From: senaey fethi (senaeyfethi@yahoo.com)
Date: Thu Jun 25 2009 - 03:36:21 EDT
Iran's manufactured revolution Despite the hopes of overexcited western commentators, demonstrations in Iran are likely to change very little
Lionel Beehner
guardian.co.uk, Wednesday 24 June 2009
I hate to say it but to all the dreamers in the western press who say that Iran will never be the same – lines lifted from protests past, from Ukraine to Burma to Lebanon – once all the debris is swept up, the Islamic republic will probably look eerily similar to how it looked before the presidential election.
"Whatever happens from this point on, nothing will ever be the same in Tehran," wrote Bernard-Henri Levi. "Whatever happens now, all is changed utterly in Iran," gushed Roger Cohen. Really? The theocratic leaders of Iran really will turn to YouTube, scratch their heads at the sight of the protests, and see the error of their theocratic ways?
Westerners love to overstate the importance of street demonstrations abroad. In our eyes anyone flashing the local equivalent of a v-sign salute represents all that is decent and democratic in the world. But we do them a disservice by raising false hopes and proclaiming their every protest as the next velvet revolution.
Regimes do not collapse as easily as we think. There were similar pronouncements that the junta in Burma was finished after hundreds of saffron-clad monks took to the streets a few years back. Well, guess what happened: not much. The junta continues to clamp down on the opposition.
In Ukraine, perhaps the most recent popular revolution in memory, the orange revolution was just a reshuffling of the chairs. They protested that Russia's stooge had stolen the election. So instead of making him president, he is now prime minister. And the government remains paralysed, the laughing stock of Europe, five years on.
To say that Iran will be completely changed is naive at best and dangerous at worst. I hope I am wrong but I've seen this movie before. The first near-revolution where the western media went gaga over the clever use of SMS technology and "flash mobs" to rally the masses was in March 2006, when thousands – mostly students – stormed the main square in Minsk. I remember a German activist proclaimed this was the beginning of the end for Lukashenka, Belarus's mustachioed strongman. He told me there were hundreds of thousands of protesters (the actual figure was about 10,000) yet the gathering never achieved critical mass. As in Iran, none of the poorer folks from the provinces bothered to show up because they kinda liked their pandering president, even if the west couldn't stand him. There just was no popular support for regime change. After about a week, there were clashes with the police, a wave of arrests, but then the protest petered out.
Neither should Iranians get too wrapped up in symbolism. The images of Neda Soltani dying on the streets are moving and shocking, but by focusing too much on them and not rallying the masses, the protesters may lose momentum. In Minsk, they got too hung up on the iconic imagery of a protester who held up a swatch of denim, and thus tried to brand their uprising "the denim revolution". But it all felt a bit forced, like a dopey ad campaign manufactured by pro-democracy groups in Washington. There was a moment on the square on election night when the protests seemed to be gathering steam, and then the leaders decided to march to some other square and light candles. Throw in the fact that the temperature was minus-10 degrees Fahrenheit, and it's no wonder most of the crowd simply went home. I worry that something similar is happening in Iran, as momentum gets lost and protesters' thumbs get sore from Twittering.
Western coverage of the uprising does not help. We have a knee-jerk tendency to label every picket line abroad as the next storming of the Bastille and give it some cheeky name (Burma's was dubbed the "saffron revolution"; Kyrgyzstan's non-revolution was called the "tulip revolution", and so forth). Paula Dobriansky famously labelled Lebanon's uprising in 2005, which booted out the Syrians, the cedar revolution. The media at the time gushed that this would usher in a new era of democratic accountability while vindicating the war in Iraq. Today we hear suggestions that the protests in Iran somehow vindicate Bush's democratic experiment – or purple revolution – in Iraq. That is a misguided reading of recent history. Iranians are protesting despite the flawed democracy on their doorstep, not because of it.
Nor should we interfere. The last time the US tried to give Iranian democracy a boost (a Bush programme to hand $75m to civil society groups there) it was ridiculed as tainted money and hurt the groups it was trying to help. Worse, whenever the White House blesses a regime change or coup (see Chávez, Hugo), it's the kiss of death.
Let's be honest about events in Iran. Yes, it is the largest popular uprising that country has seen since 1979. But that does not mean it heralds the imminent collapse of the current regime. Let's hope that I am wrong.
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