Talking to Mahmoud Ahmadinejad—and the opposition—about Iran today.
by Jon Lee Anderson, The New Yorker
The protests, which had started over election fraud, had grown into huge demonstrations against the Islamic regime, the largest in Iran since Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini overthrew the Shah, in 1979. But in the weeks that followed, Iran’s ultimate political authority, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, endorsed Ahmadinejad’s victory and condemned the protests; riot police and Basij, armed with knives and guns, were sent into the streets to attack the protesters. Between forty and eighty people were killed, Mousavi’s nephew among them, and thousands were arrested.
In show trials held in August, more than a hundred detainees were paraded in court, many of them thin and pale and clearly terrified; according to Amnesty International, many detainees had been beaten, tortured, and raped by guards and interrogators, often at secret detention centers. Several “confessed” to an improbable range of political crimes, including treason. Since then, most have been released on bail, including the Iranian-Canadian Newsweek correspondent Maziar Bahari, who fled the country. But hundreds of others have been sentenced to harsh prison terms, and at least five sentenced to death. Two have already been hanged for the crime of moharebeh—warring against God.
The Green Movement continued to hold intermittent demonstrations through the end of last year and, in diminishing numbers, into the spring. But the movement has been constrained. Days before a rally planned for June 12th, the anniversary of the election, Mousavi and Karroubi called it off, explaining that they were doing so for the “safety of the people.”
During the campaign, Mousavi spoke out brazenly for women’s rights and for normalizing relations with the United States, and denounced Ahmadinejad’s statements questioning the reality of the Holocaust. Now he rarely leaves his home in north Tehran, appearing only in pictures and statements on his own Web site. He and the other reformist leaders have been living under an informal house arrest, subjected to heckling and assaults by pro-regime mobs whenever they venture out.
Source: The New Yorker, August 9, 2010
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