by John Lyons
One candidate, Mehdi Karroubi, received only 300,000 votes. With a campaign team of 400,000, an outraged Karroubi asked: ‘Did 100,000 of my campaign workers sleep in?’
Next morning, I was at an intersection in Tehran where hundreds of young people gathered. They seemed angry. Police began trying to break them up. Some resisted, and the police attacked with batons. The mood turned nasty.
American journalist Joe Klein reported that a number of journalists were coming back to the Laleh Hotel badly beaten. Australia’s Ambassador to Iran, Marc Innes-Brown, went for a walk, and as he passed the Interior Ministry a plain-clothes official pushed his finger into the ambassador’s chest, telling him to leave.
Around Tehran, I watched a regime prepare for war against its own people. Riot police stood on every corner. Snipers took up positions on rooftops. And the most feared unit of all, the paramilitary Basij militia, roamed with batons, knives and truncheons.
Not having a government minder meant I could break away. Not only was I freer but so were the people I was able to speak to.
One of the things I investigated was an alleged massacre at Tehran University, whose students were driving many of the protests. There were suggestions that the Basij had attacked students in a dormitory, an allegation I wanted to check.
At the university, several students agreed to talk about the killings. I found out that five students had been killed. It appeared that basijis had stormed a dormitory and begun a killing spree. The students told me they’d placed the names of the five on noticeboards but the police had taken the list down.
Back at the Laleh Hotel I discovered media teams preparing to depart. Officials had been going from room to room demanding that journalists leave the hotel. Embarrassed by huge protests, the regime wanted foreign reporters gone from the country. ‘We’re out of here,’ one television journalist said to me. ‘Every time we pull out our camera someone tries to stop us.’
But for me this was a rare opportunity: I had a 15-day visa, I hadn’t registered with the Ministry of Islamic Guidance, and this was a big story. If I could get my passport back from the front desk, the authorities would have no idea where I’d gone.
Tehran was erupting. Even the executive editor of the New York Times, Bill Keller, was unable to get his visa extended. ‘Visa extensions have been denied across the board’, he wrote.
I emailed Sylvie in Jerusalem to ask her to help me find another hotel. Through the Lonely Planet Guide – IRAN, she found a backpackers’ hotel, the Firouzeh. The Lonely Planet summary read: ‘If ever there was a hotel whose atmosphere revolved around one man, this is it. Mr Mousavi is the personification of Persian hospitality and his enthusiasm, useful information and help with bookings make an otherwise unremarkable little hotel in an unlovely part of town into the city’s backpacker centre. Toilets are shared.’
But I needed to get back my passport from the Laleh Hotel without any suggestion that I was remaining in Iran. After checking out, I declined the hotel’s offer to organise a taxi for me because I didn’t want them knowing that I was going to another hotel. I walked outside and took a random taxi instead.
I arrived at the Firouzeh Hotel. It was so small you could barely see it.
A man at the front desk smiled.
‘Mr Mousavi?’ I asked. He nodded. ‘I’ve been reading about you in the Lonely Planet guide!’
He greeted me like a long-lost friend. He gave me a room at US$10 a day – then informed me that for an extra dollar I could also get the internet. I decided to ‘lash out’ and go for the US$11 package.
I slipped into backpacker mode, having breakfast with a Swedish man who was on a motorbike trip ‘across the world’ and a New Zealander who was riding his pushbike across Iran and complained that the roads were terrible. ‘I’ve gone through 10 tyres,’ he said. This was not a good time to be a foreign journalist in Tehran, so I didn’t reveal my occupation.
Near the hotel I could hear tear gas and bullets being fired, so I went to have a look. For the first time, I heard a sound I would soon come to dread: the sound of metal shutters being pulled down. Often it means the end of the working day, but in this climate it meant something very different: fear.
On my first day at the Firouzeh, the shutters were being pulled down in nearby Amir Kabir Street. Supporters of Mousavi were clashing with police. The Basij arrived on motorbikes. ‘Go!’ one shopkeeper shouted at me. ‘Basij!’
The next morning I noticed a man at breakfast typing furiously on a laptop. When you’re a journalist on the road you learn to spot other reporters; it’s almost a sixth sense. He was from Mexico.
A day later I spotted a woman who also had the look of someone on a deadline; she was a British journalist. The three of us had all fled the official hotel and we began to travel around Tehran together. Being a team gave us some protection. At one protest, police grabbed the Mexican and were about to put him into a car when I appeared from down the road; this confused them and they let him go. Two days later, the three of us became concerned to hear that officials had rung the hotel to ask if there were any journalists staying there. We needed to move out of the Firouzeh. The visas of the other two were about to expire, so they decided to leave. One of the Iranians I’d met through Susan had an apartment down a back lane where I could come and go without being noticed. This became my home. I slept on the floor, and each day I took a bus into central Tehran to cover the protests.
I frequently dropped into internet cafés. Social media was driving this uprising. This was confounding the regime, which struggled to manage the new communication form. For me, these internet cafés became a valuable way of finding out the sort of material being circulated, and of talking to protesters. The clientele tended to be young and examining videos – often gruesome – from the protests. The common message from these people – who supported what came to be known as the ‘Green Revolution’ – was that they wanted choice over their government.
Sunday, 20 June. I walked into a café to see several young people around a computer. A man called me over and played a video of a young woman lying on the ground, looking traumatised. Then I saw a trickle of blood from her mouth. Then from her nose. Her eyes widened and took on a haunted look. The people showing the video looked up at me. ‘Her name is Neda,’ one said.
Neda Agha Soltan, 26, was a student who had been at a protest when a sniper shot into the crowd. Within 24 hours, this woman would become the face of the brutality of the regime.
Another man in the café showed me a picture of a friend killed the day before. A woman showed me a picture of a young man lying on a slab with white patches over his eyes. She also showed me a picture of militiamen wielding knives at protests; this was proof, she said, that it was the Basij who were using weapons on protesters.
By posting this material, these young people were shaping international opinion. Internet cafés had become the command-and-control centres of the opposition movement. In the Middle East, social media was changing the power balance. This would be confirmed just a few months later when the Arab Spring erupted.
Not all the cafés were so friendly, though. I was on a deadline to file a story – it was 7pm Sydney time – and I needed the internet. The café I entered did not have an air of youthful enthusiasm. I sat at a booth as far away from others as possible and began writing a story about the massacre at Tehran University. A man came and sat in the next booth. It was a fixed computer, not a laptop, so I couldn’t angle it for privacy. I kept writing, but I noticed he was trying to read it. It might have been simple curiosity, or he might have been a government official. I quickly logged off and left.
The message that I wasn’t welcomed by some was made clear as I walked with protesters towards Azadi Square in the centre of the city. Two men on a motorbike came up behind me and pushed the motorbike into my heels. They did it again, and again, and stared at me. I climbed over a fence on the side of the road, which meant they could no longer follow me.
Conversely,
many Iranians showed great concern. As violence broke out in Engelab Square, another Tehran focal point, two young men beckoned me into their mobile phone shop. ‘You should not be out there,’ one said. From the shop door I was still able to see everything going on in the square.
But a day later, I found myself between the riot police on one side of an intersection and protesters on the other. Behind the lines of riot police were hundreds of police on motorbikes. It was clear the riot police were not just going to stand there; the regime was determined to crush the uprising.
The scene was chaotic: in the midday sun, car sirens were sounding and people were shouting. A man had run up some stairs, but had been caught and was being clubbed by police.
Police on motorbikes were coming down the street, brandishing wooden truncheons. I saw a woman standing by the side of the road. As the police rode past, one of them bashed the woman with his truncheon. The sound of the wood hitting her head was awful. The woman fell backwards and because she was next to a deep drain there was nothing to break her fall. The sight of that woman falling back into the drain imprinted itself on my visual memory.
All this brutality brought people together: the woman who had been hit was not religious, judging by her dress, but several women in black hijabs climbed into the drain to help her. One of the women charged up to a police commander and put a finger close to his face, then pointed to the woman lying unconscious.
At the next Friday prayers, Ayatollah Khamenei warned that organisers would be responsible for the consequences of any future protests. While in the first few days people were bringing children, everyone realised that if you turned up to a rally now you risked being killed.
At one protest, three days after the election, panic set in, and people were running to get into buses headed towards Azadi Square, one of the most violent battlegrounds. Four o’clock came and the battle began. The regime was becoming more strategic: the police sealed off streets, quarantining the protesters into small zones. This prevented the trapped protesters from bringing in reinforcements and meant the regime could dramatically outnumber them.
It felt like a scene from Dante’s Inferno. There were fires everywhere, and the smell of burning tyres. People were running in all directions and there was a constant high-pitched sound of sirens and shouting. Police began running into Azadi Square from a side street.
I was witnessing a grim daily ritual. Thousands of people came to demonstrate against their government, which was telling them it was prepared to kill them. In this gladiatorial contest, the police and militia gathered to meet them. It was now a civil war in which only one side had weapons.
‘We have the numbers, they have the weapons,’ one protester said. But the opposition had added another ‘weapon’ to their armoury: each night at 9pm, opposition sympathisers had started turning on all their electrical appliances. This would make the grid crash, plunging the city into darkness.
It was clear that the Basij militia were critical. I asked a few of the protest leaders to guide me towards anyone who had ever been in the Basij or a related part of the Iranian military.
After a couple of days I was given the name of a man who’d held a senior position in the Revolutionary Guards but become appalled by their methods and left. He was prepared to explain the Basij’s role. The reason, he explained, why the regime was able to turn fear on and off was because of a force it had been building methodically (since the toppling of the Shah in 1979): the Army of the Guardians of the Islamic Revolution.
The most feared weapon of the army is the Basij, Iran’s secret police. The full name is Sazeman-e Basij-e Mostazafan, or the Organisation for the Mobilisation of the Oppressed. While the name suggests defenders of the weak, in fact the Basij are the enforcers for the Ayatollahs. Whoever controls the Revolutionary Guards and the Basij controls Iran.
There are about 2 million members of the Revolutionary Guards, which includes about 100,000 basiji. The Basij can afford to have such large numbers because it is a volunteer organisation. Its members receive rewards rather than money. The biggest reward is tertiary education: university places in Iran are scarce. To enter university you must sit an examination called the Konkoor (from the French concours). The regime gives exemptions only for those who have shown exceptional loyalty. First among these are young people who have signed up to the Basij. The Konkoor works on a points system; although those who enlist with the Basij need to sit the exam, their membership gives them bonus points.
Joining the Basij also takes a year off the compulsory military service Iranian men must do when they turn 18. This means basijis can do other jobs and earn more than they would as a soldier. They also receive immunity from prosecution. In return for these ‘privileges’, Basij members must ‘protect the revolution’ in whatever way required. When civil unrest breaks out they must be prepared to turn on their own people.
Around Tehran at this time, the Basij seemed to be everywhere. Chains and batons in hand, basijis turned up wherever crowds were gathering and attempted to break them up. Part of their power was that they were virtually impossible to identify. Some wore balaclavas.
Mahmoud Ahmadinejad had amassed great power due to his patronage of the Basij. While the Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Khamenei, appointed the head of the Revolutionary Guard – which gave him unprecedented power – Ahmadinejad had shrewdly cultivated his own people in the Guards and the Basij. He had purged the public service of many mandarins and replaced them with Guards.
The former Revolutionary Guard I interviewed said his ex-colleagues had a power additional to violence. ‘They have the ability to destroy reputations,’ he said, citing the case of a radio broadcaster who the regime thought was becoming too powerful. The broadcaster had come up with an idea to challenge the government: each Friday, after his show, he would set off from the radio station for a walk with listeners. The regime felt threatened, and soon afterwards the broadcaster was photographed at a party dancing with two women who were not wearing scarfs: a breach of Iran’s religious laws. He was also holding a drink that the regime said was wine. The photographs were given to a newspaper and the journalist lost his job.
‘It’s called wringing,’ the former Guard told me. ‘Anybody who has something to say and is listened to by the people is dangerous and should be “wrung” of it. They take away your name, your friends. When you wring [clothing], what happens? It stretches, loses water, becomes fluffy, there is nothing left of it and it should be left on the rope to dry.’
He told me about another public figure the regime thought was ‘too big for his boots’, against whom corruption charges were fabricated. At his trial, the man testified that the Revolutionary Guard had said to him: ‘We will break you.’ The man was found guilty and became unemployable.
Even as a foreigner, I felt a sense of menace about the Basij – Iran has set up an extraordinary machine, oiled by the dark art of fear creation.
The Iranian regime had won – in the short term at least. They’d used such violence that few people would now come onto the streets.
I woke up on the 15th day of my visa. I had until 5pm to get to the airport.
I was warned by an Australian diplomat that the authorities at the airport were taking journalists away for questioning. I asked the diplomat what I should do if that happened to me. ‘Fucked if I know!’ he said. That didn’t reassure me.
An American journalist trying to leave had been taken away by Revolutionary Guard. Fearing that he would be uncontactable, he shouted his name and media organisation in the hope that others in the queue, when they reached their destinations, would telephone his editors. Someone did, so his organisation knew he’d be detained.
One of the trickiest things about being based in Israel was that I needed two passports to travel in the Middle East: one with my Israeli work visa and one with no Israeli stamps – a so-called ‘clean’ passport. Australia’s Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade will give a person a second passport if you travel frequently in
the Middle East, because some countries, such as Iran and Lebanon, will not allow you to enter if you have an Israeli stamp.
And so, with my ‘clean’ passport in my top pocket and my Israeli-stamped passport hidden in the lining of my computer bag, I headed to Tehran Airport.
The hardest part of having two passports is remembering the travels in each one. It’s a bit like long division. On one passport you’ve been to Ankara, Malta and Cyprus. On the other to Beirut, Amman, Dubai. In the taxi ride I tried to memorise my travels in the passport I was about to use to leave Iran.
Passport checks at the airport were being done by officers from the Revolutionary Guards. They were interested in trying to find inconsistencies in people’s stories. Due to their fear that Israel would try to sabotage their nuclear program, the number one target Iranian officials look for is agents from Mossad, Israel’s intelligence service, posing as journalists or businesspeople. And it’s known in the Middle East that for Mossad an Australian passport is gold.
I handed my passport to the Guard, and he and a woman went through it.
‘What is your destination?’ the man asked.
‘My eventual destination is Australia,’ I said. Which, technically, was true.
‘Where do you go from here?’ he asked.
‘I go to Kuwait, then Jordan,’ I said.
‘Do you travel to Jordan a lot?’ he asked.
This was the long-division moment: the real answer was that I travelled to Amman on almost every trip out of Israel. I knew that in the passport I was hiding from him there were many Amman stamps, but I was trying to remember if there were many Amman stamps in the one he was looking at.