May 31 Declared 'Quit Facebook Day'

The Facebook Revolt of Iran's Youth Isn't Over Yet
THE SUNDAY TIMES: For a few days it seemed Iran’s long-repressed youth were on the brink of freedom; then came the brutal reality

Photo: The Sunday Times
A young woman in a thigh-length tunic tightly bound with green ribbon danced down the middle of Tehran’s main boulevard last week. She was nominally campaigning by tossing leaflets into cars backed up for miles, but mostly she just gyrated joyously to pop music blasting into the summer night.

Six young men riding two-up on motorcycles trailed green streamers, hooted and took photos of one another on their mobile phones, then roared off the wrong way through the cars.

Thousands of other young Iranians wove through the traffic jam they had created, blowing whistles, waving green balloons, throwing campaign handouts into the air like confetti. Tehran had never seen anything like last week’s “green wave”.

Sara Siadatnejad was up until 7am loading her photos and video of the demonstrations onto Facebook.

“We were singing, dancing in the streets, boys and girls together. We had never done this before. No one wanted to go home,” she said later, sitting in an outdoor cafe and picking at chocolate cake with green-painted fingernails.

“It seems people were half dead before and suddenly everyone felt alive.”

Half dead because they were brought up in a society patrolled by religious police with the power to beat them for holding hands in the street. Alive because it was the first election in which women played a potent role, demanding an end to the inequalities they endured.

What happens now that the all too brief “Tehran spring” has been abruptly curtailed by the election result? Thirty years after Iran’s Islamic revolution, are the conservative male forces that control the country immune to the demands for reform?

The beatings by riot police, closure of universities and clampdown on foreign news websites yesterday, after President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad claimed an overwhelming victory, were targeted at the Facebook generation.

Will these women give in? Under Islamic law as it is enforced in Iran, a woman’s word counts only half as much as a man’s in court; a woman can inherit only half as much as her brother; and while men can divorce easily, a woman who wants a divorce will typically spend three to 10 years in court and automatically lose custody of daughters over the age of seven and sons over two.

“Changes have to be made,” said a 34-year-old political activist who asked to remain anonymous. Her first target would be headscarves, which are mandatory in Iran. “The least of the freedoms we need is the ability to choose what to wear. For women this is really an issue. Whenever you go out, you have to be vigilant because the moral police may not think it is appropriate and they may even take you to jail. A woman’s integrity is judged by the colour of your dress – well, isn’t that stupid?” THE symbol of the demand for reform is not so much Mir Hossein Mousavi, the 67-year-old main opposition candidate, who complained of election fraud yesterday, as his wife. >>> The Sunday Times | Sunday, June 14, 2009