The protests – and their violent suppression – continue, but now the focus of anger is shifting

Today we were supposed to gather in Baharestan Square in front of Majles (the Iranian parliament). Such a stupid idea! It hems us in between tiny sidewalks and alleys and crowded streets. At first there weren’t many security forces there, but after a while, as more people came, they closed the two subway stations near the square an reinforcements arrived with their batons and plastic pipes.

They dispersed the protesters easily, and like other days, it descended into violence, but I don’t know whether anybody was seriously wounded or killed. We heard that Mousavi and his wife wanted to come, but it turned out to be a rumour.

People are still shouting ‘Allaho Akbar!’ from their rooftops each night, but after Supreme Leader’s speech on Friday, something has changed here. Most people don’t think about Ahmadinejad anymore and believe the Supreme Leader is guilty. But I’m wondering which is correct.

An anonymous Iranian student proves how the police and media in Tehran are colluding to discredit the protestors

Today we were supposed to gather in Hafte-e-tir Square and march towards the Tehran University dormitories. I started out and saw many, many armed forces and Basijis waiting in a park. I was stopped three times and had my ID and backpack checked, just because I was wearing a black shirt to show my sorrow.

There wasn’t a big crowd in the square – perhaps two or three thousand people. We shouted for a while before the forces dispersed us by firing tear gas and shooting into the air. I saw some guards shoot people with paintball guns. They have also been arresting people for no reason – one student’s was arrested simply for waiting for his son in front of the university.

Our television has now started a huge propaganda attack on the UK to go along with their usual attacks on Europe and the US. They are saying today’s situation is a British plot. They are obviously pissed off with how the BBC is reporting things and are paranoid.

Before the election, our TV always pretended to be fair and neutral. But they have now changed their policy and report against Mousavi and, obviously, in favour of Ahmadinejad.

I am posting a picture showing the police damaging a car so they can go on the news and claim that ‘rioters’ and ‘rebels’ did it.

An insider reveals the protest movement's change of strategy

Today was a quiet day. The demonstration took place peacefully. Mousavi participated and people dressed up in black to pay their respects to the victims and wounded. 

I reported yesterday that we were going to participate tomorrow [Friday] at Prayers to show our anger to the Supreme Leader, but we have now changed our plans because Iranian television may report it as a show of support for the leader.

Some friends of mine live in the areas of the city worst affected by the rioting. They’ve told me that Ahmadinejad’s radical supporters have smashed car windscreens and beaten and shot people, all the while shouting, ‘You gonna destroy our country!’

Today, the television showed people who claimed to have been injured by our protestors, but they were actually the guys that beat people to provoke them. Our media is really, really, really shitty and makes us sick. The people are watching reports and cursing them. Unfortunately, satellite news channels like BBC Persian are down, so are Facebook, twitter and many other websites and blogs, sms services, mobile phones after sunset and sometimes even the land lines. Yahoo! Messenger and Skype are also still down. So we just have to watch the local news and see more lies. It makes us sick.

An anti-Ahmadinejad student protestor (we have hidden his identity to protect him from likely repercussions) believes most Iranians do not want another revolution

Yesterday I went to university to participate in the strike of the students, staff and teachers and they condemned the election result, and said they won’t teach again until everything gets clear.

We were supposed to have a demonstration at Valiasr Square but in the morning all [media] channels asked the people of Iran to go there just two hours before the time we had planned to show their support to the government and protest [against] the rebels. They called most of the Iranian nation rebels!

Mousavi published statement cancelling that rally and [protest organisers] asked people to gather at Vanak Square instead, but it was not clear which [instruction] was true. At first I went with three friends to the Ahmadinejad rally at Valiasr Square to spread some notices describing the authorities’ crime in the dormitories [‘Safe in Beirut’].

In just five minutes, some Basijis arrested one of friends and the other guy and I ran away. They handed my friend to some policemen beside them, but my friend was so scared and he didn’t have the notices anymore. Luckily, the policemen were nice guys and let him go.

Then we went to the Vanak Square anti-censorship demonstration, which lasted for three hours and ended at Jame Jam. It was so big and impressive!

The protesters can be divided into two groups. The first just want to protest peacefully and then go home, but the second want to start peacefully and end up sitting on the roads, blocking them – which the harsh police will respond badly to.

Until yesterday, I thought the second group was right. But then I realised Ahmadinejad and his supporters want to provoke people and get them to respond. Sure enough, just after sunset a few radical supporters of Ahamdinejad came among the protestors and beat them with sticks, provoking them until they burned their motorbikes. Then I think the special police came and attacked them. A nasty plot!

As I write this, many of my neighbours are on their roofs and balconies, shouting ‘Allaho Akbar!’, which means ‘God is great’, and ‘death to dictator’. It’s safe and effective protesting.

Some people here say we will have a new revolution, but Iranians definitely can’t handle another one, and if they feel that it’s close they will stop protesting. I will do this, too.

Although most of the nation does believe that it’s a really crappy regime and they have ruined our freedom and privacy, they made it secure and steady, so people are afraid of civil war after a new revolution.

Today we just want revenge on the people that degraded and convinced us that we would have a free election but cheated after that. I don’t know when people will be calm again, but it’s not good for us and the rest of the world

These past days were the worst days that I have ever had. I’m tired and confused. I hope that they accept our peaceful voices soon.

Update, Wednesday night

Today, I read something on a trusted source at university about how arrested students have been treated. It was exactly like something out of Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib. The authorities threw their food on the floor and made them eat it, otherwise they hit them. They were only allowed to use the toilet for 30 seconds or they were hit and thrown naked into a cell.

Mobile phones are down again and people are again out shouting on their roofs.

Iranians have divided into three groups now: protestors, Ahmadinejad supporters and neutrals who voted, were annoyed, but then calmed down and accepted the result, saying 'OK, they rigged the election as they have done for the past 30 years.'

The other two groups really hate each other and call each other rebels and rioters. Both sides have radical supporters who inflame the situation.

Frday will be an important day. The Supreme Leader [Ayatollah Khamenei] will be at Friday prayers and all the protestors want to go there and display their anger to him. I guess it will be a sort of ultimatum to him. If he still has any sanity, he will listen...

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Austin Mackell asks whether a new chapter in the troubled recent history of Iran is about to be written…

Everything really is relative. As I left Tehran, Beirut seemed like a safe destination, and this cup of machine-made airport coffee actually tasted quite decent (booze, drugs, girls and boys, I am told, can all be acquired in Tehran quite easily for the right price, but a good cappuccino is completely unattainable).

I didn’t really have much of a choice. My 10-day visa had expired and the ministry for Culture and Islamic Guidance is refusing to renew the visas of any foreign media. Normally the punishment for an overstay would be minor, but things are growing increasingly unpredictable in the Islamic Republic.

I felt guilty, though, for abandoning the brave people taking to the streets in the face of rampant government brutality and murder, and disappointed to be missing an incredible story.

In the hours since I left, a rally of massive proportions (probably the biggest protest since the 1979 revolution) was held – and fired on by government troops, with at least one death reported. There has also been an announcement by over 250 professors from two major universities that they will resign. Fellow academics from across the country are expected to follow suit, and tomorrow there will be a nationwide strike at campuses and in other industries.

I would be lying through my buck-teeth, however, if I didn’t admit to being more than a little relieved to be out of there.  

The last thing I did before taking the taxi to the airport was have lunch with a Canadian journalist called George McCloud, who in his few days in the country had twice been attacked by Iranian police. On the second occasion, he was taken to the basement of the Ministry of the Interior, subjected to an intensive beating then interrogated in broken English, before being released with apologies. This is typical of the current treatment of journalists in Iran.

Just before our lunch we had been in the Internet café of the Hotel Laleh, which had been functioning as a kind of communal office for much of the foreign press in Tehran in the last turbulent days, when the esteemed Middle East correspondent Robert Fisk came in to pass on the information that the rumours we had heard about the University of Tehran’s dormitories being stormed were true, and that the students were saying a ‘massacre’ had taken place. One of my contacts in the country has since emailed me saying that five people – three young men and two young women – were killed in the attack. Such reports are, unfortunately, in the current conditions, impossible to confirm or deny.

The situation is spookily reminiscent of incidents leading up to the overthrow of the Shah, and those similarities are not going unnoticed by the protesters.

On the plane, I finally finished reading Michael Axworthy’s concise and lucid history of Iran, Empire of the Mind. Axworthy discusses, amongst many other things, statements from Abdolkarim Soroush, a leading thinker and theologian at the time of Khomeini’s Islamic Revolution, that the combination of religion and government would ‘discredit religion in Iran and alienate the young’. In his book, Axworthy argues that ‘this is precisely what has happened’.

The book, a recent edition, covers Iranian history well into Ahmadinejad’s first term before closing with a thoughtful passage that read:

 ‘Since 1979 Iran has challenged the West, and Western conceptions of what civilisation should be. That might have been praiseworthy in itself, had it not been for the suffering and oppression, the dishonesty and disappointment that followed. Could Iran offer more than that? Iran could, and should.’

As I finished reading, a young Lebanese-Canadian boy called Ahmed who was sitting next to me asked, ‘Good book?’

‘Yes,’ I replied, ‘but it needs another chapter.’