by Hooman Majd
“Yes, Mohammadi [Mohammad Mohammadi, the spokesman for the Iranian Mission at the time] told me,” I said. “He also told me he challenged Cohen, demanding to know why he thought the election was stolen, and Cohen asked him if he had been in Iran during the vote. No, Mohammadi had said, but he was Iranian, had lived in Iran for over forty years, and expected he knew a little more about Iran than Cohen, who had spent all of four weeks in Iran in his entire life.” Al’e Habib and Alavikia laughed. “I know it’s a problem, this idea that foreigners don’t understand Iran,” I said, “but Iran doesn’t make it easy, either.”
3:00 p.m., September 30, 2009: Iranian Mission to the United Nations, New York City. I am in a reception room, handsomely and appropriately furnished in faux Louis Quinze. The floor is covered with a huge Persian carpet, one of many extra-large rugs scattered about the half-floor of a high-rise on Third Avenue that has long served as Iran’s diplomatic offices. “It’s better,” says spokesman Mohammad Mohammadi, “if you avoid mocking President Ahmadinejad in your writings.” I pick up the obligatory glass of tea from the coffee table, not sure how to respond. I, like many other Iranian writers, have been invited to appear on countless television and radio programs, and have written a number of essays on Iran in the months following the presidential election. My tone, I’m sure, has offended on more than one occasion.
“I don’t think I’ve ever intended to mock,” I say with a wince after a gulp of the scalding hot tea, “but you know my opinions on what has transpired.”
“Of course,” says Mohammadi gently. He has mellowed somewhat since June 13, the day after the election when all hell broke loose in Iran. Always an Ahmadinejad supporter, he was convinced that not only did Ahmadinejad win by a large margin, but also the West, along with its media, had conspired to create the unrest the world had witnessed. We have had many long phone conversations in the past three months, some as long as two hours, where I swear I could hear the frothing at his mouth and the tears of anger in his eyes. “After five years, I thought I understood the workings of the U.S. media,” he once told me in a fit of rage, “but I realize now I was taken in just like everyone else. All of them are working against Iran, and in coordination with the U.S. government.” Mohammadi had staunchly defended the Basij, telling me on numerous occasions that their crackdown was justified, that the media ignored the fact that rioters and protesters killed many Basij, and he became, in telling me that he was duped by the media he believed he had been helping all these years, the victim, like his Basij brethren. Shiite victimhood never goes away, not even after spending five years in New York without leave to go home.
“I know we disagree on the election itself,” I say to him, “and I appreciate your openness…”
“There’s never a problem with disagreeing among ourselves,” he interrupts me. “Nobody ever said there was!”
“Yes,” I say, “but this ongoing violence in Iran, these prisoners…one of my friends is in jail right now, a musician, and I can tell you for a fact that he is not guilty of anything, much less of trying to overthrow the system.”
“Really, your friend?” Mohammadi leans forward, genuine concern showing in his face.
“Kamran Jahanbani,” I reply. “You can check him out; he was seated in the second row during the televised trials.”
“I’m sorry,” says Mohammadi. “I’m sure he’ll be released soon; it’s just a process that has to be completed.”
“I hope so,” I say. “But what is going on in Tehran? When can we expect this violent reaction to protests to end?”
Mohammadi begins a long monologue, explaining why the government has to work diligently to foil foreign plots, that Mousavi and Karroubi and Khatami—and he emphasizes Khatami because he is well aware of my relationship with him—need to understand that they are being used as pawns of the West and of subversive elements. But as he begins to talk about the Basij and the Revolutionary Guards, I sense his discomfort. A Basij himself once, one who served on the front lines of the Iran-Iraq War and lived to tell about it, he is fiercely loyal to the militia and to their military bosses in the Guards. “You don’t know, Mr. Majd, what it’s like to hold the head of your best friend in your arms as he takes his last breath.” He’s fighting back tears as he tries to explain to me what it means to be a Basij, what many of them have gone through in defense of their country, and how unfairly they are portrayed. “All he wanted was water, and I couldn’t give him any,” he says of his wounded friend. I let him continue, and as he speaks I am more and more convinced that he is having a terrible time reconciling his beloved Basij with the images of their brutality against their own countrymen and women beamed to television sets around the world. I can sense his doubt, his discomfit. “He died in my hands, Mr. Majd. And there was nothing I could do about it.” This, he must know, what he is seeing on his television every night and far away from home, is not what his friend gave his life for. Perhaps that explains his tears, plainly visible in the corners of his eyes, for he has told me the story of his friend before, a few times. Dry-eyed, that is.
August 20, 2009: Tehran Television Studios. President Ahmadinejad is presenting his cabinet choices for a new administration directly to the Iranian people. He is proposing three women to replace three men, and if Parliament confirms any of them, it would be a first in the history of the Islamic Republic, since no women have ever served in any cabinet position. Some say it is a cynical attempt to woo Iranian women (who generally have been more liberal than men) to his side, others say it is an attempt to reach out to liberals in general, but whatever Ahmadinejad’s motivations, there are fierce arguments within the regime about whether the women will, or should, be confirmed.
One of the women he proposes, Marzieh Vahid Dastjerdi, is for the post of minister of health, but he defends his previous minister, Kamran Lankarani, while still insisting a change is needed at the ministry. He begins in a serious tone, describing Lankarani’s service in glowing terms, adding that he has a “special, personal affection for him.” And then his voice changes. “I said somewhere,” Ahmadinejad says, his voice cracking and a few decibels lower, almost child-like, “that he is like peach—you just want to eat this man.” He is using a Farsi expression reserved exclusively to show admiration and love for babies, or for a female lover. Except, presumably, it is used for gay Iranian men too. No one remembers Ahmadinejad having ever said such a thing about Lankarani, or indeed any other man. Inquiring Persian minds want to know: Could it be that Ahmadinejad, if not a self-hating Jew, is a closet queen? Could it be that the “somewhere” he said he would like to eat Dr. Lankarani was at a tryst? Nah…but Ahmadinejad proves that he is still capable of providing Iranians with the next laugh, the next moment of levity, in the Persian theater of the absurd.
9:00 p.m., July 5, 2009: North Tehran. Former president Khatami and his family and aides are under close observation by the government; their movements, their phone calls, and all other communications are monitored carefully. So far, despite new rumors every day, he hasn’t been arrested or called in for questioning. “Every single day I expect I’ll be taken away,” he repeats to his aides, also almost every day and only half-jokingly. I am on the phone from New York with his chief of staff and brother, Ali Khatami.
“It’s tense,” he says, “but we’re okay so far. We’ll see in the future.” His voice, albeit calm and reassuring as it always is, betrays his concern.
“But no one’s done anything wrong!” I protest.
“The old story is that a hare was running through the forest,” Khatami tells me, “and another hare rushes up alongside him, asking him what he’s running away from and what the great hurry is. ‘They’re castrating every hare with three testicles,’ the first hare responds, continuing on his way. ‘But you don’t have three testicles, do you?’ asks the second hare breathlessly. ‘They castrate first, and count later,’ says the first hare as he disappears into the trees. That,” says Khatami, laughing, “is what’s happening in the I
slamic Republic right now.” Un opéra bouffe, indeed, but we still don’t know how many acts there are. Nothing is permitted.
10:00 a.m., October 29, 2009: Tehran, Iran. Yesterday, IRIB televised an annual students’ and intellectuals’ audience with the Supreme Leader. The broadcast was cut short when one student, Sharif University sophomore Mahmoud Vahidnia, launched into a twenty-minute criticism of the Ayatollah, questioning the Supreme Leader directly and to his face for what Iranians believe to be the first time ever. Nothing is permitted. The entire session was captured by cell phone video, and the news has rocketed around a captivated Tehran. Even the Supreme Leader’s own website has news of the exchange, which Kayhan, the nation’s leading conservative and pro-government newspaper, describes this morning as “The Revolutionary Leader’s Fatherly Response to Critical Youth.” Critical? How’s this:
Why can’t anyone in this country criticize you? Isn’t that ignorant? Do you think that you make no mistakes? Why have they made an idol out of you that is so unreachable and that nobody can challenge? I have never read an article about your performance in any newspaper because you have shut down all the media that is against you in the country. Why does national TV show all the events untruthfully? For example, all the events after the election: why do you support them [national TV shows], when everyone knows they are lying? Since the president of national television is directly selected by you, you are thus responsible for all this.
It is, for some Iranians, a moment of truth. It is as riveting to Iranians as Joseph Welsh’s outburst directed at Joe McCarthy was to Americans in 1954, which put an end to government purges and anti-communist paranoia not wholly dissimilar to the government purges and anti-Western paranoia evident in Iran in the last four months. “Have you no sense of decency, sir?” Vahidnia might have asked if he had been a history student rather than a scientist. It is a question many Iranians, even some who supported Ahmadinejad (but not the brutality of the government crackdown), wanted to ask. “At long last, have you left no sense of decency?” Reports that Vahidnia was arrested after his monologue have proved untrue, which has led some to believe that the whole exchange was staged, to show Iranians that even the Supreme Leader allows criticism and dissent and that free speech is allowed in Iran’s Islamic democracy. It can’t be staged, most argue; nothing like this would ever cross the minds of government propagandists. Besides, few would have dared to suggest a script that called for crossing previously red lines in a public setting. Khamenei’s obviously uncomfortable responses and his early exit from the audience with the students also indicate that Vahidnia acted on his own. But Vahidnia remains free, and uncastrated. Nothing is permitted? Except when it is.
8:00 p.m., July 24, 2009: Fars News Agency, Tehran. The Supreme Leader’s letter has just arrived, been scanned, and is going up on the news agency’s website. In his brief missive addressed to the president, the Rahbar describes Ahmadinejad’s appointment on July 17 of Esfandiar Rahim Mashaie as his first vice president—that is, the person who would assume the presidency should Ahmadinejad become incapacitated—to be “null and void.” The letter is dated July 18. For a week Tehran has been abuzz with rumors that the Supreme Leader had instructed Ahmadinejad to reverse his decision to appoint Mashaie, the former vice president for tourism who also happens to be his friend and in-law. Mashaie once described Iran as “friends of the Israeli people,” which theoretically disqualifies him from this sensitive post, at least in the eyes of most Ayatollahs. That the Supreme Leader would have to resort to making his instructions public in order to force the president to obey his commands is astonishing, more astonishing even than Ahmadinejad’s blatant disregard of his allies’ sensitivities in appointing Mashaie, the bête noir of conservatives, in the first place. He still appears to be on shaky political ground, only a little over a month after his allegedly rigged re-election. Ahmadinejad, a believer that the best defense is a strong offense, has seemingly forgotten that one has to possess the ball to play offense, and neither the opposition nor his onetime allies were allowing him much possession time. Reminiscent of his brazen first term, and when only intervention by the Supreme Leader finally persuaded his vice president (but not Ahmadinejad) to apologize for his pro-Semitic faux pas, the president’s behavior, his baiting of not just the Supreme Leader but every other conservative cleric and politician he relies on for his dwindling support, is fueling rumors that he will not survive a full term. Ahmadinejad has annoyed conservative clerics in the past, in his “more Catholic than the Pope” moments, such as when he declared, without checking with the guardians of the faith, that women should be allowed into soccer stadiums, or when he claimed he had a special relationship with the Mahdi (rumor has it that he leaves a place setting at his dinner table for him, you know, just in case he arrives suddenly and is hungry, after an eleven-century fast), leading some mullahs to warn him of veering dangerously close to heresy. At times Ahmadinejad has seemed to be almost taunting the mullahs and Ayatollahs, behaving more like a fundamentalist Sunni who believes he is as qualified to interpret his faith as any imam, and less like a pious Shia who should accept an Ayatollah’s directives just as a believing Catholic must accept his Pope’s. But Ahmadinejad’s disdain for the clergy, or at least for mullahs he disagrees with, has always been shared by many Iranians, pious and secular alike.
12:15 p.m., April 21, 2010: Office of former President Khatami, Jamaran, Tehran. I am sitting across from Khatami in his office, drinking tea. Khatami is calm and collected, even cheerful. We are making small talk, asking each other about family and discussing non-political issues. At one point, I ask him a more specific question. Khatami pauses and then waves one hand toward the ceiling and the walls, and says, “You know how it is.” Yes, I do. His offices are thoroughly bugged, his every conversation monitored, his every movement tracked. The security services and hard-line papers have repeated, virtually word for word, things said in this very office by accused seditionists, those labeled Green, probably sitting in my chair. But finally, Khatami lowers his voice to a whisper. “Things have never been this bad in the Islamic Republic,” he hisses. He knows the microphones can pick up the sound anyway, but he is unconcerned. I’m reminded that only hours before I went to JFK for my April 15 flight to Iran, Khatami—who was due to attend a nuclear summit in Hiroshima the same day I attended one in Tehran—was barred from leaving the country. Nothing is permitted. Khatami is actually less pessimistic about the future of the republic than his short outburst would indicate, and agrees that on the surface, Tehran seems normal and the republic is in no danger of imminent collapse. He tells me of plans to travel abroad in coming months, insha’allah, and has taken in stride the indignity of being forbidden to travel, an unprecedented act on the part of the government, as he has all the other indignities he’s suffered in the ten months since the June elections. This morning the government, perhaps embarrassed by the international coverage his travel ban has received, simply denied its existence. “There is no official ban on Mr. Khatami traveling abroad.” Everything is true.
8:00 p.m., January 14, 2010: IRIB Channel 3 Television Studios, Tehran. The government-controlled media has begun broadcasting live debates between conservative and reform politicians and thinkers, an opening of Iran’s airwaves demanded by the opposition, the “Green Movement,” and also supported by conservatives who think that seven months of unrest is harming the republic. Millions are tuning in to the show Rou be Farda, “Facing Tomorrow,” witnessing again, as they did in the live debates between the candidates before the election and rarely since, the paradoxical nature of Iranian politics that can sometimes simultaneously allow open and deep criticism just as it stifles any dissent. Everything is permitted; nothing is true. Tonight, a professor of political science at Shahid Beheshti University, pro-reform Javad Etaat, is debating conservative MP Ali Reza Zakani, and he is merciless in his critique of both the government and the state television it controls. The screen doesn’t go black at the first mention of “green,”
no harsh words are bleeped, and the discussion proceeds as if everything the government has forbidden in the last seven months is now permitted. “I was once invited to give a speech about the attempt to topple Iran’s political system through a ‘velvet revolution,’” says Etaat in the debate, “but we all know that ‘velvet revolutions’ always occur in dictatorships. So when you say that some forces are planning to create a velvet revolution, you have indirectly admitted that your system is not democratic.”
For months now the government has leveled the accusation that the Green Movement is pursuing a “velvet revolution,” but until this moment no one has argued the point Professor Etaat is making. “When elections, discussions, and competition take place in a free atmosphere,” he continues, “why should people want to make a revolution? People make revolutions perhaps only every hundred years or so, and only when they are totally fed up with a situation. It doesn’t matter whether the revolution is violent, velvet, colored, white, black, red, or yellow. So when the Islamic Republic talks about a ‘velvet revolution,’ there is an unintended admission that Iran is not a free country, and that people cannot achieve their goals through the institutions the system offers.” How can anyone refute that? The hardest of hard-liners never cared to describe Iran as a democracy, but most government officials always have, and Etaat is challenging them to either admit they were wrong and then face a real revolution, or allow the constitution—its democratic principles, which he describes article by article—to prevail. The government, already cognizant of this logic, has in the last few days stopped referring to a “velvet revolution,” instead calling the unrest fetneh, a word that can mean sedition or something softer, such as “troubles.” This followed Supreme Leader Khamenei’s admonition to the security forces, in the wake of violence and the killings of demonstrators at the end of 2009, to not “take the law into their own hands.” Everything is true.