I debated whether to post this article. Four days ago, my friend Robbie sent me a site, with updates from Iran via cell phones and Twitter. One of the videos was a death of a young woman. I have seen the video, it will rip out your heart. The video is not posted here. This is not about the politics involved, you can make your own mind up. There is evil in the world, real evil. More often than not, it takes innocents.
I have been asking for days now, Why her? In a crowd of thousands, why her? It cannot be answered. And those who have served in combat in the military, and have had comrades, friends killed next to them, you ask the same question, Why him? Why her?, but with a slight variance, Why not me? The friends, the family, the fiance of Neda, are also asking that Why not me? It too cannot be answered. But the majority of the civilized world, who have shared in a macabre way, the death of this young lady, we simply ask Why her? I have seen the video once, I wish I had not seen it at all. I am still asking Why her? I do not have an answer. . .
NOTES:
A must read, a different article on Neda posted by Starfishred, across the pond in Germany.
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from THE INDEPENDENT, UK, Online; by Peter Popham, Tuesday 23rd, 2009, Greenwich time.
NEDA -- THE TRAGIC FACE OF IRAN'S UPRISING
Joan of Arc she was not, nor the Unknown Protester who stopped the tanks in Tiananmen Square, because that young man, 20 years ago, chose his fate and his prominence, deliberately stepping out of the crowd into the tank's and the cameras' sights.
Her name is Neda Agha-Soltan and when a sniper shot her dead on Saturday.
Not so Neda: the young Iranian woman whose quick, brutal death from a Basiji militia man's bullet during a demonstration on Saturday created the Iranian uprising's first figurehead chose nothing except to be there.
Having found the courage to come out on to the street, she may have quailed: video shot moments before her death show her and her companion looking on from the sidelines as demonstrators surge back and forth. Should they go back? Had they made a mistake coming? She was in jeans and headscarf, the uniform of the city's young women, aged 26 or 27, we understand, therefore under 30, like 60 per cent of Iran's population: a modern Iranian Everywoman. She worked at a travel agency, so she was connected with the great world every day.
This is vague because all journalists have been banished from these terrifying streets. Yet within hours of her death a thousand bloggers and twitterers had immortalised her, ducking and diving through the regime's increasingly demented efforts to isolate their country, transforming her from a blood-soaked corpse into a heart-rending symbol of the uprising.
The launch pad for Neda's posthumous glory was a bare minute of shaky film. She goes over backwards in the throng and the man with the mobile phone spots the movement and leaps towards it. The camera catches her splayed legs, the blood already oozing onto the street. Those near her crowd around to help but the cameraman moves beyond them and for a long moment focuses on her white face which is flat on the pavement, the eyes swivelling but the head deathly still.
Then suddenly the blood surges from nose and mouth and it's like a scene from a slaughter house, the people who have come to her aid scream, but it is somehow poetically appropriate that her companion chooses this moment to cry, "Don't be afraid, don't be afraid, Neda my dear, don't be afraid..." Because she's already dead, and there is indeed nothing more to fear. As one of the bloggers who eulogised her wrote, quoting the 13th century Persian poet Rumi: "When you leave me/ in the grave,/ don't say goodbye./ Remember a grave is/ only a curtain/ for the paradise behind..."
Rarely has the butchery of an innocent – the bullet came from a rooftop sniper – been captured with such cruel completeness; never has such a scene been sent so quickly around the world, despite everything the authorities could do to thwart it. The consequences, too, were almost instantaneous. Protesters vowed to rename the street where she died Neda Street. A protest in her name drew 1,000 people to Haft-e Tir Square in Tehran before police broke it up. Officials prevented her supporters holding a memorial service in a mosque yesterday. One blogger wrote of Neda as "my sister": "I'm here to tell you my sister had big dreams," she wrote. "My sister who died was a decent person ... and like me yearned for a day when her hair would be swept by the wind ... and she longed to hold her head up and announce, 'I'm Iranian'... my sister died because injustice has no end..."
Yesterday the BBC's Farsi service reported that Neda's full name was Neda Agha-Soltan, (it has been reported that Neda in Farsi means Voice) and that she had been stuck in traffic in her car with her music teacher when she decided to get out "because of the heat" – "just for a few minutes", said her fiancé, Caspian Makan "[and] that's when she was shot dead".
Pray for the youth of Iran.
When I die …
When I die
when my coffin
is being taken out
you must never think
i am missing this world
don’t shed any tears
don’t lament or
feel sorry
i’m not falling
into a monster’s abyss
when you see
my corpse is being carried
don’t cry for my leaving
i’m not leaving
i’m arriving at eternal love
when you leave me
in the grave
don’t say goodbye
remember a grave is
only a curtain
for the paradise behind
you’ll only see me
descending into a grave
now watch me rise
how can there be an end
when the sun sets or
the moon goes down
it looks like the end
it seems like a sunset
but in reality it is a dawn
when the grave locks you up
that is when your soul is freed
have you ever seen
a seed fallen to earth
not rise with a new life
why should you doubt the rise
of a seed named human
have you ever seen
a bucket lowered into a well
coming back empty
why lament for a soul
when it can come back
like Joseph from the well
when for the last time
you close your mouth
your words and soul
will belong to the world of
no place no time
~RUMI, ghazal number 911,
translated May 18, 1992, by Nader Khalili
