Then They Came For Me (12 page)

There were so many bystanders, it was almost impossible to move through the crowd. Knowing that they were being watched by people around the world, many of the demonstrators carried banners in both Persian and English.
“Khas o khashak toei, doshmaneh Iran toei!”
they had written. “You are dust and dirt, you are the enemy of Iran.” And: “Where is my vote?”

I was amazed, as we began to march, by the silence of the demonstrators. There was no chanting, no angry words—just a peaceful ribbon of green flags, bandannas, wristbands, and scarves moving from Revolution Square toward Freedom Square with an air of quiet and calm. As we marched, the sea of green grew larger and stronger, and the security forces lining the street looked on with surprise at the mounting number of people. As usual, I had a video camera with me, an old Sony PD 100 I had not used for many years. I hesitated to take it out. I didn’t want it to be confiscated, and I certainly didn’t want to be arrested. As I watched the crowd of thousands filling Revolution and Freedom Avenues, though, I felt energized. Worriedly, I pulled the video camera from my bag and held it in the air, doing my best to get shots of the crowd. I spotted many familiar faces: colleagues, friends, and acquaintances who had come to the demonstration alone or with their families. In defiance of the government’s decree that journalists should not report on the demonstrations, there were also a fair number of Iranian and foreign journalists in the crowd. I also saw many of the young filmmakers with whom I had worked over the past few years.

Despite the growing numbers and the strength of the demonstration, the protestors tried to avoid any confrontation with
the security forces. They smiled at the police officers and waved flowers at the police helicopters that hovered over the crowd. From the looks on the faces of some officers we passed along the way, it was obvious that many would have loved to join us.

Even with the sporadic violent clashes of the day before, many people still hoped for peace. Many protestors, especially the young men and women who had endured years of having their hair shorn by the Basij or who had been beaten for not appearing Islamic enough, would have loved to have thrown stones and taken over the Basij buildings. But they contained themselves. Many people believed that a compromise was still possible. They wanted the government to either re-count the votes or hold another election. The general feeling among people was that if the government listened to their voices, they would be willing to exonerate it for many of its injustices in the past and start anew.

The Basijis, on the other hand—normally so rash and confrontational—were clearly intimidated by the sheer size of the crowd. Whenever the protestors passed by the Basij compounds on Freedom Avenue, I spotted Basij members peering at the crowd through the curtains. Despite the demonstrators’ determination to keep the peace, you could feel the tension in the air.

Whenever the demonstrators passed by murals or posters of the supreme leader, they raised their green symbols or their fists to prove to him that they were a force to be reckoned with. A middle-aged man near me summarized it best when he told his young daughter, “If Khamenei had a brain in his skull, he would think about his own survival and listen to the people.”

When I filmed the march from an overpass on Freedom Avenue, I could see that the horizon had become green. All afternoon, I’d felt buoyed by the peaceful nature of the demonstration, but soon after I arrived in Freedom Square, I noticed smoke billowing into the sky a few blocks north. Then I heard the sound of gunfire. Having worked as a war reporter, I immediately
wanted to run toward the shots. Hundreds of others had the same idea.

I filmed as I moved through the crowd, holding the camera above my head. Several youths were attacking a two-story building in a narrow street a block north of Freedom Square. It was a residential street, and the buildings that lined it all looked the same. When I got closer, I realized that they were attacking a Basij base.

Basijis in anti-riot gear fired tear gas at the crowd, and I saw Basij members on the rooftop of the base firing warning shots into the air. They were trapped in the building, surrounded by youths who were pelting them with Molotov cocktails. I later learned from several intelligence officials that an opposition group, the MKO, had most likely organized the attack on the Basij. The MKO (Mujahideen Khalq Organization) is a cultlike Marxist-Islamist group that has been based in Iraq for the past three decades; its goal is to get rid of the Iranian regime. Its sympathizers had acted as agents provocateurs among the protestors, inciting violence; they continued to do so throughout the day. I kept filming as the MKO members and young people instigated by the MKO eventually brought down the fence around the Basij base. Before long, the Basijis stopped firing warning shots and began shooting indiscriminately into the crowd of protestors. The two Basijis on the roof did not seem to care if the people they were shooting at were attackers or passersby. Many peaceful demonstrators in the crowd panicked and started to throw stones at the compound.

The Basij responded by shooting at the young men who’d jumped over the fallen fence and were running toward the building. One man in his early twenties was shot as he tried to leap over the fence. The sharp ends of the collapsed fence looked like the tridents used by gladiators in ancient Rome. The boy’s slim body dropped onto the fence as soon as the bullet entered his body. He went into cardiac arrest and slowly rolled over
onto the ground. I recorded the young man’s climb and fall. Horrified to have filmed a man’s death, I couldn’t move until the Basijis started to spray bullets in my direction. Then I went behind a wall and held the camera outside, looking at the scene through the monitor. Another young man was shot in the head while trying to kick down the door of the base. People raised his body and took it toward the main street.
“Mikosham an keh baradaram kosht,”
they chanted, their voices filled with rage. “I kill those who killed my brother.”

Some young men in the crowd stopped attacking the base and carried the boy’s body to the hospital at the end of the street, a block away from where the peaceful main demonstration was still under way. But they understood that their efforts were futile. He was already dead. As I filmed the men carrying the body with my video camera raised in the air, I felt paralyzed, utterly helpless. My country was on fire, and all I could do was film.

As the Basij started to spread bullets into the crowd, as people scrambled to take cover, as bloodied people ran out of the street, and as MKO supporters started to chant, “Death to the Islamic Republic,” I continued to film.

“Hush. Be quiet! Change the slogan!
Allahu akbar!
God is great!” screamed a couple of older men trying to get the crowd out of the street. “We haven’t come here to say, ‘Death to the Islamic Republic.’ ”

“We’re here to support Mousavi,” said another woman. “Not fight!”

A small group of young men approached a few of the older men who were trying to calm people down.
“Khafeh shin madar saga!”
one said, throwing punches at an older man. “Shut up, you sons of bitches!” The crowd erupted into a brawl.

“Death to Khamenei!” cried a teenager as he joined the others hitting the older men. I turned my camera toward him.

“
Nagir! Nagir!
Don’t film!” He grabbed at my video camera,
but I shoved it under my arm and quickly sidestepped away from him. With my back against the wall of a building, I slid my body away from the crowd. An older couple blocked others from getting at me, helping me escape.

“Get out as soon as you can,” an old woman told me.

When I broke free from the crowd, I ran as fast and as far as I could and hailed the first motorcycle I saw. I wanted to edit the footage immediately, to show the world what was happening in Tehran. I knew that I had the only professionally filmed footage of the Basij shooting.

I told the motorcycle driver to take me to the Laleh Hotel, in the city center, where I knew Lindsey Hilsum, a reporter for the Channel 4 News in Britain, was staying. Within a few hours, my film, which was credited to an anonymous source, was broadcast on Channel 4 News, and then on most of the important news programs in the world.

Later that night, one of my sources in the Ministry of Intelligence told me that in the end, seven people were killed during the demonstration in front of the Basij base.

“Do you think it’s safe for me to write about the attack on the Basij?” I asked him.

“Everyone knows that you filmed the attack,” he said. “The Basijis were filming you filming it.”

Nervous that the Basij had its eye on me, I decided that the best course of action would be to mention publicly that I had filmed the Basij attack. Up to that date, my footage was the most incriminating documentation of Basij violence against Iranian citizens. I knew that the authorities would not be happy with my footage and that they would question me about how I’d managed to record it. I didn’t want it to look surreptitious and wanted to be able to answer that I’d simply filmed what had happened in front of me, the way I had always done in the past.

Later that night, I wrote an article for the
Newsweek
website expressing my fears and hopes for the future. “Mousavi’s supporters are planning to stage another peaceful protest tomorrow,” I wrote. “Tonight, it is difficult to predict what that will bring, or what the end result of the cycle of demonstrations will be.”

·   ·   ·

Amir was released the next day and called me soon after. When I went to see him, he told me that he’d been among a group of pro-Mousavi politicians who had been rounded up and taken to Evin Prison for two days. “We were warned that if we don’t calm the situation, we will be responsible for whatever might happen to us,” said Amir. According to him, Mousavi was quite upset about the attack but he was not going to let the terrorists hijack the green movement—which was how the support for Mousavi was becoming known. Mousavi had decided to tell his supporters to take to the streets one more time and avoid any confrontation with the police and the Guards that could provoke further violence.

When I told Amir what I had witnessed the day before, he made a confession that surprised me.

“Maziar
jaan
,” he said with melancholy in his voice, “I never told you this, but I always had my doubts about Mousavi’s abilities as a leader. But today … he is a changed man. I was with him an hour ago, and I could see that he has finally realized what an important role he can play in the history of this country. He has finally become what people wanted him to be: a strong leader with a clear vision about what he wants to achieve.”

After the demonstrations had begun, Amir said, Khamenei’s secretary, Vahid, had contacted Mousavi to organize a meeting between the two men.

“Let’s re-count the votes; then we’ll talk,” Mousavi had responded. He’d told Vahid to tell his master not to call him again, unless he had something new to say.

·   ·   ·

The peaceful demonstrations continued for three days without further intervention by terrorist groups. During those days I was very proud of my people. Iranians were going to achieve something rare in a Muslim country. Hitherto, mass movements in Muslim countries had been either in support of fundamentalist groups or in favor of Western models of democracy. But the people of Iran were choosing a third way. The goal of the green movement was to establish an indigenous Iranian democracy, one that at its helm could have religious men, such as Mousavi, but would still respect human rights, freedom of expression, and women’s rights.

Millions of people took to the streets over those three days. As the crowds grew in confidence and size, the regime became more and more paranoid. When I tried to call a friend four days after the election to find out more about Mousavi’s plans, cell phone and Internet communications had been cut. The government had shut down wireless communications between two and nine
P.M.
, from an hour before until an hour after the demonstrations, to stop people from telling one another where the protests would be or any news about them. By doing so, the government was disrupting its own activities as well and was losing millions of dollars every hour. But it was a price Khamenei was willing to pay to cut down the size of the demonstrations.

On the morning of Tuesday, June 16, I received a fax from Ershad, the Ministry of Culture; it had been sent to all Iranian and foreign reporters. Ershad asked all of us to stop reporting on the demonstrations and warned that continuing to do so would result in punishment. The fax didn’t specify the kind of punishment, but we all guessed that it could be annulment of
our press cards or temporary detention. I immediately went to a friend’s office to make backups of my tapes.

A few minutes after I started to digitize the tapes, an Ershad official I was friendly with called and asked me to visit him. At our meeting, he told me that I should be careful about what I was reporting. Apparently, the day after the election, the Revolutionary Guards had summoned Ershad officials and told them “to put a leash on foreign media” or they would be fired from their jobs and arrested. Knowing that I was the one who’d filmed it, the Ershad official told me that the Guards had complained about the footage of the attack against the Basij base. A chill went down my spine. As my friend spoke, he paced restlessly around his office. I’d never seen him so worried.

In order to calm him, I read him a few passages from my latest
Newsweek
article, “Who’s Behind Tehran’s Violence?,” which had been posted on the magazine’s website the night before. In the article I blamed terrorist groups for using people’s peaceful demonstrations to incite violence. I’d quoted one of the demonstrators as saying, “I think some small terrorist groups and criminal gangs are taking advantage of the situation. Thirty years after the revolution and twenty years after the war, the majority of Iranians despise violence and terror. My worry is that if the government doesn’t allow reforms to take place, we will fall into a terrorism abyss like the years after the revolution.”