How ironic that a regime that so insistently perpetuated the cult of martyrdom may itself become undone with the aid of an Iranian martyr: a 26-year-old woman named Neda Agha-Solton.
With images of fatally wounded Neda's bloodied face ricocheting around Iran and the world via the Internet, her tragic death exactly a week ago instantly made her the symbol of Iran's extraordinary protests. The regime appears increasingly successful at crushing the demonstrations, which erupted two weeks ago to protest apparent election fraud that enabled President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to win re-election to a second term. Yet Neda's memory will be a significant influence on Iran's future.
The main reason is that Neda's killing utterly exposed the repression that has increasingly underpinned Iran's regime and thus ups the stakes for continuing to employ that repression. For most of the years since the 1979 Islamic Revolution, Iran's rulers have been able to justify repression in the name of going after counter-revolutionaries or blocking foreign conspiracies. Freedom activists like Akbar Ganji and Emad Baghi were jailed, and student protesters were roughed up, but generally the regime managed to use fear to keep dissenters in check without upsetting the public at large. Now, that has completely changed. For the first time since the Revolution, the regime found it necessary to unleash the full brunt of the basij, the paramilitary group seen in the videos beating and dragging away fellow Iranians and Muslims. Neda is really not so much the symbol of the protests as she is a symbol of the repression that crushed peaceful demonstrations.
The brutality that killed Neda, furthermore, powerfully reinforces the growing challenge to the regime's claim for the right to rule, putting its hold on power on notice as never before. The Islamic regime's legitimacy has been steadily slipping ever since the death of the father of the revolution, Ayatullah Khomeini, 20 years ago. It received a boost in 1997, when a liberal cleric, Mohammed Khatami, captured the imagination of millions of Iranian voters and won a landslide victory. However, the ability of hard-line religious and military organs to block Khatami's reform agenda left a multitude of Iranians disillusioned—until this year's presidential election. Many voters put their hopes in a Khatami ally, former Prime Minister Mir-Hossein Moussavi, only to be outraged, as Moussavi himself was, when it appeared the outcome was stolen for the benefit of hard-liner Ahmadinejad's re-election. Moussavi's rejection of the results and call for protests amounted to the single greatest act of defiance of the regime in 30 years. Coming from a loyal participant in the system itself, the challenge had the effect of exposing the naked grab for power by some surrounding the Supreme Leader, Ayatullah Ali Khamenei, whose standing evaporated overnight when he blessed Ahmadinejad's victory. The brutality that killed Neda threatens to erode whatever legitimacy Khamenei and the regime have left.
