Then They Came for Me: A Family’s Story of Love, Captivity, and Survival

by Maziar Bahari

  “All journalists are spies,” the commander said. “If you don’t move from here in the next five minutes, we’ll put all of you in the truck and take you to Evin.” The mere mention of Evin, the most notorious prison in Iran, where many political prisoners were held, sent chills down our spines, and we left immediately.

  A couple of blocks away, I called Davood to see if he was free to drive me around the city. I had received a few calls from friends, telling me about clashes they were witnessing between young people and the Basij and the Guards, and I wanted to investigate this myself. But Davood did not answer his phone.

  I decided instead to take a taxi to Mousavi’s headquarters in Vali Asr Square. Clearly, I was not the only person who’d had this idea. Outside of the headquarters, hundreds of people were gathered, and here, too, they were being held back by the anti-riot police and the Guards, who were blocking the sidewalk leading to the headquarters and turning away anyone who approached. I pushed my way through the crowd toward an officer and shouted to him that I needed to get to a shop on the other side. He shouted back at me to move on, but just as I began to pull away, a plainclothes officer came from behind me and kicked me hard in the back. He then pushed me toward the line of anti-riot police. I fell onto one of the officers, who instantly kicked me and struck my arm with his club.

  “Gomsho, madar ghahbeh,” he yelled. “Get lost, motherfucker.”

  Stunned by the pain in my back and arm, I was somehow able to keep my wits about me. I was not a reporter anymore; I was part of the people. Holding my throbbing arm, I glanced quickly around me. The policemen were holding high-voltage clubs rather than their traditional batons. I knew then that they had foreseen that there would be chaos following the election, and had come prepared. My thoughts turned to the video camera in my bag. If they were to find it, they would arrest me on the spot. I walked away swiftly with my head down, weaving through the crowd as if I were just an ordinary pedestrian caught in the chaos.

  I later learned that the police had been given clear orders to disperse all gatherings close to Mousavi’s office or the Ministry of Interior building, a ten-minute walk away. They didn’t want people sharing information or potentially plotting some sort of retaliation, and so they reacted violently as soon as they saw more than two people talking. As I quickened my pace, I glanced back at the crowd to see a number of policemen striking people’s legs and backs with their clubs.

  I was watching this atrocious spectacle from the far side of the street when suddenly an anti-riot policeman charged toward me and the other bystanders. “What are you looking at, haroomzadeha, you bastards?” the officer barked, as he and others thrust their plastic shields into the crowd and lashed out with their clubs. I wanted to get a better look at the officers, but their faces were blurred behind their thick plastic anti-riot panels. I stood for a moment in stunned disbelief before I was quickly jolted back to reality with a shove from the crowd. A wave of people began to run away from Mousavi’s headquarters. I ran too, swept along in the crowd, and as we bolted, people shouted out to one another about where to go. Stores and offices along the street opened their doors to passing men and women searching for a place to hide. I suppose that we had all suspected that the police would stop some demonstrators, but no one had anticipated this level of violence.

  As I ran, I saw two mothers who were trapped by the crowd and desperately holding on to their children. No matter which way they turned, there was a wall of people, and the police were approaching fast. The mothers cried out to the crowd for help. An old man with a Muslim prayer cap and white stubble on his face was standing at the door of a nearby building. On hearing the cries, he pushed his way through the crowd and reached out to both women. He took them by their arms and began pulling them toward his building. One of the mothers, with a chubby face and the big dark eyes of a Persian miniature, nodded her head again and again in a gesture of thanks to the old man as she ushered first all the children and then the other mother into the building before quickly stepping in herself. The old man shut the door just as the anti-riot policemen lunged toward them. With the door slammed in their faces, the policemen retaliated by kicking the metal and slamming it with their clubs. The man refused to open the door. The rest of the crowd, which had until that moment remained passive toward the police, grew suddenly wild with indignation.

  “Velesh kon, velesh kon!” they chanted. “Leave him alone!” They began to throw anything they could get their hands on at the officers. Stones and tree branches were hurled, and the officers, realizing that they were outnumbered, ran away. The crowd cheered, but only momentarily. Almost immediately, out of nowhere, dozens of policemen on black motorbikes roared to the scene from the north side of the street. When the motorcycles stopped, no one knew what the officers were going to do. Suddenly five or six officers got off their bikes, took out bulky black guns, and simultaneously fired tear gas into the crowd. Some tear-gas canisters exploded in the air and some released the chemicals as they hit the ground. It took most people a few moments to understand what had hit them. Everyone rushed to escape, but there was no way out.

  As we were trapped from the north and the south, we tried to find another way out. Luckily, I had attended high school in the area and knew the streets quite well. On one occasion back then my friends and I fought with, and had to escape from, a group of Basijis in the very same streets. As the Guards charged toward the crowd from the south and the policemen from the north, I darted down a side street I had taken shelter in twenty-five years earlier, and I kept running until I was out of breath.

  I stopped near a medic who was tending to a sixteen-year-old boy. His brother kept on calling his name: “Reza, Reza joon.” Reza was semiconscious, and his blue short-sleeved shirt was drenched in blood. His brother, Maysam, was standing nearby, throwing the books he had been holding in the direction of the riot police.

  “Khaar kos deh ha, madar jendeh ha!” he yelled, his voice brimming with anger. “Sisterfuckers, motherfuckers!” These are the worst insults in Iran, but enraged by the sight of his brother covered with blood, Maysam didn’t seem to care.

  I ran up to Maysam and asked what had happened. He told me that he and Reza were coming back from language school when the riot police attacked them without provocation, striking them with clubs. When Reza fell on the ground, a plainclothes intelligence officer kicked him in the head. The medic, an older man with stubble on his chin, looked pained as he tended to Reza’s wounds. I asked the medic if he needed any help. When he glanced up at me, I saw that he was on the verge of tears.

  “I didn’t know this is what they wanted to do. I didn’t know,” he said. When I asked him what he meant, he told me that he worked for Iran’s Red Crescent organization—the Muslim version of the Red Cross. He and his colleagues had each been called at home the night before and had been told to be ready for a showdown.

  I said good-bye and kept walking until I found a man on a motorcycle who agreed to take me to my mother’s house. As we bounced over the rocky streets, I felt a sharp pain in my back, and noticed that my right arm where I’d been hit with the club had gone numb.

  · · ·

  As soon as I got home, I swallowed a few painkillers, hoping that my arm was not fractured. The government had issued a ban on reporting about any postelection demonstrations, and I knew that many reporters would be afraid to disobey the ban. But I felt differently. Given my knowledge of Iran, my contacts in the government, and my sources in the foreign media, I was in a unique position to report on the disputed election and the chaos that followed.

  I wanted to talk to Paola, but I was afraid to call her; I didn’t want her to hear the pain or fear in my voice. I was also anxious about what I knew I was going to have to tell her eventually: that I wouldn’t be coming home in a few days, as we had planned. If things were going to get violent, I had to stay and report on them. Unlike many stories I had covered in the past, I cared very deeply, on a personal level, about this one. A voice ins
ide me, maybe my father’s or Maryam’s, was urging me to stay and witness what would be the result of the turmoil that had taken over our country.

  I was relieved to find my mother asleep in her bedroom. I had Reza’s blood on my shirt, and I didn’t want her to see it. I quietly closed the door, washed my shirt, and turned the television on. Khamenei’s picture filled the screen. A narrator was reading his letter to Ahmadinejad on the occasion of his victory. “Enemies may want to spoil the sweetness of this event with some kind of ill-intentioned provocations,” the voice said over different close-ups of Khamenei’s solemn face.

  I hit Mute and watched in silence as images of the triumphant Ahmadinejad and self-satisfied Khamenei saturated the airwaves. I brought my laptop to the living room and began a story for Newsweek. “If an electoral fraud, tantamount to a coup, has indeed happened, most people believe that it was staged with Khamenei’s blessing,” I wrote.

  That evening, the Ministry of Interior released the final count: Ahmadinejad had received 24,592,793 votes, and Mousavi 13,338,121. The votes for the other two candidates were negligible. If these numbers were taken as accurate, only two conclusions could be drawn: either all the surveys by different government agencies in the run-up to the election had been wrong, or Iranians as a people are so unpredictable that no survey or poll can predict their voting patterns. Alternatively, and this was my feeling given my conversations with Amir and what I’d witnessed on the street that day, something else was at play: under Khamenei’s command, the Guards had helped officials at the Ministry of Interior rig the votes and reelect Ahmadinejad. Ahmadinejad was the only candidate who guaranteed that the interests of the supreme leader and the Guards were protected. I suspected that Khamenei had supported rigging the election so flagrantly to prove that he was the one in charge and no one could do anything about it. The sporadic clashes around the country over the next two days suggested that I was not alone in thinking that.

  · · ·

  The next day, Sunday, June 14, Ahmadinejad held a press conference in the office of the president, on Pasteur Street in south Tehran. In the large white room with its decorative varnished wood panels, I sat among the dozens of Iranian and foreign journalists, taking notes and concentrating on remaining professional, even as I felt the anger inside me growing. The newly reelected president spent the first part of the press conference boasting about his win. When reporters asked about allegations of vote rigging, he barely batted an eye: Mousavi supporters “are like a football team that has lost a game but keeps on insisting that it has won,” he said. He flashed a malicious smile and added, “You’ve lost. Why don’t you accept it?”

  Ahmadinejad’s handlers carefully chose the reporters who were allowed to ask questions. Except for a few journalists, most of them wasted time by lobbing the same questions about the future of Iran’s nuclear program. Ahmadinejad had been asked that question several times in the past and had a perfectly formulated answer: Iran wants nuclear energy for peaceful purposes and because it is our inalienable right. I was so angry with the many journalists who didn’t dare confront him about what was on all our minds: the election result and the postelection protests. Finally, the interpreter asked Max Rodenbeck of The Economist to come forward.

  “Mr. President, you accused the foreign press of a slanderous campaign against Iran, and, in fact, we see with our eyes and we hear with our ears—and I think there are hundreds of us here now—and what we have seen is an election whose results millions of Iranians do not believe in. Why hasn’t the full count of the election been revealed? Do you think that this could damage the legitimacy of your own government, of the Islamic Republic, as well as the prestige of the supreme leader?”

  I later learned that Max was chosen because Ahmadinejad’s people thought that a reporter from The Economist would ask a question about the economy. The president stared at Max for a long time before answering. “Where did you hear that the people do not accept the vote count? Have you been in touch with forty million people? You see the few people you like to see. That is your mistake. You give these reports to your peoples and your governments, and you are misleading them, too.”

  He then invited Max, as well as the rest of the reporters in the room, to join him at a rally afterward. There were hundreds of thousands of Ahmadinejad supporters in Vali Asr Square when the other journalists and I arrived there about an hour later. Many of them carried pictures of Ruhollah Khomeini and Ali Khamenei. A few people carried pictures of Mousavi with a large X painted over his face.

  Ahmadinejad took the stage like a rock star. Surrounded by his bodyguards, he congratulated the people for electing him and spoke of his honest campaign. As his supporters started to tear the pictures of Mousavi and the other candidates from the walls around the square, Ahmadinejad claimed that unlike his competitors, who were the representatives of the wealthy and powerful, he was the president of poor and ordinary Iranians.

  He repeated his football analogy and said that the supporters of the losing team were trying to change the results. “But it doesn’t matter what a bunch of khas o khashak”—dust and dirt—“are doing,” he said. “The pure tides of this nation will eventually get rid of them.”

  Ahmadinejad’s speech added insult to the Mousavi supporters’ injury. People could accept a defeat, but not humiliation. Everywhere, afterward, people talked about Ahmadinejad’s use of the phrase khas o khashak. Mousavi had asked his followers to avoid any confrontation with the security forces and to reject the use of violence, and up to this point, most people had restrained their anger. But that was changing fast. Calling millions of citizens “dust and dirt” was the last straw.

  Young people all around Tehran started to clash with the police and the Basij. The police exhibited no restraint in attacking protestors and passersby alike. As the people became more frustrated, the police and the Guards became more organized. The anti-riot units had orders to leave no space for Mousavi supporters to move in the city. They took over sidewalks and beat up anyone who didn’t get out of their way.

  I went around the city by motorcycle and taxi, and when there was no way to get through the traffic, I walked. The city was quickly sinking into bedlam. Gangs of anti-riot police on motorcycles roamed the streets, menacing drivers and stopping traffic seemingly at random. A driver on Beheshti Avenue honked his horn in protest when policemen on motorcycles blocked his way. Within an instant, three or four cops got off their bikes and smashed the car’s windows with their clubs. They seemed to have a personal grudge against side mirrors and didn’t stop hitting the car until both mirrors fell to the ground. The driver put his hands on his head and ducked down, but one of the policemen dragged him out of the car and to the sidewalk, where another officer started slapping him.

  “What are you looking at?” a policeman asked me as he pushed my face away with his hand. I didn’t see his face; all I could see were his black leather gloves with the tips of the fingers cut off and a shiny fortified plastic elbow cap strapped on top of his black uniform. “Nothing, nothing,” I said, striding away as fast as I could.

  As I walked wearily along Vali Asr Avenue that evening, I saw four or five officers beating an old woman with a club because she’d protested that they were blocking the entrance to her house. The woman collapsed with the first blow. Her black head scarf fell to her shoulders. As I saw the club hitting the woman’s backside, I felt her pain in my body as well. It was the same kind of electric instrument I’d been hit with the day before. Watching this scene but unable to act, I felt like a coward. I had my video camera in my rucksack, but I was afraid to take it out. I was afraid to help the woman because I didn’t want to risk arrest and imprisonment. I felt as if my feet were pinned to the ground. I wanted to beat the attackers off, but there were too many of them for me to be able to help her. As I was debating what to do, the beating ended. As soon as the Guards moved away, I and a couple of other men helped her into her house.

  “Khamenei will pay for this. He will pa
y for this,” she said, crying gently.

  Feeling utterly helpless, I went back home. At nine P.M., I sat down weakly in front of the television. Ahmadinejad’s victory speech and Khamenei’s message congratulating him were playing on a repeating loop. The extent to which this government was willing to publicly humiliate its people was revolting.

  Before long, my phone rang. It was Davood. He said that he and his buddies had been drinking since the election results. “I feel much better now. We spent the evening fighting the local Basij members,” he told me. “We staged our own revolution here last night.” He agreed to pick me up around eleven P.M. and take me to his neighborhood.

  That night, the streets in Poonak were covered with garbage and the plastic trash bins were on fire. “Welcome to Palestine,” Davood said. I watched a group of young people attack a local Basij base—an anonymous-looking office building—with sticks and stones. “Basiji bia biroon,” they yelled to the Basij members, daring them to come out.

  Davood introduced me to his friends in the crowd. They told me that the night before, ten people wearing green had smashed the windows of neighborhood shops. “They had covered their faces so no one would recognize them,” one young man said. “They wanted to blame it on the greens, but when we searched them, three of them had Basij cards on them.”

  As I listened to these stories and watched Davood and his friends throw rocks and pieces of a destroyed sidewalk railing at the base, I was speechless. How had we gotten here? These were the same kids who had demonstrated peacefully in the days leading up to the election, who had gone to vote peacefully on Friday. Now, all their dreams were shattered.

  Davood told me that they were not sure whether anyone was in the building but they were happy to throw stones at it anyway, just to let off steam. Davood could see that I was uncomfortable. He put his head close to mine and screamed over the noise: “What do you want me to do, Mr. Maziar? They’ve kicked me out of school. I’m unemployed. What can I do?” When he pulled back, he had tears in his eyes. I had no answer for him. “I’m going to buy a gun tomorrow,” he told me. “We’ll show them what we’re capable of.”