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“A shred of paper is driving this nation apart,” İlker Başbuğ, Turkey's chief of general staff, grumbled at a press conference last week. In neighboring Iran, it took an election to cleave the country in two.
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Turkey's top general was complaining about a document leaked to the press that potentially incriminates soldiers under his command plotting to discredit the elected government. An opposition in Iran braved batons and even bullets to protest what they say was a rigged ballot. Turkey's top general may have been complaining about the conduct of one particularly outspoken newspaper, but he was doing so at a press conference before a battery of television cameras and reporters' tape recorders. In President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's Iran, public opinion is heavily circumscribed. The freedom of foreign journalists to report is severely restricted and the domestic press is heavily reined in. At least 25 journalists who were arrested since the disputed election are still in detention, according to the media rights NGO, Reporters without Borders. A lion's share of these are staff members of the opposition paper Kalameh Sabz (“The Green Word”), which, not surprisingly, has been forced to cease publication. There are a total of 33 journalists under lock and key, which puts Iran well up the league tables in dealing roughly with dissent. It is pipped only by China and Cuba. There is one foreigner among those in prison. He is the freelance Greek photojournalist Iason Athanasiadis, a youthful but experienced reporter who speaks Farsi and has degrees from both Oxford and Tehran's School of International Studies. We met two years ago when he looked me up on his way through İstanbul from Tehran as he was about to take up a prestigious Nieman journalism fellowship at Harvard University. He is just the sort of experienced voice the world needs to listen to as events in Iran unfold at their confusing pace. However, he was detained just over a week ago -- according to one report, as he tried to leave the country. There are, I suspect, different reasons why people go into journalism -- some are attracted by its reputed glamour and some stumble just in. Some news hounds could have easily made careers as merchant bankers or surgeons. Others wish they had. And there are those, rarer than you might think, for whom the commitment to the profession is a disease. You could no more imagine them not trying their best to report a story than you could you imagine a child resisting the temptation to ride a shiny bike. Although I only spent an evening talking to Iason, I had the sense I was with someone for whom seeing the world through the prism of a byline was an obsession. A contemporary Nieman fellow wrote of him as “a top-notch human being, dedicated to fair and accurate reporting and with a deep commitment to covering Iran.” Let us hope that the Iranian authorities come to their senses soon and realize that these are the very virtues that serve their society best. Perhaps the most talked about aspect of the election aftermath is the role of the new media, the bushfire of Twitterers and Blackberryists that not even the most totalitarian government can control. The informal media have been elevated as the chief antagonist to the purveyors of official truths. Yet, in the case of Turkey, it is not the bloggers who are tying the military into knots, forcing them to account for themselves, but an old-fashioned broadsheet printed on the cheapest sort of newsprint. For all the vilification of British diplomats in Tehran, it is the credibly independent voice of the BBC that threatens the government's attempt to assert its monopoly over information. A new Farsi language television broadcast, not six months old, already reaches an estimated daily audience of between 6-8 million viewers. And even a young man with a sense of adventure and vocation can make quake those seized by the arrogance of power.
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| 30 June 2009, Tuesday |
| ANDREW FINKEL |
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Benzer Haberler 
