Keyvan Nayyeri

I’m going to celebrate the fourth birthday anniversary of my blog shortly but for the first time in this long while I really don’t know what to write. Sometimes you have many things to say and don’t know which one to write first, but you suddenly realize that no one has the time to read everything that you write!

I don’t think there is anyone who doesn’t know about the events happened in Iran during the past couple of weeks that put us on top news on almost all news websites and media. From the unique campaigning of presidential candidates to the huge contribution of people to vote, the long story of frauds in the election, and the protests that happened in response to them. Less or more, you know many things and of course, most of you don’t have a 100% correct perspective on the situation here as the overall media coverage had some serious weaknesses.

I’m not going to go over the description of events or my personal analysis of these phenomena because I’m deeply sad and don’t want to review whatever happened. Honestly, life has become very difficult here for many people including myself and it has led to a national depression in our society.

This green wave that relied heavily on technology and internet during the campaigning, voting, counting, and protesting is now known to many of you around this small world. You saw that how we, with the help of other people in the outside world, spread the word on Twitter, Facebook and other internet websites to directly talk to the world after almost 30 years of silence. For these 30 years our leaders and your leaders, our media and your media, didn’t allow us to have direct talks and let you know about our country and community. One of the best friends of the United States, UK, European countries, and many other countries turned out to be one of the few states that supports terrorism and those Iranians who were welcomed to any country became the biggest enemies and threats of the world in a few years. I’m still surprised by the power of media, and how they could turn a nation of millions of supposedly good people to the nation of supposedly bad people in a few years!

With this green wave we tried hard to talk to you and say that we’re not what you think, we’re not those who support terrorism, and we’re not those who hate you and your countries. We tried to tell you that there is a huge difference between our government and our people. We sacrificed blood to say that we don’t support our government for what they express. We tried to make a change for a better world, but unfortunately they didn’t let us to end that in peace.

In the best and worst days of these events I always was thinking about a way to thank all free people of the world for their support and keeping our back. Despite the bad coverage of western media (for several reasons that are beyond the scope of this post), most of the free people in the world kept our back and encouraged us to try for our freedom. After all, I don’t know any way to thank millions of people in the world with an action or at least I don’t have that power, but I’m sure that the future actions of Iranians all over the world can express our thanksgiving appropriately.

I should apologize if I’m not listing the name of my friends and followers even those who didn’t know me but found me on the web and made any kind of contribution to this green wave of Iranians. Fortunately or unfortunately the number of contact names is bigger than something that I can include here and name them one by one because most likely I’ll miss many names. But I must thank you all no matter where you live, what you do, and what you contributed to our green wave, for your support and the courage that you gave to our people. Seeing many famous leaders on the .NET community supporting our people was something that I never forget in my life.

There may be a question mark in your mind about the next steps in Iran, but I’m sure that no one can answer this question for you. Many protesters and reformists are boycotted, so things have calmed down in the past couple of days, but there is no doubt that this won’t be the end. Obviously, it takes longer time and more effort, even more blood, to make the real change in Iran, but soon or late it happens, and the good news is that these events brought us an important accomplishment and that was dropping the fear from people’s face.

Doubtlessly, these events had another big victory for our people and that was the possibility to talk to the world and exhibit their real face, demands, and goals. Surprisingly, technology had a great influence and usage in this process and you saw the wide use of Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, blogs, and other social networking services in getting our voice out to you. Many of the foreigners were surprised by seeing the wide use of English signs and slogans by marchers, but they were there to assure that no translator by our local TV and/or western media is required to change our words for you.

Having these said and despite the sad days we have, I’m glad to see that my attempts in the past few years have had a good result to have a very small contribution to a progress that I call it internationalization which happened quickly in the past few years in Iran. There were some people like me who took serious steps toward the use of world-wide English language in communication and applying modern technology to express their opinions, skills, and daily experiences and share them with the world. As one of those vanguards, I’ve been witnessing this good progress to this point which had a huge impact on the success of green wave to make these events public. I hope that our youth keep this line and follow our footsteps even better than us to help themselves and their homeland stay out of the darkness that media is imposing on them.

In the end I wish a world in peace, liberty, and justice for all the nations in the world including Iranians. We begin our works by saying “In the name of God, the Merciful, the Compassionate”, but I use it in the end because I’m sure that this is just the beginning of the end!