EDITOR’S NOTE: Iranian authorities have barred journalists for international news organizations from reporting on the streets and ordered them to stay in their offices. This report is based on the accounts of witnesses reached in Iran and official statements carried on Iranian media.
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One Twitter user hails her as “Neda the Divine.” Another vows: “You’ll be remembered as innocent blood, shed for the people of Iran.”
“Such a beautiful young lady to have been subjected to the slings and arrows of a corrupt Islamic regime,” laments a Facebook page, one of more than 50 established in her memory from Britain and Romania to Australia and Malaysia.
Five days after a bullet cut down Neda Agha Soltan on a Tehran street — and grainy videotape that captured her bleeding to death was viewed by millions on YouTube — the Internet is awash in tens of thousands of poems, prayers and tearful tributes.
Soltan, 27, has become an undisputed icon in the bloody struggle between Iran’s ruling clerics and opposition protesters challenging the regime over a presidential election they contend was rigged.
To many, she was an innocent bystander — a senseless victim of hard-liners’ excessive use of force.
To some, she is a martyr whose death must be avenged.
“I’ll stain my hands with that (expletive)’s blood! He will meet his “God”!!! one recent tweet raged. “Neda, we will have your revenge,” said another.
Soltan’s death, and the amateur footage that shows her eyes fluttering and blood streaming across her face as her life ebbed away and her companions helplessly screamed her name, have become an obsession for bloggers following the Iranian crisis.
“I don’t quite understand what’s going on in Iran right now, but I am so touched by this woman’s story,” reads a contribution to the blog Progress on the Prairie by a poster identified only as Spring.
“I am most touched because she was just a regular person, it seems like. A regular person who wanted to have regular freedoms like the kind of freedoms I would want if I were her,” it says.
“Sometimes it’s hard for me to be sympathetic with people fighting for a cause because I have become a bit desensitized by all the images of fighting, war, burning vehicles, bombs, etc. But this woman brought it all home to me again. When I heard her story and saw her picture, I could imagine that being me.”
Soltan, identified as a music student, was gunned down during a street protest Saturday — the largest and most violent confrontation between supporters of opposition leader Mir Hossein Mousavi and security forces loyal to Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and hard-line President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.
Khamenei, who insists that Ahmadinejad won by a landslide in a legitimate vote devoid of any major fraud, had demanded an end to demonstrations and had authorized the elite Revolutionary Guard and the volunteer Basij militia to use force to keep Mousavi supporters off the streets.
Security forces since have turned out in huge numbers and have used tear gas, truncheons and gunfire to chase away protesters.
Iranians are all too aware of Soltan’s slaying, and it appears to have deeply moved those who support Mousavi’s drive to get the election results annulled — something the government says is out of the question.
“She is one of us, she is with us, and she is me who has become us,” reads a poem in Farsi that has been circulating inside and outside of Iran since her death.
“She is my daughter who has been slaughtered by the hands of demons and she has sacrificed her blood with the hope to fly away the angels of freedom. She is not an angel, the angels owe her, they are jealous of her purity. The angels are seeking her place near god.”
On Wednesday, candles smoldered on a street corner in Tehran from a vigil in Soltan’s honor that had been quietly held the night before — underscoring how her death has prompted some to risk beatings and bullets to remember her.
But a march of mourning for Soltan and others who have died in the recent unrest was put off for at least a week. Organizers said they had not been given permission to hold the gathering, which originally had been planned for Thursday.
Vigils have been held in cities stretching from Paris to Los Angeles.
Soltan’s death also has stirred President Barack Obama, who held her up earlier this week as an example for those seeking freedom.
“We have experienced the searing image of a woman bleeding to death on the streets,” Obama said. “While this loss is raw and painful, we also know this: Those who stand up for justice are always on the right side of history.”
Expressions of devotion to Soltan dominate social networking sites such as Facebook and Twitter, and the thousands of tributes found there are brief but poignant.
“Neda, you no longer walk this Earth, but you will live in the hearts of not only those in your country but across the globe,” one message says.
“May God bless you, honey, just for being who you are,” reads another.
Some in the Arab world questioned why Soltan’s death has been getting such seismic attention.
“Neda is not the first person to die in this,” a woman who identified herself only as Fatemeh said Thursday in a post on the blog of the Muslimah Media Watch, which tracks Muslim women in media and pop culture.
“She’s not the first person whose death has been captured on video camera, either. But she was young, slender, and pretty, and so Western media images are obsessed with watching her die over and over.”
Others held out hope that Soltan — whose first name, Neda, means “voice” or “call” — might still help downtrodden demonstrators find the courage to defy the crackdown and take to the streets.
The Swiss weekly L’Hebdo put Soltan on its front cover Thursday, calling her the “martyr of the repression.”
“It took just one bullet to kill Neda,” tweeted a German calling himself kleinIrk89. “But it will take just one Neda to bring an end to Iranian tyranny.”
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