Der virtuelle Iran ist frei

Nazila Fathi arbeitete lange als Journalistin in Iran. Sie beschreibt in einem spannenden Artikel in der New York Times wie sie die Proteste im Juni letzten Jahres erlebt hat und warum sie sich schweren Herzens für die Flucht nach Kanada entschied. Ihrer Ansicht nach eröffnen moderne Kommunikationstechnologien der Opposition in Iran und im Ausland Möglichkeiten der Vernetzung und des Informationsaustauschs, die sich dem Zugriff des Regimes bis heute erfolgreich entziehen.

For me, that was like a new dawn: rather than being cut off, I had made contact with another Iran — a virtual one on the Internet, linking reformers abroad to bloggers and demonstrators still inside the country, and to reporters and sources outside. In fact, by following blogs and the cellphone videos seeping out of Iran, in some ways I could report more productively than when I had to fear and outwit the government. For example, my contacts helped me find and interview a young man who had left Iran after being in prison, where he said a guard had raped him. That interview could not have happened in Iran. Last month, I could freely translate the harsh slogans that protestors hurled about the supreme religious leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. There were palpably genuine videos on YouTube from places I recognized, with crowds chanting slogans I knew — or new ones.