At 4:15 p.m. on the 40th day of mourning for Neda, I arrived with my cousin at the Behesht Zahra cemetery.The dust here is so fine the particles don’t just stick to your clothes but find their way into your lungs.
With a capacity of 1.8 million plots, of which 1.2 million have already been filled, Behesht Zahra is the largest cemetery in Iran. With the boiling sun beating down, and later the fog of tear- and pepper-gas, today it was a place of suffering.
We arrived at block 256 (Neda is buried in block 257) and quickly realized that the police and guards were separating people by barricading them in different sections.
The guards (including plainclothes militia in protective clothing) stood in two parallel lines. They periodically picked out and attacked people, separating them and beating them over the head.
Because opposition leader Mir Hossein Musavi had already been there just before 4 p.m., the atmosphere was highly charged. News quickly spread that the parents of Neda had been prevented from saying a prayer over their daughter’s grave. The crowd chanted: “Allah Akbar” and “Brave Iranians, help Iran, help Iran.”
The guards used parked cars to create a wall (by pushing them together bumper to bumper) around block 257 in order to prevent people from reaching Neda’s place of burial. Around 4:25 p.m., reformist presidential candidate Mehdi Karubi arrived at block 255 in a four-car convoy. As Karubi walked into block 256 with his entourage, people started to swarm around him. Then the guards started attacking Karubi’s bodyguards and the people around him.
The guards’ behavior seems to have changed. Where once they might have shown a modicum of restraint, now they just keep hitting people in the face and head, cursing as they do it. Three people (two women and one man) were hit right in front of me, blood spurting out of their faces and heads.
“They’re trying to instill fear in the movement to make us give up the fight,” said Mahboubeh Abbasgholizadeh, a women’s rights activist who has been detained repeatedly in the past.”They raid homes after midnight and take away people. When you go to bed, you don’t know if it’s your turn, you just wait for that knock on the door,” she said.
They do not know if they are going to win but they know if they do not keep risking all again and again and again they are sure to lose. They also know they are alone. The current “leader” of the free world could not care less. He is too busy with beer summits and such to break his deadly silence:
Obama has the chance to speak forthrightly or repeat his week of weakness. He has consistently offered Mahmoud Ahmadinejiad an unclenched fist, and the mullahs turned their fists against their own citizens, possibly the most potent force to topple the regime.Iran’s budding revolutionaries are again in the streets. Can Obama bring himself to warn the mullahs as clearly against unprovoked police brutality as he did the anti-totalitarian leaders of Honduras against setting foot in the United States? Can he deem show trials as offensive as he has the building of Jewish settlements in Israel?
The answer my friends is blowing in the wind, the answer is blowing in the wind.
