Organizers of the Green Movement, the opposition party in Iran, plan to use tomorrow’s official commemoration of the Iranian hostage crisis to extend an apology to the US. This November 4th will mark the 30th anniversary of the day Iranian revolutionaries stormed the American embassy and took the staff hostage for 444 days. “Students Day”, as it has come to be called, is generally marked by demonstrations outside the building celebrating the takeover of the “Den of Spies” and shouting slogans such as “Death to America” and “Death to Israel”. The former embassy is now home to Iran’s elite Revolutionary Guards, and regularly hosts exhibitions highlighting the “crimes” of the US.
In a stark contrast, present-day Iranian revolutionaries will make an unprecedented gesture to the West.
Mohsen Makhmalbaf, an exiled film-maker who spearheads the opposition campaign overseas, said Iranians should repudiate the events of 1979, when a group of pro-regime agitators took over the US embassy and held diplomats and other occupants.
“Thirty years ago in the turmoil of the revolutionary zeal an indefensible act of hostage taking was committed that the new generation of Iran are not proud of at all,” he said. “We know very well how that deplorable action hurt the noble American people and how it led to three decades of unnecessary and painful bad relations between our two nations.
“Only a small and repressive minority who rule Iran today still insist on keeping Iran on a confrontation course with the US, Britain and the West and indeed they have now taken the Iranian people as hostage to their destructive policies.”
Protesters plan to deliver a letter addressed to President Barack Obama to the US embassy in London and deliver commemorative plaques to American embassies across Europe.
Today, those who once considered themselves revolutionaries are working to eradicate the new generation of internal discontents agitating for liberty from the repressive regime of the former ‘freedom fighters’. The Green Movement became an official thorn in the side of Iran’s autocratic rulers this summer, when the world’s attention was captured by their plight as they protested the fraudulent presidential election.
At least 30 people were killed, according to the Iranian government’s own admission, with many more deaths reported by people on the ground. As of this writing, an estimated 200 members of the opposition remain imprisoned, with three awaiting execution. We might know more, but the Obama team pulled federal funding from the Iran Human Rights Documentation Center, a watchdog group that has worked for years to accumulate evidence on the torture and imprisonment of Iranian dissidents.
While the world watched in horror as Iranian civilians were beaten and shot in the streets of Tehran, Obama declared that he, and by extension, we, would negotiate with whoever was “elected”.
“It is up to Iranians to make decisions about who Iran’s leaders will be. We respect Iranian sovereignty and want to avoid the United States being the issue inside of Iran,” Mr. Obama said.
“What I would say to those people who put so much hope and energy and optimism into the political process, I would say to them that the world is watching and inspired by their participation, regardless of what the ultimate outcome of the election was,” he said.
Hear that, freedom fighters? We are inspired by your deaths, imprisonment, and torture. Good luck with that.
It will be interesting to see how the Obama administration handles the awkwardness of being apologized to by the people it left to twist in the desert wind.
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