Then They Came For Me (11 page)

He repeated his football analogy and said that the supporters of the losing team were trying to change the results. “But it doesn’t matter what a bunch of
khas o khashak
”—dust and dirt—“are doing,” he said. “The pure tides of this nation will eventually get rid of them.”

Ahmadinejad’s speech added insult to the Mousavi supporters’ injury. People could accept a defeat, but not humiliation. Everywhere, afterward, people talked about Ahmadinejad’s use of the phrase
khas o khashak
. Mousavi had asked his followers to avoid any confrontation with the security forces and to reject the use of violence, and up to this point, most people had restrained their anger. But that was changing fast. Calling millions of citizens “dust and dirt” was the last straw.

Young people all around Tehran started to clash with the police and the Basij. The police exhibited no restraint in attacking protestors and passersby alike. As the people became more frustrated, the police and the Guards became more organized. The anti-riot units had orders to leave no space for Mousavi supporters to move in the city. They took over sidewalks and beat up anyone who didn’t get out of their way.

I went around the city by motorcycle and taxi, and when there was no way to get through the traffic, I walked. The city was quickly sinking into bedlam. Gangs of anti-riot police on motorcycles roamed the streets, menacing drivers and stopping traffic seemingly at random. A driver on Beheshti Avenue honked his horn in protest when policemen on motorcycles blocked his way. Within an instant, three or four cops got off their bikes and smashed the car’s windows with their clubs. They seemed to have a personal grudge against side mirrors and didn’t stop hitting the car until both mirrors fell to the ground. The driver put
his hands on his head and ducked down, but one of the policemen dragged him out of the car and to the sidewalk, where another officer started slapping him.

“What are you looking at?” a policeman asked me as he pushed my face away with his hand. I didn’t see his face; all I could see were his black leather gloves with the tips of the fingers cut off and a shiny fortified plastic elbow cap strapped on top of his black uniform. “Nothing, nothing,” I said, striding away as fast as I could.

As I walked wearily along Vali Asr Avenue that evening, I saw four or five officers beating an old woman with a club because she’d protested that they were blocking the entrance to her house. The woman collapsed with the first blow. Her black head scarf fell to her shoulders. As I saw the club hitting the woman’s backside, I felt her pain in my body as well. It was the same kind of electric instrument I’d been hit with the day before. Watching this scene but unable to act, I felt like a coward. I had my video camera in my rucksack, but I was afraid to take it out. I was afraid to help the woman because I didn’t want to risk arrest and imprisonment. I felt as if my feet were pinned to the ground. I wanted to beat the attackers off, but there were too many of them for me to be able to help her. As I was debating what to do, the beating ended. As soon as the Guards moved away, I and a couple of other men helped her into her house.

“Khamenei will pay for this. He will pay for this,” she said, crying gently.

Feeling utterly helpless, I went back home. At nine
P.M.
, I sat down weakly in front of the television. Ahmadinejad’s victory speech and Khamenei’s message congratulating him were playing on a repeating loop. The extent to which this government was willing to publicly humiliate its people was revolting.

Before long, my phone rang. It was Davood. He said that he and his buddies had been drinking since the election results. “I feel much better now. We spent the evening fighting the local
Basij members,” he told me. “We staged our own revolution here last night.” He agreed to pick me up around eleven
P.M.
and take me to his neighborhood.

That night, the streets in Poonak were covered with garbage and the plastic trash bins were on fire. “Welcome to Palestine,” Davood said. I watched a group of young people attack a local Basij base—an anonymous-looking office building—with sticks and stones.
“Basiji bia biroon,”
they yelled to the Basij members, daring them to come out.

Davood introduced me to his friends in the crowd. They told me that the night before, ten people wearing green had smashed the windows of neighborhood shops. “They had covered their faces so no one would recognize them,” one young man said. “They wanted to blame it on the greens, but when we searched them, three of them had Basij cards on them.”

As I listened to these stories and watched Davood and his friends throw rocks and pieces of a destroyed sidewalk railing at the base, I was speechless. How had we gotten here? These were the same kids who had demonstrated peacefully in the days leading up to the election, who had gone to vote peacefully on Friday. Now, all their dreams were shattered.

Davood told me that they were not sure whether anyone was in the building but they were happy to throw stones at it anyway, just to let off steam. Davood could see that I was uncomfortable. He put his head close to mine and screamed over the noise: “What do you want me to do, Mr. Maziar? They’ve kicked me out of school. I’m unemployed. What can I do?” When he pulled back, he had tears in his eyes. I had no answer for him. “I’m going to buy a gun tomorrow,” he told me. “We’ll show them what we’re capable of.”

During the annual hajj, Muslims’ pilgrimage to Mecca, pilgrims throw stones at a pillar that represents Satan. Like those pilgrims, the young people in Poonak were throwing stones at the Basij, who, for them, symbolized the evil in the country. I
began to wonder when this kind of symbolic attack would turn into real attacks against Basij members, not only with tree branches and stones but with guns and Molotov cocktails.

When I got home, I tried to find out what was going on in different parts of the country by contacting some of my friends on Facebook. Despite the government’s effort to block Facebook, many Iranians used Freegate, a filter buster developed by Chinese dissidents to circumvent government censors; they used Facebook and Twitter to communicate with the outside world and with one another. In fact, Iran had the largest community of bloggers outside of the United States and China. There were more blogs in Persian than in any other language except English. The Iranian government’s long-standing monopoly on information was being challenged not only on the streets but also in cyberspace.

By this time, Facebook was the most reliable source of information. There were reports of sporadic demonstrations all around the country, but it seemed that the police had succeeded in intimidating ordinary people in most cities and preventing them from taking to the streets. The police warnings had no effect on university students, however. Students in many dormitories around the country staged pro-Mousavi demonstrations and clashed with the police. In some instances, the police ransacked the dormitories and arrested a number of students. From different postings on Facebook, I learned that the worst atrocities that night were committed in the men’s dormitory of Tehran University. Police had apparently been called by campus security after a group of students were heard chanting anti-Ahmadinejad slogans. After the police and Basij units entered the dormitory, security closed the gates so that no one could get out. Every student from the dorm—whether he had taken part in the demonstrations or not—was dragged out of his room. Outside the dorm, the anti-riot police piled them together and beat them with clubs. Many were kicked until they became unconscious.
In some cases, the anti-riot police sodomized the students with clubs. At least seven students were killed.

That night, I heard the sound of chaos in my dreams; but before I woke up, it was Amir’s voice that echoed around me: “All we can do is pray that the supreme leader will make a wise decision.” Power blinds, and I feared that Khamenei’s blindness could only mean disaster for my country and my people.

I woke up the next morning to a disturbing email from a friend of Amir’s:

“He has been arrested. Call me.”

On the phone, the friend told me that Amir had been arrested that morning, along with dozens of pro-Mousavi politicians, including former ministers and vice presidents. The news of the arrests had gone viral.

“Should I be worried about myself?” I asked.

“Not now. Just be careful,” he answered.

That morning, I tried to reach my friends and sources within the government. Nobody was answering the phone. Everyone had suddenly gone silent.

I had asked Davood to pick me up at nine
A.M.
to take me to a few appointments and then the demonstration planned for four
P.M.
on Revolution Avenue. Reacting to Ahmadinejad’s speech after his victory, when he’d called his opponents a bunch of dust and dirt, Mousavi supporters had named their protest the Dust and Dirt demonstration. Word of the gathering had gotten around through Internet sites and was reported on satellite television. But Davood was uncharacteristically late, and not answering his phone. He called me at nine-thirty.

“Where the hell are you?” I asked angrily.

“Come to the corner of Motahari and Vali Asr,” he said.

“What do you mean?”

“Mr. Maziar, just come to the corner. I will wait for you there.”

The instructions were so strange that I began to grow worried. I remembered Davood telling me about the men in Peugeots he had seen waiting on my mother’s street. Her apartment was on a dead end, so there was not much traffic. I could easily spot strangers if they were waiting for me outside. I went to the rooftop before leaving the house and looked down. There were three Peugeots parked along the street, but that was not particularly unusual—even though Peugeots are the government’s cars of choice, ordinary people drive them as well. A few people came out of an office down the block. Nothing looked suspicious. I was late for my appointments and angry with Davood. I walked ten minutes to the corner he’d indicated and spotted him sitting on his bike.

“What’s going on?” I asked.

“There were a couple of people waiting at the end of your street, Mr. Maziar.”

“Yes, because there are offices on our street.”

“But these two looked really suspicious. I just know they were from the intelligence service.”

I was getting fed up with Davood’s erratic behavior. As I climbed onto the bike behind him and he began to drive, I noticed that he smelled of sweat and alcohol and that his hair was messy.

“Have you been drinking?” I asked him.

“Just a little bit, Mr. Maziar,” Davood said remorsefully. “I can’t sleep at night. We had another fight with the Basijis after you left.”

“Bezan kenar,”
I ordered him. “Stop here.”

He pulled over. “Sorry, Davood, I can’t let you drive if you drink like this. Go get some rest today, and if you’re clean and sober tomorrow morning, call me.” I took another motorcycle
to see some friends and contacts, then went back to my mother’s house.

There, my mother had just finished preparing fish and
torshi tareh
, a light vegetarian stew with rice. She had a mysterious ability to know what food I was in the mood for. When I needed energy, she would prepare
fesenjoon
, a chicken or duck stew with walnuts and pomegranate sauce, or
morgheh torsh
, a chicken dish with unripe grapes and split peas. On a day like this, when I was in a hurry and had to have a light meal, she would prepare
torshi tareh
or
mirza ghasemi
, scrambled eggs with tomatoes and eggplant.

As we ate, she told me that at the local market that morning, she’d heard that many people had decided to take part in the Dust and Dirt demonstration. “People are planning to come to the streets to take back their votes. I wish I could join them. If I were even ten years younger, I would,” she said, as I savored every spoonful of my
torshi tareh
. “But I’m worried that, with my back pain, I won’t be able to escape if the Guards attack the protestors.” My mother was speaking from experience. She had taken part in many demonstrations in her youth and knew how suddenly and unexpectedly violence could break out.

“Do you think these
ashghals
will just sit on their hands and tolerate people protesting against them?” my mother asked as I made Turkish coffee for her and myself.

Years of seeing her country brutalized by one government after another had taught my mother to expect the worst. She was not expecting Khamenei and his regime to act rationally. “When it comes to the tyrannical leaders of this country, none of them has been able to see beyond the tip of his nose. They just want to rule and pillage the country for as long as they can without thinking about the consequences for the people or themselves.”

“Yes, you may be right, but what about legitimacy?” I asked.
“Don’t you think Khamenei wants to stay in power as a legitimate leader?”

My mother—perhaps surprised by my naïveté—turned away and drew my attention to the news program on the television. Throughout the day, the state radio and television stations had been warning potential demonstrators that the Ministry of Interior had not issued a permit for any demonstrations. They emphasized that the security forces would punish the demonstrators as harshly as possible in accordance with the law.

“Legitimacy?!” my mother exclaimed with disdain. “Do you think they even care what people think?” She turned off the television, threw the remote to a corner of a couch, and joined me in clearing the table. “Just be careful when you go out.”

·   ·   ·

I was very curious to see how many people were going to turn up at the Dust and Dirt demonstration, and how the government would respond. My guess was that, at best, a few thousand Mousavi supporters would take to the streets, the security forces would beat them up, and most people would go home. Mousavi would eventually accept defeat and return to his government job as the director of the Academy of Arts.

I couldn’t have been more wrong.

I arrived at the demonstration at about four-thirty. The scene reminded me of the demonstrations against the shah I’d witnessed in November 1978, when I was eleven. Today, there were at least two million people, most of them in their teens and twenties, preparing to march along the same route from Revolution Square to Freedom Square. I struck up a conversation with Ahmad, a fifty-four-year-old academic. “We walk along this route because it has taken us a long time to reach freedom since the revolution,” Ahmad said. He had taken part in the 1978 march as well. “I see many similarities between what happened
then and now. In both cases, we had a clear mandate. Then we wanted to overthrow the shah. Today we want this little man”—Ahmadinejad—“who has stolen our votes to resign and accept the people’s votes.”