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

by Maziar Bahari

  During the annual hajj, Muslims’ pilgrimage to Mecca, pilgrims throw stones at a pillar that represents Satan. Like those pilgrims, the young people in Poonak were throwing stones at the Basij, who, for them, symbolized the evil in the country. I began to wonder when this kind of symbolic attack would turn into real attacks against Basij members, not only with tree branches and stones but with guns and Molotov cocktails.

  When I got home, I tried to find out what was going on in different parts of the country by contacting some of my friends on Facebook. Despite the government’s effort to block Facebook, many Iranians used Freegate, a filter buster developed by Chinese dissidents to circumvent government censors; they used Facebook and Twitter to communicate with the outside world and with one another. In fact, Iran had the largest community of bloggers outside of the United States and China. There were more blogs in Persian than in any other language except English. The Iranian government’s long-standing monopoly on information was being challenged not only on the streets but also in cyberspace.

  By this time, Facebook was the most reliable source of information. There were reports of sporadic demonstrations all around the country, but it seemed that the police had succeeded in intimidating ordinary people in most cities and preventing them from taking to the streets. The police warnings had no effect on university students, however. Students in many dormitories around the country staged pro-Mousavi demonstrations and clashed with the police. In some instances, the police ransacked the dormitories and arrested a number of students. From different postings on Facebook, I learned that the worst atrocities that night were committed in the men’s dormitory of Tehran University. Police had apparently been called by campus security after a group of students were heard chanting anti-Ahmadinejad slogans. After the police and Basij units entered the dormitory, security closed the gates so that no one could get out. Every student from the dorm—whether he had taken part in the demonstrations or not—was dragged out of his room. Outside the dorm, the anti-riot police piled them together and beat them with clubs. Many were kicked until they became unconscious. In some cases, the anti-riot police sodomized the students with clubs. At least seven students were killed.

  That night, I heard the sound of chaos in my dreams; but before I woke up, it was Amir’s voice that echoed around me: “All we can do is pray that the supreme leader will make a wise decision.” Power blinds, and I feared that Khamenei’s blindness could only mean disaster for my country and my people.

  Chapter Five

  I woke up the next morning to a disturbing email from a friend of Amir’s:

  “He has been arrested. Call me.”

  On the phone, the friend told me that Amir had been arrested that morning, along with dozens of pro-Mousavi politicians, including former ministers and vice presidents. The news of the arrests had gone viral.

  “Should I be worried about myself?” I asked.

  “Not now. Just be careful,” he answered.

  That morning, I tried to reach my friends and sources within the government. Nobody was answering the phone. Everyone had suddenly gone silent.

  I had asked Davood to pick me up at nine A.M. to take me to a few appointments and then the demonstration planned for four P.M. on Revolution Avenue. Reacting to Ahmadinejad’s speech after his victory, when he’d called his opponents a bunch of dust and dirt, Mousavi supporters had named their protest the Dust and Dirt demonstration. Word of the gathering had gotten around through Internet sites and was reported on satellite television. But Davood was uncharacteristically late, and not answering his phone. He called me at nine-thirty.

  “Where the hell are you?” I asked angrily.

  “Come to the corner of Motahari and Vali Asr,” he said.

  “What do you mean?”

  “Mr. Maziar, just come to the corner. I will wait for you there.”

  The instructions were so strange that I began to grow worried. I remembered Davood telling me about the men in Peugeots he had seen waiting on my mother’s street. Her apartment was on a dead end, so there was not much traffic. I could easily spot strangers if they were waiting for me outside. I went to the rooftop before leaving the house and looked down. There were three Peugeots parked along the street, but that was not particularly unusual—even though Peugeots are the government’s cars of choice, ordinary people drive them as well. A few people came out of an office down the block. Nothing looked suspicious. I was late for my appointments and angry with Davood. I walked ten minutes to the corner he’d indicated and spotted him sitting on his bike.

  “What’s going on?” I asked.

  “There were a couple of people waiting at the end of your street, Mr. Maziar.”

  “Yes, because there are offices on our street.”

  “But these two looked really suspicious. I just know they were from the intelligence service.”

  I was getting fed up with Davood’s erratic behavior. As I climbed onto the bike behind him and he began to drive, I noticed that he smelled of sweat and alcohol and that his hair was messy.

  “Have you been drinking?” I asked him.

  “Just a little bit, Mr. Maziar,” Davood said remorsefully. “I can’t sleep at night. We had another fight with the Basijis after you left.”

  “Bezan kenar,” I ordered him. “Stop here.”

  He pulled over. “Sorry, Davood, I can’t let you drive if you drink like this. Go get some rest today, and if you’re clean and sober tomorrow morning, call me.” I took another motorcycle to see some friends and contacts, then went back to my mother’s house.

  There, my mother had just finished preparing fish and torshi tareh, a light vegetarian stew with rice. She had a mysterious ability to know what food I was in the mood for. When I needed energy, she would prepare fesenjoon, a chicken or duck stew with walnuts and pomegranate sauce, or morgheh torsh, a chicken dish with unripe grapes and split peas. On a day like this, when I was in a hurry and had to have a light meal, she would prepare torshi tareh or mirza ghasemi, scrambled eggs with tomatoes and eggplant.

  As we ate, she told me that at the local market that morning, she’d heard that many people had decided to take part in the Dust and Dirt demonstration. “People are planning to come to the streets to take back their votes. I wish I could join them. If I were even ten years younger, I would,” she said, as I savored every spoonful of my torshi tareh. “But I’m worried that, with my back pain, I won’t be able to escape if the Guards attack the protestors.” My mother was speaking from experience. She had taken part in many demonstrations in her youth and knew how suddenly and unexpectedly violence could break out.

  “Do you think these ashghals will just sit on their hands and tolerate people protesting against them?” my mother asked as I made Turkish coffee for her and myself.

  Years of seeing her country brutalized by one government after another had taught my mother to expect the worst. She was not expecting Khamenei and his regime to act rationally. “When it comes to the tyrannical leaders of this country, none of them has been able to see beyond the tip of his nose. They just want to rule and pillage the country for as long as they can without thinking about the consequences for the people or themselves.”

  “Yes, you may be right, but what about legitimacy?” I asked. “Don’t you think Khamenei wants to stay in power as a legitimate leader?”

  My mother—perhaps surprised by my naïveté—turned away and drew my attention to the news program on the television. Throughout the day, the state radio and television stations had been warning potential demonstrators that the Ministry of Interior had not issued a permit for any demonstrations. They emphasized that the security forces would punish the demonstrators as harshly as possible in accordance with the law.

  “Legitimacy?!” my mother exclaimed with disdain. “Do you think they even care what people think?” She turned off the television, threw the remote to a corner of a couch, and joined me in clearing the table. “Just be careful when you go out.”

  ·
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  I was very curious to see how many people were going to turn up at the Dust and Dirt demonstration, and how the government would respond. My guess was that, at best, a few thousand Mousavi supporters would take to the streets, the security forces would beat them up, and most people would go home. Mousavi would eventually accept defeat and return to his government job as the director of the Academy of Arts.

  I couldn’t have been more wrong.

  I arrived at the demonstration at about four-thirty. The scene reminded me of the demonstrations against the shah I’d witnessed in November 1978, when I was eleven. Today, there were at least two million people, most of them in their teens and twenties, preparing to march along the same route from Revolution Square to Freedom Square. I struck up a conversation with Ahmad, a fifty-four-year-old academic. “We walk along this route because it has taken us a long time to reach freedom since the revolution,” Ahmad said. He had taken part in the 1978 march as well. “I see many similarities between what happened then and now. In both cases, we had a clear mandate. Then we wanted to overthrow the shah. Today we want this little man”—Ahmadinejad—“who has stolen our votes to resign and accept the people’s votes.”

  There were so many bystanders, it was almost impossible to move through the crowd. Knowing that they were being watched by people around the world, many of the demonstrators carried banners in both Persian and English. “Khas o khashak toei, doshmaneh Iran toei!” they had written. “You are dust and dirt, you are the enemy of Iran.” And: “Where is my vote?”

  I was amazed, as we began to march, by the silence of the demonstrators. There was no chanting, no angry words—just a peaceful ribbon of green flags, bandannas, wristbands, and scarves moving from Revolution Square toward Freedom Square with an air of quiet and calm. As we marched, the sea of green grew larger and stronger, and the security forces lining the street looked on with surprise at the mounting number of people. As usual, I had a video camera with me, an old Sony PD 100 I had not used for many years. I hesitated to take it out. I didn’t want it to be confiscated, and I certainly didn’t want to be arrested. As I watched the crowd of thousands filling Revolution and Freedom Avenues, though, I felt energized. Worriedly, I pulled the video camera from my bag and held it in the air, doing my best to get shots of the crowd. I spotted many familiar faces: colleagues, friends, and acquaintances who had come to the demonstration alone or with their families. In defiance of the government’s decree that journalists should not report on the demonstrations, there were also a fair number of Iranian and foreign journalists in the crowd. I also saw many of the young filmmakers with whom I had worked over the past few years.

  Despite the growing numbers and the strength of the demonstration, the protestors tried to avoid any confrontation with the security forces. They smiled at the police officers and waved flowers at the police helicopters that hovered over the crowd. From the looks on the faces of some officers we passed along the way, it was obvious that many would have loved to join us.

  Even with the sporadic violent clashes of the day before, many people still hoped for peace. Many protestors, especially the young men and women who had endured years of having their hair shorn by the Basij or who had been beaten for not appearing Islamic enough, would have loved to have thrown stones and taken over the Basij buildings. But they contained themselves. Many people believed that a compromise was still possible. They wanted the government to either re-count the votes or hold another election. The general feeling among people was that if the government listened to their voices, they would be willing to exonerate it for many of its injustices in the past and start anew.

  The Basijis, on the other hand—normally so rash and confrontational—were clearly intimidated by the sheer size of the crowd. Whenever the protestors passed by the Basij compounds on Freedom Avenue, I spotted Basij members peering at the crowd through the curtains. Despite the demonstrators’ determination to keep the peace, you could feel the tension in the air.

  Whenever the demonstrators passed by murals or posters of the supreme leader, they raised their green symbols or their fists to prove to him that they were a force to be reckoned with. A middle-aged man near me summarized it best when he told his young daughter, “If Khamenei had a brain in his skull, he would think about his own survival and listen to the people.”

  When I filmed the march from an overpass on Freedom Avenue, I could see that the horizon had become green. All afternoon, I’d felt buoyed by the peaceful nature of the demonstration, but soon after I arrived in Freedom Square, I noticed smoke billowing into the sky a few blocks north. Then I heard the sound of gunfire. Having worked as a war reporter, I immediately wanted to run toward the shots. Hundreds of others had the same idea.

  I filmed as I moved through the crowd, holding the camera above my head. Several youths were attacking a two-story building in a narrow street a block north of Freedom Square. It was a residential street, and the buildings that lined it all looked the same. When I got closer, I realized that they were attacking a Basij base.

  Basijis in anti-riot gear fired tear gas at the crowd, and I saw Basij members on the rooftop of the base firing warning shots into the air. They were trapped in the building, surrounded by youths who were pelting them with Molotov cocktails. I later learned from several intelligence officials that an opposition group, the MKO, had most likely organized the attack on the Basij. The MKO (Mujahideen Khalq Organization) is a cultlike Marxist-Islamist group that has been based in Iraq for the past three decades; its goal is to get rid of the Iranian regime. Its sympathizers had acted as agents provocateurs among the protestors, inciting violence; they continued to do so throughout the day. I kept filming as the MKO members and young people instigated by the MKO eventually brought down the fence around the Basij base. Before long, the Basijis stopped firing warning shots and began shooting indiscriminately into the crowd of protestors. The two Basijis on the roof did not seem to care if the people they were shooting at were attackers or passersby. Many peaceful demonstrators in the crowd panicked and started to throw stones at the compound.

  The Basij responded by shooting at the young men who’d jumped over the fallen fence and were running toward the building. One man in his early twenties was shot as he tried to leap over the fence. The sharp ends of the collapsed fence looked like the tridents used by gladiators in ancient Rome. The boy’s slim body dropped onto the fence as soon as the bullet entered his body. He went into cardiac arrest and slowly rolled over onto the ground. I recorded the young man’s climb and fall. Horrified to have filmed a man’s death, I couldn’t move until the Basijis started to spray bullets in my direction. Then I went behind a wall and held the camera outside, looking at the scene through the monitor. Another young man was shot in the head while trying to kick down the door of the base. People raised his body and took it toward the main street. “Mikosham an keh baradaram kosht,” they chanted, their voices filled with rage. “I kill those who killed my brother.”

  Some young men in the crowd stopped attacking the base and carried the boy’s body to the hospital at the end of the street, a block away from where the peaceful main demonstration was still under way. But they understood that their efforts were futile. He was already dead. As I filmed the men carrying the body with my video camera raised in the air, I felt paralyzed, utterly helpless. My country was on fire, and all I could do was film.

  As the Basij started to spread bullets into the crowd, as people scrambled to take cover, as bloodied people ran out of the street, and as MKO supporters started to chant, “Death to the Islamic Republic,” I continued to film.

  “Hush. Be quiet! Change the slogan! Allahu akbar! God is great!” screamed a couple of older men trying to get the crowd out of the street. “We haven’t come here to say, ‘Death to the Islamic Republic.’ ”

  “We’re here to support Mousavi,” said another woman. “Not fight!”

  A small group of young men approached a few of the older men who were trying to
calm people down. “Khafeh shin madar saga!” one said, throwing punches at an older man. “Shut up, you sons of bitches!” The crowd erupted into a brawl.

  “Death to Khamenei!” cried a teenager as he joined the others hitting the older men. I turned my camera toward him.

  “Nagir! Nagir! Don’t film!” He grabbed at my video camera, but I shoved it under my arm and quickly sidestepped away from him. With my back against the wall of a building, I slid my body away from the crowd. An older couple blocked others from getting at me, helping me escape.

  “Get out as soon as you can,” an old woman told me.

  When I broke free from the crowd, I ran as fast and as far as I could and hailed the first motorcycle I saw. I wanted to edit the footage immediately, to show the world what was happening in Tehran. I knew that I had the only professionally filmed footage of the Basij shooting.

  I told the motorcycle driver to take me to the Laleh Hotel, in the city center, where I knew Lindsey Hilsum, a reporter for the Channel 4 News in Britain, was staying. Within a few hours, my film, which was credited to an anonymous source, was broadcast on Channel 4 News, and then on most of the important news programs in the world.

  Later that night, one of my sources in the Ministry of Intelligence told me that in the end, seven people were killed during the demonstration in front of the Basij base.

  “Do you think it’s safe for me to write about the attack on the Basij?” I asked him.

  “Everyone knows that you filmed the attack,” he said. “The Basijis were filming you filming it.”

  Nervous that the Basij had its eye on me, I decided that the best course of action would be to mention publicly that I had filmed the Basij attack. Up to that date, my footage was the most incriminating documentation of Basij violence against Iranian citizens. I knew that the authorities would not be happy with my footage and that they would question me about how I’d managed to record it. I didn’t want it to look surreptitious and wanted to be able to answer that I’d simply filmed what had happened in front of me, the way I had always done in the past.