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

by Maziar Bahari

  Moloojoon’s reaction to the calls was classic, and it makes me so proud of her. After losing her husband, first-born son, and daughter within four years, she had in many ways lost the desire to live, but the calls gave her a reason to be strong once again and to fight. “Who are you?” my elderly mother demanded, challenging one anonymous caller. “Maziar is out of your hands, he is free, and you can’t do anything to him anymore.” She then simply hung up and phoned me to say that the ashghals have been calling her again.

  It is very difficult for both of us that, for the foreseeable future, I cannot return to Iran to see her. However, my mother can travel outside of the country and has come to London to visit us three times since my release from prison. As much as I’d love for her to live closer to Paola, Marianna, and me, she has no desire to leave Iran permanently. “Your mother doesn’t want to leave the country to the wolves,” a family friend told me recently. “She’s a proud Iranian who tries to keep the spirit of the country alive in her own way. Your father was also one such Iranian; so was Maryam.” Although I chose a path toward building a more democratic Iran that was different from that of Maryam and my father, their memory still gives me hope and inspires me.

  Epilogue

  On May 9, 2010, I was tried in absentia by a revolutionary court, a type of court that deals primarily with political crimes. My sentence—thirteen and a half years’ imprisonment plus seventy-four lashes—was one of the most severe imposed on any postelection prisoner. There was no court session, and my lawyer never heard the charges. Rosewater and the Revolutionary Guards’ intelligence unit, which had arrested me, dictated the following sentence to the judge:

  Five years’ imprisonment for unlawful assembly and conspiring against the security of the state. This had to do with my reporting on, and taking part in, four days of peaceful demonstrations after the election, along with millions of other Iranians.

  Four years for collecting and keeping secret and classified documents. In 2002, a septuagenarian leader of the opposition group Freedom Movement of Iran gave me a court document regarding a trial of certain members of his group. There was nothing secret in the document, all its contents had been announced by the judiciary, and the file is widely available on the Internet. During the interrogations I was asked only once about the document, which even Rosewater didn’t think was sensitive.

  One year for propagandizing against the holy system of the Islamic Republic. This was for all the articles I had written and the films I had made in Iran.

  One-year imprisonment and seventy-four lashes for disrupting the public order. This referred to my Newsweek article and Channel 4 report on the attack against the Basij base after the first peaceful demonstration. Even though I had condemned the violence in my report, the revolutionary court agreed with Rosewater that I was a “peaceful terrorist.”

  Two years for insulting the supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. Nothing would be complete in Iran without mentioning the supreme leader. In an email I’d written to my Newsweek editors Nisid and Chris, which the Guards had found, I’d said that Khamenei had learned from the mistakes the shah had made when he was overthrown by the Islamic Revolution. I mentioned that Khamenei tries to nip any opposition in the bud by arresting its leaders and preventing people from taking to the streets. Rosewater had told me that by comparing Khamenei to the shah I had implied that the supreme leader was a tyrant, and therefore I had to be punished.

  Six months for implying that the president was a homosexual. This was the real icing on the cake. I received this sentence for the picture of a young man kissing Ahmadinejad, which someone else had tagged on my Facebook wall.

  My only reaction to the sentence was to laugh it off publicly and dismiss it as a bizarre judgment passed by an irrational government. I saw it as part of the regime’s attempt to discourage other freed prisoners from speaking out. The explicit message was that anyone could be subjected to the same sentence if he or she dared to talk about the horrors of prison.

  My sentence has made me more determined to speak out against the injustices committed by the Islamic regime. I believe I have a duty to be the voice of the hundreds of journalists, students, civil rights activists, and even mullahs who oppose Khamenei’s tyrannical rule and still languish in Iranian jails in the hands of Rosewater and his colleagues.

  · · ·

  My motorcycle cabbie Davood called me a few days after my release, on the day I arrived in London. He told me that as soon as he had heard the news of my arrest, he’d changed his cell phone number and moved back to his hometown of Tabriz, where he now works as a shop assistant and tries to keep his head down. Rosewater had lied. Davood was not arrested after me. However, in January 2010, Davood saw two Basij members arresting a young girl for wearing too much makeup, and he rammed into them with his motorcycle. The Basijis called for help, and Davood was caught and taken to the local prison, where he was badly beaten and spent a few days in a cell with a group of ten student activists. Their cell had been designed for solitary confinement, so they had to sleep in shifts and had no privacy when they used the toilet in the cell. Davood’s cellmates begged him not to complain about the situation because the last time they’d complained, two of the young students were taken to another area of the prison, where drug smugglers and thieves were kept. That night, the two students were gagged by the thugs and raped repeatedly. The thugs even used soda bottles and screwdrivers to hurt the students further. The convicts had been promised by the police that “if they taught the students a lesson,” their sentences would be commuted.

  This was not the first time I’d heard such a story. Rape has become a form of punishment in the Islamic Republic. Many Iranian refugees in neighboring countries and around the world have had similar experiences, and I’m sure many young, proud Iranians are too ashamed to come forward to tell their stories. Davood was released a month later. “What kind of regime does that to the educated people of their country?” Davood asked me on the phone. “It’s become so difficult to live in this country, Mr. Maziar. People are getting poorer, and even the little freedom we used to have is almost gone.” Davood sounded frustrated, and a bit tipsy. When I asked him if he was still drinking, he answered that getting drunk on homemade vodka with his friends was his only solace.

  In an ironic twist of fate, his retired Revolutionary Guard father is helping Davood’s younger brother leave the country so he will not have to serve in the military. “My father says this regime is not worth fighting for. I wasted two years in the military, so my father is trying to sell everything he has to send my brother abroad.”

  Like many people of his generation, Davood was disheartened by the violent suppression of the green movement in Iran. But, of course, the movement was later rejuvenated in January 2011 after the overthrow of Zine El Abidine Ben Ali, the Tunisian dictator, and, a month later, of the Egyptian despot Hosni Mubarak by pro-democracy young Arabs. These actions revived the protests in Iran, and thousands of young Iranians once again gathered on the streets of Iran, calling for the removal of Khamenei. Davood told me, “Our slogan was ‘After Mubarak and Ben Ali, it is the turn of Seyyed Ali’ ”—that is, Ali Khamenei. “I was really depressed after I came out of prison, but what happened in Egypt sparked something in my heart, in all our hearts. We have realized that if we are united we can change this regime through peaceful means. We are really hopeful.”

  Davood still plans to travel, and possibly study, for a while outside of Iran. “I already have a gift for your daughter, Mr. Maziar,” Davood told me affectionately. “I can’t wait to give it to her myself.”

  · · ·

  Since Ahmadinejad’s reelection, many of those who opposed him have turned their anger against Khamenei as the main culprit behind the fraudulent election and the atrocities committed in its aftermath. Whereas during the postelection protests people chanted, “Where is my vote?” and “Death to Ahmadinejad,” these days one can rarely hear anti-Ahmadinejad slogans. People overwhelmingly blame K
hamenei for the rapes, tortures, and murders. According to the people who know him, Khamenei recognizes that the gap between the people and his government is widening. But rather than looking for a long-term solution or listening to his people, he is trying to narrow that gap through brute force. The supreme leader is becoming ever more isolated and deluded about his own powers.

  My friend Amir no longer uses honorifics when he talks about the supreme leader. “Khamenei thinks the current situation is temporary,” Amir told me when I spoke with him on Skype soon after my release. “He thinks that by jailing a few people, he can put a stop to the green movement. He is incapable of understanding that many Iranians cannot accept a god-king and want to be in charge of their own destiny in the twenty-first century.”

  These days, Amir is a worried man. He is in what he likes to call “a contemplative period.”

  He has very little choice. Like those of many other reformists, Amir’s actions are carefully watched by Khamenei’s henchmen, just as, like many despots before him, Khamenei now seeks revenge against former friends and allies who have broken ranks with him.

  Amir says that he has received several threatening messages by phone or through friends, warning him that he should watch his actions and words. Even so, he continued to visit Mousavi until February 2011, when the regime put Mousavi and his brave wife under house arrest. Since then, only Mousavi’s two daughters can visit them. On March 31, 2011, Mousavi’s 103-year-old father died. Mousavi’s father was a distant cousin of Khamenei and had given him shelter before the 1979 revolution, when Khamenei was fighting against the shah. After hearing the news, I asked Amir on Skype if he was going to attend the funeral. “An intelligence officer called one of our friends only a few minutes ago and warned me against going there,” Amir told me. “I don’t think they’re going to let the funeral proceed peacefully.” Amir was right. With Khamenei’s tacit approval, the funeral was disrupted and several people were arrested and imprisoned.

  “Before the 2009 elections we thought we could persuade him to change, but we were wrong. Khamenei and his regime cannot be reformed. This regime is like an old car that can’t be repaired anymore. You might be able to use it for spare parts, but the car itself should be scrapped.”

  Amir says he is “like a father whose son has become a drug addict and a thief.”

  In April 2011, I flew to Dubai for a few days to meet Amir. We sat in the lobby of a luxurious hotel, smoking Havana cigars, as the music of the Lebanese diva Fairouz played in the background. I asked him whether rising up in revolt against the shah’s dictatorship under the guidance of Khomeini had been the right thing to do, and if he supported the idea of another violent revolution in Iran.

  He couldn’t have responded more quickly: “No and no.”

  He then paused for a few minutes as he quietly puffed his cigar. “To tell you the truth, Maziar, we were young and immature at the time of the revolution. The shah’s government was no doubt a corrupt dictatorship, but we didn’t even think once about what kind of government we wanted to replace it with. We kept on talking about an ‘Islamic government,’ but we had no idea what this government would look like. What were its economic policies? What were its foreign policies supposed to be? What about the police, army, et cetera? We didn’t ask these questions, and that’s why we’re in the situation we are in now. Three decades after the revolution, we have not been able to achieve most of what we dreamt about.”

  Amir cleared the ashes from his suit and then gave me a stare. “There you have it,” he told me curtly. “You’ve asked me about my regrets several times in the past, and I always avoided answering you. But I owe it to you now. I owe it to Maziar Bahari, who has suffered by the regime I helped bring to power. If you really want to know, my life is nothing but regrets these days. Nothing but regrets.”

  Amir got up and, uncharacteristically, went up to his room without saying good-bye.

  Security agents stopped Amir at the airport when he returned to Iran. They took his passport and interrogated him for three days. He is still banned from leaving the country and awaits a trial.

  · · ·

  These days, I spend at least an hour a day talking to my friends and sources in Iran. Our conversations about the latest outrage committed by the regime and what may happen next are what I call “Liza Minnelli dialogues”: we cry, we laugh, we cry while laughing, and laugh again teary-eyed. And then, we all look really confused.

  No one can be certain of what the future holds for Iran. Anyone who tells you what will happen next is either delusional or a scam artist, trying to make a buck through political clairvoyance.

  The brutality of Khamenei and the Guards after the disputed election has created an uncertain situation. On the one hand, dissent is growing and people are becoming more disenchanted with the regime every day. On the other, three decades of revolution, war, and violence have made most Iranians mistrustful of any sudden violent changes.

  It is too optimistic to think that the relatively peaceful changes in Egypt can be emulated in Iran. Egyptians rose up against a corrupt dictator with no legitimacy whatsoever. Khamenei is still regarded by his followers as Allah’s representative on earth. Also unlike Mubarak, Khamenei has been very careful about his image, especially about financial corruption in his family, an issue that is very sensitive for Iranians. This has granted him an aura of sainthood that has created a cult around him. The majority of Iranians are unhappy with Khamenei’s tyranny and the misery that has befallen them as a result of his despotic policies, but assassins around him are still willing to kill and die for their agha (master).

  Iran’s future depends on a host of domestic and foreign players: Khamenei, the Guards, the economy, the price of oil, the United States, Israel, Iraq, Afghanistan, and other countries in the region will all play important roles. Most critically, what will happen in Iran will depend on the zeitgeist of the Iranian people at a given point, and that has historically been very difficult to predict.

  Extrapolating from my conversations with friends and sources inside Iran and a daily study of the country’s politics, economy, and, most important of all, culture, I constantly shift between two future scenarios. The first is a depressing prospect in which violent clashes continue to erupt between the regime and those who oppose it, and Iran is simultaneously attacked by the United States and its allies. In the other, much more positive scenario, the people of Iran, with the help of the international community, somehow peacefully transform the current regime into a relatively democratic government.

  The regime has managed to remain in power through violence. The opposition knows that Khamenei and his cronies are willing to go to any length to stay in power, and they have asked people not to resort to violence. Yet the regime itself resorts to more violence every day. The number of executions has multiplied since the 2009 presidential election, and many people have been thrown in jail for writing an article or giving an interview. The people, so far, have shown incredible self-discipline, but they are becoming more disenchanted with Khamenei’s regime. The two big questions, for which no one yet has any answers, are: When are people going to reach a boiling point? And, once that happens, what will the people and the government do?

  No one can answer these questions. But many officials in Iran have realized that the situation has become unsustainable, so they’ve implicitly tried to distance themselves from Khamenei. Even Ahmadinejad, who became president only because of Khamenei’s support, is now trying ever so discreetly to dissociate himself from his master before it is too late. Since his reelection in 2009, Ahmadinejad and his gang, including some members of the Guards, have expanded their Mafia-like grip on power by replacing more moderate supporters of Khamenei with their own, while presenting themselves as an alternative to the clerical establishment.

  The next phase of infighting in Iran will be a clash between conservative supporters of Khamenei and Ahmadinejad’s hard-line, Mafia-like supporters. The main difference between the two groups i
s their revolutionary backgrounds. The conservatives are generally people who either fought themselves during the revolution or belong to families that rose to prominence in the government or the Guards. The hard-liners are low-ranking members of the Guards or junior officials from those years. The main point of contention between the two groups is less ideological and has simply to do with their desire to be in power, and in charge of spending the nation’s significant oil revenue. Many Iranians dismiss the differences by saying that “conservatives ruined the country for three decades and now it is the hard-liners’ turn to finish the job!” Both groups despise the reformists and have their own supporters within the Guards.

  The number of Guards supporting different factions is not clear, but the general understanding is that many Guards commanders look at Ahmadinejad’s policies and actions with suspicion, and in case of any possible future clash between Ahmadinejad and Khamenei, they will support their master, Khamenei.

  Ahmadinejad and his people know this and have been very careful not to voice any explicit criticism of Khamenei. But they have been developing a long-term plan that involves undermining Khamenei and the clerical establishment by manipulating Iranians’ nationalist sentiments, which has traditionally been the best way to stay in power. They challenge the regime’s policy of emphasizing Iranians’ Shia identity by putting forward new theories about “Iranian Islam.” They glorify ancient Iranian traditions, claiming that Islam as a religion has benefited from Iranian culture. The hard-liners refer to conservatives as reactionaries, calling them out of touch with the modern world. If this new brand of nationalism were presented by a group of scholars, it would be worthy of an academic debate, but as presented by a group of thugs with little knowledge of the religion who have shown very little respect for the people of Iran, these revisionist theories can only be seen as a political ploy to remain in power.