30 years on from the ’79 Revolution comes an awakening in Iran. And it bears similarities to Tiananmen, some 20 years ago, in the wave of uprising, despair, hope…a faint whiff of momentary freedom to express, dissent and simply let out some long building frustration.

As with all decent revolutions students are to the forefront and are certainly bearing the brunt of reprisals. And those reprisals will come thick and fast, hard and long, brutal and deadly. That’s just the way it is.

The Iranian authorities are somewhat stunned looking like they have been slapped by a wet fish.

“Where is my vote” people ask. Down the back of the sofa in Ahmadinejad’s office probably but the reality is that we don’t know that answer. But certainly the polling in advance of the election suggests the actual result might be rather different to the official one.

This is a big story and like Tiananmen it has captured the interest and hearts of many around the world. The connected generation has been pounding keyboards collating and disseminating information through social media with Twitter, especially, providing an outlet for up to the minute street reports.

Journalism schools will be setting 140 word max reports as part of their testing soon.

@persiankiwi has been a star with 24,000 hasitly assembled followers. Streaming news just took on new meaning. Instead of having the same story respooled and playing non-stop for 24 hours, we are getting a blow by blow account of what’s happening on the ground. It will be interesting to see how traditional media outlets can respond to this.

Given that most of them have been expelled they may not be much help. It suggests that any concerned citizen in any given country on any given day can provide a source of news. You just need a phone and away you go.

Imagine if we’d had mobile phones and Twitter in Tiananmen Sqaure. I wonder what difference it would have made to how China handled the situation.

What interests me most about this is that its an internal action. No regime change here…no hordes of US soldiers and targeted bombs..no neo-con fantasy of parachuted democracy. It’s the Iranian people trying to have their say. That is such a difference to its poor neighbours to the east and west who are mired in US inspired conflict.

In a way the outcome in Iran right now isn’t that important. It could end up really ugly or not. It’s hard to tell but the wheels have been set in motion. The world is watching and supportive of the process of peaceful demonstration.

There may be punishment, deaths, torture but realistically the authorities have limits in that area given the widespread dissent.

As Gandhi once said of British authorities trying to crack down on peaceful protest:

“But how many can be given such punishment? Try and calculate how much time it will take of Britishers to hang 300 million of persons”

I always remember this day and this event. Mainly because it screwed up my plans to cross China and get the Trans Siberian railway home after 20 months backpacking. As it was my girfriend and I were in Sust the last village before the Khunjerab Pass that links Pakistan with China and is the highest order crossing the world. It was a glorious spot with the towering Karakorams in the distance. Anyway the plan was set until we met this English bloke walking down the road to us. He’d just crossed over the border which had been shut and told us what had happened.

Remember this was BG (before google!) and before email even. News came via GPO Poste Restante and the travellers grapevine. So that was the end of that idea. It’s actually the closest I’ve ever been to China which is still on my list on places to visit.

But a lot has changed since that fateful day in Tiananmen Square and yet much has remained the same. The Chinese authorities began their media clampdown many months ago by suspending YouTube and more recently by blocking Twitter (what a compliment!) and Bing (Crosby??). As well as the usual quiet word in the ear of any one thinking about protesting or even acknowledging the anniversary.

So fear still rules. But fear of what exactly? Many Chinese are pretty happy with the way their economy has grown and how the modern world has been welcomed in. Sure not everyone has benefitted but there is a certain pride within the nation that much has been accomplished in recent times. Times like this are a real test for an authoritarian society. Dissent cannot be tolerated at any level.

But truth is a slippery ball and when one looks across to Hong Kong, where over 100,00 people gathered to mark the occasion, one can see that the attempt to censor and punish any kind of inquiry or examination is really a waste of time. People know.

China is a unique country with a long history and strong culture. Change comes slowly but hopefully those in charge will come to see the futility of repressing protest completely and censoring mass media. One thing though is for sure:

Tank Man is an enduring image of the 20th Century and no amount of propaganda or control can ever change that.

So the Tamil Tigers are no more and yet another ethnic conflict comes to a miserable end. How many killed for this? Has it made any difference? It may take some time for that question to be answered. Like many ethnic conflicts, this one seems to have gone on for a long time making one wonder what exactly it was all about.

My parents actually lived in Sri Lanka for a short time just before the civil war broke out. I spent the Xmas holidays on 1980/1 visiting them and enjoying the gorgeous beaches of the south west and the green hinterland. When I heard that civil war had broken out it didn’t really resonate with me. As a 14 year old, the Sinhalese and Tamils I had met just seemed like people. Also growing up with the conflict in Northern Ireland never far from the news, it seemed par for the course.

People, even of the same colour and country, could still engage in war. Both sides of my family have been on the wrong end of the ethnic vacuum cleaner so maybe I was just inured to it.But these days I am very tuned into any mention of ethincity and references to improving the hygiene of ones home country.

Whilst pondering the end of the latest carnage I was floored by the story of a Catholic man who was beaten to death by a group of Rangers football supporters in a small town in Northern Ireland. It was after Rangers had triumphed by winning the Scottish soccer leage competiton that a bunch of Rangers fans, Protestants, decided to pay a visit to the Catholic part of town and basically murder someone. Which they did.

So it continues. It’s a bit 20th century though.

Nowhere is immune from this.

What about that gorgeous Kingdom of Happiness, Bhutan. Apparently a wonderful place to visit and a very progressive society. In fact about 5 years ago I included Bhutan in a paper on E-government. It was quite advanced for a small mountainous country. No mention in the Wikipedia entry of ethnic cleansing.

Yet in the last 15 Years nearly 15-20% of the population has been cleansed and evicted from the country. What the..???

They certainly kept that quiet. 120,000 Bhutanese have been transformed into refugees living in 7 camps in Nepal. Some have found their way here to Christchurch to start a new life.

It feels like an ongoing epidemic……it’s hard to know when it will stop. Our identity is so important to us, yet at the same time it allows the tyranny of the majority an easy way to express any kind of anger or frustration. As Amartya Sen writes in “Identity and Violence“,

“..a major source of potential conflict in the contemporary world is the presumption that people can be uniquely categorized based on religion or culture”.

Indeed but it’s our willingness to succumb to group behaviour and peer pressure that allows atrocities like ethnic cleansing and genocide to happy. How can we move away from the “clash of civilizations” and to an appreciation of the person?

Actually I don’t know if we can. It seems so ingrained in our nature. Of course we can all educate our children and imbue them with values that include compassion, kindness and care.

I wonder how technology will help? I have a feeling that will play a bigger part than we realise. Maybe when all the teenagers around the world are connected through the semantic web……who knows?

Last night I was fortunate to see the play “My Name is Rachel Corrie” playing for the first time in New Zealand at the Forge, the no 2 theatre at the Court. It’s a 90 minute monologue describing her journey to the Gaza strip to volunteer as a peace activist (surely an oxymoron!!!!).

Go and see it if you can.

6 years ago she was murdered by the Israeli Defence Force, run over by a bulldozer attempting to destroy yet another ordinary civilian home. A mere speck in the devastation that is Palestine. But before everyone gets too excited, this post is not about Palestine but about the difference that individuals can make. That she continues to inspire people to act is in itself telling. That she gave her life for it is tragic but as she would probably understand, innocent lives are lost every day for little or no reason.

No Tiananmen Square mythology for her. The bulldozer did not stop for her. Perhaps because it wasn’t on film the Israeli driver didn’t feel any compunction to stop. One can only imagine what happens when no one is around. But this is the point. When we survey the world we can be overwhelmed by the incessant brutality and barbarism meted out daily by tyrants the world over. Yet still individuals can make a huge difference by directing us to the most minor of events which for us assume mythic proportions…perhaps biblical….David vs Goliath ring any bells.

Our sympathy is often with the individual, the person alone. It is the power of one that can move us, inspire us, energise us to say no. It’s why leaders such as Gandhi, Nelson Mandela and Martin Luther King caused so many problems for their persecutors. One person can be harder to defeat than an army. It’s why Aung San Suu Kyi is always in our thoughts, always visible to the international community and always a thorn in the side of the tyrants.

So yes one person can make a difference. You can make a difference, no matter who you are or where you come from.

You can think about it or you can act, like Rachel did or you can write a letter.

It always counts no matter what the action.

In a wonderful case of the pot calling the kettle black, the US stomped its feet at the reprehensible actions of a member fo the Emirates royal family. The torture of a man, which was videoed, has sent US authorities into a high spin cycle of moral wash. It’s a very nasty example of what goes on “over there”. Authoritarian regimes tend to treat people however they feel like it. But somehow its what we have come to expect from certain nations.

The US is taking this very seriously and reportedly holding up several military technology deals whilst the case is looked over. At the same time, Dick Cheney, the Republican Robespierre, is a strong supporter of torture himself, a stand which has cost the US incalcuable harm in terms of foreign relations and standing.

Whilst the new administration has taken a strong stance against torture and has shut down Guantanamo Bay, the US has yet to recover from its actions during the Bush years.In fact this exchange shows that the country is very much split on the issue of torture as a means to and end…if it’s the right thing to do. Never mind that the US has rather lost its mojo when it comes to freedom and liberty and right to a fair trial, it is still yet to recover and find its feet on this issue.

The spreading of democracy and freedom by the sword seems to sounds very much like the spreading of the word of God by the sword. Are they one and the same? Has the US turned to the darkside? The war on terror or war of terror? The zeal of many Americans towards towards justifiable torture creates some interesting historical parallels.

As Brandeis said ” The greatest dangers to liberty lurk in insidious encroachment by men of zeal, well-meaning but without understanding.” Essentially “men of zeal” have always justified their actions by proclaiming some form of revelation, enlightenment or spiritual cleansing. The poster boys or high priests (literally) of torture, the Inquisitors, ahowed us the road to God but ultimately were trumped by Robespierre, surely the father of modern terror, in the world of modern state. Perhaps terror was France’s most infamous and underreported export?

As Robespierre put it “This terrible war waged by liberty against tyranny” must surely involve killing many people…who are not on the right side of the ledger…..and on and on……Leopold (The Belgian Genocider), Lenin, Stalin, Hitler, Mao, Pol Pot all merrily feasted on the droppings of this freedom lover. Can “virtue and terror” sleep easily with each other. I think not.

It’s good to see the US authorities reacting with dismay and distaste to this story. Only now can they really face up to what has happened over the last 8 years (and let’s face it many years before). But also what is clear is that its a debate that has someway to run as the US pillars freedom, liberty and virture are disinfected by the sunlight.

It’s just year now since I wrote about the death of Dith Pran and Kaing Guek Eav, the commandant of S-21 who was finally put up for trial. Well now the time has come for Duch to face justice, some 30 years after he oversaw the imprisonment, torture and execution of some 15,000 people.

It’s been a long wait for many Cambodians but justice, although seemingly asleep, can be awoken at any time. It’s also a poignant moment for Kiwis as Kerry Hamill, brother of Rob Hamill, the NZ rower, was one of the victims along with a British man, John Dewhirst and a Canadian, Stuart Glass. Their boat had drfited into Cambodian waters in 1978 leaving them at the mercy of the murderous regime. Stuart Glass was killed instantly but John and Kerry made the harsh journey to camp S-21 where they eventually were killed.

Another Kiwi, Dame Silvia Cartwright, is one of the five judges appointed to oversee the trial. It will undoubtedly be a very testing case to judge even though the evidence is quite clear. It will hopefully prompt the international community to look around the world and see if it could be doing more to prevent genocides and other cleansings from taking place.

They could start by looking at the decimation of the Karen people in the world’s No 1 Murder Regime, Mynamar. But there is no shortage of murderous action around the world especially where natural resources are plentiful. Plus ca change………

As for Duch and his explanations, I think we are long past accepting “i was following orders” as any kind of defense for violent action.

As Edmund Burke said “All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing”