Then They Came for Me: A Family’s Story of Love, Captivity, and Survival

by Maziar Bahari

  Iran’s labyrinthine system of government puzzles foreigners and Iranians alike. The complex structure is derived from the fact that “Islamic Republic” itself is a contradiction in terms. On the one hand, the government follows democratic procedures, such as elections and referendums, through which people choose their president, members of parliament, and other government officials. On the other hand, according to the Iranian Constitution, the supreme leader has the final say in all affairs of state, affording him absolute power. But there are cracks in the system, and through these cracks light sometimes shines.

  According to the Constitution, the supreme leader can overrule parliamentary bills and even force a president to step down. In practice, however, he rarely goes directly against the will of elected officials because he also needs some degree of support from them, and the people who have voted for them, to maintain his political, religious, and popular legitimacy. There have been times when the supreme leader did not exert enough control over the selection of candidates and certain reformist politicians entered parliament and even became president. In May 1997, Mohammad Khatami was elected president despite the fact that Khamenei openly supported the other, more conservative candidate. Almost three years later, in February 2000, reformist politicians took over the parliament. By the end of Khatami’s presidency, in 2005, the supreme leader and his conservative supporters had learned a lesson.

  They set up a stricter qualification process for parliamentary and presidential candidates; in 2009, out of 476 men and women who registered, only four men qualified as presidential candidates. All the qualified candidates had been high-ranking members of the regime since the 1979 revolution.

  Now the vote would take place in just three days, and as my plane began its descent into Tehran, I tried to push away the guilt I felt for leaving Paola again and remember that I was in a unique position to help others understand the complex nature of my government. I relished the opportunity to report on the upcoming elections. It seemed that the nation, and much of the world, was waiting to find out the results, as was I. I had always argued for nonviolence and peaceful change of government. I believed that many people in the Iranian government understood that suppressing people inside the country and alienating the rest of the world would result in a disaster that would not only hurt the people but also weaken the government’s ability to lead the country. I hoped that Khamenei and his cohorts could understand that young Iranians were becoming increasingly educated and were changing every day, and that the government had to change as well. The alternative to a peaceful change was chaos and violence, more international condemnation and economic sanctions. More suffering for my people.

  I had promised Paola that I would make up for my absence. “You mustn’t worry, I’ll be back a week after the election,” I’d told her the night before as we sat at the dinner table, enjoying our first candlelit meal together in months. “We will get married in July. And I’ll be with you every day until you give birth, and for at least three months after that. I won’t go to Iran or any other place in the world, no matter how big the story.” As we cleared the dishes and she helped me pack, I felt excited about everything that awaited me: more time with Paola, the birth of our child, and, with the election of a new progressive leader, a new hope for my country.

  · · ·

  As soon as I arrived in Imam Khomeini International Airport, just after four A.M., I knew that I’d made the right decision. The airport felt electric. Crowds of foreign journalists packed the customs area, lugging large camera cases and equipment behind them. Typically, the Iranian government restricted the number of visas it issued to foreign reporters, but with the upcoming election, it had issued hundreds, hoping to show the world Islamic democracy in action.

  It was still dark outside when I left the airport, and the June air was thick and steamy. Among the cars waiting to pick up passengers, I spotted Mr. Roosta, a driver for a cab company I frequently used when I was in Iran. Mr. Roosta ran toward me and took my suitcase. There was a big smile on his face, partly hidden by his thick white mustache.

  “Salaam, Aghayeh Bahari,” he said. “Hello, Mr. Bahari. How about that Mousavi? It seems that we are winning!”

  I was surprised to hear him say this. When I had spoken to Mr. Roosta a couple of weeks earlier, he had told me that he didn’t intend to vote. I had urged him to reconsider his position. “Can you stand four more years of this idiot Ahmadinejad?” I’d asked him.

  “I can’t even stand one more day of him,” Mr. Roosta had replied. Then he’d looked at me with a knowing smile. “My dear Mr. Bahari, our votes will never count. Khodeshoon”—“they”—“will choose who will rule over us.”

  This is not uncommon thinking among Iranians. For twenty-five hundred years Iran was ruled by tyrannical and often corrupt men, and in the two centuries prior to the Islamic Revolution, Russia, Great Britain, and America interfered freely in Iran’s internal affairs. With this long history of foreign invasions and successive dictatorships, many Iranians believe that the shape of events in Iran is decided by this shadowy “they”—an imaginary conglomerate composed of Western nations, multinational companies, and corrupt Iranian politicians.

  I had never liked the expression khodeshoon. My father had always believed that blaming your problems on “them” was a cowardly way of escaping responsibilities. “It’s maa, us,” he used to say. “We fuck up and blame it on them. It’s as simple as that.” My father always added a bit of spice to his language to make his points.

  I told Mr. Roosta that I really didn’t know who “they” were but, regardless, we had to use the only weapon at our disposal to get rid of them: our vote. Mousavi’s election, I argued, would send a positive message about Iran to the rest of the world, which was at best agitated and at worst provoked by Ahmadinejad’s irresponsible comments and policies. While nobody could describe Mousavi as a Jeffersonian democrat, at least he wasn’t denying the Holocaust, insulting world leaders, and threatening countries with destruction, as Ahmadinejad did on a consistent basis. If nothing else, he would be a solid step in the right direction.

  Now, just two weeks after this discussion, I was happy to see that Mr. Roosta had changed his mind and was planning to vote. He’d even taped a large picture of Mousavi on the back window of his cab.

  “Have you put Mousavi’s picture on the rear window so you can’t look back in anger anymore?” I joked.

  “In this country, Mr. Bahari, it helps not being able to look back,” Mr. Roosta said. “And with this heat, it also helps that he doesn’t let the sunlight through.”

  Exhausted from the flight, I settled into the seat for the hour-long drive to my mother’s apartment in central Tehran, where I stayed whenever I was in Iran. The billboards along the Persian Gulf Highway—some advertising luxury items like BMW cars and Tag Heuer watches, others bearing the faces of Ruhollah Khomeini and Ali Khamenei—were familiar and did not reveal much about the state of the country as it neared the elections. But more than half an hour later, when we finally reached Navab Street, I felt as if we had entered a whole new Tehran. The walls around the city were covered with posters and banners for the candidates—far more than had been there when I’d left Iran just a week earlier. Plastered with their vibrant red, white, and green posters, the colors of the Iranian flag, the city walls looked like an Iranian version of a Jasper Johns collage. I noticed a few posters in support of the two fringe candidates, Mehdi Karroubi, the former speaker of parliament, and Mohsen Rezaei, a former Revolutionary Guards commander, but the main fight for space on the walls was between Ahmadinejad and Mousavi.

  In some of his campaign posters, Ahmadinejad wore his trademark beige jacket and duplicitous smile. The three intertwined circles—the symbol of nuclear energy—were noticeable in many posters. Ahmadinejad had made Iran’s controversial nuclear program a matter of national pride, presenting himself as the candidate who would best champion Iran’s right to become a nuclear power. In some posters, he stared s
ternly at the camera against a background of floating atoms.

  While Ahmadinejad looked aggressive in his posters, Mousavi appeared subdued and modest. An architect and abstract painter, with a graying beard, a big nose, and thick glasses, Mousavi seemed uncomfortable as a politician. Now in his late sixties, he resembled a retired professor who just wanted to get on with life. But he was the man with whom our hopes lay. Hope against all hope.

  · · ·

  The sun had fully risen by the time I arrived at my mother’s house, just before six A.M. I hoped to not wake my mother, but she was already up and waiting for me. “Mazi jaan,” she said, hugging me—“dear Mazi.” Recently, her hugs had become longer and tighter.

  “How are you, Moloojoon?” I asked, handing her two big tins of her favorite chocolates, which I’d bought for her at Heathrow Airport. She didn’t answer. Instead she walked into the kitchen and put a plate of sangak flat bread and feta cheese on the table.

  “Have you had breakfast?” she asked. I knew she was avoiding my question. She sat down and drank her tea, with sour cherry jam, in silence. She looked tired, and even older than her eighty-three years. I could see the sadness in her eyes.

  In July 2005, my father had died after suffering a stroke. Almost two years later, in June 2007, my brother, Babak, who was fourteen years older than I, died of a heart attack at the age of fifty-four. And then my sister, Maryam, who was the closest person to my mother and me, lost a short battle with leukemia in February 2009. My mother and I were all that was left now, and that had brought us much closer to each other.

  “So, how are you, Moloojoon?” I repeated.

  She just shook her head and said, “How can I be, Mazi jaan? How do you want me to be?”

  I had no answer. I knew that the burden of her grief was so heavy, she was reluctant to share it with me. With her silence, she thought she could protect me.

  Sitting in the kitchen, I began to find the silence unbearable, but I didn’t know how to break it. I didn’t want to upset her. I stood and took a bottle of smuggled Johnnie Walker whiskey from a kitchen cabinet and poured a little into my tea, hoping this would help me sleep.

  “Would you like to have baghali ghatogh and fish for lunch?” my mother asked, changing the subject, as she unwrapped a chocolate. Baghali ghatogh is a dish from the north of Iran, where my mother is from. It is made with broad beans, a variety of herbs, and eggs. My brother used to refer to baghali ghatogh as “Moloojoon’s specialty,” and we all loved it more than any other dish she made.

  “You need to have your lunch before going out to report on this ashghal,” she said, referring to Ahmadinejad. Ashghal, the Persian word for “garbage,” is the strongest insult in my mother’s lexicon.

  Good, I thought. My mother, like a typical Iranian, was dealing with her grief through a combination of cuisine and humor. I knew then that there was no point in pressing her to speak about her grief, and turned instead to her other favorite topic: politics.

  My mother met my father through the Tudeh Party, when she was a twenty-five-year-old chemistry student at Tehran University. The party had assigned my father to indoctrinate students at the university about the proletarian struggle. Like many educated young people of her generation, my mother believed that communism was the answer to Iran’s underdevelopment. She had read the books of Soviet writers like Maxim Gorky and Mikhail Sholokhov, and had developed a romantic understanding of socialism. To my mother, my father—with his broad shoulders and large, dark eyes—was not only a handsome, articulate party cadre, he was like a character out of a novel.

  In 1953, when the shah’s government started to crack down on communists, my mother paid a heavy price. She was dismissed from the university and was suspended from her job as a primary school teacher for one year. Since then, Moloojoon, like my father, had been disenchanted with the idea of revolution, but she had never lost her interest in politics. The first words she taught me to read were not the ones other children learned—“table” or “bird”—but Yassir Arafat and Golda Meir, the names of the Palestinian and Israeli leaders. During my preschool years, Moloojoon’s attempts to teach me to read involved not flipping through children’s books but perusing the political commentary section of newspapers. She was a good teacher. By the time I started school, I knew how to spell words like “surplus value” and “interventionism,” even though I had no idea what they meant.

  “I’ve made a decision,” my mother told me as I sipped my tea and whiskey. “Not voting means a vote for Ahmadinejad. I’m going to vote for Mousavi.”

  This was surprising. Like Mr. Roosta, my mother had long felt disappointed by Iranian leaders, and it had been a long time since she had voted.

  “What made you decide to vote this time?” I asked her.

  “The debate, especially the way Ahmadinejad personally attacked Mousavi,” she said.

  A few days earlier, on June 3, Ahmadinejad and Mousavi had taken part in a televised debate. They had attacked each other vehemently, stirring up tensions among the voters. Mousavi told Ahmadinejad that his government had undermined the dignity of the nation. “It has inflicted heavy damages on us and created tension with other countries. It has left us with not a single friend in the region,” he said. In response, Ahmadinejad snickered and accused Mousavi of being part of a corrupt group of Islamic Republic elites who had been illegally benefiting from their positions in government since the beginning of the revolution.

  Ahmadinejad then showed a copy of the doctoral degree issued to Mousavi’s wife, Zahra Rahnavard, and argued that the degree had been obtained illegally. “This is lawlessness. My government is based on laws and regulation,” Ahmadinejad said, staring at an exasperated Mousavi.

  Family is a sacred institution in Iran. While I had thought Ahmadinejad would be universally criticized for his rude comments—this was the first time a candidate had ever attacked another candidate’s wife publicly—his supporters commended his directness, calling the allegations a necessary step to reveal the real identities of the reformists. The debate polarized Iranian society more than at any other time I could remember.

  “The debate showed the true nature of Mousavi and Ahmadinejad,” my mother said. “Mousavi was calm and polite and talked about substantial issues. Ahmadinejad has no manners. He was as vulgar as ever. Ashghal! After that debate, I decided to vote for Mousavi.”

  “You’ve made a wise decision, Moloojoon,” I told her, before kissing her cheek and going to my room to sleep.

  · · ·

  When I woke up two hours later, I couldn’t wait to get out on the streets of Tehran. I called my friend Mazdak, a photographer and an avid fan of Mousavi’s, who was always the first person I got in touch with when I arrived in Tehran. He told me that the night before, hundreds of thousands of Mousavi supporters had formed a twelve-mile-long chain on Vali Asr Avenue, the longest street in Tehran. The line had been referred to as the “green line,” as Mousavi had adopted green as the official color of his campaign. Green has long been associated with Islam; it signifies that Islam is a religion of peace. Mousavi’s supporters wore green T-shirts and wristbands and carried green banners and flags. “We will build a green Iran” was their slogan, meaning a country at peace with itself and the rest of the world.

  Mazdak had taken part in the “green line,” and his voice was still hoarse from screaming. “It was like being in a World Cup final, Maziar, but more exciting,” he said. “Mousavi was our Pelé.”

  Mazdak would be taking photographs of a group of Mousavi supporters in Robat Karim, a working-class neighborhood about twenty miles south of Tehran, that day, and I told him I’d meet him later. But first I had to decide how to get there.

  Given Iran’s suffering economy and high rate of unemployment, many Iranians—even those who are highly educated—earn a living by using their motorcycles as unofficial taxis, and the streets surrounding Vali Asr Square were crowded with men standing near their motorcycles, hoping for a fare. I told the driv
er I chose, a young man named Davood, that I wanted to go to Robat Karim. I also wanted to make a few stops along the way, at various campaign offices and coffee shops where I knew people would be gathered to have political discussions, and where I could easily conduct interviews. Luckily, Davood was interested in politics and was eager to help me out. He was less keen on respecting the traffic laws. Just seconds into our trip, he pulled his bike out of the traffic and onto the sidewalk, where he weaved through the pedestrians.

  “Shame on me, shame on me,” he said loudly when people yelled at him. “These young people today, they have no manners!” he offered sarcastically, then turned to me and winked. When we couldn’t drive on the sidewalk, Davood masterfully navigated through the slightest gap between cars and sometimes, to my horror, trucks.

  The effect of years of chaos and insecurity, war and revolution, can easily be seen in the way Iranians drive: these generally courteous people turn into monsters behind the wheel. They rarely allow another car the right of way and honk their horns as soon as a pedestrian steps into the street. Road rage—even using machetes against other drivers—is not unheard of in Iran. As a friend of mine once put it, “The disgraceful way we drive is like crapping on more than twenty-five hundred years of Persian history, arts, and culture.”

  As he drove, Davood told me that he had been kicked out of university in his native city of Tabriz. “I installed satellite dishes in people’s houses to make money,” he said. Owning a satellite dish is a crime in the Islamic Republic, but many people hide dishes on their balconies and rooftops. Davood was arrested and fined the equivalent of $3,000. The police also notified the university, and he was expelled. Even so, he considered himself lucky. Those who install satellite equipment can be sentenced to many years in prison.

  Since then, Davood had been trying to earn a living with his motorcycle in Tehran, but he was having a hard time making ends meet. That did not, however, stop him from looking stylish. His shoulder-length hair was wet with gel, and his goatee was immaculately trimmed. He had undone the top three buttons of his white shirt. If he were a bit slimmer, he could have passed for an Iranian Ethan Hawke.