Children of Paradise (61 page)

Even Mousavi’s campaign volunteers were surprised by what they’d
helped unleash. One young volunteer saw her mother in the middle of a square, chanting slogans with the young people at one in the morning. She’d been a leftist in 1979. She’d helped Khomeini come to power. She’d caused her children terrible trouble, she told her daughter now, and she wanted to make it right.

On the Chamran Expressway in the north of Tehran, a local jounalist observed one night in late May, the crowd was too thick to drive through, and people parked their cars in the middle of the road, getting out to mill among the crowds of young people who sang and danced. The crowd belonged to Mousavi, and within it rage was as palpable as hope. “One week, two weeks, three weeks, Ahmadi hasn’t had a shower,” sang the children. A popular brand of Cheetos-like snacks had a monkey on its logo, and a woman waved a bag of them out her car window, pointing at the monkey and yelling, “Don’t vote for him!” The Basijis on their motorbikes just smiled serenely.

When Khatami spoke at the Azadi soccer stadium, the atmosphere was electric: there was not a spot left to sit on the grass or in the aisles. Days later, the journalist attended a women’s rally for Ahmadinejad at the same stadium. The crowd was immeasurably thinner and a great deal older, the attendees dutiful, their energy subdued. The journalist counted sixty busloads of women from Qom, and there were buses from Lorestan as well. A famous female athletic personality was horrified when the journalist approached her. She pushed up the sleeve of her manteau to show her green shirt beneath. “Our manager said we had to come here,” she confided. “We had no choice.”

The campaign worker who’d seen her mother in the square would recall traveling to Islamshahr and Shahr-e Rey—incorporated suburbs in the south of Tehran, presumed conservative strongholds—and finding such strong support for Mousavi that she thought she’d driven the wrong direction. In Tabriz, where the ethnic Azeri population was traditionally distrustful of central government and disinclined to vote, Mousavi, an ethnic Azeri, filled the soccer stadium, with people tripping over one another to get in.

The town of Birjand, in South Khorasan province, had been an Ahmadinejad stronghold in 2005. A foreign reporter who covered Ahmadinejad’s “rock star” treatment there during a 2007 provincial tour returned in 2009 and found the town wild for Mousavi, with roaring green-clad crowds of thousands straining to brush their fingertips against the candidate’s white hair. In 2007, one said, residents had been forced to turn out for Ahmadinejad; but this time “
these are real people in this place. For love we will give our lives.”

No one, it seemed, was working in June 2009. The clock had stopped. That this festival took place in the wee hours of the mornings contributed to its aura of enchanted unreality. Older observers would liken those nights to the headiest days of 1979; younger ones thrilled to a sneak preview of a freedom they were all the more determined now to grasp. But for Asieh Amini, the excitement was tempered with foreboding. Why, she wondered, was the Islamic Republic allowing this?

• • •

T
HE
I
SLAMIC
R
EPUBLIC
, it transpired, was worried. So recounted the Revolutionary Guard Corps’ top commander, Mohammad Ali Jafari, when he explained the summer’s events to an audience of clerics and uniformed guardsmen some months later. (
A video of his address would leak to the Iranian expatriate press in 2014.) The reformists could not be allowed to return to power. This was a “red line”—whether for the Revolutionary Guard or the Leader, Jafari did not specify. But Mousavi absolutely had to be stopped. When the Green Wave crested, the reformists called explicitly on the Revolutionary Guard and the Basij not to interfere in the election. The reason for this plea was clear, Jafari said: without the security forces’ interference, the election would likely go to a run-off. The Revolutionary Guard couldn’t allow that, because there was no guarantee Ahmadinejad would win. Exactly how the Revolutionary Guard had resolved this crisis, and at whose command, Jafari left blank except to praise the initiative’s success.

On June 9, three days before the election, the Mousavi and Karroubi
campaigns wrote to the Guardian Council to warn of possible irregularities afoot. They said they had learned from sources inside the interior ministry that the number of ballots printed was vastly greater than the number of potential voters, and that twice the necessary number of validation stamps had been made and distributed as well. These materials could be put to untoward purposes, the candidates suggested, particularly in the smaller precincts, where the polls closed earliest. But their entreaty was seemingly lost in the preelection tumult.

On June 11, the night before the election, Asieh and a friend had a minor car accident near Vanak Square. No one was hurt, but the women had to wait at the police station behind the square. There, Asieh noticed something different from the previous nights. The Basijis did not venture into the crowd to argue for Ahmadinejad. They hung back behind the square on their motorcycles. Asieh saw that one was bleeding from the head.

“What happened to you?” she asked in her gentlest, most maternal tone.

“Some Mousavi supporters beat me and broke my head,” he told her.

Surely, she said, they didn’t beat him just to express their support for Mousavi. Had he gotten into a fight?

“It’s finished,” the Basiji replied.

“What’s finished?” Asieh asked.

The Basiji laughed. Another Basiji who’d been listening laughed, too. “Everything is finished,” they told her. “And Doctor,” which was what they called Ahmadinejad, “will come tomorrow.”

Now Asieh laughed. “The election is tomorrow,” she chided, “not tonight.”

“No,” one of the Basijis said meaningfully. “The election was tonight.”

• • •

O
N ELECTION DAY
, Asieh couldn’t help feeling happy and expectant. She had never seen the polling stations like this. Voters waited as long as three hours on snaking lines to cast their ballots, and the mood on those lines was exuberant for Mousavi.

Rumors of fraud wafted through the crowds, some of them—like the one suggesting that the pens at the polling stations were loaded with disappearing ink—clearly preposterous. Others were more credible, as they allegedly originated within the interior ministry. But the reformists had assured their supporters that the most the security forces could possibly falsify would be two to four million votes. With a turnout as big as it clearly was in Tehran, four million votes hardly mattered. The election might go to a run-off, and then Mousavi’s advantage would only swell.

In the afternoon, some polls closed precipitously. Others had run out of ballot papers. Text messaging service had been shut down throughout the country since the night before, and in the afternoon many reformist websites suddenly went dark. Asieh felt certain now that something wasn’t right. By evening she was fielding ominous and confused reports. And then something strange happened just as the polls closed.

Mir Hossein Mousavi called a press conference in which he claimed that there were indeed irregularities in the election’s administration. He declared himself the winner with by far the greater share of the vote, and he called on the Supreme Leader to intercede.

It was a bizarre move. Mousavi could not possibly have known the election’s outcome. But from his words and his manner, it was clear that he anticipated something, and he was sending up a preemptive flare.

The polls had barely closed when the interior ministry announced the results based on partial returns: Ahmadinejad would be the winner by a commanding margin—69 percent at the time of the announcement, although in the end the official tally would give him 63 percent to Mousavi’s 34.

The speed of the initial announcement was unprecedented. Tabulating Iran’s handwritten paper ballots normally took twelve to forty-eight hours, and this year’s turnout was much higher than normal—officially 85 percent, or 39 million voters. The interior ministry said its calculation was based on five million of those votes. Even this was far more than was normally counted so instantaneously, and to announce preliminary results with such finality was unheard-of in Iran. The capital was locked down,
with communications jammed, Revolutionary Guardsmen and Basij forces dispatched into the streets, the interior ministry sealed off like a bunker.

• • •

A
IDA
S
AADAT WAS
a thirty-five-year-old women’s rights activist from the city of Qazvin. She was a friend of Asieh’s, the daughter of a factory technician and a carpet weaver. She’d supported herself since she was eighteen, sometimes commuting eight hours a day between Qazvin and Tehran, and often, like Asieh, working multiple jobs.

Although her degree was in English translation, Aida had devoted her twenties to eradicating child abuse in the villages of Qazvin province. She believed that Iran’s problems were as much cultural as political. People needed to learn not to accept violence as a normal condition of life, she felt. Aida was divorced, with a child of her own. After years working in the villages, she came to Tehran and worked with the One Million Signatures campaign and with a human rights group that defended the rights of prisoners.

In 2009 she cast her lot with Karroubi. He was courageous and kind, Aida felt, and an unambivalent supporter of causes she held dear. Karroubi, far more than Mousavi, was the election’s outspoken advocate for women’s rights, human rights, and political freedom. He had traveled an enormous distance over the four years of Ahmadinejad’s presidency, and he had done so following only his alert humanitarian conscience.

For Aida, the two weeks before the election had been an experience apart. For four years, under Ahmadinejad, her organizations could not so much as hold meetings without someone getting arrested. Now there were no repercussions, there was no fear. Only when she tasted this freedom did Aida truly know how hungry she had been for it. She had never lived like this in her life.

She was at the Karroubi campaign headquarters the night of June 12. The students, journalists, and activists who had gathered there were puzzling over the announced returns, calling their counterparts in the provinces, when the office manager told them to vacate the building. Threats
had come in from the police, and security forces had raided Karroubi’s office in a different building, destroying everything they didn’t seize.

As Aida left the building, she saw that a cordon of police on motorbikes surrounded it. Security agents swore at the exiting campaign workers and yelled at them to leave or face arrest. Aida ventured into streets that just two nights before had pulsed with unaccustomed freedom. Now she saw Basijis beating and insulting young people who carried green or white signs from the Mousavi or Karroubi campaigns.

Security forces had invaded one of Mousavi’s campaign offices before five that evening, and his headquarters at around eight. They attacked the Setad 88 headquarters with tear gas and batons just before dawn. The activists poured down the stairs, scrambling to get out, a father separated from his crying child, some of the volunteers injured and limping. Was this a coup d’état? the volunteers asked one another. Why attack a campaign office with tear gas in the middle of the night?

It was two in the morning when Asieh Amini took a phone call from a prominent journalist.

“Sleep tonight,” the journalist told Asieh and Javad, “because it’s finished. They called all the newspapers and told them to change their headlines. Ahmadinejad will be announced the winner.”

“I know,” Asieh heard herself saying. “I heard it last night.”

• • •

T
HE SPEED OF THE COUNT,
followed by the communications blackout, the threatening atmosphere, the raids and arrests and attacks on civilians, did not give the impression of a confident, law-abiding republic that had just reelected its president by a two-thirds majority. The numbers, too, raised questions. Mousavi was alleged to have lost even in his hometown. Karroubi, after coming in a close third in 2005, pulled less than 1 percent of the vote—fewer than the number of spoiled ballots.
Ethnic minorities and rural voters dramatically changed their voting patterns. Many precincts reported more votes than they had eligible voters, and while this was somewhat normal in Iran, where people can vote anywhere they happen to
be,
the numbers suggested the presence of hundreds of visitors in villages where such an influx would surely have been noticed.

Mousavi complained that many of his election observers had been prevented from carrying out their work.
A researcher in a village near Shiraz reported that ballot boxes were sealed and swept from the polling station before the ballots could be counted in the presence of observers.
Similar allegations were reported in Azerbaijan province. Employees of the interior ministry continued to loose vexing rumors. One told
The
New York Times
on June 13 that for weeks the ministry had prepared itself by purging potential skeptics and packing its ranks with Ahmadinejad loyalists from around the country. The employee showed the reporter his ministry badge and explained, “They didn’t rig the vote. They didn’t even look at the vote. They just wrote the name and put the number in front of it.”

These and other oddities could, and would, be dismissed or explained away by those who accepted the election results as valid. In an effort to resolve what was becoming a rancorous global dispute,
foreign statisticians would pore over the election figures, wrenched from any context, looking for mathematical evidence of anomalies or the lack thereof. But on the evening of June 12, for a great many Iranian voters, the disbelief was swift and visceral. Turnout, Ahmadinejad’s opponents had believed, was the game, and they had won it, which meant they could not have lost. For Ahmadinejad to have won against Mousavi two to one, he would have needed to retain all of his voters from 2005, despite his disappointing and polarizing term in office and the conservative disenchantment with him that was evident in the 2006 and 2008 elections. He would also have needed seven million new votes. But the Iranians who had sat out the 2005 election were very unlikely hardline conservatives. Not only did hardline conservatives have a horse in that race—Ahmadinejad—but their Supreme Leader called them to the polls as a duty to God and country. By definition, they were the ones who did not abstain.