I’ve steered clear of mentioning the situation in Iran on my blog for the past couple weeks because I feel that there are many other people much more capable then myself of reporting on the situation. Additionally I didn’t think there was anything I could do to improve the situation that han’t already been done. Whilst I believe, based on the information that I have gathered, that the election is more then likely fraudulent the more involved people overseas get involved the more the government purports that the revolution that is happening over there is not of their own people’s making. That’s a pretty easy line to spin, since the US has done it in the past.
This all changed with my recent change of work place. With Austrade being a facilitator of trade negotiations between countries we have posts in every major city around the world. Most of them have just single people working from home, but many of the larger countries will have a small office with a few people in them. Part of my initial work (to get a feel for the environment) was to do a health check on all sites DHCP servers. I was successfully able to get to all but 2 servers, they were San Francisco and Tehran.
Now before I jumped to any conclusions I asked my manager if there was any work currently being done on the post servers. San Francisco was in the middle of an upgrade, so that explained why it was down. He then asked me if I followed the news and I said I knew about the situation in Tehran. Of course I knew, but I didn’t think it would affect a government agency that is trying to establish trade relationships to, you know, help their country. That’s when it really hit home, the Iranian government is trying to control the flow of information in and out of the country, there would be no other reason to block an agency like us.
There are times when all we have to go on is what other people tell us. Whenever I’m in such a situation I always try to keep myself firmly planted on the fence so I don’t get swayed to one viewpoint or another. All it takes for me to swing onto one side is an undeniable fact I can prove for myself, and this was it for the situation in Iran. All the things I had read over the past few weeks was cemented in my head, and I now firmly support the revolutionists.
My power to help them over here is limited so all I can do is hope that this blog post reaches a few people who didn’t know about the situation over there and spur them to look into it. The Iranian government can no longer hide behind a press blackout and every atrocity they commit will be shown to the world at large. The government has delegitimize itself by responding the way it has, and no one will recognise them until they rightfully return the power to their people from which they stole.
I support you, my fellow lovers of democracy.
Images used under a Creative Commons license from Flickr users Walkadog and Arasmus.
