Tehran and Tiananmen

Unfortunately we haven't seen our girls' Iranian friends since meeting them last week. Quite a lot has happened in the last week in their home country, and I don't want to miss an opportunity to comment on the coverage here in China of Iran's election and subsequent protests...

The election in Iran was last Friday, on Monday, amid the election controversy, Iran's President Ahmadinejad traveled to Russia for a SCO meeting, the Shanghai Cooperation Organization. SCO was set up in the mid-1990s by China, Russia, and three central Asian countries and has since added one more member country and several observer countries for security, military, and economic cooperation.

Iran was invited to the SCO meetings as an observer nation. You can only imagine what the conversations must have been like this week between China's President Hu Jintao, Russia's president Medvedev, and Ahmadinejad.

This week's SCO meetings dominated the news here in China. Mysteriously absent from the news coverage here in China from Chinese news sources has been any mention of of the accusations of election fraud in Iran or the ongoing public riots in downtown Tehran and in other cities around the country.

Why would China want to filter this news from Iran? Perhaps it hits a bit too close too home. The thought of college students and intellectual rioting for more transparency and democracy sounds quite a bit like Tiananmen Square 20 years ago. CNN's website has been interesting as you can read about news about Iran, but any article that mentions any comparison to Tiananmen is blocked under normal use.

Here is one of those stories that is blocked under normal viewing in China from CNN:

http://edition.cnn.com/video/#/video/world/2009/06/17/todd.iran.tiananmen.cnn

Then after a week of protests, Iran's supreme leader Ayatollah Khamenei yesterday led the Friday prayer for 10,000 people in which he stated that there was no fraud in the election results, and that Western media in fact was to blame for false reporting in which the crowd repeatedly erupted with chants "Death to Israel" and "Death to America."

http://edition.cnn.com/2009/WORLD/meast/06/19/iran.election.scene/index.html

Are you serious? While these people are really the minority in Iran (although the rigged election didn't show that), it is quite disturbing to read about such a gathering. We hope our girls' new friends will be back at the playground soon... again, I wish the world could watch our playground.