The Following are excerpts from an article author Sharif Abdolghani wrote in Qatari Al-Arab Newspaper. It has been translated from Arabic.
It was almost midnight when the phone rang. The calling number was mysterious. I answered despite my normal practice with late night calls. It was a woman on the phone. She sounded familiar.
- “I am … your journalist colleague calling from Tehran,” she said speaking in Arabic.
- “Hope all is well, what are you doing there?” I asked.
- “I participated in the revolution,” she said.
- “What? There has been a revolution in Iran?” I asked.
- “No,” she said adding, “I represent Egyptian revolution in a Conference in Tehran.” You consider this that she has never been involved in the revolution and in fact she is not really a journalist.
- “Which revolution? 1952?” so I asked.
- “No, the youth revolution.” She replied.
- “Ok seriously, what are you doing?” I asked.
The conversation took about one hour and the lady journalist kept on talking about how generous the Iranians are and there was no need for her to worry about the cost of the phone call as it is all paid for. All participants in the conference were able to use this possibility, she said.
She continued to explain that how her trip and stay in Tehran and her multiple trips were complementary and she even spoke of an envelope filled with cash that was given to her to be spent on buying stuff for her kidson her return. She also explained about the conference in Tehran which was about “Arab Spring Revolutions and the Islamic Awakenings took after Khomeini’s experience” in which about 2000 people had participated from all Arab Spring nations except of course “Syria” which is the target of “western conspiracy.”
Interesting for me was the presence of Egyptians who had attended the conference. You could say they were no one of consequence. A discredited radio announcer who supported Mubarak; the son of an Islamic figure who was thrown out of Tahrir square just recently, who was sent to Tehran by his father, and so on.
When my friend and colleague came back from Tehran, she told me her story.
She was introduced to someone who took journalists to the Iranian Embassy in Cairo to be sent to Iran on the condition that they would share the money they received from the Embassy with him.
Interestingly, she had managed to escape the control of Iranian security forces during her stay in Iran and reached inside city areas witnessing firsthand the poverty that the Iranian regime tries so much to cover up. She explained how an Iranian worker complained to her that prices had doubled during the past two months.
She also found out regarding freedom in using internet that most internet sites are filtered in Iran, and that security teams are searching for satellite dishes on rooftops and on top of all that, arbitrary arrests for fabricated allegations.
While Iranian leaders spend millions on conferences such as the one my friend has gone, the Iranian people themselves have to live in such poverty.
A Lebanese journalist wrote once that when many years back he went to Iran to find out about that country’s military capabilities, he was sent to a ceremony to introduce Iran’s first domestically built submarine. The submarine, for demonstration purposes, submerged in the water, alright, but never came backup. To explain, the military official told those present that, “It is a submarine you know, that is what it is supposed to do, go down.”
No comments:
Post a Comment