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Many lenses: how the outside world saw the Iranian protests

The reaction to the Iranian election of June 12 has been instant, varied, and worldwide. From Tehran students with video blogs to major foreign newspapers, there has been a deluge of opinions and interpretations. It isn’t yet known what the true results of the poll were, but here is a sampling of how the world reacted to the situation.

Some of the reporting most sceptical of the Iranian elections came from Germany. The Süddeutsche Zeitung newspaper slammed the Iranian government’s handling of the protests as “ruthless,” and claimed that it was the government’s escalating use of force rather than the actions of the protesters that was making the situation more dangerous.

In Russia, on the other hand, almost all papers supported the announced results. Pravda referred to opposition leader Mir-Hosain Mousavi’s supporters as “sore losers” while the more liberal Novaya Gazeta accepted the results of an election it described as “lively.”

Chinese coverage of the story took a notably calmer tone than in the west, and more reporting concerned government responses than protesters’ actions. Xinhua unquestioningly republished an Iranian report that the government there had captured five European spies working to destabilise the regime.

While western media tended to be more supportive of the demonstrators, a few papers provided another kind of analysis. The Guardian’s Tehran correspondent noted that there have been pro-Ahmedinejad protests in Tehran even larger than Mr. Mousavi’s but that they have not received as much coverage. The U.K. daily was also quick to point out that Tehran is not representative of the entire country, and that the incumbent President has strong support in the rural areas.

A major story for much of the foreign media has been the use of Twitter and other social networking technologies by the Iranian protesters to organise themselves and share their experiences with the world. The New York Times’s Thomas Friedman argued that virtual meeting spaces like Twitter could create a forum for moderates to meet, allowing them to match the organisation of more formal radical groups centred around mosques or government organs.

The U.S. government clearly believed in Twitter’s centrality in the protests, reported the French daily Le Monde, as Washington requested the San Francisco-based company to reschedule maintenance shutdowns to be minimally disruptive in the Tehran time zone. The Paris-based paper claimed that Twitter supporters in Britain and America are hailing their favoured technology as allowing for a revolution, while claiming that mobile phone giant Nokia “has blood on its hands” for having sold the Iranian government technology that could be used to trace Twitter users.

The U.S. magazine Businessweek, however, took a look at the numbers behind this theory. Looking at figures released by a Toronto-based web analytics company, it showed that there are only about 19,000 Twitter-users in Iran. Of these the majority would be wealthy young people, and few would have assured service, with the Iranian government blocking access to many users. The paper quotes a social media expert as saying that these technologies are deployed by protesters not so much for their effectiveness within the country — which is limited by minimal market penetration — as for the attention they garner with the international media.

Twitter might be a minimal force in Iran, but it enthrals tech-savvy journalists in London and New York who are able to make a story stick in the international headlines. The ability of Twitter to function as a news source for foreigners was soon degraded when those same westerners began to saturate every Iran election thread with heartfelt messages of support, rendering them useless as a method of listening to people who were actually on the ground.

Even the enthusiastic use of Twitter by educated Iranian youth cannot explain the diversity of social groups which London’s The Economist reports have taken part in the protests. It is unlikely that the Chador-wearing women and elderly shopkeepers were roused to protest via tweet, even if some of the western-dressed youth at their side were. Qatar-based Al-Jazeera interviewed a pro-Ahmedinejad blogger, attacking the often-made assumption that the youth form a homogenous political group. The blogger said that Mr. Mousavi was not his favoured candidate, but that he supported further reforms if they were taken patiently and legally.

Many reports pointed to the opposition deploying far more traditional symbols to motivate their supporters. Time Magazine reports that opposition leader Mr. Mousavi appeared on June 20 in a funeral shroud to show his readiness for martyrdom. The Economist, reporting on an intriguing fusion of the modern and the traditional, quoted Iranian twitter users as calling for protesters to carry placards with quotations from the Holy Koran.

Foreign leaders have been put in the awkward position of having to make public statements condemning or supporting the protests. These political decisions have been made more complicated in countries with large Iranian diasporas.

As late as Sunday, President Barrack Obama was refusing to openly call for a recount, saying he did not wish to give the Iranian government the opportunity to make the story about America. This position was attacked by Republican Senators such as John McCain as well as by multiple commentators on Fox News Network. Germany’s Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung also attacked the U.S. President’s stance, while praising German Chancellor Angela Merkel for her strong statements demanding a recount.

European leaders gathered in Brussels expressed their unanimous condemnation of the situation in Iran. Dubai-based Gulf News quoted French President Nicolas Sarkozy as expressing his support for the Iranian people in the streets and British Prime Minister Gordon Brown referred to Iranian government actions as repressive and brutal.

The American President did strengthen his position with a Wednesday speech in which he described himself as “shocked and scandalised” by the events in Iran. France’s Le Figaro pointed out that this was the first time that he explicitly declared that the results were in question, rather than merely appealing for the Iranian government to abide by its own laws.

Despite Mr. Obama’s more recent statements and the strong protestations by the British, French, and German leaders, Israel’s Jerusalem Post attacked the western response as being toothless in the face of overriding economic and political issues. The Israeli paper sees America’s refusal to take a strong stand, and its decision to reappoint an ambassador to Syria, as signs of weakness.

The Iranian government, meanwhile, has been vocal in its attacks on the actions of foreign, particularly European, governments. Hong Kong’s The Standard quoted president Ahmedinejad as saying that western powers should stop meddling and that they were run by “a bunch of politically retarded people.”

The Russians saw them as hooligans, the Germans as freedom fighters, and the Americans as the vanguard of a new type of politics ushered in by (American-made) technology. The results of the protest are yet to be decided, and while they seem less and less likely to raise Mr. Mousavi to the presidency, they did briefly captivate much of the world.

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