IRAN RISES

Here is a message from the Arab Human Rights Organizations’ Statement on the International Day of Solidarity with the Iranian People.

I’m not in a position to blog the hunger strike. The first day (from memory), there were very stirring speeches from Dr. Qaemmaqami, a seasoned National Front activists. Memorable quote: Most of the members of Mohammad Mosaddeq‘s National Front were religious, but the program of the party was for a secular state. Dr. Reza Baraheni, an Iranian poet and intellectual from the sixties and seventies, who had been arrested and tortured by the Shah and has campaigned for human rights in general and the cultural rights of his native Azerbaijan in particular ever since, also spoke. Nayereh Tohidi, who has been active in defending Iranian women’s rights activists for over a decade, spoke. There were assorted messages of solidarity read from Canada and Europe. The proprietor of this blog was also invited to speak, and spoke in his miserable Persian which the crowd tolerated for a few minutes. Drs. Hamid Dabbashi and Ahmad Karimi-Hakkak also spoke.

On the second day we heard an immensely stirring speech by Akbar Ganji, who had broken with the Islamic Republic and was imprisoned and tortured and had gone on a 30 day hunger strike just to the point of death. In his talk, which deserves to be translated, he said that Iran needs solidarity from the West, but not military intervention or economic sanctions, which will hurt the Iranian people and not the government. We also heard from the author Shahrnush Parsipour, who gave a moving speech in which she declared that she is religious, but does not advocate putting religion in power. The high point of her talk was on the consequences of words. She said that when, early in the revolution, we chanted, “Death to” this and “Excecute” that, the people who chanted these slogans were responsible for the executions that followed. Shirin Neshat spoke all to briefly. The high point was a talk with Noam Chomsky, who spoke on the lessons of defending human rights in Iran both under the Shah and under the current regime. The enthusiasm of the crowd was boundless, and they hung on his every word. The gist of his talk was that the struggle belonged to the Iranians who were on the ground and that he had no wisdom to impart them. As for the solidarity movement, it was confronted with a government which he said was strikingly similar to that of the Shah’s regime, but the fact that it was not, unlike the monarchy, an ally of the United States naturally made the solidarity movement’s demands very different. I remember Dr. Baraheni and Prof. Chomsky sharing the podium at teach-ins at MIT and it brought back warm memories of those days full of hope. 

The Strike for Iran website contains the Persian version of many of the messages. I hope they get translated for the international community.

I can say roughly that the people in the audience were not generally the leftist crowd, but the nationalists or religious-nationalists. There were many children who spoke, thank God, excellent Persian, for which I salute their parents. The atmosphere was almost festive, although we were soaked for a few hours into the afternoon. Yet, people’s spirits remained high, even as they got a thorough soaking.

The crowd was entertained by several musicians on each days, and I’ll bring a report of that next time I get to posting.

As an aside, going on a hunger strike is not so terrible. We are expected to hydrate; some even have tea with sugar, but I stick to water. It is fatiguing, and, of course, my mind doesn’t concentrate as well as it would were it well-nourished, but so far, so good!