Waking up to a bad dream....

iranian presidential election 2009 subjective and incomplete report by seda naiumadIran
https://un.poivron.org/~tasche/index.php?page=index

tue, june 23, 3.32 am, today i suddenly lost my fear in the midst of streetfightings. it is so weird which rollercoster of emotions one experiences in these past weeks, days, hours, minutes. on saturday the presence of raging militia plus the expectation of gunfire made me scared shitless. it also created this feeling of hopelessness and powerlessness. today i hadn't planned to go to any demonstrations. i was invited for dinner and i decided to go earlier to not get into any trouble on the street. they were saying that there is a demonstration at ferdowsi and i wanted to go to karim khan which is further up. my friends told me that hafte tir is calm. i got on a taxi to hafte tir at parkway. we got stuck in thick traffic and the driver choose to go through the little alleys instead. but we got stuck there too. slowly getting closer to hafte tir suddenly people were running towards us. they ran in the middle of the street between the cars and on the sidewalk. after them came black motorbikes with men in camouflage and black with batons and paintball guns. they were big guys, their faces distorted from the wish to destroy. they looked like they were on cocain. with high speed they drove on the sidewalk trying to single out individuals to catch them. the men on the backseats were shooting with orange paintballs.

in the taxi the guys in the backseat were on their way to the demonstration. they commented the events outside with dry sarcastic humour. one said: 'mister, i guess closing the window is better then not closing the window.' then they were complaining about the orange colour of the paintballs. it would not match with their t-shirts. outside the men on motorcycles had caught one young man. he tried to escape, one man drove his motorbike into his legs. the boy fell over the motorbike headover really badly while batons were hitting him from everywhere. a scream escaped me. it looked really ugly. at the same time the paintball guns created this sense of absurdity that almost made me laugh. he escaped in a miracolous way. the taxi moved and we passed another young men that they had actually caught. it was awfull to watch. there were four men holding him while four others hit him with batons, kicked him and pushed him. i don't know what happend to him as we drove further. the cars were all honking in protest. people looked from balconies and windows, shopkeepers stood in front of their shops. these days shopkeepers have often been the last refuge for people. they let people in who try to escape from the 'police' and shut the iron shutter. the traffic did not move a bit. in front of us one of the black vans that carry niru entezami or sepah, i can't seperate all the different forces any more. whatever they were. the men on the van looked like robocops from a computergame. after some time the driver said, that he probably wouldn't make it to the square. together with a chadori woman i decided to get out of the car and walk. we were just around the corner from hafte tir. when I arrived at the square i was first shocked. basidj, and armed forces of all possible kinds everywhere. some of them looked dangerous others lookes completly pityful and out of place. then this unit of youngster marched in. juje basidj - chicken basidj. they were on the verge of puberty some had fluffy hair on their upper lip most didn't. they were maybe 12, 13, 14. I had the same weird feelings as when watching the paintball cops in that sureal videogame appearance. it was to absurd to be true. i felt like laughing and screaming at the same time.