Iranian youth in the Green Movement

Category: International

Negar shares her personal account of what happened during those December days in Iran.

One morning I was up checking my e-mails when a friend from Austin instant messaged me to ask, “Have you heard the news?” I hadn’t. As it turned out, Ayatollah Montazeri (the most prominent reformist cleric who had been under house arrest since 1997) had died hours earlier. The news had traveled half way around the world from Qom to Austin before it reached me in Tehran. This is a typical example of how the information flows in the country and among the Greens. With the state having a monopoly over the television and radio, as well as the heavy censorship on the Internet, it is more likely for Iranians to learn about what is going on in their country from the Diaspora and diasporic media. Nevertheless, the news saddened me but also excited me, as I knew the next few days would be eventful. Text messages were exchanged. Phone calls were made. Less than 24 hours later, my friend and I were on a free bus to Qom for the funeral.

The city of Qom is the heart of religious conservatism in Iran and home to Shia seminaries. It is also a pilgrimage site for the Shiites, so for the generation of our parents, it wasn’t that extraordinary to pay a visit to Qom. But as the post-revolution generation, we think of Qom as the antithesis to everything progressive and modern. Given our modest, yet urban appearances, there was no chance my friend and I would blend in.

December 21, 2009
“No more English from this point on,” my friend said. We had arrived and he didn’t want us to attract the wrong kind of attention. Especially since the government has been wanting to blame the U.K. and U.S. for the after-election crisis. If a Basiji overhears you speaking English, you may be arrested as the foreign agent they had been looking for all along!

Although I had been in demonstrations before, I was a newbie to Green demonstrations inside Iran. My friend who had been in Iran since before the election was a pro by now. So while I was watching a little verbal clash between the Basij and the people, he was looking for obvious Greens in the crowd. To us, obvious Greens were people who literally wore a green wristband or scarf and generally the people who looked like us: middle class Tehranis.

The Basijis were chanting, “Our holy city is not the place for traitors,” when my friend pointed at somewhere in the middle of the crowd. We dived into a sea of people and started making our way through. Once immersed in the crowd, we felt a little more safe but we were still vigilant about hiding our faces from dozens or perhaps hundreds of state TV or Intelligence Ministry cameras that were filming the demonstration from the rooftops of surrounding buildings.

The chanting began with Allah o Akbar (“God is greatest”), which is an Islamic tradition at funerals but has turned into a resistance slogan for Iranians and gradually became more politically explicit. The Basij and the anti-riots seemed to have been instructed not to use violence. This allowed the crowd to grow in size, so much that although we were relatively early, we never reached the shrine where Montazeri was being buried. The turnout was estimated to have been at least a few hundred thousand.

What was perhaps most surprising was the demographics of the demonstrators. The Green Movement is often criticized for not being able to reach beyond the middle class urbanites and we, too, had bought into that myth when we had looked for “obvious” Greens. But what I saw on December 21 debunked that myth for me. Many people had come from smaller cities and towns. I saw chador clad women, who are otherwise stereotyped to be both religiously and politically conservative, courageously wearing green ribbons around their wrists and leading the group of people around them. We were once surrounded by men with shabby clothing and unkempt beards (the stereotype of a Basiji) and thought we were in trouble, but then they cried out the most radical slogans of the day. The diversity was amazing and very promising.

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