Rosewater, Chapter 5

 

I was very curious to see how many people were going to turn up at the Dust and Dirt demonstration, and how the government would respond. My guess was that, at best, a few thousand Mousavi supporters would come to the streets, the security forces would beat them up, and most people would go home. Mousavi would eventually accept defeat and go back to his government job as the director of the Academy of Arts.

I couldn’t have been more wrong.

I arrived at the demonstration at about 4:30 pm. The scene on the streets of Tehran reminded me of the demonstrations against the Shah I’d witnessed in November 1978, when I was 11. Today, there were at least two million people, most of them young boys and girls in their teens and twenties, preparing to march along the same route from Revolution Square to Freedom Square. I struck up a conversation with Ahmad, a 54-year-old academic I met in the crowd. “We walk along this route because it has taken us a long time to reach freedom since the revolution,” Ahmad said. He had taken part in the 1979 march as well. “I see many similarities between what happened then and now. In both cases, we had a clear mandate. Then we wanted to overthrow the Shah. Today we want this little man [Ahmadinejad] who has stolen our votes.”

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, bandanas, bracelets and scarves, marching from Revolution Square towards Freedom Square with an air of quiet and calm. As we moved, the sea of green grew larger and stronger and the security forces lining the street looked on with surprise at the number of people. As usual, I had a video camera with me, an old Sony PD 100 that 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 began to pull the video camera from my bag, held it in the air, doing my best to get shots of the crowd. There were many familiar faces: colleagues, friends, and acquaintances who had come to the demonstration alone, or with their families. Despite the government’s instructions that journalists should not report 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 strength of the demonstration, the protesters 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 police 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 protesters, especially the young men and women who had endured years of having their hair forcefully cut by the Basij, or beaten for not appearing Islamic enough, would have, I’m sure, loved to have thrown stones and taken over the Basij buildings. But they contained themselves. Many people felt that a compromise was still possible. They wanted the government to either recount 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 Basiji, on the other hand — normally so rash and confrontational — were clearly intimidated by the sheer size of the crowd. Whenever the protesters 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 and 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 demonstration 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, it was my instinct to run toward the shots. Hundreds of others had the same idea.

I started to film as I moved through the crowd holding the camera above my head. A group of youths was attacking a two-story building in a narrow street, about one block north of Freedom Square. It was a residential street and the buildings that lined it 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 a base firing warning shots into the air. They were trapped in the building, surrounded by a group of youths who were pelting them with Molotov cocktails. I later learned from several intelligence officials that an opposition group, the Mujaheddin Khalgh of Iran (MKO), had most likely organized the attack on the Basij. The MKO is a cult-like Marxist-Islamist group that has been based in Iraq for the past three decades, whose goal is to get rid of the Iranian regime. Its sympathizers had acted as agent provocateurs among the protesters, 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 the fence down around the Basij base. Before long, the Basijis stopped firing warning shots, and began shooting indiscriminately into the crowd of protesters. The two Basijis on the rooftop of the building 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 began shooting at the young men who jumped over the fallen fence and were running toward the building. One boy who appeared to be in his early twenties was shot as he tried to jump over the broken white fence. The collapsed fence with sharp ends looked like pitchforks used in ancient Rome. The boy’s slim body dropped on the fence as soon as the bullet entered his body. He went into cardiac arrest and slowly rolled over the wall and onto the ground. I recorded the young man’s climb and fall. Horrified to have recorded a man’s death, I couldn’t move my hands until the Basijis started to spray bullets in my direction. Then, I went inside a building and held out my hand, looking at the scene through the camera’s monitor. Another young man was shot in the head while trying to kick the door of the base down. People raised the body and took it towards the main street. “Mikosham an keh baradaram kosht, I kill those who killed my brother,” people chanted, their voices filled with rage.

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 main, peaceful demonstration was still underway. But they understood their efforts were fruitless. He was already dead. 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; 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 who tried 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! Shut up you sons of bitches!” one said, as he threw punches at an older man. The crowd erupted into a brawl.

“Death to Khamenei!” cried a young boy as he joined the young boys hitting the older men. I turned my camera towards him.

“Nagir! Nagir! Don’t film!” He grabbed at my video camera, but I shoved it under my arm and moved as quickly as I could 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 to 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 as quickly as possible, to show the world what was happening in Tehran. I knew that I had the only professionally filmed footage of the Basij shooting that existed.

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 was to mention publicly that I had filmed the Basij attack. Up to that date my footage was the most incriminating images of Basij violence against people. I knew that the authorities would not be happy with my footage and that they would question me about how I managed to record it. I didn’t want it to look surreptitious and wanted to be able to answer that I simply recorded what 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.”