[cont]

Green Movement’s trenches of resistance fell

Before all these tests, the greatest political experience of our generation, the Green Movement, met defeat despite all our hopes and sacrifices and despite giving birth to a precious political identity that, if nothing else, was a few steps ahead of the previous generation that was contaminated by political Islam.

Not only were some of us killed, but many, many of us were sent to prison. We were not only suppressed but we were also forced to accept the last remnants of political Islam within ourselves when we trusted reformist leaders and Mir-Hossein Mousavi personally as allies of the movement. This was clear from our slogans. At that time our trust was not unjustified, but, more importantly, we had no other choice.

Nevertheless, as long as the movement survived in the streets, we of the Green Movement were the victors of this coalition. As long as the streets were ours, it was we who defined the movement and its demands, and Mousavi and the reformists followed us. But when the movement was suppressed and we were forced to take shelter in our homes, the trenches that we had left undefended were taken over by the reformists’ interpretation of the movement, gradually, but more and more with the passing of the years.

The moral defeat of Mir-Hossein Mousavi

Only a few months ago Mir-Hossein Mousavi put the last nail in the coffin of the political identity that “we”, the 20-somethings, had built a decade earlier with our blood and toil. Cut off from reality and using the Shah-Khomeini duality, he defended the organized and continuous crimes of Khomeini’s regime with an undeniable clarity and called the man who bloodied and set on fire a region or perhaps the world and condemned the women of this land to hijab slavery an “ever-awake soul”.

He did not even glance at young supporters of the Green Movement to see that he owed them his new political life over the past decade, young people who, at a critical political juncture, welcomed him as an ally of the Green Movement to achieve a peaceful transfer away from Khomeini’s regime, or at least for a fundamental change in the totalitarian elements that had been established firmly within the existing system based on the reactionary principle of the Guardianship of the Islamist Jurist.

Without the Green Movement and with only his previous political identity, Mousavi’s views would have been as important as the views expressed by Ahmad Tavakoli and Ali Akbar Velayati in the introduction to their painting book or the views expressed by government ministers in the first decade after the revolution. Unlike them, Mousavi was elevated by the young people’s movement in 2009, but he turned his back on them to renew his fealty to his “Imam”. Mousavi was the purest, the most resolute and the sincerest person who carried the reformist project to its logical conclusion. The political failure of this movement in achieving its goals aside, Mousavi has now signed a declaration of the moral defeat of the movement with his “ever-awake soul” remark.

Our understanding of reforms was different

The generation of the 1980s did not shrink from sacrificing our lives to change things, but in the end the movement’s defeats outweighed its victories because of the existing realities, the repression, the absence of planning to manage change, the inescapable coalition with the reformists and the general preference for finding the least dangerous way to bring about change.

The problem with the reformists was and is that they want to save and strengthen the regime at the same time that they want to bring about a series of low-risk changes, while, in my view, reforms meant fundamental changes by peaceful means to the point where none of the totalitarian foundations of the regime remain. This, of course, was going to bring about a final confrontation. Therefore we should have anticipated the need to mobilize forces and to organize so that when the existing structure fell apart or became inactive we could arrive at a totally new social covenant.

This was my understanding of reforms as a student activist who had been sentenced to 10 years in prison. At the same time I witnessed the dying of the movement in the streets. My friends and my comrades-in-arms emigrated one after another, and institutions, networks and organizations were shattered by the repressions and frustration and helplessness as a result of defeat, the enemy’s success and the suffocating environment that infiltrated every aspect of the lives even of those who were nominally not in prison.

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