Children of Paradise (62 page)

Ahmadinejad’s supporters would point out that the Mousavi camp could muster no hard evidence of fraud. The reformists, they would say, were simply full of themselves, unaware that a few photogenic young
people in North Tehran did not represent the nation. Why was it so hard for them to accept that they were a minority after all? That the leap in voter turnout was no Green Wave but an expression of confidence in the president? Opinion polls, notoriously unreliable in Iran, did show Ahmadinejad ahead prior to the election (except when they didn’t). The Greens had swept one another up in a shared narcissism that blinded them to the greater enthusiasm for Ahmadinejad.

Those who had waited on those long lines for hours to cast their votes knew for whom they voted, Mousavi said in a statement. Together with Karroubi and Mohsen Rezaie, Ahmadinejad’s sole challenger from the right, Mousavi petitioned the Guardian Council to nullify the election and hold it anew. The three candidates called on their supporters to remain calm.

“
I personally strongly protest the many obvious violations, and I’m warning I will not surrender to this dangerous charade,” Mousavi declared. “The result of such performance by some officials will jeopardize the pillars of the Islamic Republic and will establish tyranny.”

• • •

M
OUSAVI AND
K
ARROUBI
requested permission to hold a demonstration. The interior ministry said no, as it would to every such request Mousavi and Karroubi put forth. But demonstrators came anyway. Some ten thousand protesters took to the streets in Tehran on June 13, the day after the vote. By dusk, there were clashes. Young people had set fires in plastic garbage cans all around, perhaps to ward off the tear gas that was now pouring into squares the Basij and riot police had cleared of protesters. Enghelab Square was packed with people, some of them shouting “Down with the dictator!” Others chanted a song about judgment day. Some demonstrators threw stones at the Basij, who fought back with batons, rubber hoses, and cables.

On his way to a meeting at Mosharekat headquarters, the former deputy interior minister Mostafa Tajzadeh, who was one of Mousavi’s campaign managers, spoke to his son-in-law by phone. Tajzadeh said he was
certain from the sources he maintained inside his old ministry that the election results were fraudulent.

The son-in-law told Tajzadeh to be careful. But Tajzadeh just laughed. No interrogator could get a phony confession out of him, he said, and they knew it: “But you can bring me cigarettes in prison.”

Tajzadeh’s meeting at Mosherakat was interrupted by a raid. Along with several other high-profile reformists, Tajzadeh was arrested and brought to Evin.

• • •

M
AHMOUD
A
HMADINEJAD
was never one for subtlety. Even when his hand was strong, he had a tendency to overplay it.
The president held a victory rally on Sunday, June 14, in Valiasr Square. His supporters should pay no heed to the sore losers from the other side, he told the crowd. They were like fans of a losing soccer team: “Those whose team has lost are angry and will do anything to vent their anger. Forty million people participated in the elections in Iran. . . . Now four or five dirt or dust creeping from the corners may do something. But you must know that the pure river that is the Iranian nation will not allow them to put themselves on display.”

Later, under pressure even from conservatives who thought the “dirt or dust” remark had gone too far, Ahmadinejad would walk it back, claiming that he was referring only to those who rioted and started fires: those people, he clarified, “are nothing, they are not even a part of the nation of Iran.”

But whatever he had actually meant by the remark, it was a spark to a tinderbox.
Etemad Melli
, Karroubi’s newspaper, ran a photograph of protesters carrying a banner with the words “The Epic of Dust and Dirt” in green. It was a reference to the phrase for Khatami’s 1997 win, “The Epic of the Second of Khordad.” “We are not dust and dirt,” read another placard, “we are the nation of Iran.” Mohammad Reza Shajarian, a wildly popular singer, asked the regime’s broadcasting agency to please stop playing
his songs because, as he said, “
this is the voice of dirt and dust and will always remain so.”

The night of the victory rally, in an eerie replay of a night not so long past, security forces armed with riot gear burst into the dormitory at the University of Tehran. They lobbed tear gas canisters into dorm rooms, broke windows, beat students, shot them with pellet guns, and arrested more than a hundred of them. They beat five students to death with their batons and shot two dead. Five others were hospitalized for twenty days or longer.

Security forces raided dormitories in other cities as well: Tabriz, Babol, Mashhad, Zahedan, Isfahan, Shiraz. Two students were reportedly killed in Shiraz. The university chancellor resigned in protest. Even the conservative speaker of the parliament was scandalized and demanded an investigation.
Another conservative parliamentarian reproached Ahmadinejad for his earlier remarks, adding that those who assaulted university students in the middle of the night were the ones who were dirt and dust. But the investigation would go nowhere, except to lay blame on unnamed saboteurs who sought to blacken the face of the regime.

• • •

I
RAN WAS NOT A COUNTRY
of frivolous street protests. The price was simply too high, for too little return. The reformists around President Khatami had studiously avoided calling their supporters to the streets during their time in power. Mousavi did no differently, but the times were different, and on Monday, June 15, 2009, a dam broke. More Iranians flooded the streets than at any time since the 1979 revolution, and the tactic they chose came directly from the women’s rights activists’ playbook. They would stand together in silence, many holding placards with a simple slogan: “Where is my vote?”

As Asieh got ready to leave the house, Javad told her not to expect much. He had not forgotten the Eighteenth of Tir, nor should she. The people would come to the streets, sure. But Mousavi and Karroubi wouldn’t. The politicians would do what Iranian politicians always did: they would set the people up to face the brutal security establishment alone.

But Mousavi and Karroubi did show up, and the people, if they were alone, were alone in their multitudes.

Tehran was a city truncated and divided, literally and invisibly, by the walls that set off private spaces of safety from public ones of menace. Now it seemed to have turned inside out, its residents shoulder to shoulder across the fifty-thousand-square-meter expanse of Azadi Square and the streets beyond. From bookshop-lined Enghelab Square near the university, to Azadi with its distinctive arch-shaped monument and hexagonal gardens, the people—ordinary Iranians of every age and type, alongside activists and reformists who had fought all those years—pressed together so tightly they literally took Asieh’s breath away. Tehran’s conservative mayor estimated the crowd at three million; engineers Asieh knew at the university capped it at four. The crowd vibrated with a vast, univocal silence, and with the exhilarating, surreal absence of fear.

The show of power and unity in that crowd was unlike anything Asieh had known. Even years later, the thought of it would bring tears to her eyes. As she passed Sharif University, she saw a van driving slowly with the crowd, Karroubi standing on its roof.

“Javad,” Asieh said when she got home. “You’re a big loser. Because that is the most important thing that has happened to me in all my life.”

The security forces hung back, maybe under orders, or maybe because the crowd was just too big. But toward the end of the day, gunshots pierced the silence of the demonstrators and the restraint of the security forces. Video footage would show militiamen shooting into the crowd from the roof of their headquarters near Azadi Square. At least eight people were killed in Tehran. It was a day when a young woman who came to those streets found herself holding a stranger’s corpse, her manteau soaked in blood, the dead man resting against her in her nightmares for addled nights to come.

• • •

F
AMOUS REFORMISTS WERE DISAPPEARING
. They were arrested in their homes and offices, then spirited off to Evin, where most were held
incommunicado for at least a month. They were the middle level of reformist leadership: people who had name recognition, networks, political vision, or organizing know-how. Many were major national figures from the time of the revolution. All had held responsible positions in the government.

There were former cabinet ministers, deputy ministers, and members of the parliament; hostage takers, city councilmen, a former presidential spokesman, associates of Rafsanjani and Khatami alike, even the seventy-eight-year-old foreign minister under Bazargan. Some of these men, like Mostafa Tajzadeh and Khatami’s vice president Mohammad Ali Abtahi, had been targeted for nearly a decade. Then there was Saeed Hajjarian, who still required round-the-clock nursing care and many medications.

Even for the Islamic Republic, this was new. The entire leadership of a mainstream political faction had been rounded up as criminals. The family members knew little and could say less, but what news emerged was disturbing. Hajjarian, his daughter alleged, underwent interrogation under the blazing sun, with buckets of ice water occasionally dumped on him to elicit shock. Mohammad Ali Abtahi told his wife he was drugged: “In the last few days, they have been giving me a pill that separates me from the noise and tumult of this world.” Soon enough, a number of the detainees, including Hajjarian and Abtahi, issued statements describing the excellent treatment and quality of life they enjoyed in Evin. They would not be seen publicly until August 1, when they would be paraded on television in shocking condition, to deliver their forced confessions and stand in trumped-up show trials.

• • •

F
OREIGN JOURNALISTS WERE EJECTED
from the country. Internet speeds slowed to a crawl when connections weren’t blacked-out altogether. When SMS service functioned, Javad Montazeri got text messages from
Ershad
. He was not authorized, the messages said, to take photos of protests. Similar messages had gone out to all the photojournalists. Javad didn’t stop photographing, and he didn’t stop sending images and videos to friends abroad, no matter how slowly the Internet functioned or how
heavily it was monitored. Asieh reported from the streets for a website called Roozonline, using five different pseudonyms.

Thousands of demonstrators continued to turn out daily, although plainclothes militias beat them with abandon. Aida Saadat walked whole days armed with a water bottle and cigarettes and lighters, which were said to ward off tear gas. She was on the phone all the time, telling reporters what she saw—here on Valiasr, there at Haft-e Tir Square, wherever she happened to be. She was beaten so often that her friends made jokes about not wanting to stand near her. Once she bit the Basiji who assailed her. She wasn’t sure he felt it through his uniform, but it was better than doing nothing. Sometimes she was tagged with green and yellow paint balls that the security forces used to identify activists for arrest.

When Aida wasn’t haunting the streets, she could be found in front of Evin Prison. Thousands of people had been arrested, and many of them were now missing. Aida and some activist colleagues were looking for the family members, in order to build an information network. She was also looking for the sheets Evin posted outside with lists of recent detainees. When the lists went up, even though there were security cameras trained on her, Aida would read the names aloud into a voice recorder. Then she would go home, transcribe the lists, and send them to human rights organizations. She collected some two thousand names. They accounted for, at most, half of those who’d disappeared.

Some Iranians repaired to their rooftops at night, where they sent up calls, one roof to another:
Allahu Akbar! Allahu Akbar!
Such, in 1979, had been the midnight call and response of the revolutionary multitudes. Back then, it signaled resistance to the shah in the name of God. Now it signaled the persistence of the protest movement in the face of violence and its refusal to be cast as irreligious or counterrevolutionary. It reclaimed the past and reproached what the Islamic Republic had become.

• • •

O
NCE UPON A TIME
, in Ayatollah Khomeini’s day, the government’s warring factions had appealed to the Supreme Leader to arbitrate their
disputes. Khomeini was never exactly neutral. He had winnowed the governing factions to a narrow band within a single party. But within that inner circle of government, Khomeini was a balancer of interests and a settler of conflicts. He was never so much missed in that role as he was in 2009.

Khamenei was no Khomeini. He had been a factional player from the start, a party to the disputes Khomeini had arbitrated—usually between himself, as president, and Mousavi, as prime minister. As Leader, Khamenei’s hardline allegiances were explicit, his preference for Ahmadinejad common knowledge, and his Guardian Council, led by the aging Ayatollah Ahmad Jannati, was as hardline and partial as he was.

Still, if only in fantasy, the Leader had a role to play. There was no one else in a position to unite the country, to curtail the security forces’ excesses, or to soothe the wounded dignity of the Green Movement. Ahmadinejad was committed to the harsh course he’d chosen, but Khamenei could still unwind the noose. The Leader was to speak at Friday prayers at the University of Tehran on June 19, and the country awaited him tensely.

The prayer hall was packed tightly with devoted followers. Ahmadinejad was there. Mousavi and Karroubi were noticeably absent. Khamenei spoke for an hour. He began by praising the nation for participating in the election despite the usual foreign plots to discourage it. Iran had once again showed the world that it loved and trusted its Islamic Republic. All four candidates, Khamenei insisted, belonged to the system and upheld its legitimacy. Khamenei knew them well, and while he favored Ahmadinejad, he assured the hardline crowd that there was no true opposition in the race, and that the voters had made their selections within the boundaries of the constitution.