Iran round up

16 Jun 09 | Uncategorized

The protests in Iran have been seen by many as conclusively proving the value of the Internet in organising and reporting civil movements.

Perhaps the tech-savviness is the only unsurprising element of the events of the past few days. Despite restrictions, Iran’s youth are remarkably active on the web, with Farsi the fourth most prevalant language in the blogosphere. As was pointed out at Internet Sans Frontieres:

“In 1979 revolutionary songs started to fill the streets of Tehran while the Shah was boarding the plane that brought him out of the country. Today the web is spreading and amplifying the news of the ongoing protests at last week’s election results.

In Iran there are more than six million web users, the majority of whom are under 25.”

Particular attention has been paid to the events on Twitter, with thousands around the world following #IranElection.

At friendfeed.com, you can view an aggregation of all related tweets coming out of Iran.

Citizen photojournalism hub Demotix is hosting pictures from its contributors in Iran here.

As foreign media have now been severely restricted (the BBC having already experienced jamming since Friday afternoon), these citizen sources may be the only way to find out what’s happening.

"Iran’s civil liberties are regularly eroded as part of a ten-year political cycle"

15 Jun 09 | Uncategorized

In rare footage from a year ago, President Ahmadinejad can be seen giving an open-air speech on the outskirts of Tehran. An official film crew, from the president’s office, has a monopoly filming presidential duties. As the camera panned from Ahmadinejad to the audience, it revealed an endless sea of people, seemingly hanging on his every word. It took me a moment to understand what I was seeing. There were men and women in attendance, but the crowd of literally thousands was segregated by gender.

The footage had been obtained by documentary filmmaker and Newsweek correspondent Maziar Bahari for a documentary he was making about Ahmadinejad.

Ahmadinejad has always safeguarded the country’s hard-line tradition. When he was mayor of Tehran, he proposed burying a martyr from the Iran-Iraq war in every city square to remind Iranians of the eternal threat against their country and religion.

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