Yasaman wrote before yesterday’s rally, “The West has started to consider this over while people are being beaten throughout the country. We will march today for freedom from Enghelab to Azadi square!” It puts our recent “political revolution” into context, eh?