Then They Came For Me (9 page)

“Don’t call me again,” he said. “Just come here, to the temporary office, as quickly as you can.” The day before he had sounded nervous; now he sounded scared.

The office was in Zaferanieh, an exclusive area in north Tehran. Before reaching the office, I called Alireza at Ahmadinejad’s headquarters to see how he was feeling.

“Mr. Ahmadinejad’s votes are above twenty million,” Alireza told me. “We expect it to go as high as twenty-five million. I’ll call you later.”

I hung up with a lump of cold fear in the pit of my stomach. There are no exit polls in Iran. At about five
P.M.
, more than four hours remained before the polling stations closed. It didn’t make sense that Alireza would know the number so early. Once again I thought of Leonard Cohen’s words.

For the first time I began to think that perhaps I should resign myself to a different outcome than the one I had been hoping for. Perhaps Mousavi was fighting a losing battle. At the temporary office, I rang the buzzer Amir had told me about on the phone: the third one from the top, with the logo of a construction company. Someone in a state of fear answered the video intercom.

“Who are you?” he asked, in a direct—and wholly un-Iranian—manner.

“I want to talk to Mr. Amir,” I answered.

“Who are you?”

“Maziar Bahari.”

“Wait,” he directed me. It was a few seconds before he returned. “Come in,” he instructed. “Wait in the lobby.”

The building was a gaudy modern structure with brown marble and golden railings. There was a large brown leather sofa in the lobby. Before I could sit down, the elevator’s doors opened. From inside, Amir waved hurriedly for me to join him.

“Did anyone follow you here?” he said, wiping the sweat from his forehead with his white handkerchief.

“I don’t think so.”

Amir had not pushed the button for any floor. “Okay. Get back in the car and ask your driver to circle the area and come back after ten minutes. I will look from the window to see if anybody’s following you.”

“What’s happening?” I asked as calmly as I could.

“It’s a coup d’état, a military takeover by the Revolutionary Guards,” Amir said. “Now go.”

Amir’s words worried me, but more than anything, I was worried about the future of the country. The consequences of the Guards taking over the government were so horrifying that I didn’t even want to think about it. I didn’t want to envision the claustrophobic society that would create, or the possibility
of a military confrontation with another country if the Guards came to power.

I had to invent an excuse to get Mr. Roosta to drive us around the block a few times without arousing his suspicions. As he rolled down the window to ask what was wrong, I told him that I had decided to buy some pastries for my friends. In the car, I kept my eyes trained on the side mirror to see if anyone was following us. There was no one. I had never seen Amir so afraid. What did he mean by a coup d’état? I wondered. Had the reformists seen the results and did they want to take preemptive action and accuse Ahmadinejad supporters of vote rigging? Had Ahmadinejad and the Guards managed to pull off a scam that meant that he had gotten himself elected four hours before the polls closed?

I could barely concentrate on what I was ordering from the pastry shop. I called a friend of mine. He told me that the Fars News Agency, which was run by the Revolutionary Guards, had just announced—at five-thirty, three and a half hours before the polling stations closed—that Ahmadinejad had won the election with more than twenty million votes.

When we pulled back in front of Amir’s building, fifteen minutes later, he was walking out the door with another Mousavi adviser I knew.

I jumped out of the car. “Have you heard about the Fars News report?”

“Yes, we have,” the other man said. “That’s why we’re leaving.”

The man got inside his car and started the engine. Amir told me in a hurry, “I’ll call you later tonight, Maziar. They have staged a coup. Votes are rigged, ballot boxes are missing around the country, and Ministry of Interior computers have been hacked. We don’t know what exactly has happened. But one thing we know is that there’s been a coup. We have to go now.
You have to go now. I don’t think you were followed. But we have to move. They may raid this office at any time.”

Amir got into the car, then rolled down the window. “Mousavi will have a press conference tonight,” he said. “Someone will call you in an hour or so.” With that, the car sped down the street.

I tried to push aside my feelings about what Amir was saying—my fears about what might be happening in my nation—and do my job.

Like many other journalists, I had planned to spend part of the night, after the polls closed, at the Ministry of Interior, where the votes were being counted. But at eight
P.M.
, when I arrived at the ministry headquarters in Jihad Square, the streets around it were blocked by hundreds of policemen and officers from the anti-riot unit, fully armed with pistols and high-voltage clubs. I got out of Mr. Roosta’s car and approached a policeman at a checkpoint in the square. After I showed him my press card, the policeman politely asked me to wait and went to speak to his superior. He came back and apologized, explaining that no journalists from the foreign press were allowed inside.

Unusually for June in Tehran, it suddenly started to rain. The rain made the anti-riot policeman’s knee and elbow pads look shiny. I tried to insist that I be allowed in, and had begun explaining that I had reported on elections in Iran in the past and was always allowed into the ministry, when an anti-riot commander approached us. His face was hidden behind a plastic shield, shiny from the rain. He pushed me toward Mr. Roosta’s car, then beat its hood with his club.

“Berin gomshin!”
he yelled at me and Mr. Roosta. “Get lost!” He pointed the club at me. “If you stay one more minute
koonet mizaram, madar jendeh
,” he threatened. “I’ll fuck you up the ass, you motherfucker.” Angry and upset, and soaking wet from the rain, I got back in the car and told Mr. Roosta to take me to my mother’s house. Later, I would be very grateful
that I had not pressed the issue. I learned that many protestors were arrested and kept in the basement of the Ministry of Interior that night. They were beaten and raped with clubs by the same anti-riot police who had threatened to sodomize me.

When I arrived at my mother’s house, she was sitting quietly in front of the television with her cousin Jafar. They were eating sunflower seeds, and the plate in front of them was stacked with shells.

“Is he going to win again?” my mother asked me sadly, without taking her eyes off the television.

“It seems so,” I answered.

Jafar, who was in his seventies and was usually very mild-mannered, shook his head, a look of disgust on his face. “Khamenei would never have allowed Mousavi to get elected,” he said. “He doesn’t want a president. He wants a servant like Ahmadinejad. Mousavi would be his own man and would stand up to Khamenei. They only allowed Mousavi to run to stir people’s emotions and make them show up at the polls so they can say they are a popular regime.”

As the presenters on the state television shamelessly praised Khamenei and what they called Iran’s “Islamic democracy,” a small panel at the top right corner of the screen showed the number of votes for each candidate. Ahmadinejad’s numbers were rising dramatically. Mousavi and the other two candidates, Karroubi and Rezaei, were not even shown to be winning in their own places of birth. If these results were true, they were an unprecedented development in Iranian politics.

I couldn’t bear to watch. I lay down on my bed and called Paola. I needed to hear her voice and talk about my homecoming, to tell her how much I’d been dreaming about lying beside her and kissing her pregnant belly. But Paola, too, wanted to talk only about the election.

“Is it true?” she asked. “Did he really win?”

“Sadly, yes,” I answered. As I tried to tell her about the
events of the day, I was overwhelmed by a feeling of utter exhaustion, and only then did I realize that I had barely slept since landing in Tehran three days earlier. Trying to relive the experience was too much for me. I said good-bye to Paola and called a taxi to take me to Mousavi’s press conference.

The press conference was held in an anonymous building off Africa Street. In his public appearances, Mousavi usually seemed far more like a subdued artist than a charismatic politician. But that night, he was a changed man. He acted defiant and confident. The support he had been receiving from millions of Iranians had made him animated and inspiring. As he stood before a room full of almost fifty journalists and cameramen, he explained that he didn’t regard the official result as an end to his campaign. “Any result other than one indicating my victory will be wrong and manipulated,” Mousavi proclaimed. The reporters in the room, mostly Iranians working for the foreign media, looked at one another with surprise. Even though we were trying our best to remain professional, I know that, like me, most others in the room were rooting for Mousavi.

I had rarely felt more patriotic, or more depressed, than I did that night. I was worried about the future of Iran and angry at the thugs who were going to rule it for, at least, the next four years. It was as if bandits had kidnapped one of my loved ones. But the thought of Mousavi fighting for his votes thrilled me. Maybe he could stop the pro-Ahmadinejad thugs from carrying out their military takeover by mobilizing the people.

·   ·   ·

That night, when I got back from the press conference, I turned off my cell phone and unplugged the landline in my room. I knew I would be receiving dozens of calls, and all I wanted to do was sleep. At nine the next morning, I found that I had thirteen missed calls and four messages from Mousavi’s office. His
people were eager to get coverage from foreign media, since Iranian state television was not giving them any airtime.

“Mr. Mousavi and his wife, Mrs. Rahnavard, are allowing interviews today, in the
Etela’at
building at two
P.M.
,” one message said.
Etela’at
is a state-controlled newspaper, but its editor was friendly to Mousavi.

In the living room, my mother was reading
Beyhaqi’s History
, a book about Iran in the Middle Ages that told the story of Hasanak the Vizier, a competent minister to a king in the eleventh century who was hanged in favor of a useless but ingratiating successor.

“Rooz az no. Roozi az no,”
she said. “Same kind of day. Same kind of action. This country has been plagued by these
ashghal
, garbage, rulers for centuries.” She looked tired. She laid the book on her lap. “I knew I shouldn’t have voted. At least then I could have kept my integrity intact. This way I feel used. It seems like I have voted for this
ashghal
system.”

My mother’s gloominess set the mood for the rest of my day. Economic hardship, decades of political turbulence, and polluted air have made Iranians a borderline depressed nation. In fact, in the 1990s an adviser to the mayor of Tehran suggested that they add Prozac to Tehran’s water to revitalize the citizens. But on the day after Ahmadinejad’s reelection, no amount of antidepressants could have helped many Tehranis. The misery in the air was almost unbearable.

From my contacts, I learned that the supreme leader, Khamenei, had called Mousavi on the afternoon of the election and told him that he understood that Ahmadinejad had won. Khamenei asked Mousavi to accept the defeat gracefully, and even promised him a major position in the new administration. Mousavi told Khamenei bluntly that it was too early to decide. “The people have to make a decision. Not you,” Mousavi said. He hung up on Khamenei and refused to meet him that day.

A few hours later, Khamenei sent a message to the people of Iran congratulating them on their historic achievement. He called Ahmadinejad’s reelection “a divine sign” in support of the Islamic Republic.

Afterward, the Revolutionary Guards received an order directly from Khamenei’s office to take preemptive measures to stop the reformists from stirring the public to protest against the election result. Since most Mousavi supporters were communicating primarily through text messaging, the government stopped the service. Mousavi’s offices were ransacked that night, and their computers and files confiscated. Prior to the election, the Tehran police had announced that they were preparing themselves for an operation called Eghtedar, the Might. It was nominally meant to guarantee the security of the election but it was, under Khamenei’s direction, becoming a means of managing the threat of unrest.

Under the supervision of Khamenei’s intelligence adviser, a man named Asghar Hejazi, and Khamenei’s second-eldest son, Mojtaba Khamenei, the Guards had compiled a list of reformist activists to be arrested. “Mojtaba Khamenei is worried about who will eventually succeed his father as the supreme leader. So, he is trying his best to prevent someone he cannot control coming to power,” a source in the Intelligence Ministry told me at the time. I later learned from intelligence officials that the Guards—in effect Khamenei’s private army and answerable to no one but him—had taken over all intelligence and security operations in the country a few weeks before the election. In other words, the Guards were in control of the country.

That day, as I went around Tehran trying to visit my sources, the streets were full of guardsmen, uniformed police officers, and plainclothes security agents carrying walkie-talkies. Basij forces were also on many street corners, watching people’s every movement. If a coup d’état means a military takeover, then indeed a coup had been executed by the Revolutionary Guards.

I had my video camera in my rucksack, but with the number of police officers on the streets, I knew it would not be possible to film. I decided, instead, to take shared cabs around the city and talk to the people in the cab with me. I asked each person in the cab about their thoughts and feelings regarding the election, but most people were not interested in talking. Only Ahmadinejad supporters spoke freely—and they were few and far between that day. So I dropped the cab strategy and began eavesdropping on conversations in buses and on the streets. Some young people were discussing the number of votes Ahmadinejad had won in different provinces, expressing their disbelief that he had gained such a majority over Mousavi. Over and over again, I heard many people lament the fact that their vote had been stolen.