Until We Are Free by Shirin Ebadi

Author:Shirin Ebadi
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 2016-03-07T16:00:00+00:00

Those early days of the demonstrations kept the world transfixed, and the images and scenes of a Middle Eastern nation rising up for freedom dominated the international news. I imagined that the protests would force Supreme Leader Khamenei to back down, to admit fraud and hold new elections. Mousavi had even agreed not to run personally, simply to open a way for Ahmadinejad to step down. But as Nargess and I watched from her flat by the river, it was clear that not only was the regime unprepared to back down, but that it intended to crush the protests.

In those tense days of late June, the state sent its full armory of police officers, security agents, and paramilitaries into the streets. They beat matrons who had been protesting peacefully; they opened fire on the unarmed crowds, composed of the young and the old, the working class and the middle class. On one street a militiaman shot a young woman called Neda Agha-Soltan, whose body crumpled in the road. People in the street managed to detain the militiaman who killed her. They took his ID card off him, to keep as evidence that he worked for the state. A passerby filmed the whole incident and posted it online; the killing of Neda went viral, and her frozen face became iconic of the brutality of that time.

By this point, everyone knew that those who were injured and went to the hospital were often arrested by the police in the emergency room. And so the injured went home, waiting to be called on and treated by doctors they knew.

Throughout, the protesting people of Iran did not resort to retaliatory violence. They knew that the slightest hint of violence toward the state would lead the regime to respond furiously, going on a killing and execution spree, as it had done in the early days of the revolution when it had been challenged by people.

And so they stayed stubbornly in the streets, chanting, “We don’t want an Islamic state!” and “Death to the dictator!”

As tensions mounted and the depth of the challenge posed to the regime became more evident, many Iranians began to complain that the United States was not doing enough to support the protesters. “Why doesn’t Obama say something?” people asked; they felt his response had been tepid and disappointing. Some imagined that forceful words might make a difference on the ground; some seemed to think they would carry symbolic value that would have its own importance. But I thought President Obama’s cautiously worded statements were precisely the right approach. What could he have done, in the end? Was he going to send ground troops to defend the protesters? Of course not. Was he going to make weekly statements condemning the supreme leader and championing the opposition? This would have been a destructive course to take. It would have emboldened the establishment figures and led them to call the opposition American stooges, and it would have risked creating a rift between the opposition leaders and the Iranian people.

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