Moeen among bloggers; hopeful mingling with doubtful

Yesterday, I went to one interesting session in which Mostafa Moeein (reformist presidential candidate) who himself is a blogger, reached out other bloggers to talk with them about the election and concerns of these mostly young fellows who have already chosen to speak up in cyberspace. That was a very friendly kind of gathering and I was amazed by the great questions that were asked and frankly the questions were more interesting than Moeen’s answers. Here is my personal account of the event. I am just copying and pasting from my scrap book with very little editing so forgive me for errors and if I missed something. see the photos here and here

I got to the place almost fifteen minutes late. I thought I had missed a big part of the show when I saw a group of almost fifty people having sandwiches that were apparently free! Provided by the hosts as lunch maybe because the event was almost around lunchtime. After a while Moeein himself joined the crowed for the same. Anyway, the talks started with almost an hour delay. It was in a nice and cozy amphitheater and I could read a little piece of poem written on a small banner that I discovered later as Moeen’s election motto: “Move like river that hits the rock head to head in the slope of the valley. No magic is expected from the dead, be alive” -oh, another version of Khatami with nice words then, I assumed- Finally, talks got started when Moeein finally got his seat facing the audience joined by a group of young (apparently bloggers) boys and girls of the organizing (?) committee. One of them announced the start of the second gathering of bloggers with Dr. Moeein’s campaign for sharing the concerns. Then Moeen himself pledges for open discussion and asked the audience not to be suppressed and talk freely and not just about election which indeed happened and I heard questions so straight that I thought maybe I am not in the Islamic Republic! That was unfortunate to see many of the questions did not get any answer because of the shortage of time and those were actually the most critical ones. Moeen however promised to answer them in his blog.
Questions got started by a lady, she accused Moeein for misusing his blog (using it’s popularity as an illegitimate tool for his presidential campaign). “Your blog lacks the most basic function that is two way discussion in an open manner”, she said. Being very formal and unfriendly were two other shortcomings she pointed out. This language is not as she stated as “the language we know for blogs” it makes the whole thing not sensible enough.
The next question was about filtering and what so called red-line he consideres for bloggers and what he will do for supporting bloggers from unfair judicial actions?

The next question was about a doubt of many bloggers and was asked by a cameraman in this way “This cyberspace that we have created by ourselves is under constant threat, every now and then someone comes with rules for limiting us. He questioned Moeen for his plan to tackle such behavior. He was also wondering how Moeein is to treat the current conservative parliament.

Answers: Moeein kind of confessed that he is still very new to blogging and there are many things for him to learn about it. He mentioned the bandwidth problem his blog had experienced during the very first days of its life and added that only with the help of other bloggers was the fact got discovered. “This is not just for election, but it happened to be a kind of coincidence that I started writing in this period”, he said. But I am not new to Internet and have been using it for more than ten years for academic purposes, he added. He tried to be very friendly like an academic fellow that he is and stated that for him, the results of election is not important and he is running because he feels responsible for the country and it’s young generation of intelligent individuals.

During his talk once he was talking about a meeting he had participated but misused the word for the host of the meeting “one of the reformist parties of Iran” and the name became like the name of the major armed militia groups who fight the regime. This made everyone to laugh. About his red-line, he mentioned human rights as something he does not tolerate disrespect for. (Khatami said so before by the way and see what happened). He asserted firmly that rights like freedom of expression is not given by the government so they can not be taken by the government. He regretted for the mistreatment of some bloggers when they were held under the custody of the judiciary system. 

About Filtering, he accused the current situation as totally unacceptable. That means the way two or three people deciding what is to be filtered.

For the seventh parliament, he like other reformists questioned the credibility of the previous parliamentary election where the council of guardians rejected thousands of reformist candidates. “However, if I want to run for president I should be loyal to constitution and work live with it”, he added and in response to one of the fellows who named this as a contradiction he nodded that “I have thousands of reasons to become an opposition but I am here to take action and for this I need to work with the seventh parliament accordingly”, he nodded. We as reformists had many shortcomings and were also treated in an unfair manner in many situations but we are still young and I am sure we will progress. I noticed former vice president and Iran’s one of the most famous bloggers.

A young man accused Moeein as a candidate without attraction to the ordinary public and he explained what he meant by exemplifying other candidates who talk to people with new ideas and innovative promises while for Moeein campaign, there is nothing very new apart from what we heard in the last eight years, he pointed at the poem on the banner. He accused reformist campaign for loosing the trust of university students and alarmed that even the most strong supporters of reforms are now going to Rafsanjani.

The next fellow asked: 1)Please make your view clear about the constitution. 2) When you were a cabinet member, President Khatami told reporters many times that there is no filtering apart from websites with immoral content (pornography) while there were many political websites filtered even at that time. Why didn’t you react?

Moeein replied: “I agree that my plans are very general. When I started this campaign, the society was so reluctant and was not ready for details of the plans, I had to start with general plans. Now it is time to be specific. Some of the terms are so much used that will act reverse.

Ido not think really that those students who were supporting reforms go to Rafsanjani but If finally we can not get the trust of students, there would be a problem. But I doubt.

My main concern about the constitution is the realm of presidential power and his area of capabilities. I do not like some of my defenders who attract people for voting with fear strategy that people may be in the hand of conservatives. My primary strategy is to invest on human resource. I will not spend on cars to turn my country into a big parking. Our imported machinery cannot recognize us in the world but every our human resources can. 90 percent of the investment should be on human resources. Our human resource wealth is just 34% while the world average is 60%. Intelligence development is the key strategy of mine at this time.

I am glad that one of the audience mentioned the name of the active bloggers in exile like Hossein Derakhshan and Sina Motallebi who have difficulty coming back to Iran in the fear of capture.

From that point, many other questions were asked but Moeein postponed the answering to his blog because of the lack of time. In summery there were mainly about:

Executions of oppositions back in 80s. Issues in society like Hijab (Islamic covering), social freedom etc. Some of them were so plain straight questioning supreme leadership that everyone’s eyebrows raised after hearing them. All in all, I enjoyed the session indeed. What a crap long report it became.  I promise to get better in reporting

Comments

[KL]

Wow! it was not at all a crap reporting, but a very interesting one. How could you translate from Farsi to English such quickly and without any flaw? First of all, one thing: your link for Hoder and Sina Motallebi are not working. Nwo I've some dumb, general questions, for the time being (hope you don't mind) and could ask more perhaps later:

1. Has the guardian council approve the candidates who can run for president, and if not when will they do it?

2. Are the candidates allow to run in public places, like street corners, etc, and preach (like usually happens in other countries), so that people, while travelling by that area, can stand for a while and listen. And, that's also a more effective way to reach en mass.

3. Is nuclear-Iran a big issue in this election? Has blocks formed where one block wants a nuclear iran and the other one a nuclear-free iran, etc?

4. From whatever I read, it seems that Iranian Parliament/President has no power. All the power rests with that Guardian Council. I think they also control the judiciary, all those moral police/military, etc. So, basically whatever or whoever reformist candidate comes to power, he won't be able to do much. So, is any of those candidate giving any idea/plan/sketch about how they are going to deal with the issue or do something about it? Also, what do the general Iranians think? They also must be knowing about all these, so what do they expect? Do they expect that after their choice candidate comes to power, he takes action like hunger-strike, parliament-strike, coming down on the stree, walking with people, raising slogans, etc, so that a slow peaceful revolution starts where the Council will be forced to recognize basic human rights?

5. Women are forced to wear head-coverings and they are not even allowed to run for presidentship. For any basic things they do, as far as my knowledge goes, they either have to take permissions from their fathers or husbands (hmm...what happens if she is not married and father has died?). So, are women voters talking or raising any of these issues? Any chance they unite and refuse to vote? Will that affect the election much after all there are more women in Iran than men? Any men (candidates/general) talking about these issues?

6. Anyone raising question or showing concern about any possible war with the USA? And, then what are the opinions?

Please feel free not to answer any of these. I'll understand.
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Mr.Behi says: Sorry if I do not respond to some of the comments you make. It is for sure not the case of "liking". I do like responding. I can not make sure the links are working as both of them are filtered here :-) but I am sure for hoder it is hoder.com

1. Has the guardian council approve the candidates who can run for president, and if not when will they do it? Not yet, The registration has not started yet. I will post when it starts.
2. Are the candidates allow to run in public places, like street corners, etc, and preach (like usually happens in other countries), so that people, while travelling by that area, can stand for a while and listen. And, that's also a more effective way to reach en mass.
- They do but maybe not like that. They mostly arrange for places to make their talks.
3. Is nuclear-Iran a big issue in this election? Has blocks formed where one block wants a nuclear iran and the other one a nuclear-free iran, etc?
- It is indeed an issue but no one really comments on nuclear free Iran that openly because is it basically a taboo.
4. It is reallt true that selected parties are really limiting elected parts of the system. But this does not mean that they have no power (I mean the elected ones). It is difficult to find out what general people may do because statistics never works here! You are right and that is why people are hopless of reforms and that is why conservatives could get the perliment in the last election. More later.

[KL]

Thanks for commenting :). Motallebi's page is: http://www.rooznegar.com/
and Hoder's is: http://www.hoder.com/weblog/ (English) and http://i.hoder.com/ (Persian). That's what I got. If those blogs are filtered, how do you keep on reading them? I hope you use proxy server, dynamic IP addresses, keep on clearing your cache/history and don't stay on a computer online doing all these for more than 5 minutes. I don't know how they catch these bloggers, but in case they monitor online activities, so please be careful Mr.Behi.
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Mr.Behi says: Well. hoder was kind enough to provide mirror sites and also by using bloglet.com I receive their posts by e-mail. The risk is high for those who write with their real name. Sina was a famous journalist so he was known. I write in English so have little Iranian readers. My readers in Max reach 100/day and I used encrypted (https) service provided by typepad and my real name is not revealed. Thanks for thinking of my well being. I appreciate that. By the way Thanks for your time for searching and correcting the links.

[KL]

No problemo, Mr.Behi. With an ethernet access of 100Mbps, we can access any site or download anything faster than one can blink one's eyes. So, seriously I didn't take any time to find those sites.

100 hits/day!! Ok, 4/5 of them will be from me, but still so many..I hardly get 30/40 :-(:-(..only once in a blue moon will i get so many hits.
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Mr.Behi says: And the rest are from other friends. I personally do not care about number of visitors that much as my personal interntion for blogging has been having a tool for tracking my own life cause I have a very short memory for the events of the past.

[Brian H]

Mr Behi;
Your memory is ours, too. Record well!

What do you remember about the events of the future? ;)