The bearded thug clenched a heavy wooden stick, occasionally waving it in the air as he surveyed a small group of protesters. It was 2003 and the assembled crowd – a mix of university students, middle-class professionals, and disaffected, unemployed young men – had gathered to commemorate the fourth anniversary of Iran’s 1999 student protests, the most dramatic eruption of open dissent in the history of the Islamic Republic of Iran.
The student revolt of summer 1999, which began with protests over the closure of a reformist daily and ended in six days of pitched street-battles between a cocktail of Iranian security services and pro-democracy students, had seemed to promise a new dawn to many Iranians.
Afshin Molavi is responding to Mohsen Sazegara’s proposal for a referendum on a new Iranian constitution, “Iran’s road to democracy”
For an introduction to openDemocracy’s Iran symposium, see David Hayes’s “Iran between revolution and democracy”
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The protests renewed hope that a tipping-point had been reached and the Islamic Republic’s days were numbered. They were brutally repressed, but Iranians reasoned that it was only a matter of time before another protest broke out, before the “children of the revolution” – those two-thirds of Iranians under the age of 30 who were unwitting children or unborn at the time of their parents’ revolution – acted on their frustration with the rulers who had misruled them; before Iranians rose up in defiance of a graying leadership whom they constantly mocked behind their backs; before Iran’s rulers paid heed to the demands of their people, simple demands for greater economic dignity, basic social and political freedoms, and the simple right to take part in one’s own destiny.
And yet, here we were in 2003, four years on from those protests, and a bearded thug – a member of Ansar-e-Hezbollah, loosely affiliated with regime hardliners – stood in the way: a stark symbol of the violence that underpins the regime. With chants of Mashallah Hezbollah (Mashallah meaning literally “what God wishes”), he and his henchmen rushed the crowd, their sticks crashing on backs, fists flying, prompting screams and roars of anger. Nearby, police in anti-riot gear watched. Revolutionary guardsmen rumbled by on fat motorcycles. Helicopters circled overhead.
When the dust settled, I saw a tattered sign on the ground. It read, in both Persian and English: referendum. Instinctively, I reached down to pick it up: a souvenir of the day’s events. My second instinct, the “Islamic Republic instinct”, kicked in, and I put the sign back down: was the souvenir worth the trouble I would be in if I got caught with the sign?
Later that night, I met a friend, a young Iranian journalist, to compare notes. We were both impressed (if that is the word) with the regime’s systematic crackdown: it jammed all satellite signals, preventing Iranians from watching opposition television stations; the judiciary’s secret police (yes, the judiciary have their own intelligence arm) brazenly took pro-democracy student leaders into custody in full view of the domestic and international press corps; checkpoints sprouted across Tehran, with members of the Basij, a hardline militia, providing an atmosphere of intimidation; the ministry of intelligence silenced newspaper editors, ordering them to refrain from reporting on student protests.
“I have lost hope with the reformists,” the journalist told me on that night, as we sipped fresh watermelon juice in a quiet park. “They don’t have the strength.” He was clearly melancholy from the day’s events. Finishing his juice, he said: “If only Iranians could choose. If only we could be given the same choice that our parents were given: an Islamic Republic – yes or no?”
I remembered the worn “referendum” sign on the pavement, the footprints still fresh. I wished I had picked it up. I wished my first instinct had overcome my second.
