Going Green
If you haven’t logged into Twitter for the last couple of days, once you do, you might be tempted to check whether your monitor is working properly. But don’t worry, all the green avatars that you will see have nothing to do with a malfunction of your monitor.
Since last weekend, the term “going green” took on a whole new meaning, one that isn’t related to Al Gore and climate change. Changing the colour of your Twitter avatar to green means that you support the thousands of people who take to the streets of Iranian cities daily to protest the outcome of last week’s presidential elections, which they claim was rigged. Most protesters wear something green, like signs and shirts that ask “Where is my vote?”, and green has become the colour of the protest movement in Iran and their supporters around the globe.
Protest in Hamburg, Germany (Picture: Welt Online)
When more and more of my Twitter friends started to change their avatars, I had mixed feelings about it. On the one hand, I was outraged by how the Iranian government is dealing with the protests: banning them, threatening protesters with imprisonment and even violence, shutting down communication systems, and banning journalists from reporting about the protests. On the other hand, I didn’t want to fall into the trap of only judging from my western, European perspective and wanted to make sure that I didn’t support something or someone I wouldn’t usually support.
One of the key figures of the protests is Mir Hossein Moussavi, a former Iranian Prime minister and the most promising – and by now most prominent – opponents of current Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. Green was the colour of his campaign, and most of the protesters supported him during the campaign. In the last couple of days, some people have compared Moussavi and his campaign to Barack Obama’s 2008 presidential election campaign. A lot of people hope that, if Moussavi became president of Iran, things would change and the country would become more liberal.
In fact, Moussavi has announced that he intends to improve the relations with western countries, end corruption and even get rid of laws that discriminate women. But he also made it clear that he never wanted to change the system per se – Iran would remain an Islamic state, a state in which, as of today, homosexuality is viewed as a crime under pain of death. Under Moussavi, it would most likely still be the regime that, in the movie “Fremde Haut”, the lesbian Fariba had to flee from because she had a relationship with another woman. Moreover, it seems adequate to assume that even a lot of the protesters agree with the ban on homosexuality and think that homosexuality is a sin that deserves punishment.
So if I decided to “go green” anyway, it’s not because I particularly support Moussavi or because I hope that, if the protesters succeed, things in Iran will all of a sudden get better, especially for homosexuals. But I believe in democracy and freedom of speech as a basic human right, and that people aren’t allowed to peacefully protest the outcome of an election, especially if there’s a strong indication that it was indeed rigged, is unacceptable to me. Watching the unsettling pictures and videos that were somehow smuggled out of Iran and that show the violent escalation of protests this past weekend during which at least 19 people were killed and many more wounded only affirmed my decision to show those fighting for their rights on the streets of Tehran and other Iranian cities my support by “going green”.
Even if some of them wouldn’t support my protest for equal rights.
If you want to “go green” as well, log into your twitter account and go to http://helpiranelection.com/. A good source for current updates on the situation in Iran and some background information is Huffington Post and their Live-Blog.
Posted on eurOut on June 24th, 2009
