Iran after the elections: 22 June 2009 - part 2

Hi - if you're here due to a Twitter update, check the bottom of the post.

I'll be updating this post throughout the day as events warrant.



It's almost 4 pm in Iran now, and today's big event is a gathering in Haft-e-Tir Square to mourn the recent casualties in the uprising. Mousavi1388 on Twitter has just put out a message that many are RTing:



You can explore the area here.


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This is a gathering for mourning and so it's hard to say just how strict security will be considering how bad it would look to be seen cracking down on mourners, but then again emotions may also run high. We'll find out today whether yesterday's relative calm was an indicator of a shift in mood (perhaps towards more targeted goals like the strike due to start tomorrow) or whether everyone was just tired from the events the day before.

It's 5:30 now and a tweet in Persian is now saying that there are too many police in the area for people to gather. No idea whether this is true or not.



A reporter from Mardomak News is saying that there are about 3000 people gathered in front of the Ali-ibn Musar Reza Mosque, quite close to Haft-e-tir:


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No idea what the police presence is like over there.



Juan Cole has been doing some great writing on the numbers for this election and has a piece today on the definite conclusion (not that it wasn't obvious to anybody else paying attention) that the election was stolen. The official numbers simply demand too large a suspension of disbelief (not to mention the fact that more people voted than were registered in at least 50 cities, and this was reported by Press TV).

A video has just been uploaded of some of the attempted protests today, where Shiroudi Sports Complex was used as a kind of military garrison for the day.



The sports complex is here and you can even see that gate they were using to enter. This also shows why authorities are loath to restore SMS access to the city, as word could have easily spread of them moving in in the morning, whereupon a protest could easily be rescheduled.


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An op-ed here in the New York Times sums up the core of what I wrote yesterday with this sentence: "...the loss of trust by millions of Iranians who’d been prepared to tolerate a system they disliked, provided they had a small margin of freedom, constitutes the core political earthquake in Iran".