June 21, 2009
Arsalan Iftikhar | BIO
AC360° Contributor
Founder, TheMuslimGuy.com
Editor’s Note: Arsalan Iftikhar is an international human rights lawyer, founder of www.TheMuslimGuy.com and is a contributing editor for Islamica magazine in Washington.
Watching the events in Tehran unfold over the past week has conjured up tragic memories of what took place in Tiananmen Square more than 20 years ago.
In 1989, China’s largest pro-democracy protests in history ended when military tanks rolled onto Tiananmen Square (translated literally as ‘Gate of Heavenly Peace’) and armed Chinese troops opened fire on crowds of more 1 million people.
The tragedy sadly resulted in the deaths of between 180 to 500 people, according to a 1989 U.S. State Department briefing on the matter.
Following the violence, the government conducted widespread arrests to suppress protesters and their supporters, cracked down on other protests around China, banned the foreign press from the country and strictly controlled coverage of the events.
That sounds eerily familiar to what we are seeing transpire on the streets of Tehran, Iran today.
In the aftermath of the hotly-contested presidential election between hard-line incumbent Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and reformist candidate Mir Hossein Moussavi, we have seen hundreds of thousands of average Iranians take to the streets of Tehran, Isfahan, Shiraz and other Iranian cities. Iranians are demanding their votes to be accurately counted — and certified. It is the closest thing that Iran has seen to a ‘velvet revolution’ in recent historical memory.
Through the use of social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter, average Iranians are putting their own lives on the line serving as ‘citizen journalists’ to report on events in their country. The Iranian government has cracked down on international news organizations, creating an essential media blackout.
Continue Reading Arsalan’s June 2009 CNN Column Here…
