Neda Agha Soultan

The video started to roll on my PC monitor showing the legs of someone being dragged along the street accompanied by other legs. Slowly the pair of legs dragged along lay down on the ground covered with blood and then I could discern the face of a woman with her eyes open wide and unable to speak. There was no eloquence in her eyes and I don’t remember them to be beautiful either. What remained with clarity were a shocked and vacant look in her eyes. Two people were bent over her, one cradling her head and the other trying to stop the blood oozing out of the bullet wound on her chest. She was dying. A moment later blood gushed out of her mouth down to her ears and all this time the shouting of the people around her stunned by the strange accident and probably watching their friend die in front of their eyes, kept her company. She was walking along the street, speaking into her mobile phone and was probably passing through a pro-democracy gathering when shots rang out and people around her found her shot. She has now become the martyred face of Iran’s pro-democracy movement without even her own permission. Human beings never had a choice on their own destiny, helping to make life strangely beautiful and cruel at the same time.