My Person of the Year: Neda Agha Soltan

Unlike TIME magazine and FT who respectively chose FED Chairman Ben Bernanke and Goldman Sachs' CEO Lloyd Blankfein as their "person of the year", the Times of London (UK) newspaper has chosen a very modest person, who gave her life not in the pursuit of capital or saving the financial behemoths of Wall Street from their own self-inflicted greed, but rather for simple measures that we in the West take for granted every day.

Neda Soltan was not political. She did not vote in the Iranian presidential election on June 12. The young student was appalled, however, by the way that the regime shamelessly rigged the result and reinstalled Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. Ignoring the pleas of her family, she went with her music teacher eight days later to join a huge opposition demonstration in Tehran.

“Even if a bullet goes through my heart it’s not important,” she told Caspian Makan, her fiancé. “What we’re fighting for is more important. When it comes to taking our stolen rights back we should not hesitate. Everyone is responsible. Each person leaves a footprint in this world.”

In Iran Neda has become the face of the revolution against the aging, sclerotic, and corrupt Mullahs.  Vigils and shrines were established across the country to commemorate her murder by a Basij militiaman on a motorcycle as she protested and chanted, "Death to the dictator!"  The Times elaborates:

It was not hard to see why Ms Soltan so quickly became the face of the opposition, the Iranian equivalent of the young man who confronted China’s tanks during the Tiananmen Square demonstrations 20 years earlier. She was young and pretty, innocent, brave and modern. She wore make-up beneath her mandatory headscarf, jeans and trainers beneath her long, black coat, and liked to travel. She transcended the narrow confines of religion, nationality and ideology. She evoked almost universal empathy.

The cowardice of the Mullahs and their police apparatus reached new heights in the months that followed her death.  The regime banned public displays of mourning, intimidated and jailed witnesses who observed her death, harassed Neda's family to prevent them from talking in public, and blamed foreign journalists for her death.

The corporate yes-men who have bankrupted our states, the war-mongers intent on justifying torture and genocide, and the shifty immoral politicans who run our governments and collectively represent the very worst of humanity, deserve nothing but contempt.  We however, as individuals can look through the veil fashioned by the corporate media and find virtue and human decency even in the darkest corners of this world.  This is why I too, even though her life was short and her contribution an accident, feel that Neha Soltan deserves to be known by us all; because her struggles and the ideals of the Green Revolution are our struggles.

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For more information on Neda and the international response to her death, PBS's Frontline has an excellent documentary that is viewable online and also has a set of links on the subject.