by Hooman Majd
In 2005, Ganji, who refused to renounce his writings and apologize to the Supreme Leader in exchange for leniency, had begun a hunger strike to protest his detention and bring attention to political prisoners in Iran, and the government of President Khatami had implored him (as Ali Khatami had assured me) to quit, especially since he was already very close to his release date. But I was taken aback, once in Iran, by the almost complete lack of concern, even among intellectuals who are quick to decry the lack of press freedoms, for the defiant dissident. Although much had been made of his plight and his struggle in the West (he was made an honorary member of PEN), in Tehran his cause was less than célèbre. His bravery in calling in July, during the presidential elections, for the Supreme Leader to “go” in a letter widely read on the Internet (intentionally evocative of Khomeini’s simple call for the Shah to “go”) was the talk of many a party in middle-class Tehran, but Iranians by and large ignored the Ganji issue. Some Iranians even questioned his bravery—all the attention from the West, including from George Bush, they said, guaranteed him immunity from harm—and others, even while admiring his stand, thought his hunger strike to be hopeless and therefore pointless, particularly since he had served most of his sentence anyway and would have soon been released from prison. Even when Massoud Moqadasi, the judge who had presided over his trial and conviction, was assassinated a week after I arrived in Tehran in a rare instance of political violence, there seemed to be no expressions of delight among reform-minded Iranians.
Why? Certainly some viewed Ganji suspiciously because he had been a part of the system himself, a former Revolutionary Guard who had served the Islamic Revolution at its most terrifyingly intolerant early stage, a personal history that for those, openly dissident or not, with a deep hatred of the mullahs could not be redeemed. Others felt that he was grandstanding, and of course there were always those conspiracy-minded Iranians who believed that he had to be an agent of the West, witting or unwitting, since he seemed to receive all the attention outside the country while others just as deserving were suffering as much (or had suffered worse) without even a peep by any foreigner.
But the reality is that ordinary Iranians, despite what we’re told about how much they dislike their government, do not seem to desire a revolution; rather, there are those who are politically minded who want democratic change, even if it is gradual, and there are those for whom the only real changes that are important are economic. Revolution, for a people that remembers the last one all too well, entails too much uncertainty, and Ganji was for many simply too revolutionary. Though he has been keen to emphasize that he is for democratic change from within Iran, his headline-grabbing hunger strike and his radical words challenged the very legitimacy of the Islamic Republic and have given him a revolutionary aura. Perhaps if he had died in prison, or had been executed, Ganji could have become a dangerous rallying force for opponents to the Islamic regime, but the government was far too shrewd to allow that to happen. With the knowledge that a generation earlier the executions of Khosro Golsorkhi and Keramat Daneshian, two poets who had been improbably accused of plotting to kidnap the crown prince by the Shah’s government, had been one of the sparks that ignited the populist revolution of 1979, the Islamic government had no intention of creating a martyr who could most influence the youths, as Golsorkhi, a Che Guevara–like figure for young Iranians in 1974, had done. At the time the Shah, eager to both intimidate his rivals and show the world that his rule was based on law, chose to allow televised broadcasts of Golsorkhi’s military tribunal, a colossal mistake that accomplished neither goal. Golsorkhi recited poetry, what Persians consider their highest art, throughout his trial; he made a mockery of the military judges; and his bravery, including his refusal to beg the Shah for clemency (or to wear a blindfold at his execution), only served to make him a hero and a symbol of the Shah’s merciless dictatorship. (A documentary film on the trial of Golsorkhi has been shown in art house theaters throughout the world since the revolution, and is still riveting to watch.3) Ganji, intentionally or not, evoked Golsorkhi in his steadfast refusal to admit any crime, his calls for democratic rule, and his defiance in not begging for forgiveness, but the government’s releasing him from prison and allowing him to travel abroad freely, as it well knew, deflated any chance, however remote, of his someday becoming a martyr for a new revolution.
A slightly different attitude prevailed in Iran two years later (when Ganji had long been released from prison and was still busy touring the United States and Europe), when Iranian-American academics, a reporter for the U.S.-run Radio Farda, and NGO representatives were arrested in Iran on charges of espionage. Foreign journalists remarked on how little coverage or sympathy the Iranian-American cases received inside Iran while making headlines in the rest of the world (which may be one reason why Haleh Esfandiari, who had access to the local news, remarked upon her release and return to the United States that one of her greatest fears while in prison was that the world had forgotten her). Iranians, even reformists and intellectuals, indeed seemed to show very little sympathy for the plight of the detainees, certainly less than for Ganji, but it was not out of any fear. Many Iranians simply felt less than sympathetic because they viewed the Iranian-Americans as a privileged lot—Iranians who lived abroad in luxury (with foreign passports no less!) and who suffered none of the travails of living and struggling day to day under a difficult system, as domestic dissidents and political activists do, but who nonetheless felt that they had a right to opinions on the future of Iran. These were not Iranians who had chosen to stay through the worst of times, as my Iranian friend, no fan of the Islamic government, who had stayed so fittingly put it, revealing the value Iranians place on what they believe to be true patriotism. Shirin Ebadi, for example, the Nobel laureate lawyer who often represents the most high-profile political cases (and whom I have heard referred to as a “political ambulance chaser” by precisely the reformist and anti-authoritarian intellectuals who ought to be her biggest fans), garners far more public support when she represents ordinary women activists, or other often-ignored domestic dissidents, than when she takes on the cases of those who are the least likely to suffer prison sentences in anonymity.
On a few occasions in Tehran, when I have expressed political opinions not to the liking of those who truly loathe the mullahs, I have been admonished with the expression “Nafas-et az jay-eh garm meeyad”—“Your breath emanates from a warm place,” meaning that someone who lives in that “warm place,” the free West, really has no right to an opinion on Iran at all. It is perhaps for this reason that Iranian dissidents abroad, or exile groups intent on regime change, have had so little success in gaining any measure of popularity inside Iran. Their satellite television broadcasts are watched often enough, sometimes disdainfully and with intent to mock, but the very idea that Iranians in the diaspora might hold the solution to Iran’s political problems is laughable to most. Of course the level of support they receive even in their own countries of residence, their bases of operations if you will, might be indicative of the hopelessness of their ambitions.
When President Ahmadinejad made his first trip to the United States in the immediate aftermath of his election, an election that exiled Iranians had encouraged their compatriots to boycott via television and the Internet, he said at a breakfast meeting with journalists (where I was present) that he had intended to stop by the massive protests he had been told were to occur at Dag Hammarskjöld Plaza across from the UN in New York, and to even speak to the Iranians assembled there and hear what they had to say. He said he drove by in his limousine, but when he saw the pitifully small handful of protesters, he decided they weren’t worth talking to. Ahmadinejad may have been dishonest, or more accurately using ta’arouf, in expressing a desire to speak to Iranians who were against the Islamic regime, but he clearly savored the moment when he could, in the presence of American journalists, point out how preposterous the idea was that exiled Iranians, some with influence in Washington, might be t
he catalysts for a change in the Iranian regime.
I had gone to the demonstration myself and had been surprised not only at the lethargic turnout of two groups, one pro-Shah and the other pro-MEK, but also at the incongruous attendance of many obviously out-of-place and even indigent Americans in the MEK contingent, some wearing brand-new anti–Islamic Republic T-shirts, contrasting sharply with their otherwise cast-off Salvation Army attire. (I asked a few why they were there, and one man, missing most of his teeth and the laces on his well-worn boots, and badly in need of a shower, admitted that he had been lured there in a bus from near the Bowery Mission with the promise of fifteen dollars and the T-shirt.) Reza Pahlavi, the man who would be Shah, was not present himself when I visited, but his face was on the placards his supporters held high for motorists passing by to see. The fifty or so royalists, Shah-philes if you will, in keeping with their aristocratic sense of themselves, were enthusiastic but did not shout or yell, vulgar as that might be seen to be, and Ahmadinejad, if he did drive by, must have given a scornful snigger.
It is perhaps ordinary Iranians’ views on democracy and political issues that reflect their ambivalence toward the people we in the West believe to be working to make the country a democracy more along the lines of a Western model. Iran is not a totalitarian state; Iranians have a good measure of political freedom, at least compared with many Third World countries, and there is often lively public debate on what we might presume would be sensitive political issues. There may be tens or even hundreds of political prisoners in the notorious Evin prison, but there are also plenty of public figures opposed to the ruling clergy who state their views with relative freedom. But what many Iranians want most, if they are young, are social freedoms and, if they are older, a better economy. Politics, and an idealized political system, are simply not the overwhelming concerns of most ordinary Iranians who are struggling to better their lives, and those for whom they are, the intellectual elite who love nothing more than discussing politics at every opportunity, are, despite their inflated sense of relevance or influence, better at talking among themselves than at galvanizing the people into a real opposition. And nothing demonstrated this fact better than the reformists’ dismal showing in the elections that brought President Ahmadinejad to power.
An ambivalence toward political activism we might think appropriate to the young is in evidence in Elahieh, one of the most fashionable districts of Tehran, where there’s a busy hamburger stand called, without irony (a word that in any event has no good translation in Farsi), Bobby Sands Hamburger. Bobby Sands, the IRA political prisoner who starved himself to death in a British prison in 1981, also has a street named for him in Tehran: formerly Winston Churchill Boulevard, it runs conveniently beside the British Embassy and is the automobile access to the compound but, in true uncaring government fashion, is misspelled on signs and on maps variously as “Babi Sandez” or “Boby Sendz,” somewhat defeating its purpose in tweaking the noses of British diplomats as they enter and leave their offices. In 2005, while Shirin Ebadi was representing Akbar Ganji, she had been told by the government that her client’s hunger strike was illegal, and Ebadi, who does understand irony, had asked for a clarification. A nation that names a street after a hunger striker, she had famously argued and been quoted in the papers, could hardly be in a position to outlaw the practice. Needless to say, the judiciary did not issue the clarification she requested.
The Bobby Sands burger joint was crowded with young boys and girls on the night I visited, in the midst of Ganji’s hunger strike and as he was wasting away, but none of them seemed to care very much about him. I asked a few people about their concerns that the new government of Ahmadinejad may crack down on many of the liberties granted them in the Khatami years. “Granted?” one young man snorted as he munched on a Bobby Sands special. “Nothing was given to us, not by Khatami or any one else. We fought for our freedoms. Beaten, imprisoned, and harassed by the police, we took them back. Do you think we’ll ever let them take them away?” Spoken like a true revolutionary indeed, but he wasn’t talking about political freedom, freedom of the press, or being able to criticize the government—freedoms that to one degree or another were ushered in under Khatami. He certainly wasn’t talking about the freedom to go on a hunger strike; what he was talking about was being able to chat with a girl, exchange a phone number, and maybe dress as he pleases (all of which he was doing). Being able to watch satellite TV and bootleg DVDs. Or being able to drink and party at home, or hang out with girls at coffee shops like the Doors, an inviting place downtown with a large photo of Jim Morrison on what would be the bar if there were any booze, and typical of the many coffee shops that Iranian youths hang out in. And sex? Many young Iranians manage to have girlfriends or boyfriends, many have sex quietly and discreetly, and for those men who are single for whatever reason, there are always the prostitutes. In recent years prostitution has become so widespread in Iran that even the state-controlled press mentions it regularly and politicians rail against its spread. On the night after Ahmadinejad’s swearing in, prostitutes were out in full force in Vanak Square, near the hotel I was staying in on that trip. How, I wondered, can one tell them apart from the girls who have merely pushed back their headscarves a few inches and applied a little too much makeup? “Twenty-six years in an Islamic Republic,” my Iranian companion who was giving me a ride home told me, “and you can tell.”
The dynamics of Iranian politics, which make the Islamic Republic a difficult target for regime-change proponents, can be witnessed a few miles farther north of Vanak Square at the Center for Strategic Research, a quasi-governmental organization, which occupies a striking blue glass modern high-rise in Niavaran, one of the northernmost and wealthiest districts of Tehran. The center, a think-tank-like arm of the Expediency Council (whose chairman is Ayatollah Rafsanjani), employs a legion of former government employees, allies of Rafsanjani and Khatami, who have found themselves unemployable in President Ahmadinejad’s administration. The Expediency Council is one of those governmental bodies that mystifies Westerners; it was set up originally to settle disputes between the elected parliament, the Majles, and the Guardian Council (the body that ensures the principles of Islam are adhered to by the Majles and also vets candidates running for election, theoretically on their Islamic qualifications), but its true power lies more in its advisory role to the Supreme Leader, who in 2005 delegated some of his own authority to the council—granting it supervisory powers over all branches of the government of President Ahmadinejad—some think as a consolation prize demanded by Rafsanjani after suffering his humiliating defeat at Ahmadinejad’s hands.
A former ambassador under the previous administration invited me to a lunch there one day in early 2007, a political salon of sorts where former government officials who now presumably do strategic research for the benefit of one or another branch of the government (though certainly not the president, who couldn’t be less interested in the views, strategic or not, of any of his rivals) gather in a capacious conference room every Thursday to exchange ideas and, of course, discuss politics. Hassan Rowhani, the center’s highest-profile strategist, former chief nuclear negotiator in Khatami’s regime, a close confidant of the Supreme Leader and Rafsanjani, a member of the Assembly of Experts, and a potential rival to Ahmadinejad in the next presidential elections, does not participate in the salon; perhaps he knows that if he did, it would take on an uncomfortable hue of intrigue against an already paranoid presidency.
The conference room where we gathered was on the first floor (or “1th,” as was indicated by signs on the pillars, perhaps a strategic goof) of the building. A stream of attendants laid out steaming platters and plates of rice, kebabs, stews, and salads on the huge table around which we sat. The conversation was interrupted every few minutes by someone’s cell phone ring, usually an unlikely tone such as the “William Tell Overture” or a Muzak version of the theme from Titanic (also evidently the most popular song in elevators throughout the Islamic Re
public), and at one point it seemed that half the room was talking on phones between mouthfuls rather than listening to any of the conversations that started and stopped in fits. But as the plates were cleared of the last morsels, talk turned to Ahmadinejad and his hated government, which had put these men out of work. “Do you realize,” one man said, “that he’s even tightened the customs office? I used to be able to just call the customs depot and have personal stuff I’m importing cleared through, but just last week I was forced to actually drive down there!” Others shook their heads in dismay that Ahmadinejad’s anticorruption drive had inconvenienced one of their own. “He’s serious about this business,” the man continued, shaking his head.
“That’s not all,” piped in a round and balding man, finishing a phone conversation by shutting his flip phone with a decisive snap while still noisily chewing on a piece of chicken. “Do you know anyone who wants an almost-new Mercedes S?”
“Why?” a chorus of voices responded.
“Ten million tomans!” he said incredulously (about eleven thousand dollars, and one-tenth the going market rate). “But you can’t get plates.” Sounds of “tsk, tsk” echoed in the room. “Maybe you can just wait this thing out,” he continued, shrugging his shoulders and reaching for another kebab. Ahmadinejad’s anticorruption drive had, seemingly, driven the price of stolen cars, usually from Dubai or other Gulf states, way down, because there was no longer a way to register the vehicles, not even with once-common bribes and influence. The conversation continued with indignant stories of how difficult life had become under a new administration, and I wondered if Ahmadinejad, if he could hear these men, would be slapping his thighs with delight at how he had not only shut them out of government but deprived them of what they thought was their right to a privileged life. But despite their loss of real political power, these men were still very much part of the ruling class of Iran, and they all believed that their situations could only be temporary. They were very much against men such as Ahmadinejad, either for rational reasons of opposition to hard-line policies or for less virtuous reasons of self-interest, but they could never be recruited to a cause against the Islamic Republic.