Courage in Iran

Timothy Garton Ash:

Whatever ­happens next, Iran has ­already written a new chapter in the history of people power. Every single Iranian woman or man who has ­broken through a personal barrier of fear to ­protest peacefully on the streets of ­Tehran, Isfahan or Shiraz, wearing some strip of green, is making history.

Alone, each individual is ­powerless. Together, by the sheer power of ­numbers, they can – if only for a few hours – utterly confound the violent repressive power of the state. Even the brutal thugs of the Basij militia simply cannot beat so many human beings over the head. So long as the green-clad ­protesters remain non-violent, which the great majority of them do, and so long as they keep coming out in large numbers, Mahatma Gandhi will be applauding from beyond the grave. For they will have learned Gandhi's fundamental lesson about the power of the powerless.

The quintessence of people power remains the same, but every new chapter in its history brings some new development. This year's Iranian innovation is the deployment of the latest information and communication technologies.

Details of demonstration venues, tactics and slogans are passed round via Twitter, social networking sites like Facebook and text messages. Videos of demos and shootings are uploaded on to YouTube and other websites, whence they can be accessed from outside the country and broadcast back into it. Digital David fights theocratic Goliath.

None of which is to say that the young Iranians tweeting for freedom will succeed in the short term. Or that more of them will be not be assaulted and murdered in their student dorms by those Basij goons, as some already have been. Or that we in the west should rush to label this "the green revolution", and over-hastily compare it to the toppling of the Shah 30 years ago. Or that we should be naive about the motives of clerical schemers like Hashemi Rafsanjani, whose backroom manoeuvering is an important part of this story.

People power movements often do fail, at least in the short term. Like the Burmese protests of 2007, they then live on as memories and touching images of a brief people power moment – until, maybe decades later, they finally take their place in the retrospective ­mythology of a liberated country.

In this case, I have no doubt that the young men and women who provide much of the energy of the opposition demos will win in the end. Two out of every three Iranians is under 30. Many were born at a time when the ­mullahs were urging families to have more children – little "soldiers of the hidden Imam", propagandists called them – to strengthen the new Islamic regime and replace the martyrs of the Iran-Iraq war. Thanks to a big expansion of higher education under the Islamic Republic, millions of them have been to university. Roughly half of those graduates are women. And more than two thirds of Iran's people live in cities.

This young, increasingly educated and urban population wants jobs, homes, opportunities and more freedom. Anyone who has travelled around Iran talking to these young people knows how discontented they are. Last week the whole world saw it, above all in the unforgettable faces and words of those Iranian women who, as women in an Islamic state, are doubly in need of the power of the powerless.

So this Islamic revolution has ­created the children who will eventually devour it. Those who were meant to be ­"soldiers of the hidden Imam" will one day see off the self-styled officers of the hidden imam, such as Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. But that day seems unlikely to be today or tomorrow.

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There is more.

I think it is too early to predict failure or victory. It is still an unfolding story and when a general uprising gains momentum it is difficult to put back in the box, unless you engage in brutal suppression. One of the elements of a successful general uprising is that the government forces reach a tipping point where they are unwilling to engage in mass murder to protect the regime. There have been hints of such a tipping point but it is still too early to predict which way this is going to go. The one thing that seems clear at this point is that the people have decided to keep marching against the religious bigot despots in power.