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On Iran streets, diverse views on clash over British captives
On vacation when the crisis arose, the Iranian public is now debating what to do.
By Iason Athanasiadis | Contributor to The Christian Science Monitorfrom the April 3, 2007 edition
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TEHRAN, IRAN - As Tehran and London squared off over the capture of 15 British sailors and marines, Iranians were on holiday, largely unaware of the magnitude of the latest international quarrel involving their country.
Much of the news about the detainees was broadcast not in native Farsi but in Arabic on a channel controlled by the Revolutionary Guard Corps, the elite military unit that seized the British vessels on March 23.
This week, though, Iranians head back to work, newspapers begin publishing again, and the country has started to tune in after two weeks of vacation to mark the Persian New Year.
A Sunday protest of some 200 pro-regime demonstrators at the British Embassy in Tehran – they threw firecrackers and briefly scaled a perimeter fence before being repelled by Iranian police – also helped shift what had seemed to be a debate between Iranian hard-liners and British diplomats to more of a domestic concern.
"This is turning the international community more and more against us," says Shahram Khateri, a veteran of the eight-year Iran-Iraq War.
"Maybe the British did enter our waters, but this government must handle the issue in a wiser way and not escalate," he says.
Mashallah, an auto-parts trader who spent seven years in prison after his involvement in leftist activities at the beginning of the 1979 Iranian Revolution, says he can guess what the 15 British marines and sailors may be experiencing.
"This government is expert at psychological pressure," he says, analyzing the performance of the British detainees who have been seen here on videotapes released to the media.
"They may have put them in isolation for two days before their first confession and told them that if you don't apologize, Britain and Iran may go to war," he speculates.
Mahmoud, a sculptor and intellectual, says, "People remember the experience of the US hostage siege and how it became a game of the system against the West. So this time they remain outside the media furor and unmobilized. Once bitten, twice shy."
Iranians have been more interested lately in rising inflation and captivated by the saga of Shahram Jazayeri, the high-profile Iranian financial criminal who escaped in February and was recaptured in Dubai recently, than whether the British detainees were in Iranian or Iraqi waters.
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