by Majd, Hooman
Later, having washed my face and eaten two or three pistachios (a Persian trick) to eliminate any residual opiate odor that might cling to my skin or my breath, I crossed Vali Asr. A stream of motorcycles was coming down slowly, as slow as bicycles, in the bus lanes. Two abreast, a passenger behind every rider, the Basij came and kept coming. Thousands, I thought, some wearing the camouflage of regular troops, others in the all black of the police special forces, some in body armor, truncheons hanging from their belts, and others in plainclothes on their private motorcycles. It was as intimidating a sight as I had ever seen in Iran, but the expressions on the faces of most of these young men were oddly peaceful, as if they expected no tension and no fight. The handful of older men among them, mostly overweight and sweating, with their small Chinese bikes straining under their weight, looked more menacing—these were the most loyal of the Basij, men whose livelihood fully depended, and always had, on the generosity of the regime.
One grunted angrily at me as I almost stepped in his way trying to cross the bus lane to the sidewalk on the other side. I stepped back just as another pair on a khaki dirt bike, young men in army fatigues without insignia, stopped in front of me. The rider edged his front wheel toward me, and I thought I might be in trouble for some unknown infraction—like stepping into a stream of Basijladen motorcycles. But he leaned forward, arched his body, slightly raised himself off his seat, and said, “Pardon me, haj-agha”—imputing to me the piousness of a haji, someone who has made the pilgrimage to Mecca—as he gently maneuvered the bike into the traffic behind him, reversed his course, and accelerated back up the avenue. So much for trouble, but once again I was mostly annoyed that a young man would view me as old enough to have performed the hajj.
Vanak Square, on a workday, was as busy as ever with car traffic and pedestrians, and on that still bright and sunny evening, the hundreds of motorcycles and their riders, stationed all around in a sea of black, seemed like tremendous overkill. A few people, older men and women, appeared for a moment to be marching together on one side of the square, but the crowd dissipated as they passed the security forces. Another group moved past the square and toward Gandhi Street, but it was impossible to tell if they were there to silently protest or if they were commuters who happened to be huddled close together as they made their way home. A friend who joined a group of men and women walking together—he assumed they were protesters—told me later that he was worried by the sheer numbers of Basij, so he stepped into a bakery and bought a loaf of bread; that way, in case he was stopped or harassed, he could argue that he was simply out on an errand and had nothing to do with any demonstration. An unusually large number of other pedestrians were also carrying bread under their arms, which, if anyone had realized it, could have become a sign of protest itself. But that was it, at least in Vanak, where Iranian activists outside Iran and, presumably, the security forces within had expected much more.
As I got back on a bus and headed home, I wanted to pronounce the Green Movement dead and buried—and not because of my relatively torpid state, after a puff or two (actually three or four) of select Iranian opium. Concerned about the possibility of a renewed clash between protesters and security forces, or at least about the danger of Karri and Khash being mistaken for protesters, I had insisted that they stay close to home. There they had witnessed nothing out of the ordinary, at the shops, at the Tajrish bazaar, or at the park where Karri took Khash, Basij be damned. Iranians today hold too many wildly differing views of what the country should be to form any real united opposition to the regime; even supporters of an Islamic system, who are most likely to be able to effect change, believe the regime has merely strayed from the path of Islamic democracy and needs a course correction.
The two most famous regime supporters who want change—but not outright revolution—are Mir Hossein Mousavi and Mehdi Karroubi, the 2009 presidential candidates who cried foul over the results and were under house arrest while we lived in Tehran. Karri had read and heard much about them since those elections, and she was surprised, even more than I was, that no one we came across, from die-hard regime haters to mild critics, seemed to care very much about them or their incarceration.
What had happened between the time when millions of citizens had come out onto the streets to support them, and now, when hardly any voices of protest were raised about their unjust imprisonment, let alone about the crackdown on already weak civil rights? Had security forces fired so many bullets against protesters during the Green demonstrations, had so many tanks appeared on the streets of Tehran, had the state killed so many people in suppressing dissent, that it caused the movement to crumble? Far fewer people were killed than in Egypt, as it happened, where the regime fell within weeks of the first protest in Tahrir Square. According to the government, fewer than fifty were killed in Iran, but more important, the opposition put the number at under a hundred. (Of course hundreds and then thousands were rounded up and jailed; many were released over time, but quite a few still languished in Evin while we were in Tehran.)
Arrest rather than slaughter: perhaps that was the key to the Iranian regime surviving the protests. It had had no difficulty convincing its frontline defenders, the volunteer Basij and their overseers, the Revolutionary Guards, that the protests were less about a vote than about a challenge to the very existence of the regime; but it knew it would have a much harder time convincing them to shoot or kill their fellow citizens, whom many loyalists believed to be—and the domestic media made this point—mere pawns in the Western game of destabilizing the regime. (The regime is loath to admit that millions of citizens might despise it; from a propaganda standpoint, pointing its finger only at the Green Movement “leaders” was a winning strategy, and Ahmadinejad’s likening the ordinary protesters to emotional and angry fans of a losing football team effectively made them innocent of treason.)
In the revolution that toppled the shah, the army, mainly consisting of conscripts on the front lines who were reluctant to fire on protesters, declared its neutrality relatively quickly, thus cementing the shah’s downfall; the revolutionaries of that time, now the leaders of the regime, were hardly going to tempt that fate for themselves by ordering their shock troops to kill their neighbors and perhaps their own family members en masse.
One of my cousins lives in an apartment building across the hall from a Basij, a family man with two small children. She told me that she couldn’t reconcile the image of the man, a perfectly normal and even affable person, with that of the Robocop who every day during the 2009 protests dressed up, got on his motorcycle, and went off to corral and beat demonstrators with a stick. Would he have been able to beat, let alone shoot, his very neighbors, most of whom he knew supported the Green Movement? Once protesters were carted off to jail, they were out of sight of the militiamen, who could decline to speculate on their fate, but death and martyrdom are impossible to ignore. They have an altogether different significance in a Shia Muslim country, which is why the slow death of Neda Agha Soltan, flashed across TV screens throughout the world, had, for a moment, the potential to ignite a revolution and why the government was at pains to place the blame on foreign agitators.
The Iranians of 2009 and 2010, I knew, had been no less courageous than their Arab counterparts who were inflaming the region in 2011. But no leader inside Iran called for regime change, no one promised a rosy revolution that would bring forth democracy, and as was not the case in the Arab Spring, legions of regime supporters were willing to fight and die for the cause—defense of Islam as they saw it, and a way of life that was ensured by the preservation and perpetuation of the regime. In the midst of the Arab Spring, while some Iranians professed to envy the success of revolutions in their immediate neighborhood, most recognized that Iran’s regime still largely had faith and Islam on its side, unlike in the Arab countries, where virtually no one, not even in the militaries, was willing to die in support of a secular dictator. Iranian youth who opposed the regime had no leader they believed in, no
one to rally around, and they showed as much disdain for the leaders of the Green Movement, such as Mousavi—even if they voted for him—as they did for any regime stalwart.
Those who opposed the regime as it was, but wary of outright revolt against it, were still very much unsure of how they could actually effect change. The regime had effectively divided Iranian society: one was either for or against it, with no other alternative. That was one reason so many citizens wound up in prison during the Persian Spring, and why so many more continued to be thrown behind bars on national security charges while we were there, even citizens who were apolitical or had no desire to see the regime change completely. You are either with us or against us, and if you have any complaints, you are against us. The security apparatus was watching, and one wrong move would be enough to get you a free ticket to Evin.
It was a little disheartening and depressing, more so because we, and I mean Karri too, cared about Iran and its future. Despite hearing constant complaints about the system, despite the obviously heavy-handed security crackdown, I still wasn’t sure that a large majority of Iranians desired a revolution—quick and clean or long and bloody—or even a radical change in the regime’s theocratic nature. It was easy, living in Tehran, especially in North Tehran, to be seduced, as so many foreign journalists are, by the notion that all Iranians are desperate for some form of regime change, but I knew that even apart from the Basij and Revolutionary Guards, many Iranians still supported the system; and a great number of them were deeply religious and would never abandon their beliefs that Islam must play a role in politics and society at large, and that the Islamic system was just.
“No one stays in Evin just for thinking something,” said one such young man, beard neatly trimmed, at a kebab house downtown, where communal tables allow for interaction with strangers. “Sure there have been some mistakes, but those people have always been released, and whoever is tried and convicted must have done something wrong.” It was impossible to argue with anyone who still had faith in the judicial system (nor are political arguments in public particularly wise), so I rarely challenged someone I didn’t know well.
Also, Iranian religious family culture, an issue that observers of Iran’s political scene tend to overlook, has always played an important part in the regime’s support and its longevity. A short time after we left Iran, a young woman, a recent college graduate, gave a striking interview to a foreign newspaper. The Islamic Revolution had enabled her to go to college and get an education, she said, not because of its efforts to promote university education and the attendant building of new schools, but because her father would never have allowed her to go to school in the first place if the clerics hadn’t said it was okay for women to do so. Her father knew that under the regime, the Islamic atmosphere in schools—the hijab and the strict segregation of the sexes in the dormitories—would keep his daughter safe and chaste. I had heard such sentiments before, from supporters of the system and from those who believed that progress could come to the country only if Islam was a factor. Certainly some Iranians, even pious ones, have lost faith in the theocracy today, but how was one to change the beliefs, not of the young women like her, but of their fathers? Any revolution in Iran would have to account for them, even if it didn’t for the Basij and the Revolutionary Guards.
8
JUDGE NOT
“Listen, I didn’t vote, because I don’t believe in it, in here [Iran]. In fact, I’m apolitical. I just wanted the whole thing to be over. I knew, unlike the kids who were dancing and singing in the streets outside my apartment during the campaign, that the freedom they had today would be gone as soon as the election was over, no matter who won. The regime has always done this: loosened the reins that suffocate before an election, only to tighten them again after.”
My friend paused, lit another cigarette, and blew smoke out the window above us. “So when the election was over,” he said, smoke still escaping his nostrils, “I was looking forward to the summer and maybe some better work opportunities. That evening I heard on the street that Ahmadinejad had won and was a little surprised. No one I knew had voted for him, but I shrugged it off, happy that at least the election was over now. Later that night, I was sitting in my apartment when I heard the same noise outside as I’d heard during the campaign. Cars honking, people shouting. What was going on? I wondered. Don’t they know their man lost?
“I went outside to see what the fuss was all about. And I heard things I never imagined I would ever hear, not in the Islamic Republic. Things like ‘Death to the dictator’ and so on. I cried. My tears weren’t quite tears of joy, nor were they tears of sadness. They were just tears—I’d been waiting for this for over thirty years.”
I stopped the tape recorder: Karri needed help with Khash, who was wreaking havoc at a friend’s house, where we had gathered for a party on a Thursday night, when parties, big, small, and even in the streets, are going on all over Tehran. I was in the kitchen with another friend, who must remain nameless, as he still lives in Iran; an artist my age, he was telling me about his arrest and experiences in Evin prison in 2009, and we were already on our second large glass of aragh. Quite a few people I knew, from good friends to family members, had been jailed in the aftermath of the 2009 elections, and it seemed almost a completely ordinary thing to have experienced across a wide swath of society, as if “Yeah, sure, I was thrown in jail” were no more unusual to hear than someone telling you he or she had just seen the latest blockbuster at the cinema.
My own temporary detention at the airport and subsequent interrogation in the city was nothing near the terrifying, cruel, or psychologically scarring experiences that others had had. And it was unlikely that I would ever experience prison, unless I did something egregiously wrong or pissed off the wrong person; throwing an American writer and journalist in jail for no particular reason would be too much trouble for the authorities and would bring them no particular benefit, not even as a bargaining chip in their conflict with the West over the nuclear and other issues.
While Karri, Khash, and I were in Iran, the American “hikers”—two young men and a young woman arrested for illegally crossing the border from Iraq into Iran—were still being held in Evin as spies, but their arrests and incarceration had brought Iran no advantages and were unlikely ever to do so; they were finally released toward the end of our stay with no quid pro quo from the United States. I was, however, aware that I was being monitored, certainly on the occasions when I visited a high-profile opposition figure (like former president Mohammad Khatami, who was under persistent surveillance) or attended an embassy party, where by definition every guest’s attendance would be noted in a file somewhere, checked and crosschecked with other files. I also received phone calls every now and then, calls from government officials I knew, that were ambiguous but seemed designed to either draw me out and discover what I was up to in Iran, or what I thought, or simply to remind me of their presence. “Mr. Majd,” a National Security Council staffer said, one of the times he called me, “how is this trip going for you? Are you writing at all?”
“No,” I replied. “As I’ve said, I’m just here with my family, trying to absorb the culture.”
“And are you enjoying it? If you’re here as a tourist, I highly recommend you go on long road trips—to the sea, of course, but also to the south, with stops along the way, like in Kashan. Of course, if you’re busy …”
“Yes, we’ll definitely be traveling,” I replied, “and no, I’m not busy with anything in particular.”
“No? Okay, now of course I don’t have to tell you about Yazd, but I’m sure your family will enjoy that,” he said, reminding me none too subtly that they knew who I was and where I came from. “But the politics may have changed there a little,” he added, referring to the change in Friday prayer leadership: to my disadvantage, he wanted to imply. I ignored the remark.
“Yazd, absolutely,” I said. “We plan a long stay there.”
“And when do you plan to r
eturn to New York? Will you be here for Moharram?” he asked, referring to the Shia month of mourning.
“I’m not sure, exactly,” I replied. “But I’d say we’ll most probably be here then.”
“Well, call me and come and see us, so we can talk more.” It was more than a suggestion, and I did visit the National Security Council, just to be safe, where for two hours I was politely asked my opinion on a range of subjects and given the occasional helpful hint about what I should or shouldn’t write about in the future.
Karri was always a little nervous that the government hadn’t bought my story—that I just wanted to spend time in my home country with my family—and might think my mission was sponsored by the CIA or some other American or foreign agency. I told her they probably did suspect that I was somehow passing information to the CIA, since many Iranian officials, as prone to conspiracy theories as anyone else in Iran, find it difficult to believe that any Western journalist is not somehow also tied to the Western intelligence services, especially in recent years, as cyber assaults, assassinations, and other covert operations allegedly carried out by the CIA, MI6, and Mossad burst into full view.
That’s my take, anyway—for why else put such heavy restrictions on foreign journalists and writers? The authorities know that the vast majority of Iranians are unlikely to read anything written in any language other than Farsi, and that allowing journalists to freely report and move about the country would probably result in more positive reporting on Iran—they’re “not stupid, after all,” is how one government official put it to me. They seem to believe that journalists are simply not what they appear to be. But in my case, since they had no evidence that I was doing anything other than living a boring and uneventful life in Tehran—not reporting, not sending out articles, even anonymously, which I’m sure they could have traced back to me anyway—I was not overly concerned.
