Persian Mirrors: The Elusive Face of Iran (41 page)

The era of an independent-minded press ended with the reign of Reza Shah, whose priority was law and order, not the rule of law. It was no better under his son, Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, whose heavy censorship of all forms of expression—newspapers, books, films, even fiction—worsened over the years. My friend Karim Emami, a leading literary scholar, translator, and book publisher, tells a funny (tragic, really) story about once having to destroy the entire printing of a harmless book about Marie Antoinette because the translator used the Persian word
shahbanu
for queen, not the more popular word,
malekeh
. The censors ruled that the word
shahbanu
could be used only for the present queen, not just for any queen. But maybe that wasn’t the most important reason. After all, the book told the story of a king and a queen who had been executed.

The Islamic revolution was supposed to abolish censorship. One of the first posters of the revolution that I bought from a street vendor showed a dove with a flower sprouting from its head. The words, “For a Free Press!” were written across it.

But press freedom was short-lived. “I condemn the corrupt intellectuals and the poisoned pens of conspiring writers and democrats!” Khomeini declared soon after the revolution when the voices of opposition got too loud. Newspaper editors were given orders to reflect “a proper Islamic emphasis” in their pages, and for years the press remained cowed. Then slowly, in the early 1990s, publications began to take chances. The boldest was
Salaam,
a leftist daily run by a mid-ranking cleric named Mohammad Mousavi-Khoeiniha, who had achieved international notoriety in the early days of the revolution as the spiritual mentor of the militants who seized the American embassy. Like other political figures frozen out of the system by the conservative clerical establishment, Mousavi-Khoeiniha decided that the press was the most fruitful way to have an impact.
Salaam
promoted social justice and the redistribution of wealth from rich to poor. For years, its “Hello
Salaam
” column, in which ordinary people called in their questions and complaints, was the liveliest feature in the Iranian press. The first editor of
Salaam
was Abbas Abdi, one of a new breed of young revolutionaries who evolved into one of the more astute observers of Iranian politics; still, I couldn’t forget that he had been one of the original hostage-takers.

I never knew whether people actually telephoned
Salaam
with their gripes, or whether the
Salaam
editors made them up. It didn’t matter. The column was lively and, in the absence of opinion polls, reflected what people were grumbling about in shops, communal taxis, and the privacy of their homes. Callers complained about high prices, low salaries, hoarding, clerics who drove Mercedes. One caller said the confiscation of satellite dishes was “nothing but a ploy to distract people’s attention from the country’s economic problems.” Another had this message for the authorities: “You never listen when the Iranian people say that we don’t want hostility with the United States anymore. Do you have any statistics? In one of the anti-America demonstrations held recently, only seven hundred people showed up. That means in a big city like Tehran, there are only seven hundred anti-American people.”

Jameah,
even more daring, showed that the gates had been flung wide open in the struggle for control of the world of talk. The form and the outcome of the struggle became thoroughly unpredictable, in part because the political structure in Iran was becoming less monolithic. There were surprise attacks and surprise refuges. A court could shut down a newspaper one day; the Ministry of Islamic Guidance could issue a new license for it to open under a new name the next; the staff and editorial team of the shuttered newspaper could take over the license of another newspaper. The absence of complete centralized control was visible even in the world of state-controlled television. Clerical censors could demand strict adherence to a conservative line in television news, while secular producers could turn out imitations of American game shows on the entertainment side. In the movies, even as films were banned from Iranian movie theaters, the state-run Farabi Cinema Foundation allowed them to be made and shown at special screenings or to be sent abroad to compete in international film festivals.

Along the way, the struggle has pitted conservatives who, for the sake of unity and stability, are determined to preserve adherence to a strict line against reformists like Jalaeipour and Shamsolvaezin who are equally determined to open up the lines of debate and make the system more transparent and accountable. For the conservatives, too much transparency can only weaken Islamic and revolutionary values and erode the clergy’s grip on power; for the reformers, democracy—and open access to good information—is the key to stability. And both sides are learning to use existing laws to their advantage. The conservatives, who control the Judiciary, obviously have more power to use—and abuse—laws, and they have done so by repeatedly closing publications and hauling off their editors and publishers to court. But the reformers are refusing to fold under the pressure; they are using both the pages of their publications and the courtrooms to challenge the way laws are interpreted.

In a sense, Khatami’s election served to accelerate the effort by Iranians and some elements of their government to press for freedom, tolerance, and the rule of law. Newspapers were an important part of that process, and their success was, ironically, due in part to initiatives by the clerics to fulfill the social goals of the 1979 revolution. Literacy in Iran soared from 58 percent in 1979 to 82 percent in 1998; and the number of university graduates increased almost tenfold from 430,000 to more than four million. Khatami’s election more than doubled the number of publications, for a total of more than 1,200 newspapers, magazines, and journals. At the beginning of 2000, there were more than two dozen daily papers in Tehran alone. As a deputy in Parliament in the late 1990s, Ahmad Nateq-Nouri, the brother of the former Speaker of the Parliament, complained, “Everyone who has had a fight with his mother goes and opens up a newspaper in this country!”

Readers look to newspapers less for factual information or exposés about government misdeeds than for the intense debate about the direction of the Islamic Republic. This explains why many educated Iranians would prefer to read several papers. (Some complain that it takes them two hours to read the papers every day.) I’ve seen people crowd around newspaper kiosks the moment papers are delivered early in the morning to check as many headlines as they can before deciding what—or whether—to buy.

The newspapers run the gamut.
Hamshahri
(Citizen), which is the mouthpiece of the mayor of Tehran and is funded by the city, focuses on local news, including announcements of social and cultural events and reviews of plays, movies, and concerts. It has the largest daily circulation—more than 400,000—in part because it has the best classified ads.
Jomhouri-ye Islami, Resalat, Kayhan,
and
Qods
spout the party line of the most conservative clerics. Before it was shut down,
Khordad,
published by former Interior Minister Abdollah Nouri, was more of a political platform for him and the reform movement than a bearer of news. The most reactionary paper is the monthly
Ya-Lessaratal Hosein,
which is run by the vigilante group, Ansar-e Hezbollah. One of its editorial positions is that vigilantes should be given arms to confront any and all anti-revolutionaries in their offices, businesses, and homes.

Jameah
’s approach and style was duplicated by newspapers across the country. Some, like the weekly newspaper
Sirvan
(circulation five thousand) in the Kurdish provincial capital of Sanandaj, are tiny. The paper is produced by a staff of three young men armed with one telephone line and two computers, but no e-mail or Internet connection. When I visited these journalists in mid-1999, they had been receiving repeated death threats at home from unknown opponents of their demand for more openness in the political system. They complained openly in their pages that the Islamic Republic had failed to build Kurdish cultural centers to teach their language and history and that the Khatami administration had not appointed even one Sunni Kurd (most Kurds belong to the Sunni branch of Islam) to a high government position. “If Khatami really wants a ‘dialogue among civilizations,’ he should start with the Kurds,” Mohammad-Karim Assadbeghi, the paper’s editor, told me.

Iran is not a country of independent nongovernmental organizations; the community and charitable organizations that do exist are wholly or partially controlled by the government. (The few private charitable organizations that do exist are largely apolitical.) So the main arena for independent political discourse in Iran became the newspapers. Jalaeipour once tried to form his own political party, but wasn’t given a license. So he looked at
Jameah
as a substitute, an indispensable channel of communication between the people and the ruling elite, and therefore an element in the way decisions might be made more democratically. The name
Jameah,
in fact, means “Society.” “It was easier to get a license to open a newspaper than a license to open a party,” he once told me, “so I opened a newspaper.”

With $100,000 in savings and loans, the
Jameah
team bought sophisticated computer equipment and rented a sprawling, white, California-style villa with good electrical wiring in north Tehran. Jalaeipour and Shamsolvaezin hired some of Iran’s best journalists and solicited copy from some of Iran’s most respected intellectuals. Within weeks of its debut in 1998, the sixteen-page paper of news, good writing, lively commentary, political cartoons, and color photographs became the boldest experiment with free speech in the course of Iran’s revolution. Within six months circulation soared from 130,000 to 300,000 a day—
Jameah’
s maximum printing capacity. The paper called itself “the first civil society newspaper” in Iran and sold out almost as soon as it hit the newsstands in the early mornings.

Jameah
journalists wrote, under their own bylines, about many hot subjects that had been considered off the table for discussion: the weaknesses of Ayatollah Khomeini, the misuse of Islam for political purposes, torture in the prison system, the need for political dissent and relations with the United States. They also wrote about offbeat subjects, such as a student demonstration over the bad quality of drinking water. One sportswriter—a woman—once elbowed her way into a men’s only soccer stadium for a story on the national team.

The paper appealed to the young. It even covered Hollywood. Rather than dwelling on tragedy and martyrdom,
Jameah
embraced the positive. On the day after Iran beat the United States in the World Cup soccer tournament,
Jameah
published a photo of the captain of the American team, Thomas Dooley, wearing the shirt of Ali Daei, the Iranian soccer star. There was even humor in its pages. When a deputy of Parliament gave a speech one day accusing
Jameah
of getting a $6 million payoff from the White House,
Jameah’
s most opinionated feature, the “Fifth Column,” ostentatiously thanked President Clinton for the donation, but corrected the deputy, saying that the gift was $60 million.

Even before the court shut down
Jameah
in the summer of 1998, Jalaeipour and Shamsolvaezin were already armed with the license of another paper. Immediately after the court order was issued, several other dailies offered them their own licenses. The day after
Jameah
was closed down, the new newspaper reopened in the same headquarters, using the same printing presses, virtually the same staff and a new name,
Tous,
after the hometown of the beloved tenth-century Persian poet Ferdowsi.
Tous
lasted for five weeks before it too was closed down for “endangering national security.” Jalaeipour and Shamsolvaezin were sent to prison. One cleric branded them
mohareb
—insurgents against Islam—who should be executed. It was only then that President Khatami offered a tepid show of support, inviting family members of the arrested editors for a visit. Still, he held back. “You have my sympathy, but my hands are tied,” the President reportedly said. “It is unfortunate that Mr. Jalaeipour and Mr. Shamsolvaezin went so fast, that they didn’t see the yellow light. They think they’re living in Switzerland!”

Jalaeipour’s mother didn’t see it that way. She declared that the Judiciary had no right to accuse her son of weakening the country’s national security. Theirs was a loyal, patriotic, and revolutionary family, she said. Then she delivered the coup de grâce. “I gave you three sons,” she told the President. “You are not getting a fourth one.”

It was
Saving Private Ryan,
Iranian-style. Jalaeipour and Shamsolvaezin were released.

And so it went. Every time the paper was closed, it reopened under a new name:
Aftab-e Emrouz
(Today’s Sun),
Neshat
(Liveliness),
Akhbar-e
Eghtesad
(Economic News),
Asr-e Azadegan
(The Age of the Free). It moved to a safer building in a more remote part of the city, installing wire mesh screens to better withstand grenade attacks.

Over dinner one evening at a conference in Cyprus, Shamsolvaezin told a group of us that he thought of himself as Jerry the mouse in the
Tom and Jerry
cartoons that had long played on Iranian television, their American origin notwithstanding. It was Ali Razini, the head of the Tehran Justice Department, who first gave Shamsolvaezin the idea during a conversation after one of the newspaper closures.

“Mr. Shamsolvaezin, how long do you intend to continue with this Tom and Jerry game?” Razini asked.

“It’s up to you to decide, since you’re Tom,” Shamsolvaezin replied. “And it is Tom who always chases after Jerry.” Then Shamsolvaezin explained to his adversary why he would lose. “You will fail, because Jerry can always run into a little hole. And like Tom, you will end up banging your head against the wall.”