THE TIMES: Tomorrow will mark exactly one year since Neda Agha Soltan ignored the pleas of her anxious mother and joined a million other Iranians protesting against Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s theft of the presidential election eight days earlier. She had no idea that she would win global support at the cost of her life.
The pretty young student was shot by a government militiaman. She collapsed on a Tehran pavement, eyes wide open, blood spewing from her mouth, those around beseeching her not to die. Mobile telephone footage of her death was posted on the internet and flashed around the world.
Ms Soltan, 26, instantly became a global symbol of the opposition’s courage and the regime’s brutality. Her name was invoked by President Obama and other world leaders, while her portrait appeared on T-shirts and placards at demonstrations outside Iranian embassies. She inspired songs, poems and films; her fame a measure of the damage she caused to a regime that purports to champion Islamic values but butchers those who oppose it. The other is the extent of its efforts to suppress Ms Soltan’s story; redoubled in the run-up to tomorrow’s anniversary.
The regime has repeatedly sought to jam satellite broadcasts by Voice of America’s Persian News Network of a new HBO film about Ms Soltan’s life featuring interviews with her family.
When it failed, it simply switched off the power in whole areas of Tehran, according to Antony Thomas, the British director of For Neda, which had its first London screening on Thursday night.
In Iranian terms, the film is downright subversive. Ms Soltan’s parents, sister and brother talk, sometimes tearfully, of a vivacious, free-spirited young woman who was not political, but hated the draconian restrictions placed on her sex and was so appalled by the election rigging that she felt compelled to resist. Read on and comment >>> Martin Fletcher | Friday, June 18, 2010
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