Shayan Ghajar

Anyone who expected massive demonstrations in the streets of Tehran on the one-year anniversary of the controversial election that brought millions of Iranians into the streets to protest in numbers unseen since 1979, will be sorely disappointed. Tehran’s streets, by all accounts, are largely empty of overt signs of resistance. Police numbers are overwhelming, as multiple videos purportedly taken June 12 show, and protests remained sporadic, small in numbers, and primarily confined to universities. Tehran police claimed the arrest of 91 demonstrators, according to the Iranian Student News Agency, a government-affiliated news site.

Authorities were so anxious about the potential protest, according to a New York Times reporter in Tehran, that mass texts were sent to cell phones in the capital reading, “Dear citizen, you have been tricked by the foreign media and you are working on their behalf. If you do this again, you will be dealt with according to Islamic law.”

The Green Movement, however, is by no means crushed.

Tactics appear to be shifting in the Green Movement away from overt confrontation with authority to more passive forms of resistance. On the night of June 11, the eve of the election’s anniversary, signs of discontent remained ubiquitous in Tehran as much of the population stood on rooftops screaming protest slogans. InsideIRAN’s contacts in Tehran indicate that these screams of protest were heard in a socio-economically diverse variety of neighborhoods across Tehran.

The Green Movement’s methods of political expression are more variegated and subtle than just shouting from rooftops or attempting to march in demonstration, recent months show. The crackdowns in public on signs of protest or social dissent have driven Iranians to less obvious expression of dissent, such as writing anti-government slogans on banknotes, discussing sensitive political issues in private meetings of friends or family, and circumventing firewalls with programs such as Tor and Haystack to access forbidden sites.

As an acknowledgment of the potential for these grassroots methods of communication, both digital and interpersonal, opposition leader Mir Hossein Moussavi issued a statement on the night of June 11 stating that the Green Movement’s tactics will be changing. In the statement, posted on Saham News, a website affiliated with Moussavi’s political ally Mehdi Karroubi, the opposition leader emphasized the need for better organization, saying the Green Movement needs to expand “real and virtual social networks,” and garner momentum by increasing the number of websites and uploads of grassroots media, such as the well-known videos on YouTube capturing regime violence against peaceful protesters. The statement was, in essence, an acknowledgment that the crackdowns on mass protests have forced a change of tactics from disorganized, centralized demonstrations to organized, decentralized social groups.

Expression without action will not be enough. On the other hand, recent economic and political trends within Iran are gradually drawing two extremely important categories of Iranians into the fold of the government’s harshest critics. If these trends continue, it will be a major asset for the Green Movement’s ability to pressure the government.

Economically, the Ahmadinejad administration’s poor management of the nation’s various industries, as well as oil wealth, have left unemployment around 25% nationally, with numerous industries reporting the government has defaulted on its debts. The recently passed 4th round of U.N. sanctions will compound troubles further for average Iranians. As a recent interruption of an Ahmadinejad speech by protesters demonstrates, economic pressures are galvanizing opposition to his administration every bit as much as desire for civil liberties. The protesters in the video are shouting only one word to interrupt his speech, “bikari”—unemployment.

Another group whose support is essential to the Green Movement’s success is the military. While the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps is often portrayed as a fanatical, monolithic entity in Iranian politics, a just-released brief documentary by the Guardian reveals that even within the strictly-guarded intelligence units of the IRGC, dissent is finally beginning to manifest itself and fragment the Guards.

Thus, while the absence of organized protests seems a defeat for the Green Movement, many long-term trends indicate it is just starting to build momentum. A top-ranking IRGC commander, Brigadier General Mohammad Ali Jafari, said just yesterday that the Green Movement was a greater danger to the nation than Saddam Hussein had been during the 8-year Iran-Iraq War.

As the saying goes in Iran, there is “fire beneath the ashes”— the frustration of the Iranian opposition continues to simmer despite the inability to protest. The government’s actions and words—whether it is busing thousands of police into the capital, or the aforementioned comparison of the dangers posed by the Green Movement to the war with Saddam Hussein— give every indication they feel the Green Movement remains a very substantial threat.