Children of Paradise (35 page)

Karbaschi’s unregulated dealings in the shadow economy of speculative development gave him little cover from the charges he faced. Accused of embezzling millions of dollars, receiving bribes, mishandling public property, illegally possessing public property, illegally conducting government transactions, and engaging in “despotic and dictatorial behavior,” Karbaschi maintained that not one rial of city money had gone into his pocket. “All that I have done is turn a stagnant city into one that is modern and livable with hundreds of kilometers of highways, green spaces and cultural centers,” he told the judge.

On the merits, Karbaschi’s defense at times seemed weak and disorganized, not least because many of the charges took the mayor and his legal team by surprise. But Karbaschi had a larger strategy. With the whole country watching, the mayor brought the discussion back, again and again, to the judiciary’s strong-arm tactics and the question of procedural legitimacy. Karbaschi reminded viewers that he was learning of many charges against him only in court, and that police had stormed his office and confiscated his confidential documents. When the judge presented confessions from city officials who had been interrogated in prison, Karbaschi retorted, “
You’ve set up a group of 70 men, most of whom have little more than a high school education, and put them in charge of this investigation. They take each person into a basement and emerge with a confession. What is the meaning of this?”

On July 11, at the court’s seventh and final session, Karbaschi presented his concluding arguments. He spoke for four hours. He wept. He spoke of his revolutionary past. He noted ruefully that this investigation had cost the municipality time, money, and jobs. After eight and a half years of fifteen-hour workdays, the mayor lamented, here he stood. The judge sentenced Karbaschi to five years in prison (reduced to two on appeal), sixty lashes, $530,000 in fines, and a twenty-year ban on political activity.

• • •

W
ITH THE MAYOR OF
T
EHRAN
just a few months from the start of his prison sentence, Iran held its first municipal elections in February 1999. It was the most open political field the Islamic Republic had ever known, with some 330,000 candidates competing. And the reformists swept it. They dominated the councils nationwide, but nowhere was their showing more definitive than in Tehran, where they took fourteen of fifteen seats.

They spanned the gamut of their faction’s views and pedigrees
.
Some were technocrats close to Karbaschi and the old city management. Others, like Ebrahim Asgharzadeh, the organizer of the U.S. embassy takeover in 1979, were more radical populists. Still others, like Saeed Hajjarian, came from Khatami’s forward-thinking brain trust. As mayor, the Tehran City Council appointed a centrist technocrat.

Once in power, the reformists faced the same options Karbaschi had. To raise taxes, the municipality would have to build trust with the citizenry—something the central government, with its oil rents and authoritarian history, had never done. And it would mean reconfiguring the finances and political arrangements of a city that appeared to be working—even to be a symbol of recent managerial success.

And so Tehran continued along the path Karbaschi had blazed. The municipality commissioned a new Comprehensive Plan for Tehran in 2000. But it would not be approved, let alone implemented, for another six years. Tehran’s urban planners came to suspect that the reformist city council was stalling just as Karbaschi had. To adopt a city plan meant regulating density—and looking for a new way to raise money.

Moreover, Tehran’s city council members were distracted. Quite a few of them were determined to keep one foot on the national playing field. One city councilman ran for president; others ran for the parliament in a campaign for which Saeed Hajjarian was the chief reformist strategist and adviser.

Hajjarian had no more ambitious vision than the one that launched the city councils in the first place. But with the city of Tehran standing by,
the parliamentary campaign he spearheaded (
he told reporters that he’d learned how to put together coalitions and campaign strategies from reading American political journals) won by a landslide, with the reformists carrying close to 77 percent of the legislative body’s 290 seats. The moment was an exhilarating one for a movement on the ascent—enough so, perhaps, to offset the frustrations of urban management.

• • •

S
AEED
H
AJJARIAN BEGAN FIELDING
death threats in the spring of 2000. An anonymous cassette tape informed him of his impending execution. He was a particular bête noir to the hard-liners, who not only presumed him to be the reformists’ mastermind but also suspected him of being the Deep Throat behind Akbar Ganji’s reporting on the chain murders. Hajjarian had once worked for the intelligence ministry, after all, and he held the license for the newspaper in which Ganji published.

At 8:35 one Sunday morning, Hajjarian parked his car near the white stone-and-glass tower that housed Tehran’s city hall. He strode toward the building with a colleague, and as he mounted the few shallow steps at the building’s entry, a group of men approached him. One handed Hajjarian a letter while others detained him to ask questions. A high-powered red motorcycle, of a sort reserved for use by the Revolutionary Guard and Basij, pulled up curbside. A young man leapt off the back of it.

His name was Saeed Asgar, and what he did next he would later say he was told to do by associates from his mosque—a circle around an extremist cleric in Shahr-e Rey. He claimed he had nothing against Saeed Hajjarian. He had read some of his articles and even voted for him for city council. But he’d been told it was his “religious duty” to assassinate the man known as the brain of the reform movement.

Because he did not know what Hajjarian looked like, Asgar hesitated, awaiting a signal from an accomplice to tell him which man was his target. Then he approached Hajjarian and shot him point-blank. He aimed for the city councilman’s temple, but because his hand shook, he shot Hajjarian in the face.

Asgar leapt back on the motorcycle and, together with an accomplice, sped away. He shed an extra pair of pants he’d worn so witnesses wouldn’t recognize him, went to the movies, paid his water bill at the bank, and then headed home, weaving through the capital’s gridlocked streets.

• • •

W
HEN
S
AEED
H
AJJARIAN AWOKE
from his coma, a bullet was still lodged at the base of his neck. His legs were paralyzed and his speech was painstaking. He had survived his assassination, but he would never be the same. Nor would the reform movement. Nor would City Hall.

Reformists decried the attempt on Hajjarian’s life as a political act ordered by hard-liners. President Khatami declared, “
The enemies of freedom wrongly believe that they can attain their goals by assassinating a pious intellectual who was serving the nation.” Supreme Leader Khamenei called for calm and restraint. Nothing was known about the assassins, he told the public, and to leap to political conclusions was inflammatory and unhelpful. True, the assassins used a type of motorcycle issued only to the state-run militias. But conservative spokesmen argued that this indicated only that one of the conspirators was a guardsman, not that the plot originated from any authority within the system.

Eight men were arraigned and tried. Five were convicted, their sentences ranging from three to fifteen years. Even the judge seemed perplexed by the accused men’s casual demeanor, their lack of malice toward their target. He ordered psychiatric evaluations, which found the conspirators mentally competent. But at the trial the men were not linked to any chain of command.

Perhaps it had all along been Hajjarian, with his long view of politics, his visionary patience, his refusal to relinquish the historic opportunity he’d felt within his grasp, who had kept the Tehran City Council from descending into the mire of personal rivalry and political intrigue. Or perhaps that future was already inscribed—in the conundrum of political development, which called for starting somewhere but seemed always to require one or another condition not yet met; in the history and mechanics
of running the city of Tehran, which yielded only unpopular choices, and whose managers had never before had to answer to its citizens, let alone promised to make their city the springboard for democratic reform.

In November 2000, eight months after he was shot, Hajjarian returned to work. Damage to the base of his brain left him able to stand only momentarily but not to sustain his balance; when he tried to walk, he felt as though he were moving through a swimming pool. The very air opposed him. His left hand was paralyzed and his right hand shook, so that he could not write. His speech was halting, his face slack, although his mind remained alight.

The Tehran City Council had disintegrated into rancorous factions. Its members battled one another, the mayor, and the interior ministry over who held sway over what domain and who would decide how the city would finance itself. Disputes between one councilman and the mayor went to arbitration. Another councilman was briefly charged with complicity in the plot to kill Hajjarian (he was acquitted); another was jailed on charges of defaming a police official involved in the Karbaschi trial; two councilmen resigned, allegedly because of “
certain internal organizational problems.” Hajjarian tried to resign in order to seek medical care abroad, but the council did not accept. Bowing to pressure, the mayor eventually stepped down, to be replaced by a new one who almost immediately fell out with the same councilman as his predecessor.

The fundamental urban issues remained. Tehran was still overbuilt and polluted, and density sales were still underwriting its economy while undermining its stability. Seismologists were still issuing dire warnings about the likelihood of urban collapse. Rumors abounded that some city council members were profiting from the sale of vertical space to developers.

What had begun as a promising experiment in local governance had devolved into a circus. In January a national arbitration board dissolved the Tehran City Council, on the grounds that it failed to meet regularly or to make decisions regarding the budget. The mayor was fired and sentenced to five months in prison for corruption and abuse of his position. Less than three months before the country’s second provincial elections, Tehran’s entire management had apparently collapsed.

• • •

T
HE CITY OF
T
EHRAN
, and the reformists themselves, had done the hard-liners’ work for them, showcasing the reform movement’s every failing—its vanities and petty rivalries, its managerial inexperience, its predilection toward abstraction.

The hardline press lost no time in writing this failure as large as possible.
Kayhan
’s managing editor wrote of the Tehran City Council: “
During the past four years the only thing that did not concern the council or take up too much of its attention was the city’s problems and the execution of its legal duties.”
Another commentator in
Kayhan
crowed that this vaunted civic institution had been “stillborn.” A group of “inexperienced politicians” who saw the elections merely as “launching pads” for their national political careers threw the people’s trust to the wind. The councilmen “bashed each other on the head every day and threw Tehran’s situation into further chaos.”

These editorials must have stung the reformists to the quick, in large part because they were true. But the hard-liners’ indictments did not mention the arrest and trial of the outgoing mayor, or the attempt on Hajjarian’s life—two episodes that served not only to demoralize the reformist politicians but to deprive them of significant sources of advice, support, and expertise. Nor did they account for the reformist vision’s daring. When Hajjarian imagined the role city councils could play in the political development of the country, he did not factor in the foibles that plague municipal politics the world over: personal rivalries and power plays, human weakness, systemic corruption, problems that required revenue to fix, revenue streams that created more problems to solve.

The
Kayhan
editorialists did note that, unlike the councils managing Iran’s swelling modern cities, the councils in rural areas had been a success. The conservative pundits attributed this to the cohesion of rural communities, which had elected local leaders they had reason to know and trust. They might also have noted that the provincial councils handled issues whose scale and nature were manageable and familiar. Half a
century earlier, Iran had only one city with a population over a million; now it had at least six, and about seventy with between one hundred thousand and a million residents. The reformists may have imagined that, by opening direct democracy at the local level, they were starting small. But actually they were beginning with some of the least familiar and least tractable of the country’s managerial puzzles.

• • •

A
LTHOUGH THE REFORMISTS
did not succeed in entrenching themselves or their ideas in urban governance, they did create the conditions for others to do exactly that. Not one but two major national political figures would rise to prominence thanks to the urban machinery the reformists set into place. The Tehran City Council would, in the end, incubate powerful new forces in national politics—just not reformist ones.

The 2003 election for city councils carried such a low profile that it practically slunk onto the national stage. Conservatives were well positioned to win, so long as they made little noise. Low voter turnout would work in their favor, as hard-liners were stalwart voters. More liberal-minded Iranians had to be persuaded that elections were worth their while, something the performance of the outgoing city council had done little to suggest. Sure enough, in the provinces, where the local councils had enjoyed a quietly successful four years,
some 95 percent of voters turned out. In the cities overall, the turnout was closer to 65 percent. And in Tehran it was a stunningly low 10 percent.