A event on July 15 put on by the PEN American Center provided a fascinating look inside the recent protests following elections in Iran. Iran: A Conversation About Elections, Protest, and the Future, was co-sponsored by the New York Review of Books at the 92nd Street Y Unterberg Poetry Center in Manhattan.
Shaul Bakash moderated the conversation between political analyst Karim Sadjadpour, writer and activist Haleh Esfandiari, and journalist Roger Cohen. Although all the event participants were heavy hitters with deep personal and professional experiences related to Iran, there was one standout: Roger Cohen.
Cohen, who writes for The New York Times, was in Iran during protests following highly suspicious presidential election results. As the protesters became targets for plainclothes police who were beating and attacking them, Cohen was there to see it first-hand. He was tear gassed, marched silently and ran side by side with Iranians calling for fair and accurate election results, and looked in the eyes of the people exercising their ability as human beings to use a massive physical presence in public to send a message to those in power.
“As a journalist, you have to be on the ground to touch, taste, smell….get the pulse of the place,” said Cohen about his time in Iran during the PEN event . According to Cohen, he was one of the last foreign journalists to be kicked out of Iran.
With the drain of foreign journalists and an internal muzzle on domestic journalists, the question now remains as to where accurate and reliable information about what’s happening in the aftermath of the protests can be found. Particularly vital is an accurate count of those killed during the protesting. According to Cohen, he got a recent phone call from a contact in Iran who said that at one hospital morgue, there were more than 20 bodies.
A lot of news about Iran so far has gotten out to the world in a flurry of activity through social networking tools like Flickr, Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube. With an absence of a foreign press corps, this could continue to be the case. For Cohen, it is a way around the restrictions on getting information out, but lacks the filter of the professional eye.
“There’s some use in having people on the ground who have some training in gathering information,” said Cohen of the benefit of professional journalists being present and able to do their jobs.
All of the panelists speculated about what’s next for Iran; whether the “green wave” of opposition to 30 years of suppression was just a flash in the pan, or the beginning of a new era there. While the world waits and watches, opposition to the current administration is reportedly almost all locked up. Many journalists are also imprisoned, and the count of the dead is incomplete at best–at worst, inaccurate.
If Iran is any gauge of a state in the Middle East that could impact the foreign affairs of the region, things seem to be on a tipping point.