The Killing of Neda – Arash Hejazi

For the eyes of Neda (Per gli occhi di Neda) – L’espresso 23-06-2011

Arash Hejazi — Mon, 01 May 2017 10:48:05 +0000

Neda, the girl who died so the world knew

Arash Hejazi — Tue, 19 Jun 2012 20:03:09 +0000

Three years ago, on 20 June 2009, Neda, the Iranian girl, bled to death on the streets of Tehran, shot by an Iranian pro-government militiaman during the protests to the fraudulent presidential elections.

She was one of hundreds of people who were slain by the Iranian brutal government, just because she aspired for change. Right before she died, her gaze was captured on a cameraphone, circulated the web, and caught the attention of millions around the world and became the most watched death in the history.

In the days after she died, the international media went hysterical about this tragedy. Presidents and Prime Ministers condemned it, the Iranian people called for justice, the Iranian government denied it. But her death had moved millions. The world now knew. They knew that in the mysterious land of Iran, there also lives a generation who is so much like their peers around the world, a generation who wants to find joy in life, wants to have a voice, and is ready to give up everything in the quest for freedom.

However, three years have passed now. The green movement has been suppressed violently, hundreds of people are in prison, hundreds in anonymous graves, and those who have a grave are under constant surveillance lest people pay homage to them.

Three years have passed and the world has moved on. Their only concern about Iran is for the nuclear ambitions, for which no evidence exists. In the meantime, those who shouted for freedom have fallen into despair, feeling that the world has forgotten them. In the meantime, the world no longer remembers Neda, the girl who stared into the camera seconds before she died, saying ‘look at me, don’t forget that they killed me, because I wanted to have a voice.’

The media has moved on, they no longer care about the most watched death in the world, it’s the time of Euro games, and then Olympics.

And the brutal Iranian regime looks back at all the crimes and injustice it committed in the last three years, and realised that no one really cares anymore. The fundamental regime smiles and says, ‘I did the right thing to kill all those who protested. I’ll do the same next time. After all, everyone would forget the bloodshed before the next Olympic games

Arash Hejazi’s Interview with BBC World – Outlook – Thu, 22 Dec 11

Arash Hejazi — Fri, 23 Dec 2011 13:22:35 +0000

The doctor who got death threats after trying to save the life of Neda Agha-Soltan, the young woman who became the symbol of the anti-government protests in Iran in 2009.

Listen to the interview here.

Arash Hejazi’s interview with Radio Netherland about his memoir The Gaze of the Gazelle

Arash Hejazi — Sat, 03 Dec 2011 13:34:23 +0000

As British embassy officials flee Iran, we speak to an Iranian man in the UK: Arash Hejazi.

He’s the doctor who tried to rescue Neda Agha-Soltan, the young woman who was shot during the 2009 protests in Tehran and became an icon of the struggle for democracy there. YouTube: Death of Neda (warning: graphic content)

Arash talks to host Jonathan Groubert about living through four decades of tumult in Iran before finally hitting his breaking point.

The Gaze of the Gazelle is Arash Hejazi’s memoir of growing up and then fleeing Iran.

Listen to the interview here:

http://english.arashhejazi.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/12/en_the_state_were_in_20111203_64_44_2.mp3

Book Review: The Gaze of the Gazelle, the memoir of a little boy who became a revolutionary for truth

Arash Hejazi — Sat, 22 Oct 2011 13:10:17 +0000

Source: Middle East Book Review

We talk about the tyranny of the Shah of Iran and the even worse tyranny of the Mullah’s that followed. We talk about the politics of Iran today and its role in terrorism, violence and the instability of the Middle East. We talk about the conflict that the United States started using their dictator pal Saddam Hussein, and quickly forget the hardships that were wrought on the people of Iran and also Iraq. And we talk about the Middle East conflict as if it is just another story.

Yet what we don’t talk about are the lives that were destroyed and permanently altered, reshaped violently and the many deaths, most of the dead are names and faces we will never know or see.

Iran has been but a political square in a political debate. But it is a nation of enslaved people, enslaved under the pro-Western backed tyrant the Shah Reza Pahlavi and then by the Ayatollah Khomeini and then again by the little dictator President Ahmedinejad.

Arash Hejazi tells the story to the Western World that is so ignorant of the facts of the Middle East and the Persian Gulf and the Islamic World in a way that puts a human face on its cover. “The Gaze of the Gazelle” is a poignant retelling of all the history we have accepted as political rhetoric in a human form. The story of real people who were impacted by our policies and our political viciousness and our stereotyped rhetoric and racism in America.

The story begins from the eyes of a young boy and watches as the world around him collapses following the fall of the Shah and the Rise of the Mullah tyrants. Then there is the war with the US backed Iraq and Saddam Hussein and the destruction in brought on everyone in the country. He tells the story of how he watched the Revolution turn from a people’s movement to another vicious dictatorship, this time religious and twisted. And he recounts the day when he was only 17 and watched the Mullah’s soldiers pull aside a young Muslim woman who was also only 17 and shoot her in the head in front of a crowd of frightened observers.

He watched as his family life was destroyed and his friends and his father’s friends fled or vanished.

No one could speak but Arash managed to launch a publishing company and his struggle to get the true story out about the criminal behaviour of the leaders of Iran is a compelling story that every American should read. It was our tax dollars that paid for the bullets that fired into the brains of young women by the mullahs, that bought the scimitars that were used to cut off the heads of dissidents, and that funded the bombs that rained down on millions of innocent people.

We owe it to the Iranian people to at least try to learn the truth.

“The Gaze of the Gazelle” offers one window into the horrors of the history of Iran under tyrannical oppression over the years.

I couldn’t put this book down. It read swiftly and cleanly and with a comprehension that was utterly shocking to me. I urge everyone to read this memoir of a little boy who became a revolutionary for truth.
Read the full review here

The National’s Review on The Gaze of the Gazelle: Witness to a death that changed history

Arash Hejazi — Tue, 04 Oct 2011 15:14:16 +0000

The Gaze of the Gazelle, Arash Hejazi's memoir on the story of Neda has been published in English, German and Italian

Source: Noori Passela, The National, Sep 16, 2011

Arash Hejazi is an Iranian writer, publisher, doctor and one of the few to witness Neda Agha-Soltan’s dying moments first-hand, when he captured it on a mobile-phone camera during the 2009 riots. It was his choice to upload the video, whichsparked an international media frenzy over the death of the bright-eyed young woman.

Forced to leave his country and live in exile due to his prominent role as an opponent of the Ahmedinejad regime, it is no surprise that Hejazi comes across as a weary narrator.

Along with Hejazi’s recollections of his youth and experiences in Iran’s publishing industry, The Gaze of the Gazelle is also an account of the nation’s history of uprisings – political, religious and cultural. From being prosecuted by hardline Islamists for his outspoken attitude at college to the difficulties he endures under Iran’s strict censorship regulations, Hejazi spares little in recounting the decline that finally culminated in the incident that put him in the global spotlight.

Hard-hitting and direct, this book provides valuable revelations about a struggle that receivedvery little coverage inside Iran.

A review on The Gaze of the Gazelle: Witness to a death that changed history

Arash Hejazi — Sun, 02 Oct 2011 00:25:22 +0000

Source: Noori Passela, The National, Sep 16, 2011

Forced to leave his country and live in exile due to his prominent role as an opponent of the Ahmedinejad regime, it is no surprise that Hejazi comes across as a weary narrator.

Hard-hitting and direct, this book provides valuable revelations about a struggle that receivedvery little coverage inside Iran.

The killing of Neda Agha Soltan & an extract from The Gaze of the Gazelle

Arash Hejazi — Sat, 23 Jul 2011 16:50:06 +0000

Arash Hejazi John Angerson

Martin Fletcher, Saturday Times Magazine

July 23 2011 2:52PM

Arash Hejazi witnessed the shooting of Iranian student Soltan in Tehran in 2009. What he did next would rock the regime – and change his life for ever

The house is part of a bland new estate on the western edge of Oxford. In its sparsely furnished living room, the floor littered with toys, a young boy is playing computer games. His mother is making coffee, but his father, though physically present, is mentally a thousand miles away from this mundane scene. He is on his laptop, watching camera-phone footage of an event that has changed his life for ever, and may eventually be seen as the beginning of the end of one of the world’s most pernicious regimes.

The jerky, 47-second clip shows an attractive young woman wearing jeans and sneakers beneath a long black coat. She is outside on a street, and being lowered gently to the ground by two men. One has grey hair tied back in a ponytail. The other is younger and wears a white shirt and jeans.

As she lies on her back, the woman’s brown eyes swivel sideways towards the camera. “Don’t be afraid, Neda. Don’t be afraid,” the older man implores her. Suddenly a stream of dark red blood spurts from her mouth and runs down the side of her face. Then a second stream of blood gushes from her nose, drowning an eye.

There is panic in the voices of those around her. “Stay, Neda. Stay with me!” the first man cries. “Open her mouth. Open her airways,” yells the man in the white shirt as he presses on a wound in her chest in a desperate attempt to save her. Seconds later it is all over. The woman is dead. An onlooker holds out his hands, palms open, in apparent despair and bewilderment.

The woman was, of course, Neda Agha Soltan, the 27-year-old Iranian student shot dead during one of the massive street protests that rocked Tehran following President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s blatantly rigged re-election in June 2009. The man with the ponytail was her music teacher, and the man in the white shirt is Arash Hejazi, 40, a doctor-turned-publisher who is now sitting in his rented house in Oxford watching the video clip.

This thoughtful, softly spoken Iranian has watched the footage 100 times before, and with good reason. He could so easily have left the scene, washed Soltan’s blood from his hands and kept silent. Instead he took a stand. He resolved to let the world know what the regime had done to Soltan, how evil had destroyed innocence. In a forthcoming book, The Gaze of the Gazelle, he reveals how he himself posted the video on the internet within an hour of her death. He recounts how, as the regime did its best to discredit the footage that had ricocheted around the planet and made Soltan a symbol of its barbarity, he fled to Britain and told the world how she had been shot by a government militiaman.

Read the rest of this article here

For Neda: The film: Tuesday 21 June, 10.00 PM on More 4 (UK only)

Arash Hejazi — Thu, 16 Jun 2011 17:40:32 +0000

On 20 June 2009, Neda Agha Soltan was shot in the heart by a sniper and lay bleeding to death in a backstreet of Tehran. Within hours of her death this young Iranian woman’s dying moments, captured on mobile phones, were appearing on computer screens across the world.

Anthony Thomas’s film tells Neda’s personal story and attempts to find out who this young woman was, how she became a powerful symbol to millions and what she was fighting for.

The film not only shows the plight of the Iranian citizens who peacefully fought to free their country from its current government regime, but also the ongoing struggle the women of Iran face every day in an attempt to live a life free from oppression.

The only way to get to the heart of the story was to work inside Iran, at a time when foreign film-makers are forbidden entry, and Iranians themselves risk arrest and long-term imprisonment if caught filming without official approval.

The film won the Foreign Press Association’s Best TV Feature/ Documentary Award and was among 2011′s Peabody Awards winners list.

Read More

Arash Hejazi’s Interview with the Italian Magazine Io Dona: I can’t live in silence, Neda’s eyes hunt me

Arash Hejazi — Fri, 20 May 2011 19:17:25 +0000

“Non posso vivere nel silenzio, gli occhi di Neda mi perseguitano”

Dal suo rifugio a Londra parla ilmedico che cercò di salvare la studentessa-simbolo della rivolta iraniana. E che trovò il coraggio graziea Paolo Coelho

di Emanuela Zuccalà, Io Dona, 20 May 2011

UNA RAGAZZA A TERRA, il volto percorso da rivoli di sangue scuro. Due uomini tentanodi rianimarla. Uno urla: “Resta con me!”. Le grida della folla crescono tragiche e confuse. Era il 20 giugno 2009: a Teheran milioni di persone manifestavano contro i brogli elettorali, che avevano portato alla vittoria del presidente Mahmud Ahmadinejad sull’avversario riformista Mir-Hossein Mousavi. Neda Soltani, 26 anni, studentessa di Filosofia freddata da un miliziano, diventava il simbolo dei giovani iraniani affamati di libertà. La sua morte in diretta, ripresa da un telefonino, si diffondeva per il globo attraverso YouTube: un documento eccezionale, che rivelava senza filtri la brutalità del regime iraniano. A metterlo online era stato lo stesso uomo in camicia bianca che nel video cerca di salvare Neda. E che adesso siede di fronte a me in un appartamento di Londra.

Read the Rest of the Interview Here