Then They Came For Me (6 page)

Davood explained to me that many supporters of Mousavi were disillusioned former revolutionaries. Over a lunch of
dizi
, a traditional Iranian dish made with lamb, potatoes, and chickpeas, Davood told me that his father had been a staunch revolutionary and had fought for five years in the war with Iraq. His devotion to his country had left him with an artificial eye and leg. But while he was still a loyal citizen, Davood’s father had no respect for the current Islamic regime. He despised the officials in the Ahmadinejad government and saw them for what they were: corrupt, power-hungry hypocrites.

“Because my father is a decent man, he lives on a pension of two million rials [about $200] per month,” Davood said. “But my father’s cousin is as dirty as a dog. He’s a billionaire.” His father’s cousin, a real estate developer in Tabriz, had worked
closely with the government of the shah before the revolution. “Ever since then, he’s made his money by bribing successive Islamic government officials,” Davood noted, a look of disgust clouding his face.

Despite Davood’s disdain for traffic laws, it took us almost six hours to cross the city, and it was nearly four
P.M.
when we finally reached Robat Karim, one of the poorest suburbs of Tehran. I spotted Mazdak taking photos of a group of young Mousavi supporters distributing leaflets. Like many good photojournalists, Mazdak is usually calm to the point of invisibility. But that day, the fifty-year-old professional bubbled with the excitement of a teenager. He eagerly embraced Davood and me and introduced us to some local Mousavi campaigners. Mazdak couldn’t stop talking about his experience of the green line demonstration the night before, where he and his wife had stood alongside their twenty-two-year-old son and eighteen-year-old daughter.

“It was like going to a political picnic! I’ve never seen anything like it, Maziar,” he said, grabbing both of my arms. “Everyone was marching peacefully. There were some clashes with Ahmadinejad supporters here and there but nothing serious.” Like a delirious drunk looking for someone, anyone, to talk to, Mazdak couldn’t stop telling me about what was happening around him. “Something has changed in this country, Maziar. People have become political and won’t take this government’s shit anymore. Ahmadinejad’s people know their days are numbered, and they have accepted the idea of defeat,” he burbled excitedly.

Ahmadinejad was essentially using an already existing system to get reelected, a system that had made millions of Iranians dependent on the government. I spent an hour or so with Mazdak, walking among the gathering crowds. Most of the Mousavi supporters on the streets were young, educated people repulsed
by how Ahmadinejad was manipulating their neighbors and families. Most of the Robat Karim residents were migrants from villages whose livelihoods depended on government handouts, and the slightest change in the government could significantly affect their income.

Areas like Robat Karim are called
hashieh
, or the margins, and the migrants themselves are commonly known as
hashieh neshin
, the margin dwellers. Each major city in Iran has a large
hashieh
. Most candidates ignore
hashieh
residents, but Ahmadinejad aggressively campaigned in these areas, warning that Mousavi was out to cut government subsidies. Since the start of the Iran-Iraq War, in 1980, the Islamic government had been selling many basic items, including rice, sugar, flour, and gasoline, to citizens at subsidized prices. This service costs the government billions of dollars every year. Though on its face the policy is intended to help the poor, consecutive governments in Iran had used it to buy people’s loyalty. But no Iranian official had ever used the system as aggressively as Ahmadinejad was doing.

Additionally, since the beginning of the revolution, the regime had also placed almost one million families—or about five million people—under the protection of the Imam Khomeini Relief Foundation. Through this charity, families receive around the equivalent of $50 per month. Targeting people’s economic fears and simultaneously offering short-term solutions, Ahmadinejad’s teams throughout the country had been stirring up fears that, if elected, Mousavi was going to make poor Iranians even poorer.

Rasool, a young engineering student I met in the crowd, told me that Robat Karim was sharply divided between the educated and the uneducated. “The educated vote for Mousavi and the uneducated vote for Ahmadinejad. When you’re poor and ignorant, you can be easily manipulated.”

For an engineering student, Rasool had an impressive knowledge of social problems in Iran. “According to the government’s own statistics, out of seventy million Iranians, ten million live in absolute poverty,” he said. “We have almost two and a half million drug addicts. Percentage-wise, that’s more than any other country in the world, and there are five million officially unemployed young men and women. This government doesn’t want people to know about what’s going on in the country. It wants to keep the people uninformed.”

I wondered where Rasool had gotten his information. He took me to the rooftop of a three-story building and showed me satellite dishes sprouting like mushrooms from many roofs in Robat Karim. “There are an increasing number of satellite television and Internet users in the area,” he said. “They are the only way we can have correct and uncensored information in Iran.” Many sites, including
The New York Times’
and CNN’s, are filtered in Iran, but Rasool’s family and friends—like so many Iranians—had found ways to buy satellite antennas on the black market and used filter busters to access the forbidden Internet sites. In the period before the election, BBC Persian television, broadcasting out of London, and Voice of America, from Washington, D.C., had become the main sources of information for many Iranians. “Most people with the Internet and satellite can learn about the lies of the government and they’ll vote for Mousavi,” Rasool told me. “But the ignorant will vote for Ahmadinejad.”

·   ·   ·

Back on the street, the enthusiasm of the Mousavi supporters was intoxicating. I was so excited about the desire for change in Robat Karim that it was hard for me to pull myself away from the area. But I knew I had to visit Ahmadinejad’s campaign headquarters on the southern part of Vali Asr Avenue to gain a
better understanding of the situation. Davood reluctantly agreed to take me there. It was after seven
P.M.
when we arrived. The sun had already set, but it was still hot.

There is a clear class divide in Tehran. The rich live in the northern part of the city, in tall high-rises on wide streets. In the southern part of Tehran, the streets are crowded and narrower, the houses significantly more modest. The building that held Ahmadinejad’s campaign headquarters could have belonged to any factory worker or junior government employee. I had been here on reporting trips twice before, but the house was so nondescript that I had a difficult time finding it.

There were dozens of shoes piled one on top of another in the entrance of the headquarters. In accordance with Islamic practices, I removed my shoes, then went inside to look for Alireza Asadi, a student leader with the campaign whom I had met a month earlier at a rally. Inside, the office was even more modest than its façade.

The Ahmadinejad posters on the walls of the headquarters, proclaiming his humility and religious devotion, made me sick. Groups of young Ahmadinejad supporters were poring over maps and lists. Alireza took Davood and me to a corner, where we couldn’t hear what was being discussed.

Alireza was an engineering student and a classmate of Ahmadinejad’s younger son, whose name is also Alireza. They were both part of the Islamic society of their university as well as members of the Basij, the volunteer arm of the Revolutionary Guards, which has a unit at every government office and school in Iran. The Basij’s mission is said to be defending the ideals of the revolution. This vaguely worded mission allows the Guards commanders to use the paramilitary group in any way they desire. That had included ransacking student dormitories, attacking opposition newspapers, and even staging assassination attempts against reformist politicians.

At the rally, when I had asked Alireza why he’d joined the Basij, he’d looked at me as if the answer were obvious.

“There’s nothing I’m more proud of than being Basiji,” he told me proudly. “The Basij is the backbone of this country.”

One of the things that fascinated me most about Alireza was that he was so unlike the stereotypical Ahmadinejad supporter, who is typically poor, uneducated, and close-minded. The son of two physicians, Alireza had spent the early part of his life in England. But the devout Muslim family had decided to return to Iran when Alireza’s sister hit adolescence, finding British society inappropriate for bringing up a good Muslim teenage girl. “Most British girls are corrupt, as you know,” Alireza told me once, unaware that Paola, my fiancée, was British. “As soon as they can, they start whoring around,” he added with a cheeky smile.

Even though he’d left England for Iran at the age of eight, Alireza talked about British society with the authority of a sociology professor at the London School of Economics, and as we sat across from each other on the faded orange wall-to-wall carpet of the campaign headquarters, he spoke with the same conviction about why Iranians should reelect Ahmadinejad. To him, it was very simple. According to the Iranian Constitution, he pointed out, the president has very limited power. The main power lies in the hands of the supreme leader, who has the final say in all major decisions in the country. Many who support the supreme leader don’t think of him merely as the political leader of the country, but also as the highest Shia religious leader, who can control all aspects of their lives.

Shiism, or Shia Islam, is the second-largest denomination in the religion. The majority of Muslims are Sunnis. Shias are the majority in only four countries in the world: Iran, Iraq, Bahrain, and Lebanon.

The division between Muslims started after the death of the Prophet Mohammad in
A.D.
632, due to political differences.
The Sunnis believed that one of the close allies of the Prophet was his rightful successor. The Shias believed that Ali, the Prophet Mohammad’s cousin and son-in-law, was the Prophet’s rightful successor.

Ali is the first imam, or saint, of Shias. Sunnis call all their local religious leaders imams.

Most Shias believe in the sanctity of twelve imams: Ali and his eleven direct descendants. The twelve imams are regarded by Shias as “the infallible,” those who never committed a sin. During their lifetime, the Shia imams interpreted the teachings of the Koran for their followers and were responsible for the welfare of their followers.

Shias regard the twelfth and last imam, Imam Mahdi, as their Messiah. According to Shia history, Imam Mahdi went into hiding in the eighth century to escape persecution and will return to establish a peaceful and just Islamic society.

During Imam Mahdi’s absence, Shias have a duty to follow a religious leader, called a
marja
, who interprets the teachings of the Koran for them.

Marjas
are chosen from the ranks of grand ayatollahs, high-ranking religious scholars, and each Shia Muslim is free to choose the
marja
of his or her choice.

Most Shias in the world believe that the role of the
marjas
is limited to teaching about Islam and taking care of the weak and the needy. But in the 1960s, Khomeini took the concept of the
marja
a step further and divined his
velayat-e faqih
theory, about the leadership of the supreme jurisprudent. According to Khomeini, a supreme jurisprudent should not only teach his followers about Islam but should rule an Islamic government with absolute authority, ensuring that all affairs of the country are conducted in accordance with Islamic teachings. Given that this leader will be in charge of all the systems of checks and balances in the country, it is not difficult to see why Iran became a dictatorship soon after Ruhollah Khomeini came to power in 1979.

Most Shia clerics in Iran and around the world never accepted Khomeini’s theory and believe in a separation of mosque and state. But by stirring Iranians’ nationalist sentiments, Khomeini gained popular support and led the Islamic Revolution, which established the first
velayat-e faqih
government and installed Khomeini himself as the first supreme leader.

After Khomeini’s death in 1989, Ali Khamenei succeeded him as the
valie faqih
, the supreme jurisprudent, or supreme leader. His followers simply call him by his unofficial title: Agha, the master.

That is what Alireza, the young Ahmadinejad supporter, liked to call him.

“We are not a nation, we are the
umma
,” Alireza told me, using the Arabic term for the Islamic community. “As the
umma
, we have to obey the commands of Agha. The most important characteristic of Ahmadinejad is that he is devoted to Agha,” Alireza said. “Ahmadinejad is a man who has dedicated his life to Agha and the return of the imam.”

I could see that Davood was getting uncomfortable as Alireza told us that our votes were not worth anything and that our destiny could be determined only by Agha. When it was time for us to leave, Davood avoided having to kiss Alireza, as would have been appropriate, and did not even shake his hand. “We’ll invite you to our celebration ceremony,” Alireza said before kissing me on both cheeks.

“Mr. Maziar, I’m going to start the motorcycle,” Davood said, practically running toward the door.

Davood was waiting for me outside of Ahmadinejad’s campaign office. “You are a very patient man, Mr. Maziar,” Davood told me as we drove north. “I could’ve killed that guy.”

“He has a right to his opinion,” I said. “Anyway, Khamenei is the one who should be upset now. Just look at all these people. Do you think Ahmadinejad has any chance to win?” It was evening, and hundreds of young men and women in bright
green shirts and scarves still lined the streets, singing patriotic songs.

In the evening, more people gathered in the streets. I didn’t want to go home. I asked Davood to take me to his neighborhood, a working-class area called Poonak in west Tehran. There, the street was blocked off and hundreds of young people were holding a party. I called Paola from my cell phone and told her that as much as I missed her, I was very happy to be in Tehran at this moment.