Tehran--A city of whispers

Roger Cohen:

This has become the city of whispers. Many of the people I spoke to when I arrived last week are in prison. Stabbings and shootings punctuate the night. Fear rushes down alleys and dead ends. Still the whispering continues.

“Tomorrow, Vanak Square.” Or “Four o’clock, Imam Khomeini Square.” Or “Everyone wear black.”

An election result was announced a week ago that, in the words of the most senior opposition ayatollah, Hossein Ali Montazeri, “no wise person in their right mind can believe.”

Force rammed home the false, but still it did not stick. Switches were flicked to block texting and cell phones. Still the whispering continued.

From a four-year-old boy: “Ahmadi-byebye” — referring to President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. From a young woman with a photograph of Mir Hussein Moussavi, the opposition leader whose occasional appearances send jolts of electricity: “Five o’clock, Vali Asr Square.”

The whispering is heard in the throng’s silence. It is the word-of-mouth switching mechanism of Iran’s uprising. I’ve never seen such discipline achieved with so little, millions summoned and coordinated with hardly a sound. “Silence will win against the bullets,” says one banner.

The odds must still be against that. But Ahmadinejad, in his customary bipolar (but tending manic) fashion, is making nice. “We like everyone,” he now says. I suppose he must mean those who are not in prison, hospital or a cemetery.

However, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the country’s supreme leader, adopted a harsh tone in a Friday sermon, warning of chaos and bloodshed if protests continue, blaming “evil media” run by “Zionists” for unacceptable disturbances, dismissing rigging as impossible, and charging the United States with meddling. In effect, Khamenei drew a line in the sand.

...

A man holds his mobile phone up to me: footage of a man with his head blown off last Monday. A man, 28, whispers: “The government will use more violence, but some of us have to make the sacrifice.”

Another whisper: “Where are you from?” When I say the United States, he says: “Please give our regards to freedom.”

Which brings me to President Barack Obama, who said in his inaugural speech: “Those who cling to power through corruption and deceit and the silencing of dissent, know that you are on the wrong side of history; but that we will extend a hand if you are willing to unclench your fist.”

Seldom was a fist more clenched than in the ramming-through of this election result. Deceit and the attempted silencing of dissent are now Iran’s everyday currency. In this city of whispers one of the whispers now is: Where is Obama?

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Cohen must be doing penitence for all those columns he wrote talking about what reasonable people were in the Iranian regime. He seems to be getting an up close look at the evil that lurks in the hearts of the religious bigots in charge of Iran. As for "Where is Obama?" He is voting present for the time being.