Every few years a man, or a woman, whose name is often familiar to few beyond the circle of their family and friends, is ambling through a more or less anonymous life when they find themselves ambushed by history. For many of these people, their life changes forever. Frequently, tragically, it ends; leaving behind an image that haunts the world long after they themselves have gone.
Neda Soltan was such a person, a young beautiful woman who had studied philosophy, was now an aspiring singer, who found herself abruptly catapulted from the crowds of Tehran to become the face of protest against Iran’s repressive rulers; a symbol of rebellion against the fraudulent election that had just returned Mahmoud Ahmedinejad to power.
Like the nameless student who taunted that tank in Tiananmen Square, like Jan Palach, the Czech student who died after setting himself alight in Wenceslas Square in January 1969 to protest against the Soviet-led invasion of Czechoslovakia, Neda Soltan became the icon for the mutiny against Iran’s brutish regime as images of her face, and amateur footage of her murder by a sniper from the pro-government Basij militia, sprinted around the world. Like the photograph taken in South Vietnam of a bewildered young girl, the victim of a napalm attack, running naked down a road; and like the images of those skin-and-bones internees, standing semi-naked in the prison camp run by Bosnian Serb forces in Omarska in 1992, their ribs as prominent as xylophone keys, the image of Neda Soltan lying bleeding on a Tehran street has become the shorthand for the horrors of a conflict. With their beseeching eyes such images become, as the war photographer Don McCullin has pointed out, our modern versions of religious icons.
Certainly a superior choice to the Political Class bank’s CEO: Goldman’s Lloyd Blankein.