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Who hit the TV “replay” button? For a moment, one asked: Weren’t those re-runs of tatmadaws beating up demonstrators in Burma’s “Saffron Revolution?”
They were footage of Iran’s baseej para-military trashing protestors against election dagdag-bawas. Many saw bleeding Neda Agha-Soltan’s eyes go blank on a Tehran sidewalk. She was one of thousands who challenged President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s “reelection.”
A 63-percent margin means Ahmadinejad boosted his conservative vote by 113 percent over 2005 results, notes the Chatham House study. “There’s little correlation at provincial level.” Turnout in Mazandaran and Yazd provinces exceeded 100 percent. “Using identity documents of dead people to cast additional ballots is a widespread problem.”
Just like our “birds and bees”? In the 1986 snap elections, Ferdinand Marcos “won” with 10.8 million votes. But Namfrel’s quick count proved Corazon Aquino trounced Marcos. That fraud triggered People Power.
Iran is also strapped to primitive manual counts. Yet, in just over 48 hours, Tehran claimed it collected, counted, verified, then collated 37 million ballots cast. That’s physically impossible. Worse, Ahmadinejad “won” every single province – by identical margins. That is implausible.
Filipinos agonized through manual elections since 1907. The process is tortuous. In the 2004 elections, 35.4 million voted. Count for local officials ended two weeks after the May 10 vote. Tally for the President came 41 days later – on June 20.
Iranians flayed vote-rigging with silent, peaceful marches. They were met by beating, tear gas and, as the Neda Agha-Soltan video shows, bullets. U.N. Secretary Ban Ki-moon urged an “immediate stop to the arrests, threats and use of force.”
Grudgingly, the Guardian Council conceded irregularities in 50 districts. Some returns outnumbered voters. “If votes cast exceed the number of cardinals present, let all ballots be burned,” directs a rule for conclaves to elect Popes.
A Tehran re-reun would correct injustice. But it’d compel Supreme Leader Ali Khameinei to swallow his claim that God “blessed” this electoral fraud. Thus, the Revolutionary Guards Monday warned protestors: “Prepare for a revolutionary confrontation.”
The Guards compete with Burma’s tatmadaws in brutality. Is there a “Tiannamen Moment” just ahead?
“I don’t know,” Adrian Sullivan wrote in the Times (London) “But something changed last week... The ‘twitter revolution’ will transform the way we cover and consume breaking news… Nothing quite captured the mood and pace of events like the tweets coming from people of Iran.”
In 2001, Filipinos were the first to harness text and cell phones to call out People Power, Howard Rheingold observed in his book “Smart Mobs; The Next Social Revolution”: Japanese use cell phones to shop. Filipinos waged a peaceful revolt with them.
Black-clad supporters were summoned together by a single line, passed from phone to phone: “Go to Edsa. Wear black,” Rheingold reported. That helped topple the corrupt Estrada regime. Lebanese cloned that tactic to wage their “Cedar Revolution,” reported Cathy Hong of Christian Science Monitor.
Dictators like Ferdinand Marcos or Papa “Doc” Duvalier padlocked newspapers, cut phone lines and jailed journalists. Information Minister Francisco Tatad ordered registration of mimeograph machines.
But the spread and speed of Internet changed the “calculus of censorship.” Over 35 governments – from China, Cuba to Burma – block access to the Web. “Iran is one of the most aggressive,” notes Harvard University’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society.
“YouTube” traffic within Iran was down 90 percent last week. Facebook has been tamped down by more than half. Some 20 million Iranians are wired. In the Middle East, they’re second only to Israel’s cyber-savvy citizens, proving adept in hop-scotching controls.
Iranians connect to “digital safehouses”– computers outside Iran. These strip identifying data and open blocked Web sites. Traffic from Iran to such “safehouses” increased tenfold in a week, New York Times reports.
The Ahga-Soltan video, for example, went through server proxies. An Iranian slipped copies to Guardian, in London, Voice of America and five contacts in Europe. CNN broadcast the film. “In less than 24 hours, Ms. Agha-Soltan was transformed, on the Web, from a nameless victim into an icon of the Iranian protest movement.”
Twitter sends a burst of 140 characters. Thus, it was derided as the “inane calling to the impatient.” But Twitter proved particularly resilient to censorship, notes Harvard Law School’s Jonathan Zittrain.
Twitter can originate from a phone, a Web browser or specialized applications. The posts find their way to many outlets. “Qualities that make Twitter seem inane and half-baked make it easy to be echoed elsewhere in the world – and makes it so powerful.”
“Tehran (meanwhile) has become the city of whispers,” New York Times’ Roger Cohen observes. “Tomorrow, Vanak Square,” whispers one. “Everyone wear black,” says another. A man, 28, whispers: “The government will use more violence.”
Reminds one of 1986. Here, a neighbor would whisper: “Rally at Camp Crame, Edsa, at 4. Tell others.” Twitter, with its 140-character cap, come to think of it, is a whisper. Only it sounds in cyberspace.
