Iran: The Regime Overplays Its Hand

By Al Giordano

Reuters reports:

TEHRAN, June 16 (Reuters) - Iran on Tuesday banned foreign media journalists from leaving their offices to cover protests on the streets of Tehran following the country's disputed presidential elections.

The Culture Ministry said journalists could continue to work from their offices but that it was cancelling press accreditation for all foreign media.

"No journalist has permission to report or film or take pictures in the city," a Culture Ministry official told Reuters.

While there probably isn't much penalty from the Western press that is already not friendly to the Iranian regime, this move completely blows any good will or impartiality it enjoyed from very important Arab (Al Jazeera, Al-Arybia), Persian (BBC Persia), and developing world media (China's Xinua and People's Daily plus news agencies from Russia, India, Brazil, etcetera, that have correspondents on the ground in Tehran). There is no quicker way to turn the spin against you than to put all international reporters under what is essentially "house arrest." Even the most cynical, establishmentarian or hopeless reporter gets indignant at the slightest of personal inconveniences. Way to go, Mahmoud!

What the regime is attempting is a 1989 China-style stonewall attempt to shut down the flow of information (like I've said again and again, the fight to keep the channels open is "the front" in this war for hearts and minds) but I see this as far more difficult to pull off in a plugged in country with high numbers of technologically trained young people who are risking all to break the information blockade. Getting that genie back in the bottle after it is already out is probably impossible.

Authorities have also physically blockaded the hotels where foreign correspondents are holed up in Tehran, to keep the students and other dissidents from passing along their photos, videos and eye-witness accounts of what is clearly an escalating wave of repression by a flailing regime.

The other borrowed maneuver from the authoritarian playbook being utilized now by the Iranian regime comes from Mexico in 2006: A "partial recount" of election results. Mexico's in fact proved that the votes, had a nationwide recount changed the results at the same percentages as the partial recount found, it would have had to grant the victory to the opposition candidate - but that's not the point of a partial recount, which is meant to stall and buy time while clouding the entire matter of electoral fraud under the dust of "he said, she said" claims and counterclaims until only confusion reigns.

Nate Silver gets it:

...this story really isn't about the way that the votes were counted. It's about whether Iran is capable at this point of having an election in which the democratic will of its electorate is properly reflected… the tentacles of fear in Iran run deep.

As we've pointed out over the years in this hemisphere - from the dirty wars of Operation Condor and its military dictatorships throughout South America in the 1970s to the terrible 1980s death-squad era in Central America to the Colombian and Mexican repressive farce democracies of the present - it is impossible to hold a "free and fair election" in a land where expressing dissident views can land you in prison or assassinated or tortured or watching any of those things happen to your family members and friends as a result of your outspokenness.

The house arrest situation for foreign news agencies is likely aimed at making sure that today's big story - a general strike - doesn't get reported, and it is so far having its intended effect: the shutdown of business as usual (and the consequent slowing of the national economy). The Foreign Affairs Committee of the National Council of Resistance of Iran reports that the general strike is to a great extent working:

Many merchants in the bazaar in Tehran, including textile traders, on Monday went on strike, and parts of the bazaar were closed down.

Merchants had on Monday said in a statement they would go on strike on Tuesday.

Since this morning large sections of the bazaar have been closed.

No other media source (among the thousands aggregated by Google News) has mentioned the results of the general strike one way or another although it began seven or eight hours ago. The photo the regime fears is not of another huge demonstration - that horse escaped from the stable already - but of the haunting specter of images of locked up shops and stalls on empty streets. There is nothing like the suggestion of economic boycott and slowdown to scare the captains of finance and industry away from one's regime. I wonder how many minutes or hours will pass before those photos or video clips sneak past the state censors. Consider this a kind of online scavenger hunt, Field Hands: Use the comments section here to link when you find the first ones...

Update: Doug Rushkoff, perhaps the earliest and most important young scholar of the study of the art of creating the "media virus," agrees:

Iran's Internet-savvy youth have fought back, however, exploiting "proxy servers" to make their messages appear to be coming from different sources, and exchanging the digital addresses of the ever-changing list of servers still capable of transmitting packets. Iran's government counterattacked with a blockade, closing off the four Internet access routes it controlled, leaving just one pipe through Turkey for messages to breach it...

The net result proves that the age of the totalitarian dictatorship is over. Pictures of protests, police violence, and the reality of life on the streets in post-election Iran manage to seep out through the social networks.

Rushkoff calls the battle to free information to and from Iran "the opening salvo in a digital war with global implications, and a blueprint for the democratizing influence of the Internet."

Update II: The regime outlaws BBC Persian, threatens BBC's English-language operations with expulsion if its images and reports appear on BBC Persian, and the Brits are pissed. (Keep in mind, also, that so many of Al Jazeera's correspondents are BBC veterans, and this move will have an affect on their attitudes, too.)

Update III: An interesting "tweet" among the hundreds of comments a minute being generated on the main Twitter #IranElections thread:

At first Arabs sent their congrats to AhmadiNejad very fast but now their newspapers are turning on him.

This "grounding" of foreign journalists really isn't working as the regime intended.

Update IV: Booman makes an important point that ought to be pondered by many in the "instant gratification" West and especially its high-speed-Internet point-and-click blogsophere:

This is just a reminder that the 1979 revolution in Iran took over a year to unfold. Here's a timeline to refresh your memory. One key was that each clash with protesters that resulted in fatalities led to new more impassioned protests as people gathered for funerals and memorials. It's often said that the revolution advanced in 40-day stages, as forty days is the traditional period of mourning in Iran's culture. Americans are not accustomed to such slow-motion revolution with massive (over month-long) pauses. Add to this, the new 24-hour news environment, and this feature of Iran's political and religious tradition should solidly flummox most analysts.

I was suggesting something similar when over the weekend I suggested the post-electoral conflict in Iran would take "five to ten weeks" to play out. The "40 day stages" observation, though, as revealed by Booman's "timeline" link is quite plausible. Perhaps we are looking at a year-long battle. Allah willing, maybe this adventure could also become a lesson in patience for many who tend to see the sky falling, and thus start panicking, with every raindrop.

Update V: Via Andrew Sullivan (doing a heroic job on the Iran crisis), an Islamic scholar's translation of a bombshell statement by a highly respected Ayatollah who instructs that a regime that deploys repression or electoral fraud loses legitimacy, and that police or soldiers that execute such violence are violating divine will:

 

1- A legitimate state must respect all points of view. It may not oppress all critical views. I fear that this lead to the lost of people’s faith in Islam.

2- Given the current circumstances, I expect the government to take all measures to restore people’s confidence. Otherwise, as I have already said, a government not respecting people’s vote has no religious or political legitimacy.

3- I invite everyone, specially the youth, to continue reclaiming their dues in calm, and not let those who want to associate this movement with chaos succeed.

4- I ask the police and army personals not to “sell their religion”, and beware that receiving orders will not excuse them before god. Recognize the protesting youth as your children. Today censor and cutting telecommunication lines can not hide the truth.

Wow. Read the whole thing.

Update VI: For days we've been hearing criticism of CNN's rather lame and sparse coverage over the weekend of Iran's post-electoral struggle. But now that the regime has banned international media from shooting or broadcasting their own images of what goes on outside their Tehran offices, CNN has suddenly found religion! "Coming up, graphic images, I mean very graphic images from Iran," Wolf Blitzer repeats about every twenty minutes on CNN's Situation Room today. CNN then takes some clips off YouTube (of the kind you've already seen here and elsewhere online) mainly showing police violence against peaceful protesters, and promotes them as "Images the Iranian government doesn't want you to see."

See what I mean about overplaying its hand? The Iranian government has suddenly and ham-handedly given CNN, among others, a reason to broadcast what they had been mostly ignoring before the ban!