The Ministry of Guidance Invites You to Not Stay: An American Family in Iran (20 page)

At Tajrish Square, where I waited for a bus, the security forces were gathering a few hours before the protests were called for, to intimidate potential protesters and to announce their readiness for any move they might make. Motorcycle Basij and black-uniformed shock troops were stationed all the way to Vanak, a rather large contingent of them menacingly mustered under the Parkway overpass, but beyond their heavy presence, there was no sign that anything unusual was going on, not even that air of anticipation and anxiety you can almost smell in any danger zone. Certainly no one I spoke to could sense anything out of the ordinary, except the presence of the well-prepared troops, who obviously log on to the same Facebook pages and visit the same opposition Web sites as everyone else.

As the bus pulled up, I happily noted that it was an articulated and fully air-conditioned Iranian-made model, unfortunately named King Long—surely the Iranian who came up with
that
name for a bus had, unlike most Iranian men, never seen or paid attention to the clever titles of American porn films—and I dutifully boarded. It was already filled with passengers, men in the front section and women in the back, and grumbling was under way. “Look at all the Basij,” one man said loudly. “What do they think they’re protecting?”

A boy, probably in his late teens, got up from his seat, offering it to me. “
Befarmaeed
,” he said, “Please,” gesturing to the seat he had just vacated for me, the much older man. I would usually be just a little annoyed at the presumption of so many young Iranian men that I was at such an advanced age that good manners dictated that they offer their seats to me, and usually I declined, insisting that I was happy to stand, but this time I took the boy up on his insistent offer and sat down next to another man closer to my age.

He thrust his chin in the direction of the window, at the youthful security forces milling about on the sidewalk near a newsstand,
walkie-talkies in hand. “They’re always telling us that Islam is in danger,” he whispered loudly, “but no—it’s
you
who are in danger!”

I smiled and nodded.

“Islam has been fine for fourteen hundred years,” he continued, “and you’ve been around for thirty. It’s
you
who are in danger!” The
you
was obviously the state, and he was right. If it didn’t sense danger, why was it mobilizing its shock troops, now and at every perceived threat? The proposed demonstrations were still hours away, but if any were to occur, they would be easily broken up by the thousands of militiamen, some of whom seemed, at least on the surface, quite sanguine at the prospect of beating their fellow citizens into submission.

I had an afternoon tea appointment near Vanak before I went to the opium party, so I got off at the Mirdamad stop, a busy intersection where grotesque cement-block high-rise apartment buildings, Eskan I, II and III, built in the latter days of the shah’s rule, stood looking as if the slightest earth tremor would send them tumbling down. They anchor a once-beautiful corner of a beautiful boulevard, facing a park. The balcony of my friend’s apartment afforded an unobstructed view of the square farther south and of the militiamen now milling about everywhere, their motorcycles neatly parked on the sidewalks, ready for action.

All my friend’s guests dismissed the idea that anything significant would happen. “Nothing!” said my friend, no fan of the regime himself. “It’s ridiculous all this talk—who’s going to challenge
these
people?” I left after tea, near the appointed time of the demonstrations, and descended to the square.
Someone
was bound to show up. I continued to the home of another friend, and the opium smokers, regime haters all, were even less concerned with protest and revolution. The British were right about opium in China—it
does
keep the natives from getting restless, and I didn’t expect anything different.

Later, having washed my face and eaten two or three pistachios (a Persian trick) to eliminate any residual opiate odor that might cling to my skin or my breath, I crossed Vali Asr. A stream of motorcycles
was coming down slowly, as slow as bicycles, in the bus lanes. Two abreast, a passenger behind every rider, the Basij came and kept coming. Thousands, I thought, some wearing the camouflage of regular troops, others in the all black of the police special forces, some in body armor, truncheons hanging from their belts, and others in plainclothes on their private motorcycles. It was as intimidating a sight as I had ever seen in Iran, but the expressions on the faces of most of these young men were oddly peaceful, as if they expected no tension and no fight. The handful of older men among them, mostly overweight and sweating, with their small Chinese bikes straining under their weight, looked more menacing—these were the most loyal of the Basij, men whose livelihood fully depended, and always had, on the generosity of the regime.

One grunted angrily at me as I almost stepped in his way trying to cross the bus lane to the sidewalk on the other side. I stepped back just as another pair on a khaki dirt bike, young men in army fatigues without insignia, stopped in front of me. The rider edged his front wheel toward me, and I thought I might be in trouble for some unknown infraction—like stepping into a stream of Basijladen motorcycles. But he leaned forward, arched his body, slightly raised himself off his seat, and said, “Pardon me,
haj-agha
”—imputing to me the piousness of a
haji
, someone who has made the pilgrimage to Mecca—as he gently maneuvered the bike into the traffic behind him, reversed his course, and accelerated back up the avenue. So much for trouble, but once again I was mostly annoyed that a young man would view me as old enough to have performed the hajj.

Vanak Square, on a workday, was as busy as ever with car traffic and pedestrians, and on that still bright and sunny evening, the hundreds of motorcycles and their riders, stationed all around in a sea of black, seemed like tremendous overkill. A few people, older men and women, appeared for a moment to be marching together on one side of the square, but the crowd dissipated as they passed the security forces. Another group moved past the square and toward
Gandhi Street, but it was impossible to tell if they were there to silently protest or if they were commuters who happened to be huddled close together as they made their way home. A friend who joined a group of men and women walking together—he assumed they were protesters—told me later that he was worried by the sheer numbers of Basij, so he stepped into a bakery and bought a loaf of bread; that way, in case he was stopped or harassed, he could argue that he was simply out on an errand and had nothing to do with any demonstration. An unusually large number of other pedestrians were also carrying bread under their arms, which, if anyone had realized it, could have become a sign of protest itself. But that was it, at least in Vanak, where Iranian activists outside Iran and, presumably, the security forces within had expected much more.

As I got back on a bus and headed home, I wanted to pronounce the Green Movement dead and buried—and not because of my relatively torpid state, after a puff or two (actually three or four) of select Iranian opium. Concerned about the possibility of a renewed clash between protesters and security forces, or at least about the danger of Karri and Khash being mistaken for protesters, I had insisted that they stay close to home. There they had witnessed nothing out of the ordinary, at the shops, at the Tajrish bazaar, or at the park where Karri took Khash, Basij be damned. Iranians today hold too many wildly differing views of what the country should be to form any real united opposition to the regime; even supporters of an Islamic system, who are most likely to be able to effect change, believe the regime has merely strayed from the path of Islamic democracy and needs a course correction.

The two most famous regime supporters who want change—but not outright revolution—are Mir Hossein Mousavi and Mehdi Karroubi, the 2009 presidential candidates who cried foul over the
results and were under house arrest while we lived in Tehran. Karri had read and heard much about them since those elections, and she was surprised, even more than I was, that no one we came across, from die-hard regime haters to mild critics, seemed to care very much about them or their incarceration.

What had happened between the time when millions of citizens had come out onto the streets to support them, and now, when hardly any voices of protest were raised about their unjust imprisonment, let alone about the crackdown on already weak civil rights? Had security forces fired so many bullets against protesters during the Green demonstrations, had so many tanks appeared on the streets of Tehran, had the state killed so many people in suppressing dissent, that it caused the movement to crumble? Far fewer people were killed than in Egypt, as it happened, where the regime fell within weeks of the first protest in Tahrir Square. According to the government, fewer than fifty were killed in Iran, but more important, the opposition put the number at under a hundred. (Of course hundreds and then thousands were rounded up and jailed; many were released over time, but quite a few still languished in Evin while we were in Tehran.)

Arrest rather than slaughter: perhaps that was the key to the Iranian regime surviving the protests. It had had no difficulty convincing its frontline defenders, the volunteer Basij and their overseers, the Revolutionary Guards, that the protests were less about a vote than about a challenge to the very existence of the regime; but it knew it would have a much harder time convincing them to shoot or kill their fellow citizens, whom many loyalists believed to be—and the domestic media made this point—mere pawns in the Western game of destabilizing the regime. (The regime is loath to admit that millions of citizens might despise it; from a propaganda standpoint, pointing its finger only at the Green Movement “leaders” was a winning strategy, and Ahmadinejad’s likening the ordinary protesters to emotional and angry fans of a losing football team effectively made them innocent of treason.)

In the revolution that toppled the shah, the army, mainly consisting of conscripts on the front lines who were reluctant to fire on protesters, declared its neutrality relatively quickly, thus cementing the shah’s downfall; the revolutionaries of that time, now the leaders of the regime, were hardly going to tempt that fate for themselves by ordering their shock troops to kill their neighbors and perhaps their own family members en masse.

One of my cousins lives in an apartment building across the hall from a Basij, a family man with two small children. She told me that she couldn’t reconcile the image of the man, a perfectly normal and even affable person, with that of the Robocop who every day during the 2009 protests dressed up, got on his motorcycle, and went off to corral and beat demonstrators with a stick. Would he have been able to beat, let alone shoot, his very neighbors, most of whom he knew supported the Green Movement? Once protesters were carted off to jail, they were out of sight of the militiamen, who could decline to speculate on their fate, but death and martyrdom are impossible to ignore. They have an altogether different significance in a Shia Muslim country, which is why the slow death of Neda Agha Soltan, flashed across TV screens throughout the world, had, for a moment, the potential to ignite a revolution and why the government was at pains to place the blame on foreign agitators.

The Iranians of 2009 and 2010, I knew, had been no less courageous than their Arab counterparts who were inflaming the region in 2011. But no leader inside Iran called for regime change, no one promised a rosy revolution that would bring forth democracy, and as was not the case in the Arab Spring, legions of regime supporters were willing to fight and die for the cause—defense of Islam as they saw it, and a way of life that was ensured by the preservation and perpetuation of the regime. In the midst of the Arab Spring, while some Iranians professed
to envy the success of revolutions in their immediate neighborhood, most recognized that Iran’s regime still largely had faith and Islam on its side, unlike in the Arab countries, where virtually no one, not even in the militaries, was willing to die in support of a secular dictator. Iranian youth who opposed the regime had no leader they believed in, no one to rally around, and they showed as much disdain for the leaders of the Green Movement, such as Mousavi—even if they voted for him—as they did for any regime stalwart.

Those who opposed the regime as it was, but wary of outright revolt against it, were still very much unsure of how they could actually effect change. The regime had effectively divided Iranian society: one was either for or against it, with no other alternative. That was one reason so many citizens wound up in prison during the Persian Spring, and why so many more continued to be thrown behind bars on national security charges while we were there, even citizens who were apolitical or had no desire to see the regime change completely.
You are either with us or against us, and if you have any complaints, you are against us
. The security apparatus was watching, and one wrong move would be enough to get you a free ticket to Evin.

It was a little disheartening and depressing, more so because we, and I mean Karri too, cared about Iran and its future. Despite hearing constant complaints about the system, despite the obviously heavy-handed security crackdown, I still wasn’t sure that a large majority of Iranians desired a revolution—quick and clean or long and bloody—or even a radical change in the regime’s theocratic nature. It was easy, living in Tehran, especially in North Tehran, to be seduced, as so many foreign journalists are, by the notion that all Iranians are desperate for some form of regime change, but I knew that even apart from the Basij and Revolutionary Guards, many Iranians still supported the system; and a great number of them were deeply religious and would never abandon their beliefs that Islam must play a role in politics and society at large, and that the Islamic system was just.

“No one stays in Evin just for thinking something,” said one
such young man, beard neatly trimmed, at a kebab house downtown, where communal tables allow for interaction with strangers. “Sure there have been some mistakes, but those people have always been released, and whoever is tried and convicted must have done something wrong.” It was impossible to argue with anyone who still had faith in the judicial system (nor are political arguments in public particularly wise), so I rarely challenged someone I didn’t know well.