Children of Paradise (30 page)

One night, Ali drove the government-tagged car to Fatemi Square, in central Tehran. In the car he had three other student activists and a big poster of Khatami they planned to hang. The police pulled them over and arrested them for misuse of the vehicle. The students spent two days in the basement of the judiciary building, where many other campaigners for Khatami were already being held.

But they were out in time for the day that would become legendary as the Second of Khordad—election day, 1997. There was a huge celebration for Khatami’s victory at Amirkabir. As Ali would later remember, “All the students thought that every single problem they had was going to be solved.”

• • •

I
F
A
LI
A
FSHARI
nurtured such illusions, they were punctured very early when President Khatami appointed ultraconservative university presidents rather than tussle with hard-liners to secure more liberal appointments. Khatami could not afford to duck confrontation, Ali felt. The hardline right would certainly do no such thing, and it still controlled the parliament, the judiciary, the intelligence ministry, the Guardian Council,
and the militias. Then came Khatami’s bold handling of the chain murders, which allayed Ali’s fears. Khatami had some fight in him after all.

Saeed Hajjarian had defined the reformist strategy as “Pressure from below, negotiation at the top.” Ali Afshari and his fellow activists understood that their role was to mount the popular pressure that would allow the politicians bargaining room. This was a delicate business. They should push, but not too hard or too far. They were to strengthen Khatami’s hand without overplaying it. Students campaigned for reformist candidates for the parliament and the city council. They protested the impeachment of Khatami’s most liberal ministers, which parliamentary hard-liners doggedly pursued. The students were avid readers and defenders of the newly vibrant press, which now teemed with publications unafraid to challenge the ruling establishment.

Reform, Ali imagined, was like a bird. One wing was the student movement, and the other was the independent media. Together they could beat the air away and press Khatami’s project forward, lift it higher, demonstrate to its adversaries that momentum, and the public itself, was on Khatami’s side. And so the student activists were particularly ardent in protesting the hard-liners’ harsh treatment of the press. The Special Court of the Clergy opened a branch for press offenses, bringing the prosecution of clerics who held publishing licenses under the jurisdiction of the Supreme Leader’s office. Newspapers vanished as quickly as they appeared; editors faced prison sentences; publishers lost their licenses; and young writers bounced between jobs, forever scrambling to chase that last paycheck from a publication that no longer existed. Daftar Tahkim answered all of these affronts with protests. And Ansar-e Hezbollah, the hardline militia, answered the students’ protests with violent clashes.

• • •

I
N
J
ULY OF 1999
, the parliament
debated a sweeping new law formalizing the hardline assault on the press. The law would greatly restrict the number of publications in the country. It would also eliminate the statute of limitations on press offenses, which could then be prosecuted at any
time and not only against editors in chief, as in the past, but against individual writers and reporters as well. Reporters could be forced to divulge their sources, and the supervision of the press would fall partly to clerics in Qom.

Khatami and his ministers urged the parliament to reject the press law. “
We have to create laws in accordance with freedom, not freedom according to our laws,” protested Khatami’s Ershad minister. But the conservative speaker of the parliament had a different view: “The press is a gateway for cultural invasion, so let us take measures,” he admonished.

On the eve of the vote, the reformist newspaper
Salam
published an explosive story. The press law, it suggested, was the brainchild of Saeed Emami, the notorious mastermind behind the serial murders.
Salam
published excerpts from an internal intelligence ministry memo Emami had penned, urging the state not only to restrict the issuance of publishing licenses but to use the security apparatus to confront writers “individually, using the law, in order to ban them from writing or publishing.”

If the document was authentic, it suggested that the mainstream conservatives in the parliament were doing the bidding of a disgraced intelligence thug who also endorsed strangulation as a means of censorship. The intelligence ministry quickly disavowed the memo, claiming it was a fake. But curiously, when the publisher of
Salam
was called before the Special Court of the Clergy later that month, he was charged with publishing a classified document, among other offenses.
Salam
was shut down, its editors arrested, on the afternoon of July 7, the very day the parliament approved the press law.

It was summer vacation, the study period before exams, and most students had gone home. But this news could not be ignored. Those students who remained at the University of Tehran called friends to come and join them on campus in protest. As the crowd swelled, it grew bolder, chanting slogans against the judiciary and venturing off campus. When the students reentered the university, they found Ansar-e Hezbollah waiting for them with rocks and clubs. Activists fought back, hurling rocks at the militiamen. By Thursday evening there was a confusion of arrests and injuries.

The next day was Friday, the eighteenth of Tir by the solar calendar, and things took a turn for the far worse.

• • •

A
LI
A
FSHARI WAS IN
Q
AZVIN
. He’d stopped there to see his family before going on Hajj, the annual pilgrimage to Mecca. A late-night phone call led him to abandon his plans and rush back to the capital, arriving early Saturday afternoon on a campus that looked to him as if it had just been sacked by an invading army.

Revolutionary Guards had stormed the students’ dormitory in the dead of night, dragging students from their beds to beat them, breaking windows, and setting rooms on fire. Students covered their faces and defended themselves with rocks and Molotov cocktails. Police swarmed a passageway by the dormitory, where they beat students down with clubs. One student would recall seeing his friend dragged by his long hair down that passage, which was studded with broken glass. The friend would spend twenty days in the hospital afterward. A student named Ezzat Ibrahim Nejad was killed in the melee that night. By the time the battle ceased, the dormitory was a burned husk.

Police had sealed the campus gates, but Ali and other student leaders knew the clandestine routes of entry. The university teemed with jangled, maddened students and their supporters. Daftar Tahkim called an urgent meeting. The students would organize a sit-in, they decided, to peacefully protest the dormitory attack. They would call for exams to be postponed until the matter was properly addressed. But even as the activist leaders met and strategized, students flocked to the campus. The police could no longer hold back the crowds, nor could Daftar Tahkim control them as some demonstrators started chanting slogans against the Supreme Leader. The crowd surged through the campus gates and headed for the interior ministry.

The interior ministry, technically, controlled the police. But that ministry was in the hands of reformists, who adamantly denied any role in the dormitory attack. Ali was convinced not only that the students had the wrong address for their complaint but that they were being conscripted
into a larger plan. Maybe the leader and his hardline allies were baiting the students into a big street confrontation. Then they would unleash the Revolutionary Guards on the students while impeaching Khatami on law-and-order grounds—for being unable to keep the streets calm and the country secure. Ali’s reformist contacts in government circles suspected this scenario as well.

Ali rushed to the front of the crowd that had amassed in front of the interior ministry. He urged the students to turn back. “I understand your concern and your pain,” he said, “and I believe that those who committed these crimes should be identified and brought to justice.” But the interior ministry was not the culprit, he insisted. By coming to the streets disorganized and angry, the students would only undermine their goals. They should continue their protest on campus.

He began to lead the crowd—he would later estimate it to be between sixty thousand and seventy thousand people, but most news sources suggest it was closer to twenty-five thousand—back to the university. Along the way, a group of students started agitating to bring the crowd to the president’s office instead. Again Ali Afshari objected. Khatami wasn’t responsible. “Let’s go and demonstrate in front of Khamenei’s house,” said another activist. “He’s responsible!”

This might have been closer to the truth, but to Ali it was the worst idea of all. The students would accomplish nothing and meet with violence. But the crowd was deaf to verbal entreaties. Ali and the members of Daftar Tahkim lay down in the street to stop the students from going to the Supreme Leader’s house.

At long last, the student leaders wrangled the crowd back to campus. There they had, Ali reflected, a “magnificent” demonstration. Students chanted slogans, including, “The murderers of the Forouhars are hiding inside Khamenei’s robes.” Ordinary people came to the campus to bring the students food. When Ansar-e Hezbollah attacked again, student vigilantes seized the militiamen and confiscated their weapons, including guns and knives. They turned the militiamen over to the interior ministry together with a list of the weapons they’d carried. The next day the
demonstration became a sit-in organized around Daftar Tahkim’s clear list of demands: that the chief of police be fired; that those behind the dormitory attack be identified and prosecuted; that the press law be killed; that
Salam
be allowed to publish; and that the public learn the complete truth about what had happened to the victims of the chain murders.

But Ali could see that the crowd was slipping from his grasp. Not everyone endorsed Daftar Tahkim’s reformist strategy. More radical students believed that the demonstrators should leave campus and take over national institutions like state television and police headquarters. Another part of the crowd consisted not even of students but of people with a disorganized array of grievances, who were eager to turn the sit-in into an uprising. By Monday, as the Tehran demonstration grew and as demonstrations spread to other cities across the country, Supreme Leader Khamenei was at last compelled to speak.

Khamenei condemned the attack on the University of Tehran dormitory. “This bitter incident hurt my heart,” he said. “In the Islamic system, it is not acceptable to attack the house and shelter of a group, particularly overnight or at the time of congregation prayers. The youth of this country, whether students or not, are my children, and it is very difficult and bitter for me to see them embarrassed and upset.”

He said that he forgave even the demonstrators’ insults to his person, and he urged calm, telling hard-liners to “keep quiet even if they burn or rip my photographs.” At the same time, however, Khamenei insinuated that a foreign hand was at work on those fevered streets and that a victory should not be handed there to the Americans. “I want to tell students to watch out for enemies, strangers who come among you disguised as friends,” he admonished.

• • •

N
ONE OF THIS ASSUAGED
the students’ anguish or answered their demands. Several hundred activists brushed aside Daftar Tahkim’s objections. They left the campus and took their protest to the streets. There the demonstration quickly spiraled into violence and confusion, with shop
windows smashed, vehicles burned, and more students injured and arrested. The Revolutionary Guards doused the campus in tear gas. Showing scenes of mayhem in central Tehran, state television accused the students of attacking mosques, robbing banks, and burning buses.

After the undeniably brutal attack on the sleeping students just a few nights earlier—after the Leader’s televised contrition and sadness—the hard-liners now succeeded in taking control of the public narrative. The state media characterized the students as violent, anarchic, and counterrevolutionary. As Ali Afshari had feared, some of the demonstrators’ actions had helped reinforce that impression.

On Wednesday, July 14, 1999, hard-liners packed the University of Tehran campus and the surrounding streets with counterdemonstrators in strict Islamic dress, holding banners of Khamenei’s face and chanting “Death to America.” Reformists charged that these were ringers bused in from the provinces or the suburbs. Whoever they were, most foreign media estimated their number at one hundred thousand, but Iranian state-run media reported a crowd a million strong. Thousands of hardline militiamen thundered through the city on motorcycles that day, policing streets now plunged into an uneasy silence.

On the university campus, a succession of turbaned clerics addressed the hardline crowd. One among them stood out for the ferocity of his condemnation of the reformist students. He was a conservative cleric with deep ties to the security apparatus, to Rafsanjani, and to the Supreme Leader. He all but called for student protesters to be executed. His name was Hassan Rouhani.

“
We will resolutely and decisively quell any attempt to rebel,” Rouhani declared. “Those involved in the last days’ riots will be tried and punished for fighting God and sowing corruption on earth.” Those were charges that carried the death penalty.

Some two thousand students were arrested that day, including Ali Afshari’s brother. Most were released about a month later, but some—particularly those without major organizations behind them—served long and terrible prison terms.

“That was the day they almost buried the heart and soul of the peaceful university student movement,” one student leader later mourned. “No one asked us what happened. The people were so happy that the government had stood against anarchism.”