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Before June 12 2009, some of us had predicted the coup, yet we did not expect how the impudent government would play with our hope and enthusiasm. Before June 12th I had written somewhere that we Iranians have Che Guevara but we don’t have Martin Luther King Jr. and if we do have Dr. King, we can find the way to freedom. After the coup, we had millions of Martin Luther Kings but we have a long way to freedom.
I realized this on the Freedom Street on June 15th after two days of running, chasing, tear gas, bullets and fire. After two days of disbelieving and the dreadful impact of the lie. A seventy year old writer contacted me, saying, “I want to join you guys for the protest; they won’t hurt me in respect for my grey hair”. I knew that he had seen Shah’s brutality, had lived the political slaughter of the early eighties and was breathing the memories of the massacre of 1989, but he still insisted on coming with us to the streets. The only excuse I could give him was that he would slow us down because he was old. The next day I realized that the coup-leaders were more impudent that the rest of the oppressors of our history. Not only do they dishonor elders, but they don’t have any shame in killing children either. In the Freedom Street three million Martin Luther Kings joined one another and chanted “I have a dream”. Our color was green, we were all green. People would wave their hands from the top of the buildings. There were green ribbons, colorful laughs of beautiful women and amazing enthusiasm of men.
It was sunset. We had tied the green strings of our dreams together and were going back home. Then, there was the sound of bullets, the color of blood, in just the moments on our way back home. I got to an alley covered with smoke and fire. They were taking away the wounded. Someone shot from the heights of his anger. I picked up a rock and I wanted to throw it as high as his anger…but I couldn’t. I slowly put the rock down. The rock was stuck in my throat like spite. That evening, just on that one alley, seven got killed simultaneously. The ambulances had to take the wounded to the hospitals, but we had no idea that they had the siren of death on. Most wounded were taken straight to the jail, many died.
The day we were Che Guevara they killed us at night and buried us in group graves. No one knew they had demolished our graves and they had built highways on the top of our remembrance. The day that we all became Martin Luther King in the streets, right next to the eyes of history and memory, right in the gaze of the cameras, they fired at us.
We have a long way to freedom.
- Translated by Sara Alavi, Painter
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