Children of Paradise (53 page)

By the fall of 2008, with the presidential election less than a year away, the reformists appeared to be spent. Their constituency was the one least likely to vote, because they were allowed so few candidates and had suffered such dispiriting experiences in power. To stand a chance of winning back the presidency the following year, reformists would need two things
that seemed entirely quixotic to hope for: a galvanizing candidate and enormous voter turnout.

Toward the end of 2008, a declaration appeared, signed by an organization that called itself Setad 88. The group consisted of eighty-eight young reformist activists from across the country, and it announced its support for Mohammad Khatami if he were to run for president. Khatami was, the young activists felt, the only reformist who could handily defeat the incumbent. In spite of everything that had transpired during Khatami’s eight years in power, the man was still widely loved and respected, the more so after the four years Iranians had just endured of Ahmadinejad’s amusement park ride.

Setad meant business. It had already begun organizing a nationwide Khatami campaign without the former president’s consent. It formed campaign teams, with eighty-eight members apiece, in every province. The provincial teams then organized township teams, and the big cities like Tehran had a team for each municipal district. There had never been anything like this in reformist politics. Setad was not a campaign run by a candidate. Khatami was a candidate recruited by a campaign.

Khatami had been a reluctant candidate in 1997; it was said that he shed tears upon agreeing, even more reluctantly, to run for reelection in 2001. Now he came to the fray, in February 2009, with what was undoubtedly a very heavy heart. But the situation in the country was dire, and the campaign preceded him. For the third time in his life, he took to the campaign trail, where the young people who’d once turned from him in disappointment now thronged his events. For all that he had failed to achieve, Khatami still represented something to his constituents—the better angels of their Islamic Republic, perhaps; the face of invitation rather than exclusion. Still, Khatami told his followers that he would step aside, gladly, for another reformist candidate, and that he would focus his energy on persuading the former prime minister, Mir Hossein Mousavi, to run in his stead.

• • •

M
IR
H
OSSEIN
M
OUSAVI
was a cipher. He had done something no other prominent member of the postrevolutionary nomenklatura had done:
he’d all but quit politics. From the very pinnacle of power under Khomeini, when he was Iran’s wartime prime minister and favored son of the Supreme Leader; for twenty years, while his associates and his rivals battled over the legacy of the revolution they’d wrought; Mousavi largely retreated into private life. He was an architecture professor and a painter. He rebuffed all entreaties to run for office, even as he became an icon, to older Iranians, of a revolutionary competence and rectitude lost.

As a contemporary politician, said Khatami’s former vice president Mohammad Ali Abtahi, Mousavi was “
like an unopened melon; people don’t have much information about what’s going on inside.” For those had been a crucial twenty years. Most of Mousavi’s colleagues on the Islamic Left had made the dramatic and unforeseeable turn to liberal reformism. Then they had weathered the eight disappointing years of Khatami’s presidency, and fallen along a spectrum of critique. Mousavi had not publicly accompanied his former allies on any part of this journey. By the company he kept, he was presumed to be a reformist. But by the history he embodied, he was still Khomeini’s man.

Mousavi announced his candidacy on March 10, 2009. Khatami, as he’d promised, withdrew. He directed his supporters to embrace Mousavi instead. “
I know that I would get the vote if I ran,” said Khatami, “but the election is not just the voting on Friday. One also needs a candidate who on Saturday is strong enough to push his agenda. Mir Hossein is the man of Saturday.”

For many young people, including those with Setad 88, this wasn’t an obvious choice. They didn’t know Mousavi, and his association with the revolutionary decade wasn’t a credit to him in their eyes. Moreover, he was an ambiguous candidate. He distanced himself from Mosharekat’s endorsement and suggested that if he was a reformist, he was equally a “principlist,” which was the conservative faction’s self-description.
In an interview with
Der
Spiegel
, Mousavi was hard put to distinguish himself from his rival on foreign policy, particularly regarding the nuclear issue, Israel, and relations with the United States; he even danced around a question about the Holocaust. But he did suggest that he would try to abolish the religious police.

Mainly, at first, Mousavi campaigned on a return to rational and responsible economic policy and planning. Under his premiership, Iran had suffered war, sanctions, and record-low oil revenues, but there had been neither shortages nor runaway inflation. Ahmadinejad, by comparison, looked profligate and unprofessional. And yet, Mousavi’s ideological background marked him as a populist from the left, just as Ahmadinejad was a populist from the right. Like Ahmadinejad, Mousavi was also an ascetic who challenged official corruption with the very public humility of his lifestyle and character.

Mousavi was not the only reformist in the race. Mehdi Karroubi, by now a perennial candidate, had registered as well. Karroubi had made a very credible showing in 2005, and since that time he had come to speak out ever more boldly on rights and freedoms. Many of the old reformist intellectual elite supported Karroubi, mindful not only of his theoretical positions but of his consistently humane treatment of the families of political prisoners. Setad contemplated supporting Karroubi as the candidate most clearly in line with the demands of its young activists. But in the end it cast its weight behind the more visible candidate with the greater chance of winning.

Mousavi instantly inherited a campaign infrastructure that penetrated the entire country and that benefited from the energy of young people fed up with the status quo. For its posters and other campaign materials, Setad selected an image of Mousavi in a habitual pose, with his hand on his chest, an Iranian gesture of humility before one’s interlocutor. The campaign adopted the color green, traditionally symbolic of Islam.

None of this suggested that the 2009 election would be an exciting one. Since Bani-Sadr, no elected president of the Islamic Republic had failed to serve two terms. Ahmadinejad was controversial and even unpopular among conservatives, if the midterm elections were any indication, but he faced no credible conservative rival. Mousavi was the de facto candidate of the reformists, but no one expected them to vote; so he was making a run for Ahmadinejad’s voters, appealing to their nostalgia for early revolutionary ideology and the shared purpose of the Iran-Iraq War. So long as the
reform-minded voters who’d sat out 2005, 2006, and 2008 remained on the sidelines, this election would be a narrow battle fought on Ahmadinejad’s home turf.

• • •

S
UPREME
L
EADER
A
LI
K
HAMENEI
portrayed every election as an opportunity to demonstrate Iran’s revolutionary steadfastness to the world by showing Iran’s enemies that the Islamic Republic was vital and loved by its people. The country’s high voter turnout was a matter of pride, as was the atmosphere of relative freedom that attended the campaign season, which officially lasted just two weeks prior to the vote. Given the lackluster turnout for the last three elections, the Islamic Republic was eager to “warm up the scene,” as was often said in Tehran, to create a sense of excitement that would spur the fence-sitters to vote.

And so, in early June of 2009, the Islamic Republic tried something new: televised presidential debates in what would be described as the “American style.” To any American viewer, however, the style was entirely foreign. The Iranian politicians did not speak in glib, focus group–tested sound bites but tended to ramble, interrupt themselves, and preface their remarks with prefaces to their prefaces. They spoke not to the public but to one another, unscripted and unrehearsed, and the combat was, at times, ferocious despite occasional exaggerated displays of Persian gentility. Iranian viewers were riveted.

Mousavi and Ahmadinejad squared off on June 3. It was the first chance many viewers had to get to know Mousavi as he spoke off the cuff, batting away what seemed at times to be a hail of missiles. The men faced each other at opposite ends of a large oval table in a television studio, across a centerpiece of white flowers. Mousavi was an elegant man in a professorial way. He was slender and white-haired, with wire-rimmed spectacles and a trimmed goatee. His gestures were restrained, his gaze cold. Across the table, Ahmadinejad looked more dapper than usual in a pressed gray blazer. He was also unusually serious, his mouth set in a line, his eyebrows parenthetical, a sheaf of papers in his lap and on the table before him.

The president’s tone was bullying, self-pitying, and smarmy by turns. He opened by arguing that he faced not one opponent but the combined force of three: Mousavi, Khatami, and Rafsanjani had ganged up against a solitary, beleaguered Ahmadinejad in a relentless conspiracy. The public should not be fooled: Ahmadinejad ran not against Mousavi but against the whole past establishment, which felt its privileges threatened by Ahmadinejad’s selfless service to the people. All the problems of the country had been laid at Ahmadinejad’s feet. “Are these problems all created in the past four years?” demanded the president bitterly. “What about the twenty-four years before that? Does it mean that there was a heaven, and a utopia, and you delivered that to me, and I turned it to hell, and nothing positive has been done?”

Mousavi had complained that Ahmadinejad’s foreign policy was reckless, the president groused. But during these four years Iran had made significant progress on its nuclear program and won the respect of Third World nations. “If Mr. Mousavi thinks that we should try to favor and please three or four major powers, this is against the late Imam’s ideas and the values of the Islamic Revolution and our independence.”

Ahmadinejad had many reasonable points to make, mainly about Mousavi’s record, which the president claimed was not significantly better than Ahmadinejad’s on civil liberties: in Mousavi’s time, the president pointed out, there was but one newspaper that dared criticize the prime minister’s proposed budget, and Mousavi had fulminated against it as an enemy of the revolution. Ahmadinejad, by comparison, tolerated a great deal more criticism. Could Mousavi speak of Ahmadinejad as dictatorial when his own government had stripped the president of his powers and used strong-arm tactics against its rivals in the parliament?

But the president came off as emotionally labile and thuggish. He lobbed criminal accusations at Rafsanjani’s sons, and of their father he said darkly, “We believe he’s actually the main player. We know who is running whose electoral campaign committee and what meetings, who’s organizing those meetings and campaign.” Toward the end of the debate, he displayed a photograph of Mousavi’s wife, a former university chancellor. “I have a
dossier from a lady,” the president sneered. “You know the lady. She sits next to you in your campaign, which is against all the regulations.” Ahmadinejad accused Mousavi’s wife of having falsified her academic credentials. “
This
is lawlessness,” Ahmadinejad remarked. The move would have been shocking anywhere, but in Iran it was especially brazen. To attack not only a respected cultural figure but the wife of a pious man, holding up her photograph no less, was the height of disrespect.

Mousavi did not shrink from the bullying or pretend that he and Ahmadinejad agreed more than they differed, nor did he respond in kind to Ahmadinejad’s many saccharine protestations that he sought only to educate Mousavi because he liked him so much. There were two ways to govern the country, Mousavi stated. One was on the basis of “adventurism, instability, exhibitionism, raising slogans, imaginative moves, superstition, selfishness, self-centeredness, and not abiding by the rule of law, and also on the basis of going to extremes.” If this didn’t sound good, Mousavi offered the path of “collective wisdom” and “moderation.” He’d decided to run for president, he explained, because the country had gone so far off course that he considered the situation dangerous.

Ahmadinejad had a tendency, Mousavi alleged, to flout the law when it got in his way. He set a bad precedent by doing so and a pernicious example for the people. He ignored parliamentary legislation he disagreed with and had dissolved the Management and Planning Organization on a whim. And wherever Mousavi went, he heard that university students were arrested, humiliated, and expelled, publishers banned or forced into bankruptcy by the censorship of their titles, artists and even clerics suppressed. Ahmadinejad had needlessly turned countless Iranians, including the cultural elite, against the government by dividing people into insiders and outsiders.

Ahmadinejad’s erratic approach to foreign policy had undermined Iran’s dignity and created tensions with other countries, Mousavi said. His extremism was a particular boon to Israel, which could now credibly claim to feel threatened by Iran. This was a “calamity,” according to the former prime minister. As for the claim that he, Mousavi, was three candidates in
one, the candidate openly scoffed. “Mr. Khatami is not just an unknown person; he has been a president for eight years; Mr. Hashemi too. So you can talk to them. . . . [The state broadcasting network] is at your disposal; you can invite them to a round table and talk to them. [How] are they related to me? It has nothing to do with me. I say that your foreign policy has inflicted damage on the country and on us, and Iran has been caged as a result of your economic and foreign policies.”

Maybe it was his incontestable stature, as a former prime minister from the storied past, or his twenty-year absence from the scene, or maybe it was just his character, but Mousavi came off as a man who refused to be intimidated. Rumor had it that Mousavi had left politics at Khamenei’s command, because the Leader feared his obstinacy. The former prime minister’s performance on live television gave credence to such rumors. Iranians were watching, and many were persuaded that night to vote.