30 years ago, the Iranian Shah was deposed, and was replaced with the theocratic Islamic Republic.

Last week, the Iranian public went to the polls to determine their new president. Since the polls closed, and Ahmadinajed declared the winner, many Iranians have taken to the streets, but there has been an almost complete media blackout.

But the regime has struggled to close all channels, and one of the most prolific has been Twitter. Just looking at the hash list for #iranelection nets an evergrowing number of tweets from people in Iran and participating in the protests that are continuing (and, unfortunately, a lot of hashed spam, too).

I’ve only been following one Twitter account – but what has been posted there is eye-opening and, at some points, rather harrowing. @Change_for_Iran appears to be one or more university students in Tehran, and is apparently reporting events that are happening in and around the part of the city he is in. (I say ‘appears’ and ‘apparently’ because there really isn’t anyway to confirm that a Twitter account is authentic – but in this case, that is a good thing as it makes it harder for Iranian security forces to track the origin of the tweets).

It now appears that the university and neighbourhood have been overrun by the Iranian Republican Guard and there have been shootings and deaths.

Living here in South Australia, it is almost impossible to imagine such a situation – and the same would be so for most of the readers of this blog. We are in established democracies. I don’t know about Australia itself – but that last major riots and protests in the UK were in the early to mid-80s, and they were nothing on the scale of what seems to be happening over there in Iran.

I wish that there were more that I could do other than read these postings, and other images and stories which are filtering through the communications barrier setup in Iran.

I really hope that these democratic reform revolutionaries are successful in achieving what they are working towards – and I really hope that they have outside help (the west was happy to invade Iraq and seek regime change – so why not help establish another democracy right next door?)

I’ve just read that the Guardian Council, the true power in Iran, will recount the votes in the election – but without independent witnesses, any recount is a nonsense.