Individual acts of defiance continue: this woman took off her head-scarf and made the Green movement V sign in a Tehran street. There have been no reports of her since her arrest.
Iran’s Green opposition movement cannot readily adopt the strategies and tactics of the color revolutions, argues Mohammad Tahavori, writing in the must-read Gozaar. The movement still seeks the reform of the Islamic Republic, not a democratic revolution, he writes.
The Green opposition is not easily suppressed, Tahavori believes, because it remains a flat, flexible initiative, a grass-roots movement that does not rely on leadership directives to mobilize.
Mir Hossein Mousavi, the opposition’s de facto leader, has been criticized for failing to offer strategic direction, but he too appears content for the Green movement to remain relatively amorphous. “The point is not forming social networks that do not exist and then trying to reinforce them,” Mousavi said recently. “The point is that the power of people lies in social networks that have formed among them naturally and organically.”
While some observers believe the opposition has lost momentum and focus since the protests at the stolen June 12 election peaked, others suggest that the Quds Day demonstrations confirm that it still retains the capacity to mobilize. The spirit of resistance is also being kept alive by below-the-radar acts of defiance, including boycotts of government products.
It may be that the opposition is pursuing a gradualist strategy, quietly marshalling its forces and developing organizational networks. But the regime is also consolidating and reinforcing its repressive apparatus in anticipation of any serious challenge, with the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps emerging as the dominant power bloc within the fractious ruling elite.
“It’s not just a matter of the Guards dominating the economy, but of controlling the state,” said Alireza Nader, co-author of a comprehensive RAND report on the Revolutionary Guards. “A lot of it is about ideology, but a lot of it is about money, too,” he said.
Could you elaborate about different typye of green movement. inside and outside iran and who is funding them?
Arash with all due respect your question shows that you did not understood the point of the article, it intended to say that the green movement in Iran is self mobilizing and not organized and founded in a formal way!