Iranian youth in the Green Movement
Category: International
April 11, 2010 | BY Stephanie Kuo
We finally found the crowd. By parking the cars in the middle of the streets, the Greens had created barricades and stopped the flow of traffic into a very large intersection. The people came together, stamping their feet and crying out for justice. I lost track of time but believe that the area was controlled by the Greens for 20- to 30-minutes. Of course the police shot tear gas bullets into the crowd, which the people fought against by setting trashcans on fire. Smoke is rumored to keep the eyes from burning.
The streets looked like a battleground. There was fire and smoke everywhere. People chanted at the top of their voices. On an overpass dozens of young men and women banged pieces of gravel against the guardrail, creating an extraordinary cacophony that seemed appropriate for that day. Then the barricade was broken down, and the chase and hunt began again. Remarkably, during all of this there were young people who risked their lives to take pictures and videos of the events. That made me better appreciate the YouTube videos I see from the comfort of my living room.
There are so many images that have stayed with me from that day — the friendly firefighters, the cars and motorcycles set on fire, stopping to look at my childhood home and running again….
By the time we were dispersed, we had been on our feet for 4 to 5 hours. It took another hour to walk home. We were exhausted but happy.
What shook us was what we read on Facebook when we got home: seven demonstrators had been shot to death. This was again an absurd flow of information. It had taken place only a block south of where we had spent most of the day, yet we had to come home and read it on Facebook or the Iranian version of Digg. For hours I couldn’t believe it because, according to Shiite tradition to which the hardliners are supposedly faithful, acts of violence on the day of Ashura are absolutely forbidden. Also we had seen bloody faces and bruises but not heard shots.
But the death toll continued rising and as the evening unfolded a new wave of arrests began. The wireless networks were down all day so by the time I contacted my parents they were petrified by the thought of me having gone missing. The signals of the satellite news channels like BBC Persian and Voice of America were jammed. Gmail was inaccessible. And most proxy servers that I used to get past Iran’s filtering were blocked. Frustrated, I lied down and listened to Allah o Akbar (“God is greatest”) chants rising from the rooftops of Tehran. It was the loudest I had heard during my visit.
I would be coming back to my relatively comfortable life abroad in the United States. This was the sound of people who would stay and fight.
Tags: featured, International, Iran, Social Media
About the Author
Stephanie Kuo: A graduate of Plano Senior High School, Stephanie is a sophomore at The University of Texas at Austin, studying copy-editing and design in the School of Journalism. Last summer, she interned at a small community newspaper, where she worked full-time as a writer and editor. Currently, she is a member of the Society of Professional Journalists, and serves as webmaster and service chair at the UT chapter. Stephanie hopes to make it in the world of magazines someday, writing and editing for publications like Vanity Fair. Stephanie affiliates herself with the Democratic Party, with liberal perspectives on issues such as capital punishment, health care, and abortion. She is extremely interested in foreign policy and the need for the United States to form more diplomatic ties with foreign nations.
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