warning Hi, we've moved to USCANNENBERGMEDIA.COM. Visit us there!

Neon Tommy - Annenberg digital news

Iran 2009 Protests: How Green Of A Movement It Really Was

Tara Kangarlou |
November 23, 2010 | 4:37 p.m. PST

Staff Reporter

Young Protestor in Tehran. Photo by Farhad Rajabali
Young Protestor in Tehran. Photo by Farhad Rajabali
A year has passed since the June 2009 Iranian presidential election. Millions of Iranians came out to the streets protesting what they believed was an unjust election. The weeklong protests opposed the president-elect Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

People all over the country marched the streets in support of Mir Hossein Mousavi, a second choice, libertarian candidate that everyone in Iran seemed to support.

Since then there has been no strong confirmation as to whether Ahmadinejad cheated in the election. Yet, the post-revolutionary protests known as the “Green Movement," Mousavi’s moto for reformation, lead the oppressed and confined Iranian nation on the verge of a new revolution, and brought them to the forefront of the Western media's attention.

The events created an immediate urgency causing the world to finally take a closer look at an oppressed young nation that for the longest time failed to be noticed. Yet, with all the torture, oppression, political imprisonment, and detention in Iran, the state of Iran remains the same.

“The Green Movement” was green enough to give the Iranian nation a new image on the forefront of the Western media, yet it wasn’t green enough to condemn any serious changes to the oppressive regime in Iran. “What happened was that the movement created a division among the clergy”, Dr. Firouz Naderi, JPL director and an Iranian-American reformist said in an interview. “The protests didn’t overturn the government, but at least created a dispersion between the Ayatollahs themselves.”

One point that many Iranians in Iran, other Iranian-American activists and American experts believe is the positive global exposure that the Iranians received after the June 2009 elections. "Now at least the Americans and the rest of world have the ability to distinguish the Iranians and the Iranian youth with the oppressive government of Iran,” Naderi said. “Now the world can see that the Iranians are not Ahmadinejad and Ahmadinejad is not the Iranian nation.”

Besides the positive exposure received worldwide, there are still many external and internal issues that have negatively prohibited this movement to be a complete success. The existing discord and division among the Iranians living in the United States and other countries is an inevitable disease that has consecutively barred them from succeeding in any unified uprisings.

For many reasons, such as political views, religious views, and generational gaps, the Iranian Americans living in the United States did not carry the same message that their fellow Iranians carried in the protests of June 2009. Although both groups shared similar thoughts on democracy and liberty in Iran, the Iranian community in the U.S. allowed unnecessary differences over power their unity.

“People here were protesting in support of the movement in Iran, but among themselves they would be fighting with another over whose flags they are showing,” Naderi explained. “The green flags would curse the ones with the old Pahlavi flags, and vice versa, and somewhere between those lines they would forget the primary reason as to why they are protesting in first place”.

This division may have been a result of a strong generational gap between the first generation of immigrants to the United States and the recent generation who emigrated from Iran in the recent years. Regardless, when the country is in such deep crisis over freedom and democracy, many Iranians believe that it was a shame to see the their community in America fight over flag colors and forget the main cause of the protests.

The U.S. response was also duly noted. Many protestors in the U.S. and Iran are still opposed to the very weak stand that President Obama took. “The young generation in Iran wanted and still wants the support of Obama, they want diplomatic relations, not military force”, an Iranian activist in Tehran told me.

“There were no strong statements made by President Obama. What a shame it was to see that strong of a movement in Iran and no support being received from U.S.—we were waiting for that,” said Arezoo Rashidian, an Iranian-American political activist, in the aftermath of the 2009 protests.

“The United States is the number one supporter of democracy and freedom and they didn’t have any immediate report when millions and millions of Iranians were out protesting amidst the brutality of the Iranian regime,” Rashidian adds. Furthermore it is vital to note that after the election, the only State figure who initiated strong stands on the issue was U.S. Secretary of State, Hilary Clinton. Clinton condemned the election and urged the country to support the revolutionary movements in Iran.

It's important to note that there are still some Iranian-Americans who would not appreciate American interference or involvement in the movement. "The green movement might have been tainted if the United States would have interfered directly,” Naderi speculates. Many suggest that due to the country's previous involvement with Western influence and expansions during the Pahlavi regime, the Iranians want to fight this battle themselves and that Obama’s interference would take the movement towards a less positive direction.

Either way, the Iranian-American community in the United States didn’t take a strong stand to forcefully support their fellow Iranians in Iran. Support was limited to facebook communications, exposing the events happening inside the country, and protesting in different areas of the larger metropolitans, such as N.Y., L.A., and D.C.

As for how “green” of a movement it was, or how greener it could have been, the movement created a distinction between the Iranian nation and their supressing government as well as their desire for democracy and human rights, and the government’s lack of democracy.

The aftermath of the June 2009 election filtered the corrupted views that the world had of Iranians and brought a more enlightened view on the Iranian community worldwide. Unfortunately, the momentum has ceased as it became transformed into political imprisonment and torture by the government—where the nation was awaiting support from the rest of the world.

After that, people in Iran no longer cared for the injustice election but instead were concerned over the lack of democracy in Iran. Mir Hosein Mousavi was an “accidental leader” and the choice was no longer between the two candidates, but rather the protests were geared towards a new quest for freedom and democracy.

The western media managed to capture a glimpse of hatred that one nation harbors for its government. That itself was perhaps the largest prize that the green movement brought to the Iranians worldwide. The protests may have been slowly dissolved after a few months in August, yet the biggest result is the strong focus on the human rights violations in Iran—a path that is directing more attention to the nation’s never-ending desire for democracy and freedom.

Reach Reporter Tara Kangarlou here.



 

Buzz

Craig Gillespie directed this true story about "the most daring rescue mission in the history of the U.S. Coast Guard.”

Watch USC Annenberg Media's live State of the Union recap and analysis here.

 
ntrandomness