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Society & Culture

Iran Weekly Wire Podcast

March 6, 2015
8 min read
Iran Weekly Wire Podcast
Iran Weekly Wire Podcast

In Iran, the Internet is a battlefield.

Most Iranians are under 30. This means that a huge proportion of them are so-called “digital natives”—people familiar with computers and the Internet from an early age.

It also means that the ageing revolutionaries who run Iran feel besieged by both youth and technology. They try to censor major news and social media sites. But they are not succeeding.

Iran’s Ministry of Sports and Youth estimates that about 70 percent of Iranians aged between 15 and 29 use special software to break through government filters and protect their identities.

They also report that less than half of young people—only around 45 per cent—say they trust official news broadcasts in Iran.

For the rest, the Internet is the main source of news.

Many Iranians try to use the Internet and social media in the same ways as people in the West. And most of them manage to get away with it. But the risks can be huge.

In 2012, for example, Iran’s Cyber Police, which is part of the Revolutionary Guards, arrested a 35-year-old blogger named Sattar Beheshti. He died in custody in obscure circumstances a month later. According to the Iran Human Rights Documentation Center, he died of torture.

In 2013, they arrested a 30-year-old blogger named Soheil Arabi for insulting Muhammad, and posting other supposedly “offensive” material on Facebook.

According to the Huffington Post, one of Arabi’s offending Facebook pages referred to Iran’s youth as “the burnt generation.”

He was saying that his generation has not power because it never got to influence the revolution.

Courts sentenced him to death last August, but he has yet to be hanged.

Iran’s cruel treatment of young people who are both net savvy and critical of the government is nothing new, and cases can grind on for years.

Way back in December 2009, when the Green Movement was still kicking, the Revolutionary Guards arrested a young blogger named Hossein Ronaghi-Maleki.

He is a computer programmer who helped develop the same methods many Iranians now use to get around government filters.

Courts sentenced him to 15 years in prison for insulting the supreme leader and the president, and for membership in the Iran Proxy Network.

But Ronaghi-Maleki also suffers from kidney problems. The harsh interrogations, solitary confinement, and cold temperatures his captors subjected him to made his conditions worse.

In 2014, his health collapsed. A prison doctor decided he couldn’t endure incarceration, and Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei allowed his release on medical grounds.

But soon after that, authorities arrested him again, and accused him of escaping punishment.

Now, his father Ahmad fears his son will die in prison, and he has taken Hossein’s case to the international media.

Speaking with to IranWire last week, he said he feared the authorities will kill his son, who is only 29, just like they killed Sattar Beheshti.

He said he would stage a sit-in outside the Tehran Prosecutor’s office.

Speaking with great emotion, he said that he would bring gasoline with him, and that if no one answers him, he would set himself on fire.

It’s hard to imagine a sadder or more terrible tribute from Iran’s revolutionary generation to its burnt one.

*

Last week rumours about the death of Iran’s supreme leader Ali Khamenei lit up the Internet.

This time, the rumors seemed to spring up in Israeli and Arab media, but this happens all the time.

Iranians, and just about everyone in the Middle East, worry about what will happen when Khamenei dies.

Youth is a rare quality in the Iranian government today. Iran is run by Islamist revolutionaries who were all active in 1979.

Khamenei is 75. President Hassan Rouhani is at the young end of the revolutionary spectrum at 66.

The advanced age of Iran’s leaders raises awkward questions about what will happen as revolutionaries die out.

Even though Khamenei isn’t the oldest in the group, his revolutionary colleagues hope to survive him, and to influence Iranian politics after he’s gone.

The Iranian government has an institution that is supposed to choose a new supreme leader when Khamenei dies. It’s a body of clerics called the Assembly of Experts. Its decision will determine the future course of the Islamic Republic.

On Tuesday, the assembly chose an 83-year-old hardline conservative, Mohammad Yazdi, as its new chairman.

Yazdi is a loyal supporter of Khamenei, and he reveres the memory of Iran’s first supreme leader, Ayatollah Khomeini. He has said that if Khomeini went to hell, he would follow him.

He takes a harsh stand on social issues. He says for example that music is forbidden in Islam. He’s a harsh critic of anyone the West might call a moderate or a reformer including President Hassan Rouhani.

Yazdi’s main rival in the assembly is 80-year-old former president Hashemi Rafsanjani, who is sometimes described as an architect of the Islamic Republic.

In fact, Rafsanjani was the man who chose Khamenei to become supreme leader when his predecessor, Khomeini, died in 1989.

These days, though, Yazdi accuses Rafsanjani of showing insufficient respect to Khamenei.

Rafsanjani is a bloodstained figure implicated in many of the Islamic Republic’s abuses of its citizens. But he also has a long history of trying to improve Iran’s relations with the West.

As he has aged, his views on social issues have become mild by Iranian government standards.

Rafsanjani and Yazdi often clash in public. Rafsanjani has implied that Yazdi is unqualified to sit on the assembly.

As if to emphasize the geriatric character of their dispute, he has said that Yazdi has “physical problems” that make him hotheaded.

Yazdi’s ascent to the chairmanship of the assembly this week must have rattled Rafsanjani. But Rafsanjani has tried to play it down.

He assured the reformist newspaper, Shargh Daily, that he will be able to wield influence over Iran’s future when what he calls the “sensitive moment” of Khamenei’s death arrives.

But there’s an element of hubris in this dispute, since both clerics are older than Khamenei himself.

And to outsiders, they look blinkered. Someone should tell them that question of who will succeed Khamenei is small...compared to the question of how a new generation will succeed the revolutionary one.

*

The stretch of land running from the eastern Mediterranean to the Persian Gulf is the Cradle of Civilization. It’s where our species first started to farm and build cities.

These were the lands of the Assyrian Empire, and the Babylonian Empire, and the Persian Empire, and the empire of Alexander the Great.

But in northern Iraq today, the Islamic State is destroying all evidence it can find of ancient civilizations in the regions it controls.  

The loss is incalculable. Before the war, archaeologists were actively investigating these sites for clues that would illuminate the story of humanity.

Now the Islamic State has destroyed priceless statues in the Mosul Museum.

They have bulldozed the site of the ancient Assyrian capital of Nimrud.

They have destroyed the ancient city of Hatra, which was established by the successors of Alexander.

For western observers, their wave of cultural cleansing recalls the Taliban’s dynamiting of the Buddhas of Bamiyan in Afghanistan in 2001.

But for Iranians, it’s a reminder of something that very nearly happened in their own country during the Iranian Revolution.

One of the most terrifying figures of the revolution was a Shia cleric named Sadegh Khalkhali.

Khalkhali was a merciless judge early years of Khomeini’s Islamic Republic. He executed thousands of Iranians as supposed enemies of Islam and revolution.

As a sideline to mass murder, he also waged a campaign against symbols of monarchy in Iran.

He began by dynamiting tombs associated with the Shah’s regime, and then moved on to the tomb of a 19th century king, Nasser al-Din Shah.

Emboldened by the terror he had spread, and the lack of resistance he had met, he then set out to bulldoze Iran’s most spectacular ancient site: the 2500 year-old ruins of Persepolis, near Shiraz.

In 1971, the Shah had used the site as a backdrop for a ridiculous and extravagant celebration of Persian monarchy. He served world leaders luxury food flown in from Paris.

Persepolis was the capital of the ancient Persian Empire. It was founded by King Darius I in 518 B.C. The armies of Alexander the Great conquered it in 330 B.C., but the ruins are still vast and impressive.

Khalkhali wasn’t just motivated by hatred of monarchy. He also wanted to destroy Iran’s main symbol of pre-Islamic history.

Now, despite the occasional anxieties of conservative clerics, most Iranians don’t have a problem reconciling their Muslim identity with their respect for antiquity.

Indeed, for many Iranians, Persepolis is a symbol of national identity.

That’s why, when Khalkhali and his supporters arrived in Shiraz to flatten Persepolis, local residents and even clergy turned out to stop him.

The governor of Fars province ordered the army to confront him if necessary.

So he backed down.

Khalkhali died in 2003. But even today, the Iranian government still dislikes anything pre-Islamic. Instead of smashing antiquities, they mostly just neglect them.

While Iran’s leaders have been quick to raise the alarm about the threat the Islamic State poses to Shia holy sites, they have kept quiet about its attacks on world heritage.

Indeed, it seems the only Iranian government body to condemn the Islamic State’s cultural vandalism has been Iran’s Culture and Tourist Organization.

While Iran’s old revolutionaries may have mellowed a little, The Islamic State’s hatred of history probably reminds them of the passions of their youth.

*

That’s all for Iran’s Weekly Wire. To find out more about these stories, join us on Facebook or Twitter, or visit IranWire.com

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