“He’s not here.”
“Could you tell me at what time he’ll be there?” I asked.
“And you are?”
“A friend of his.”
“Mr.—?”
I hung up.
I became worried about Amir. I knew that he had been threatened several times by the Guards and that its leaders were trying to find any excuse to put him behind bars. I climbed into Mr. Roosta’s car and decided to call Amir later; I had work to do. My first visit was to polling stations in the Qeytariyeh area, in north Tehran, where Mousavi’s campaign headquarters was located. Hundreds of people waited in line outside of every venue. I found the same thing at the polling stations in Robat Karim and other southern suburbs. In some places, people had to wait more than two hours for their turn to vote. Many of the people I spoke with were voting for the first time in their lives. They were excited and impatient and passed the time in heated political discussions.
Visitors to Iran are often surprised to find that, unlike in most Middle Eastern dictatorships, there are not that many uniformed policemen or army officers in Iranian cities. That is true until you take out your video camera or try to interview people—then you are surrounded within a few minutes by undercover and uniformed police.
I managed to interview just two or three people at each of the first five polling stations before I was asked to leave by security agents in civilian clothes. They never introduced themselves, but I later learned that they reported to the Ministry of Intelligence. I’d expected that it would be like this throughout the day, so I wasn’t surprised when a uniformed policeman hastily dismounting a motorcycle stopped me as I left a polling station on Gisha Street, in west Tehran, where I’d just cast my vote for Mousavi.
Apparently, an undercover agent at the station had called the police.
“Where are you from?” he asked.
From the single-striped badge on his dark green jacket, which he had awkwardly tucked into his trousers, I gathered that he was a second lieutenant in the Tehran police force. Unlike the Revolutionary Guards and the Basij, the police are less indoctrinated, and concerned mostly with matters of general security.
The second lieutenant’s thin mustache and stubble were covered with sweat, as if he had rushed to the station in a hurry. I showed him my press card and said I was a reporter and cameraman for Newsweek magazine and its website. He called his superior officer on his two-way radio receiver. “Sir, there’s a man who interviews people for New Zealand.”
“Newsweek,” I corrected him.
“Shut up!” he yelled, pushing me around and telling me to face the wall. “He is interviewing people!” He said the word “interviewing” as if it were a capital crime. “Should I arrest him?”
This was not the first time I had been stopped by a policeman. Usually when it happened, they would call someone from Ershad and I would be let go within minutes or, much more rarely, a few hours. As any journalist in Iran can attest to, 80 percent of your time is spent dealing with officials, and only 20 percent working. I had long ago accepted this reality, so I faced the wall obediently and waited for the verdict.
“I don’t know, sir,” I heard him say. “He looks Iranian, but he says from New Zealand.” He came closer to me. “Hey, you! Do you speak Farsi?”
“Yes, sir. I do,” I replied politely. “I’m an Iranian citizen. I just voted.”
“Come here, Mr. Colonel wants to talk to you,” he said curtly.
“Hello, sir. This is Maziar Bahari from Newsweek,” I began. “My accreditation was issued by Ershad. I came here to conduct interviews about the election, but I was asked to leave. I was doing exactly that when the officer stopped me.”
Mr. Colonel explained that because of security threats, police officers were being more vigilant that day. The colonel then apologized for the inconvenience and asked me to pass the walkie-talkie to the policeman.
“Yes, sir! Should I arrest him, sir?” the second lieutenant asked eagerly. He looked uncomfortable with his boss’s reply and turned his back to me. “Yes, sir!” He put the walkie-talkie on his belt, next to his gun, and asked me, “Do you know Mr. Colonel? He sounded angry with me.” Then he looked at me apologetically. “I just follow orders. They called and said that you were doing interviews. Sorry to bother you.”
“No problem, sir. You’re just doing your job,” I said. “At least it’s a nice cool day for the election. So who will you be voting for?”
He gave me a surprised look. “Now you’re interviewing me?!”
“No. I’m just asking. Have you voted already?”
“I think Ahmadinejad.”
“You think? You have to vote today. You must’ve made your mind up already.”
“Yeah, I’ve already voted for Ahmadinejad. They say the other guys are going to stop the subsidies and are going to fire a lot of policemen.”
“Who says that?”
“Aghidati-Siasi,” he said, referring to the ideological and political bureau. Every base of every branch of the Iranian armed forces, which includes the national army, navy, and air force, the Revolutionary Guards, and the police, has an Aghidati-Siasi office. The office is in charge of religious indoctrination of the armed forces personnel. The supreme leader chooses the director of Aghidati-Siasi, who is expected to act as the leader’s eyes and ears in the military. Aghidati-Siasi branch officers are usually junior clerics who give the armed forces officers religious training and make sure that everyone prays and fasts. Aghidati-Siasi also works closely with army intelligence units to spot “undesirable elements” in the military.
“We had a few sessions with Aghidati-Siasi—they talked about different candidates and they told us that Mr. Ahmadinejad is the best candidate.” He looked worriedly at my voice recorder and walked toward his motorcycle. “I hope you don’t get me into trouble, sir. I can lose my job for talking to you.”
After I got into Mr. Roosta’s car, I tried Amir again. He answered the phone, but didn’t want to stay on too long.
“Don’t call me again,” he said. “Just come here, to the temporary office, as quickly as you can.” The day before he had sounded nervous; now he sounded scared.
The office was in Zaferanieh, an exclusive area in north Tehran. Before reaching the office, I called Alireza at Ahmadinejad’s headquarters to see how he was feeling.
“Mr. Ahmadinejad’s votes are above twenty million,” Alireza told me. “We expect it to go as high as twenty-five million. I’ll call you later.”
I hung up with a lump of cold fear in the pit of my stomach. There are no exit polls in Iran. At about five P.M., more than four hours remained before the polling stations closed. It didn’t make sense that Alireza would know the number so early. Once again I thought of Leonard Cohen’s words.
Everybody knows that the boat is leaking
Everybody knows that the captain lied
Everybody got this broken feeling
Like their father or their dog just died
For the first time I began to think that perhaps I should resign myself to a different outcome than the one I had been hoping for. Perhaps Mousavi was fighting a losing battle. At the temporary office, I rang the buzzer Amir had told me about on the phone: the third one from the top, with the logo of a construction company. Someone in a state of fear answered the video intercom.
“Who are you?” he asked, in a direct—and wholly un-Iranian—manner.
“I want to talk to Mr. Amir,” I answered.
“Who are you?”
“Maziar Bahari.”
“Wait,” he directed me. It was a few seconds before he returned. “Come in,” he instructed. “Wait in the lobby.”
The building was a gaudy modern structure with brown marble and golden railings. There was a large brown leather sofa in the lobby. Before I could sit down, the elevator’s doors opened. From inside, Amir waved hurriedly for me to join him.
“Did anyone follow you here?” he said, wiping the sweat from his foreh
ead with his white handkerchief.
“I don’t think so.”
Amir had not pushed the button for any floor. “Okay. Get back in the car and ask your driver to circle the area and come back after ten minutes. I will look from the window to see if anybody’s following you.”
“What’s happening?” I asked as calmly as I could.
“It’s a coup d’état, a military takeover by the Revolutionary Guards,” Amir said. “Now go.”
Amir’s words worried me, but more than anything, I was worried about the future of the country. The consequences of the Guards taking over the government were so horrifying that I didn’t even want to think about it. I didn’t want to envision the claustrophobic society that would create, or the possibility of a military confrontation with another country if the Guards came to power.
I had to invent an excuse to get Mr. Roosta to drive us around the block a few times without arousing his suspicions. As he rolled down the window to ask what was wrong, I told him that I had decided to buy some pastries for my friends. In the car, I kept my eyes trained on the side mirror to see if anyone was following us. There was no one. I had never seen Amir so afraid. What did he mean by a coup d’état? I wondered. Had the reformists seen the results and did they want to take preemptive action and accuse Ahmadinejad supporters of vote rigging? Had Ahmadinejad and the Guards managed to pull off a scam that meant that he had gotten himself elected four hours before the polls closed?
I could barely concentrate on what I was ordering from the pastry shop. I called a friend of mine. He told me that the Fars News Agency, which was run by the Revolutionary Guards, had just announced—at five-thirty, three and a half hours before the polling stations closed—that Ahmadinejad had won the election with more than twenty million votes.
When we pulled back in front of Amir’s building, fifteen minutes later, he was walking out the door with another Mousavi adviser I knew.
I jumped out of the car. “Have you heard about the Fars News report?”
“Yes, we have,” the other man said. “That’s why we’re leaving.”
The man got inside his car and started the engine. Amir told me in a hurry, “I’ll call you later tonight, Maziar. They have staged a coup. Votes are rigged, ballot boxes are missing around the country, and Ministry of Interior computers have been hacked. We don’t know what exactly has happened. But one thing we know is that there’s been a coup. We have to go now. You have to go now. I don’t think you were followed. But we have to move. They may raid this office at any time.”
Amir got into the car, then rolled down the window. “Mousavi will have a press conference tonight,” he said. “Someone will call you in an hour or so.” With that, the car sped down the street.
I tried to push aside my feelings about what Amir was saying—my fears about what might be happening in my nation—and do my job.
Like many other journalists, I had planned to spend part of the night, after the polls closed, at the Ministry of Interior, where the votes were being counted. But at eight P.M., when I arrived at the ministry headquarters in Jihad Square, the streets around it were blocked by hundreds of policemen and officers from the anti-riot unit, fully armed with pistols and high-voltage clubs. I got out of Mr. Roosta’s car and approached a policeman at a checkpoint in the square. After I showed him my press card, the policeman politely asked me to wait and went to speak to his superior. He came back and apologized, explaining that no journalists from the foreign press were allowed inside.
Unusually for June in Tehran, it suddenly started to rain. The rain made the anti-riot policeman’s knee and elbow pads look shiny. I tried to insist that I be allowed in, and had begun explaining that I had reported on elections in Iran in the past and was always allowed into the ministry, when an anti-riot commander approached us. His face was hidden behind a plastic shield, shiny from the rain. He pushed me toward Mr. Roosta’s car, then beat its hood with his club.
“Berin gomshin!” he yelled at me and Mr. Roosta. “Get lost!” He pointed the club at me. “If you stay one more minute koonet mizaram, madar jendeh,” he threatened. “I’ll fuck you up the ass, you motherfucker.” Angry and upset, and soaking wet from the rain, I got back in the car and told Mr. Roosta to take me to my mother’s house. Later, I would be very grateful that I had not pressed the issue. I learned that many protestors were arrested and kept in the basement of the Ministry of Interior that night. They were beaten and raped with clubs by the same anti-riot police who had threatened to sodomize me.
When I arrived at my mother’s house, she was sitting quietly in front of the television with her cousin Jafar. They were eating sunflower seeds, and the plate in front of them was stacked with shells.
“Is he going to win again?” my mother asked me sadly, without taking her eyes off the television.
“It seems so,” I answered.
Jafar, who was in his seventies and was usually very mild-mannered, shook his head, a look of disgust on his face. “Khamenei would never have allowed Mousavi to get elected,” he said. “He doesn’t want a president. He wants a servant like Ahmadinejad. Mousavi would be his own man and would stand up to Khamenei. They only allowed Mousavi to run to stir people’s emotions and make them show up at the polls so they can say they are a popular regime.”
As the presenters on the state television shamelessly praised Khamenei and what they called Iran’s “Islamic democracy,” a small panel at the top right corner of the screen showed the number of votes for each candidate. Ahmadinejad’s numbers were rising dramatically. Mousavi and the other two candidates, Karroubi and Rezaei, were not even shown to be winning in their own places of birth. If these results were true, they were an unprecedented development in Iranian politics.
I couldn’t bear to watch. I lay down on my bed and called Paola. I needed to hear her voice and talk about my homecoming, to tell her how much I’d been dreaming about lying beside her and kissing her pregnant belly. But Paola, too, wanted to talk only about the election.
“Is it true?” she asked. “Did he really win?”
“Sadly, yes,” I answered. As I tried to tell her about the events of the day, I was overwhelmed by a feeling of utter exhaustion, and only then did I realize that I had barely slept since landing in Tehran three days earlier. Trying to relive the experience was too much for me. I said good-bye to Paola and called a taxi to take me to Mousavi’s press conference.
The press conference was held in an anonymous building off Africa Street. In his public appearances, Mousavi usually seemed far more like a subdued artist than a charismatic politician. But that night, he was a changed man. He acted defiant and confident. The support he had been receiving from millions of Iranians had made him animated and inspiring. As he stood before a room full of almost fifty journalists and cameramen, he explained that he didn’t regard the official result as an end to his campaign. “Any result other than one indicating my victory will be wrong and manipulated,” Mousavi proclaimed. The reporters in the room, mostly Iranians working for the foreign media, looked at one another with surprise. Even though we were trying our best to remain professional, I know that, like me, most others in the room were rooting for Mousavi.
I had rarely felt more patriotic, or more depressed, than I did that night. I was worried about the future of Iran and angry at the thugs who were going to rule it for, at least, the next four years. It was as if bandits had kidnapped one of my loved ones. But the thought of Mousavi fighting for his votes thrilled me. Maybe he could stop the pro-Ahmadinejad thugs from carrying out their military takeover by mobilizing the people.
· · ·
That night, when I got back from the press conference, I turned off my cell phone and unplugged the landline in my room. I knew I would be receiving dozens of calls, and all I wanted to do was sleep. At nine the next morning, I found that I had thirteen missed calls and four messages from Mousavi’s office. His people were eager to get coverage from foreign media, since Iranian state televisio
n was not giving them any airtime.
“Mr. Mousavi and his wife, Mrs. Rahnavard, are allowing interviews today, in the Etela’at building at two P.M.,” one message said. Etela’at is a state-controlled newspaper, but its editor was friendly to Mousavi.
In the living room, my mother was reading Beyhaqi’s History, a book about Iran in the Middle Ages that told the story of Hasanak the Vizier, a competent minister to a king in the eleventh century who was hanged in favor of a useless but ingratiating successor.
“Rooz az no. Roozi az no,” she said. “Same kind of day. Same kind of action. This country has been plagued by these ashghal, garbage, rulers for centuries.” She looked tired. She laid the book on her lap. “I knew I shouldn’t have voted. At least then I could have kept my integrity intact. This way I feel used. It seems like I have voted for this ashghal system.”
My mother’s gloominess set the mood for the rest of my day. Economic hardship, decades of political turbulence, and polluted air have made Iranians a borderline depressed nation. In fact, in the 1990s an adviser to the mayor of Tehran suggested that they add Prozac to Tehran’s water to revitalize the citizens. But on the day after Ahmadinejad’s reelection, no amount of antidepressants could have helped many Tehranis. The misery in the air was almost unbearable.
From my contacts, I learned that the supreme leader, Khamenei, had called Mousavi on the afternoon of the election and told him that he understood that Ahmadinejad had won. Khamenei asked Mousavi to accept the defeat gracefully, and even promised him a major position in the new administration. Mousavi told Khamenei bluntly that it was too early to decide. “The people have to make a decision. Not you,” Mousavi said. He hung up on Khamenei and refused to meet him that day.
A few hours later, Khamenei sent a message to the people of Iran congratulating them on their historic achievement. He called Ahmadinejad’s reelection “a divine sign” in support of the Islamic Republic.
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