Children of Paradise (63 page)

Khamenei spoke at length about the televised debate between Ahmadinejad and Mousavi. He reprimanded Ahmadinejad for accusing Rafsanjani and his sons of corruption, even while clarifying that in the 2005 election, he himself preferred Ahmadinejad, whose views on domestic and foreign affairs were closer to his own. He also expressed grave sadness that Mousavi had assailed the honesty and character of the president and exaggerated the country’s current difficulties.

The election results were legitimate, the Leader asserted: “The Islamic Republic does not betray the votes of the people.” A million votes or fewer could be fraudulent, but not 11 million. Those who had doubts should lodge their complaints with the Guardian Council. Street pressure would be counterproductive. To submit to it would be the beginning of tyranny. Moreover, said the Leader, protests furnished cover for infiltrating terrorists. When such elements then provoked violence among the people, and the Basij reacted appropriately, who was to blame?

“One’s heart is torn apart when one sees such events,” the Leader lamented, “when one sees that they raid university dormitories and harm young students, not rioting students but the pious students, and then chant slogans in support of the Leader, too. One’s heart is torn apart by such events.”

In his wisdom and kindness, his solidarity with his people, his profound sorrow for their sufferings, Khamenei reserved his most ominous words for Mousavi and those who would follow him in protest:

Those—the politicians, heads of parties, and directors of political currents—who can exert some influence on the public and are listened to by some groups, should be very careful of their conduct. They should be very careful of what they say. If they show the slightest extremism, the repercussions will be felt by the body of the people and can lead to a very sensitive and dangerous situation, which even they cannot control. . . . If the political elite ignore the law, or cut off their noses to spite their faces, whether they want to or not, they will be responsible for the bloodshed, violence, and chaos to follow.

• • •

M
OUSAVI AND
K
ARROUBI HAD LODGED
their complaints with the Guardian Council, which promised a random review of some ballot boxes; but they expected little from the high clerical body, given its biases and those the Leader had just expressed. Mousavi was famous for his obstinacy,
however, and he was true to his reputation now.
He responded to Khamenei’s speech with a statement striking in its continual evocation of the 1980s as a wellspring of ideology and of hope.

He had come to the election, Mousavi said, to assure Iran’s people that the revolution had not been in vain and that it was still possible to live spiritually in the fallen modern world. “I had come to say that bypassing the law results in tyranny; to remind that attention to human beings’ generosity does not weaken the foundation of the regime, but strengthens it,” Mousavi said. “I had come to say that people expect truth and honesty from their servants, and a lot of our troubles have arisen from lies. I had come to say that backwardness, poverty, corruption, and injustice are not our destiny.”

Mousavi, like Khamenei, praised the participation of the people, although he suggested that voters had poured forth in hope of righting a crisis of administration. And he directly answered Khamenei’s attempt to lay the regime’s violence at his door: “If this good faith and trust coming from the people is not answered by protecting their votes, or the people cannot react in a civil and peaceful way to defend their rights, there will be dangerous pathways ahead, responsibility for which lies with those who can’t stand peaceful behaviors.”

Mousavi dismissed Khamenei’s argument that the sheer volume of votes in Ahmadinejad’s favor made fraud impossible. The Leader was in effect suggesting that the magnitude of the alleged fraud was evidence that no fraud had taken place. Such sophistry insulted the republican foundations of the state and gave comfort to those who all along thought Islam incompatible with republicanism. Khomeini had left Iran a better legacy than this.

To his followers, Mousavi pledged that he would stand by their side at all times. He urged them to let no one steal from them the flag of the Islamic Republic or the heritage of the revolution their fathers had wrought. He told them to “continue your social movements based on freedoms explicitly stated in the constitution and stay away from violence, as you have been doing.” And he staked out his territory within the orthodoxy of the revolution and under the supposed protection of its security forces:

In this road, we are not up against the Basij members; Basijis are our brothers. In this road, we are not up against the Revolutionary Guard members; they are the protectors of our revolution and regime. We are not up against the military; they are the protectors of our borders. We are not up against our sacred regime and its legal structures; this structure guards our independence, freedom, and Islamic Republic. We are up against the deviations and deceptions and we want to reform them; a reformation that returns us to the pure principles of the Islamic Revolution.

• • •

K
HATAMI HAD ONCE CALLED
M
OUSAVI
“the man of Saturday.” He had meant the Saturday after being elected president. But Mousavi was a man for Saturdays no one had imagined. No politician under the Islamic Republic had spoken up for the masses on the streets as he had. The Saturday that followed Khamenei’s speech was June 20, and it would be known forever after as Bloody Saturday. Mousavi did not call off his supporters, as the Leader had told him to, and his supporters did not stay home. They came to the streets, by some estimates in the tens of thousands, specifically to show that they were not afraid. Security forces met them there with knives, razors, and guns. More than twenty people were shot to death, untold numbers beaten to death or seriously wounded.

Between Valiasr Square and Enghelab was an inferno, young people on the ground with Basijis beating their heads with clubs until their brains bled. Asieh was on her way to Enghelab Square with two of her friends when a tide of people came barreling toward them in flight. Asieh felt herself carried by the crowd and then pulled from it by two large men in black uniforms with big batons. They flattened her against a wall and beat her shoulders, back, and head. When she crumpled to the ground, her assailants were swept away by the stampede. Asieh’s friends had turned against the current to find her. But Asieh couldn’t run, and they needed to. She released their hands and threw herself into the nearest alleyway on her hands and knees.

The shouted slogans and gunfire drew nearer, and the sky darkened with a thick cloud. Asieh’s eyes burned and she choked on her breath. She dragged herself along the ground to the nearest doorbells. It was a long time before anybody answered. A man cracked a gate and beckoned her to come in. In his courtyard he doused her with water to cleanse the tear gas. It didn’t help much, but later she was grateful, because it helped conceal the fact that she lost control of her bladder as she slept in that courtyard. Asieh was the first of many wounded the man ushered in.

The Basij were out in the alley, loudly discussing whether or not they should search all the homes on the block. The wounded protesters in the courtyard kept their voices low, worried they would bring violence on their host. Asieh spotted a colleague from
Etemad
, and there was a father with his college-aged son, whose face was bloodied and his shoulder broken. The son was a poet, the father told her eagerly, and he had the battered young man pass the time by reciting his poems for Asieh. Her head still swimming, Asieh took out her voice recorder and let it run. Crimes had been committed here, she thought woozily. Maybe one day she would need evidence.

When evening fell, Asieh started for home. Traffic was heavy. A stranger gave her a ride halfway, and she found a taxi for the rest. Wherever she looked from the windows, she saw fires burning. She heard gunshots.

For the second time in her life, Asieh needed an emergency room but did not dare go. Security forces lay in wait at all the hospitals. A friend of hers had gone from emergency room to emergency room with a gaping head wound and found no safety in any of them. At last he got his stitches at a dental clinic. Asieh found a doctor who would come to her home. She was lucky, the doctor said. The club had hit the hard part of her skull. She needed to rest. Her concussion would heal. But her bruises were impressive. He photographed them and prescribed a painkiller for her neck.

• • •

N
EDA
A
GHA-
S
OLTAN
, twenty-six years old, was a middle-class girl from Tehran who had studied philosophy, tourism, and voice. Her name, in fact, meant “voice.” But in the final video of her, the one that would make her an international symbol, Neda was silent. She had already spoken her last words—“I’m burning!”—before the film began.

Shot in the chest on Bloody Saturday, Neda bled to death with her eyes seemingly locked to the viewer on the other side of an anonymous camera phone at the scene. The clip showed her splayed on the sidewalk in gray pants and a black manteau, men bent over her, frantic to stanch her bleeding chest. She stared, a gaze unblinking but full of fear, until it was emptied of everything as blood spidered and then gushed from her nose and mouth.

Neda was not the first to die that week, nor the only one that day. But she was the only one to die on camera, in a video clip that would be seen all over the world. Something about the occlusion of her beauty by that dark mask of blood captured a particular horror—of things that did not go together, untimeliness, the triumph of death over life. Inside Iran, where the culture of martyrdom ran deep, Neda became a vessel for the anger and grief of millions.

The young woman was unarmed. She had exited a car and walked into the street at the wrong moment. Two men had tried mightily to save her. One of them was a doctor. He could be heard in the video clip shouting at the others to apply pressure to her wound. Another voice—that of Neda’s music teacher, who had accompanied her that day—cried, “Neda, don’t be afraid! Neda, stay with me.” They tried to resuscitate her breathing, then they loaded her, well past hope, into a car bound for a hospital.

The doctor remained behind at the scene and saw the crowd mob a militiaman who exclaimed, “I didn’t mean to kill her!” The crowd ripped the Basiji’s shirt and took his weapons and his identity card. Then they debated what to do. They could hardly hand him to the police, and while some people hungered for immediate revenge, they resolved not to make themselves murderers, too. Instead they kept his identity card and set him free.

The doctor who witnessed all this fled to Britain. He told the BBC that the bullet had entered Neda from the front, rupturing her aorta and probably her lung. There was no exit wound. The look in her eyes, he said, was of surprise and frank confusion. The innocence behind that look haunted
him ceaselessly. For three nights he didn’t sleep. He felt guilty because he hadn’t managed to save her and because, after she had gone, when he rose from her body and understood that he stood in the spot where she had been shot, he felt afraid for his own life.

The other documented witness, Neda’s music teacher, spoke to the press of his anguish and sorrow for the loss of a young woman he described as joyful and vibrant. “
This is a crime that is not in support of the government,” he said. “This is a crime against humanity.”
Then he was imprisoned and apparently coerced into challenging the doctor’s testimony. Neda was shot not from the front but from behind, he would allege; there had been no militiamen on the scene. He died on the fifth anniversary of Neda’s death, reportedly a depressed and broken man.

The Islamic Republic variously blamed Neda’s death on fellow demonstrators, the Mojahedin, the BBC, and the doctor who tried to save her life. Mousavi would have none of it. On June 21 he spoke up for the present and even for the past: “
Had those responsible for the murders at the student dormitory on the Eighteenth of Tir, 1999, been confronted under the law and in an appropriate manner, today we wouldn’t have to bear witness to the same type of tragedies on a larger scale, and wouldn’t have to hear the truth being bent in a more brazen fashion.” The same criminals, Mousavi asserted, were responsible for manipulating the election as for brutalizing the people, and now they dared to deny what hundreds had witnessed and even documented.

“
I am not ready to stop standing, even for a second,” Mousavi insisted, “in the shadow of the green tree of restoring the rights of the people of Iran, that has been unjustly fed with the blood of the youth of this country.”

• • •

W
HEN
A
SIEH SAW THE VIDEO
of Neda’s death, she wondered why the young woman’s family had not come forward. And were there other demonstrators killed? Had they returned to 1988, when political massacres, carried out in secret, were not spoken of, even as the bodies vanished into mass graves?

One day, a women’s rights activist called Asieh’s home. She needed a new manteau, the activist said; would Asieh care to go shopping with her? Asieh understood at once that this was code. Of course, she said. She needed a new manteau, too.

A group of six activists gathered. They had all heard terrible, unconfirmable things. Some demonstrators had been shot; others might have died under torture. But none of the families were coming forward. Maybe they were still looking for their loved ones in the chaos, hoping to find them in prisons and hospitals. The women decided that the time had come for them to reactivate their network. They would search for the victims and offer solace to the families, encouraging them to speak out. They would try to organize memorials for the fortieth day after each death, according to tradition.

Their first lead came from within their own network. Parvin Fahimi belonged to a group called Mothers for Peace, of which Asieh was also a member. Fahimi had been searching in vain for her nineteen-year-old son, Sohrab Arabi, since he disappeared at the June 15 protest in Azadi Square. They’d gone there together and were separated by the crowd. Cell phone communications were jammed that day. For nearly a month, Fahimi haunted the prisons and the hospitals until at a police station she was allowed to view photographs of the unidentified deceased. Sohrab was “Picture Number 12.” A perfunctory coroner’s report gave June 19 as the date of death but no cause, and no accounting for Sohrab’s whereabouts from June 15 to 19. When the family recovered the body, they saw that Sohrab had taken a bullet in his chest.