Persian Mirrors: The Elusive Face of Iran (45 page)

Shots were fired. An off-duty soldier was killed.

Vigilantes routinely invade private spaces in Iran, breaking up private parties and weddings, stopping people in cars and even on the streets. They are political thugs, not street thugs. It is assumed that they are paid, not necessarily by the Islamic Republic itself, but perhaps by a few powerful clerics whose funds come from important supporters. But the university incident was an invasion of privacy on too grand a scale even for the authorities to ignore, and they universally denounced it. The students were not mollified. Bigger demonstrations followed, and they spread to at least two dozen other cities.

As the demonstrations continued, they became more menacing. In Vali Asr Square, one of Tehran’s busiest intersections, a police car and two police motorcycles were torched. I watched as riot police and security police rounded up dozens of students, beating some and forcing them into cages mounted on the backs of pickup trucks. “Filthy swine! Filthy swine!” one red-faced student screamed over and over from inside one of the cages. “Assholes! Jerks! Assholes! Jerks!” yelled another. One chadorwearing woman in the crowd cursed the clergy. “May you all be sent to burn in hell,” she ranted. “Damn you all! May God rain curses on you!” I even heard chants aimed directly at Ayatollah Khamenei:
Khamenei haya
kon, rahbari ro raha kon
(“Khamenei have shame, let go of the leadership”). Since the beginning of the revolution, Iranian demonstrators have had a flair for making up rhyming slogans as they went along. This one was as piercing and as dangerous as it could get.

At that point, the authorities concluded that the movement had to be stopped, no matter what. Ayatollah Khamenei himself struggled to calm the highly charged atmosphere by condemning the dormitory attack in a speech to a handpicked crowd. But he did not apologize. Rather, he blamed the United States for the unrest. The enraged students, however, were in no mood to shift the blame to the country’s predictable scapegoat, and they proved their resolve the following day.

July 13 saw the worst public violence since early in the revolution. Rioters burned banks and overturned buses and police cars. Stone-throwers smashed storefront windows. Tens of thousands of onlookers climbed on rooftops and hung out of balconies and windows to watch the drama unfold. The chaos and violence closed hundreds of stores, banks, gas stations, shopping centers, office buildings, and even the vast bazaar in the south of Tehran. Security police, soldiers, anti-riot forces, Revolutionary Guards, intelligence operatives, and vigilantes fanned out from the University of Tehran north and south for miles.

Rioters of unknown identities burned police and civilian vehicles, public offices, and even the platform used for the weekly Friday prayers at the university. The violence continued into the night, with a frenzy of beatings of students, demonstrators, journalists, and bystanders. The vigilantes attacked with stones, sticks, chains, metal cables, knives, and meat cleavers as well as their traditional green batons. The cleavers reminded me of the butcher knives carried by black-clad women in the days after Khomeini’s victory, when they called for revenge against the Shah’s generals.

During the demonstrations, Ahmad Batebi, a student, held over his head a bloodied T-shirt for a photographer to immortalize on film. The dramatic color photograph appeared in a number of Iranian newspapers and on the cover of
The Economist.
Later, Batebi was convicted of endangering national security and spreading anti-government propaganda and was sent to prison. His sentence: ten years.

Through the commotion, I stayed on the sidelines, unobtrusive in a long black coat and a black scarf pulled tightly over my hair, wondering if I was being courageous or just foolish. I said nothing in English, and kept my few phrases of Persian to a minimum, since my accent betrays me as a foreigner. These were not days for man-on-the-street interviews. Yet the events of that day somehow did not seem like another revolution. In fact, the demonstrations showed not how close Iran was to the flowering of a second revolution, but how far.

President Khatami, whom the students had envisioned as their hero, pleaded with them to end the demonstrations. The unrest had hurt Khatami, who was caught between the students who supported him and the conservative clerics with whom he had to share power. This was not a battle worth pursuing, the President told the demonstrators. Indeed, his aides told me later that the President and many other reform leaders had feared that all-out violent street fighting could give Khatami’s political opponents the ammunition to brand him weak and remove him from office. The very next day, the conservative forces turned the tables on the demonstrators by amassing crowds of their own, and it was not long before calm returned. By the time the unrest subsided, three people were dead by the official count, more by the unofficial count. Countless others were injured. Fourteen hundred people were put behind bars for inciting unrest. For the moment, the student protest movement was over.

What was clear once the excitement died down was that the students hadn’t known how much power they had or exactly how much they wanted. Their demands had ranged from petty to pie-in-the-sky. One student wanted the creation of a national day of mourning in memory of the students who had been killed; another demanded a public trial for the people who had ordered and carried out the dormitory attack; another asked that the bodies of those killed be returned to the students, not their families; another would be satisfied only with the execution of those who had attacked the dorm. “Either Islam and the law, or another revolution,” the students chanted, but it wasn’t at all clear what a new revolution would be fought for. No one seemed to want to die so that a newspaper could reopen. If there was a common goal, it was not to abolish the Islamic system of government, but to achieve a quickening of the movement toward democracy, the rule of law, and the expansion of personal freedom. And there was a quiet understanding that summer that violence was not the way to get there, which meant that the Islamic Republic was not in jeopardy—at least not yet.

I had found one key to understanding what the youth of Tehran want a year before the unrest, in a crumbling old white stucco mansion in south Tehran. Not far from the Presidential Palace, the mansion houses a curious student commune, the Office for Fostering Unity, which wages a political battle against what it considers the excesses of Iran’s clerical rule. The members live rent-free in the government-owned building, oblivious to the chipping plaster, peeling paint, exposed wiring, and absence of air-conditioning. But they enjoy telephones, computers, a fax machine, and a photocopying machine. That’s all they need.

The first time I visited in 1998, I noticed that some of the old bookcases, tables, chairs, and filing cabinets didn’t have a particularly Iranian look. I spotted one bookcase with a small brass plate engraved with the words “
Teheran-American School.
” “Isn’t this American furniture?” I asked Meysam Saidi, a twenty-eight-year-old graduate student in chemistry and one of the student leaders.

“Oh, yes,” he replied, laughing. “It’s the furniture from the American embassy taken by our predecessors. We’re taking good care of it.” I knew that the student commune drew its inspiration from the students and militants who had taken American diplomats hostage in 1979. But the presence of the furniture was unsettling. I told Saidi that perhaps he should petition the government to move into the old American embassy. “It’s a pretty nice space,” I joked. “Twenty-seven acres and a pool.”

But where their mentors in revolutionary fervor had looked to the religious ethics of Ayatollah Khomeini for guidance, students a generation later were looking to the civic formulas of President Khatami. They had campaigned hard for him in 1997, and had embraced his message of the rule of law and the creation of a civil society, wrapping it in leftist-sounding rhetoric about social justice and equal distribution of wealth. “The most important activity of students in the last decade was the election of Mr. Khatami,” Saidi explained. “He presents his ideas in beautiful language. He treats us with respect. That appeals to the youth. On the other side is a totalitarian view expressed by people who want to keep all the power in their hands. No one can claim all of Khatami’s promises have been fulfilled. But the movement has begun.”

And yet that movement is still being defined. The youth know what they do not want: a second revolution. They proved as much in their massive turnout in the 1997 and 2000 elections and in their decision to retreat from the streets in the summer of 1999. Slowly, they are coming to realize that with the huge youth population and a voting age of sixteen, their numbers count. And they have rejected the violent ways of their predecessors. “We will never prescribe such an action as hostage-taking of an embassy again,” Saidi said. “We will make our objections known through legal ways.” As for the furniture, he said, “We’ll give it back when you get back your embassy someday. God willing, one day there will be relations between the two countries.” In February 2000, Saidi was elected to Parliament on the reformist ticket.

Shortly after the demonstrations, I went back to the white stucco mansion. About two dozen young men who call themselves the Select Council of Sit-in Students were in charge. In a generous act of solidarity, the older student commune temporarily had turned over its headquarters to them. A handful of students ushered me into a conference room where they explained why they had taken to the streets. “Our demonstrations were different from twenty years ago,” said Mahmoud Milani, the young man who had been an eyewitness to the initial invasion of the dormitories. “Twenty years ago people had one purpose: overthrowing the Shah. People today do not want another revolution. We had our revolution. We are not revolutionaries. We are reformers. We support the Constitution, as do the majority of the people.”

“Supporting the Constitution” is a particularly subtle form of code. On the one hand, it implies support for the idea of religious rule, which is a safe thing to do, and on the other hand it suggests a challenge to Ayatollah Khamenei’s power, which is less safe. The second point refers to the position taken by many reformers that the Constitution doesn’t give Ayatollah Khamenei all the power that he enjoys in practice.

But if the students are capable of spinning such subtlety into their words, it does not necessarily follow that they have fully mastered the art of political infighting. I spotted on a bookshelf a collection of the dozens of paperback volumes published by Iranian authorities years ago that contain copies of the classified documents seized from the American embassy and their translations into Persian. Many of the most sensitive had been shredded by American diplomats in the tense moments before the seizure was complete. The occupiers painstakingly had pasted them back together.

“Have you read them?” I asked.

“Some of them,” Milani said sheepishly.

“Only some of them?”

“I’m an electronics major!” he exclaimed. “I’m not in political science! I don’t know about politics.”

Before I left, I chided the students for not informing me of a news conference they had held the day before. “We didn’t call any foreign press,” one of them told me.

“Why not?” I asked. Maybe the group didn’t trust the foreign media, I thought. Maybe it didn’t want to be accused of conspiring with foreign plotters.

But no. These kids were politically green, isolated, even naive. Their explanation turned out to be much more mundane.

“We didn’t have any of the phone numbers,” the student replied. “Can you give us the phone numbers?”

And it was then that I realized just how spontaneous the unrest had been and how disorganized the student movement still is.

Just as the soccer celebration had done a year before, the street unrest in July 1999 crystallized the fundamental truth that the youth of Iran are its political future. Those in power know that to ignore their desires and aspirations is to tempt fate. It is a simple matter of demographics.

Ayatollah Khomeini had encouraged his people to breed, particularly during the war with Iraq. And breed they did. By 1986, the population growth rate was 3.2 percent per year. Realizing by then that such a large birth rate was disastrous for the economy, Iran’s Health Ministry launched a nationwide campaign and introduced contraceptives—pills, condoms, IUDs, implants, tubal ligations, and vasectomies. In 1993, Parliament passed legislation withdrawing food coupons, paid maternity leave, and social welfare subsidies after the third child. Birth control classes were required before a couple could get married. Dozens of mobile teams were sent to remote parts of the country to offer free vasectomies and tubal ligations. These days, an Iranian condom factory churns out more than 70 million a year, packaged in French or English to suggest that they are imported, available in textures and flavors like mint and banana. “Islam,” said Deputy Health Minister Hosein Malek-Afzali during a birth control workshop in 1995, “is a flexible religion.”

But the trend had already been set. In the first two decades of the revolution, the country’s population nearly doubled. And today an estimated 65 percent of the population is under the age of twenty-five. Unlike their parents, who lived through the events of the revolution, most of Iran’s youth know the revolution only through their history books. Many have no particular love or hatred for the Shah, or, for that matter, for Ayatollah Khomeini.

But many of them do know the Internet—or at least know of its existence—and watch American television beamed in by satellite. Many of them just don’t buy it when their leader gives speeches about the “disgustingly sick promiscuous behavior” of Western youth.

Many young people are also frustrated by the lack of economic opportunity and the continued invasion of privacy by Iran’s massive security apparatus and its street thugs. They are fed up with the discrimination that is at the core of the system. Only one out of ten applicants makes it into a university, some because they are at the top of their class, some because they are well connected, some because of quotas for families of war martyrs and disabled veterans, some because they are poor but lucky.