Bottom up movement difficult for Iran to control

Martin Fletcher:

Iran’s panicking regime is once again seeking to suppress the Green Movement by decapitating it.

Just as it did after June’s hotly-disputed presidential election, it is arresting high-profile reformists, academics and journalists who support the opposition.

It hesitates to detain Mir Hossein Mousavi lest millions of his supporters take to the streets, but it has locked up his brother-in-law and is widely suspected of killing his nephew. It cannot arrest Shirin Ebadi, the Nobel laureate, as she is abroad, but it has imprisoned her sister.

The tactic will prove as futile now as it did in June. Decapitation will not work because the opposition is a bottom-up movement run not by Mr Mousavi or Mehdi Karroubi, its nominal leaders, but by its grassroots members. It is a massive campaign of civil disobedience.

“Ahmadinejad, Khamenei and the Revolutionary Guards still don’t get it,” said one Iranian academic. “The Green Movement is a decentralised popular front run by local cells and local leaderships across the country. The main opposition figures do not control it. They are spiritual leaders, but do not provide any direction in regard to demonstrations or slogans.”

For the most part the demonstrations are spontaneous outpourings of anger. Decapitating the movement will not stop them, nor stop the defacing of banknotes with anti-government slogans, the daubing of anti-government graffiti on walls, the boycott of goods advertised on the state-controlled media or the shouting of “Allahu akbar” from rooftops at night.

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At this point Fletcher is probably right. The so called leaders are just along for the ride right now and persecuting them will only provide more motivation for the general uprising that is roiling Iran.

The police and the militia that are attacking the people are also under attack when they are overwhelmed by the crowds that surround them and destroy their motorcycles and cars.

The lashing out out Britain and the US only makes the regime look more ridiculous. Insults from this regime not going to change anyone's mind in Iran or elsewhere. They have lost their legitimacy. They need to be preparing their escape routes.