Persian Mirrors: The Elusive Face of Iran (51 page)

In addition, the Guardian Council can veto any legislation it deems un-Islamic. Any insoluble dispute between the Parliament and the Guardian Council can be resolved by the larger Expediency Council, of which Rafsanjani is still the head. “There should have been a way to keep Rafsanjani inside the tent,” Nasser said. “He should never have been discredited like that. He would have made the pace of change slower, but safer. We don’t have enough of a center. That makes it a dangerous time.”

Indeed, after the election an article in the ultraconservative newspaper
Jebheh,
called for the police and volunteer forces to increase “their moral, social, and cultural enforcement and carry out Islamic punishments precisely, so the middle class feels fed up and believes the reformists are incompetent.” The first act of revenge came swiftly. Less than a month after the parliamentary elections, Saeed Hajjarian, an intellectual pillar of Khatami’s reform movement and a key organizer of the reformer’s landslide victory, was shot and critically wounded by two assailants who approached on a motorcycle.

Hajjarian had made many enemies, particularly among right-wing extremists opposed to President Khatami’s cultural, social, and political reforms. Having served as deputy Minister of Intelligence from 1984 to 1989, Hajjarian had first-hand knowledge of how the ministry operated. He later turned reformer, using the newspaper,
Sobh-e Emrouz,
to publish exposés of the Intelligence Ministry and its involvement in political murders over the years. The conservatives also used legal means at their disposal to forestall change before the new Parliament took power. The restrictive press law that sparked the nationwide unrest in mid-1999 was hurriedly passed. Even more serious, the Expediency Council, led by Rafsanjani, decreed that the new Parliament had no authority to investigate any institution or foundation under the purview of the Supreme Leader.

Then the conservative forces shut down reformist newspapers and magazines, arrested leading reformers, and flagrantly tampered with election results throughout the country. There was open talk of a creeping coup by the conservatives to weaken or overthrow Khatami. But these actions did not kill the reform movement. The impetus for accommodation remained strong on both sides. The goal, it seemed, was to seek some sort of equilibrium, however uneasy it might be, between the people and the theocrats.

There were even predictions that if the reformists could successfully circumvent the undemocratic elements within the Iranian political system, the outcome could have far-reaching implications not only for Iran but also for the Islamic world. The Parliamentary elections of 2000 seemed to transform the image of Iran around the world from an authoritarian, rigidly Islamic state to a vibrant political system that had proven many of its critics wrong in its ability to push for democratic change. Unlike most of the Arab Middle East, for example, Iran had shown that democratization in the region—however episodic it could be—was possible. Iranians knew it; so did their nighbors. Iraq, Syria, Libya and Egypt, for example, had long been controlled by leaders backed by the military. New monarchs took power in Jordan, Bahrain, and Morocco in 1999—after their fathers died. “In spite of the fact that it is a theocratic state ruled by a group of clerics,” wrote Riad Najib Rayyes in Lebanon’s
An Nahar
newspaper, Iran “has managed over the course of twenty years to nurture institutions . . . based on a mechanism of democratic competition.” The London-based pan-Arab newspaper,
Al Qods al
Arabi,
wrote, “To put it very simply, Iran is moving forward. We are moving too: backward.”

Of course, it was possible that the conservatives would seek to snuff out the democratic movement altogether. But what an irony it would be if a generation after Iran shook the Muslim world with its revolution and its pledge to export its model of theocracy, it exported a model—however imperfect—of democracy instead.

PART FIVE

———

Dreams

C H A P T E R   S I X T E E N

Making Money God’s Way

The mullahs have become God and the people have become poor.

— CHANT BY DEMONSTRATING STUDENTS IN TEHRAN IN JULY 1999

The crisis of unemployment, the crisis of recession, the crisis of inflation and high prices, these crises can do to Iran what the United States and world imperialism have been unable to do.

— HASSAN GHAFURIFARD, DEPUTY FROM TEHRAN, IN DEBATE IN PARLIAMENT, AUGUST 11, 1999

You know what could make a killing here? Starbucks! Imagine it! There’s no alcohol here. I’ve got just the guy to invest in it. I’m going to talk to him when I get back to the States.

— DR. SHELDON KATZ, AMERICAN TOURIST AND RETIRED NEUROLOGIST

L
ET ME TELL YOU
a little bit about the background of Islamshahr,” Ali-Reza Shiravi told me as we drove on a modern highway to the dusty, crowded, impoverished town twenty-five miles south of Tehran. “It used to belong to landowners—big and small—who grew crops and raised cattle. But then the revolution and the war with Iraq came. The town became full of Turkish and Kurdish people from the villages near the border.” That, he said, was when the economy went to pieces, shattered by the pressure of too many refugees and too little work to sustain them.

I couldn’t have asked for a better guide to Islamshahr than Shiravi. Not only was he the deputy director of the foreign press in the Ministry of Islamic Guidance, but he also had lived in the town for most of his life. Even though Shiravi was only thirty-three, he was known and respected by the local officials. He had extraordinary patience; seven and a half years as a prisoner of war in Iraq had taught him that. The experience also had taught him fluent Arabic and passable English. And those skills, plus honesty and hard work, had landed him his coveted post in the ministry.

Shiravi and his wife, Massoumeh, had one child, Mohammad-Javad, a boy of eight. One child was all they could afford. But Shiravi loved what he did for a living. And his years in the prison camp had earned him double credit for his time of service in the government, which meant that he could retire with a pension in six more years. He would study law then; for the moment, he was proud to show me around his hometown.

It was July 1999, soon after the student riots had rocked the nation. Islamshahr was unaffected by them, but it had suffered through its own revolt four years before, the last time I had visited. In some ways, that revolt was a small-scale dress rehearsal for the unrest that had just come.

Islamshahr is a microcosm of the economic problems that plague Iranians—high inflation, high unemployment, high expectations. Once a small village that was a center for cattle, sheep, and crop farmers, Islamshahr has seen its population swell to 250,000 as peasants have fled the countryside and Afghans have fled their war-torn country in search of work in or near Tehran. Over time, the town has become ringed by shantytowns of houses slapped together with cement and scrap metal. Electricity service became sporadic and social services nonexistent.

In the spring of 1995, inflation hit Iran hard. One morning,the independently operated minibuses that transported day laborers to Tehran doubled their fares. The commuters revolted, blocking the roads and preventing the minibuses from leaving.

“It was the time of the Iranian New Year, when people had to have money to buy new clothes for their kids,” Shiravi explained. “When workers protested the bus prices that morning, an official from the municipality came to calm them down. But he antagonized them instead. He said, ‘So what that the fare has increased? You should pay it.’ The number of protesters grew. They set fire to a bank. Then they moved on to Islamshahr. They set fire to another bank and then another. More people joined in. They smashed the windows of stores and burned gas stations and municipal buildings. They even attacked the Ministry of Education building.”

The government rushed in anti-riot police, who fired wildly and fought hit-and-run battles with protesters. Plainclothes intelligence officials patrolled the streets and arrested dozens of people. By the time the riots were put down at nightfall, the streets were strewn with broken glass, burned tires, bricks, and rubble. Several people had been killed. The next day, hundreds of police officers lined the streets of Islamshahr as authorities bused in thousands of people to chant pro-government slogans. The families of the dead were made to repay the police for the bullets that had been fired. Public mourning was prohibited. No official death toll was released.

But the bus fares came down.

When I visited Islamshahr a few weeks after those riots in 1995, an air of fear still hung over the town. The governor refused to talk to me. An official of a bank that had been burned pleaded with me not to ask him questions. Most shopkeepers and residents I approached told me they had not been in town that day. But I finally found a hotel worker who said he had been an eyewitness to a killing. “I saw a soldier take out his gun, point it at a man, and pull the trigger,” he recalled. “The soldiers took away the body. They cleaned up the blood right away. It was very professional.”

The owner of a fabric store told me something else. “There was nothing political about the riots,” he said. “They were all because of inflation.”

That last comment came back to me when I returned to Islamshahr four years later. I arrived better prepared this time, with Shiravi and with stamped letters of introduction from the ministry where he worked.

Our first stop was a courtesy call on the governor, Buyuk Mousavi, whose office was in the midst of a major renovation. He told me of his pride in the city. Islamshahr is, indeed, a town in transition. After the 1995 unrest, the central government poured in millions of dollars, in large part to stanch dissent. Apartment blocks with electricity and running water replaced concrete shacks. Murals of flowers and landscapes were painted on walls. Building codes were strictly enforced. A regulation banning all new settlements finally brought migration to an end.

Islamshahr now boasts new roads, new monuments, a conference hall, a cultural center, a telecommunications building, an amusement park, a university for five hundred students, and an air-conditioned movie theater. “We don’t have any problems anymore,” Mousavi said.

But construction projects and agriculture have not solved the unemployment problem. The work is dirty, backbreaking and low paying. Many of the poorest Iranians prefer unemployment, leaving the construction companies and farms to hire undocumented Afghan workers instead.

We drove past the bus stop where the trouble began in 1995. A few hundred men and boys stood idly, waiting for day work that did not come. At an open area with a long line of public telephones, dozens of young men competed to sell telephone cards for a tiny profit as they complained about their lives. “Look at all of us,” said one young man in his twenties, pointing to his friends. “We’re all jobless. We have nothing to do. We try to do a little bit of business here and there and we get arrested as troublemakers. That’s why there are so many drug addicts here. It’s the despair.”

On another corner near the town’s main park were three young men—a soldier in civilian clothes, a musician in jeans and a slicked-back puffy hairdo, and a paramilitary Islamic volunteer turned drug addict. “I just exist,” said the musician. “I make enough to get food and shelter. I can’t play my music in public. How could I ever get enough money to get married? You’ll always find me here, on this corner. I wouldn’t dare go to the park over there because everyone is addicted. They’re all shooting heroin. As for politics, I’m like a turtle. I keep my head inside my shell.”

Then it was the turn of the Islamic volunteer with the sallow complexion and yellow in his eyes. “Can I talk?” he said. “I fought forty months in the war against Iraq. When I came back the regime abandoned me.” He acknowledged his addiction, which he said he supported with occasional day jobs and the charity of his friends. “The youth are becoming drug addicts,” he said. “We have no freedom, no jobs, nowhere to go and have fun. So we are all addicts. The corruption is so bad that the government pays the demonstrators to chant. I know, because I used to be one of them.”

Iran has a lot of drug addicts. Heroin from neighboring Afghanistan is plentiful and cheap. The official estimate is that there are as many as 1.2 million addicts among a population approaching 65 million. Sixty percent of the inmates in Iran’s crowded prisons have been convicted of drug possession, dealing, or trafficking. To reduce the prison population, the judiciary has stopped jailing offenders, and instead has begun to fine and lash them and send them to outpatient clinics. Not all of the men on that corner were drug addicts. But depression was something they all understood.

“I would hang myself if I weren’t so afraid,” the musician said quietly.

“But suicide is against Islam,” said the soldier. “And we believe in God.”

There was a long, uncomfortable silence. Then the musician changed the subject. “Come to our house for lunch today!” he said.

I knew he didn’t really mean it. It was an invitation that was supposed to be refused. But it was the most intimate thing he could say to me, and I thanked him over and over for the kind offer, even as I declined.

In their own way, these men are just as disaffected from the Islamic government as the student demonstrators in Tehran. They share the same desires for personal freedoms. It is just that in Islamshahr, the freedom that matters is a job. They will not rebel over the closure of a newspaper. But they might over the price of a bus ticket.

Indeed, for four hours one day in January 2000, a crowd from the slum of Chahar-Dongeh just outside Islamshahr blocked the main road, smashed the windows of a public clinic, and attacked a municipal kiosk. The crowd was protesting a decision to detach its town from Tehran (and its many social benefits) and annex it to Islamshahr. “Unfortunately the lack of attention to the problems of our residents has laid the groundwork for dissatisfaction and social protests,” Governor Mousavi was quoted as saying. “We have repeatedly communicated the problem to the authorities in Tehran but our efforts have been fruitless.”