Letter from Tehran (II)

 Another anonymous dispatch from Tehran:

 22 June, 2009

There are two main areas in Tehran that are full of good bookstores:
the area around Tehran University and Enqelab Square and the Karimkhan Bridge – just down the street from Haft-e Tir Square. Enqelab has been the site of the biggest demonstrations and most violent protests since the elections; Haft-e Tir has also seen its share of action. The huge street battles that took place on Saturday that you saw on the news happened around Enqelab. At any rate, today I decided to speed up my book buying because if the situation keeps deteriorating here I won’t stick around; I headed down to Enqelab.

To say that there was an eerie calm on the street would be an understatement. People walked by the stores and carried out their daily business under the gaze of a massive security presence. Every block on Azadi Street had dozens of baton-wielding police officers standing alongside the road, some twiddling their thumbs, others
staring you down, others staring off into space. The side streets
around Azadi were full of Basiji militiamen wearing helmets and
holding batons. Inside the stores business had obviously slowed down and there was a clear reluctance by some to talk about what’s going on. Perhaps they thought I was a journalist:

“Anything going on here today?”

“No.”

“Yesterday?”

“No.”

"It was pretty bad a couple days ago, though, huh?”

“Yeah. You were here?”

“No. I saw pictures.”

“It was bad.”

And that was it; nothing more from this man. I thanked him and left. The few other places that I stopped by weren’t much better.  One man told me that he was planning on closing at 1:00pm today, like he had the past two days.

“It was chaos a couple days ago,” he said.

“Is there going to be something today?”

“Yeah, now at Firdousi Square and they just announced Haft-e Tir.”

One of the random emails that I’ve been receiving in the past four or five days said that everyday there will be a protest at Enqelab at 5:00pm. Perhaps that’s why the police presence was so heavy. I don’t know who sends these emails and who else receives them.

Perhaps one of you is sending them? They come from cryptic email addresses with names like “Free Iran”, “Payandeh Iran” (Iran Forever), “A Friend”. They contain announcements that apparently come from Mousavi or Karroubi, information about where demonstrations are being held, how to access the web via proxies and filter breakers (none of which work anymore, by the way), how to treat gunshot wounds, why you should bring cigarettes with you to protests as a means to fight the effects of tear gas and other things. Where and who these come from remains a mystery to me.

It was nearly 5:00 when I left and still no signs of anything on the
street. There were so many police and militia men standing around that one would have to be rather stupid to stage a protest there.

Leaving Enqelab I got into a shared taxi going towards the Sayyed
Khandan Bridge, where I get another one to go further north where I’m staying. The taxi took off making its way through streets that started crowding up just before rush hour. Near the Karimkhan Bridge traffic came to a total standstill. I asked the driver what was going on, he didn’t know. The other passengers were just as clueless or were acting they didn’t know like I was. The helicopter circling above our heads made it impossible to think that it was simply bad traffic or a car accident. As we inched forward, I, like many of the other passengers in the taxis around us, got out and started walking towards the square. Hopefully there I could catch another taxi and go up to Sayyed Khandan. I was maybe a half mile away from the Square when I used a pedestrian bridge to cross the street and hopefully get a glance at what was going on further ahead. You could see that people had gathered, but that was it. You needed to get closer if you wanted to see what was happening.

It was at that moment when I heard men chanting…screaming “Ma’ sha’ Allah! Hizbollah! Ma’ sha’ Allah! Hizbollah!” (What God wants! The party of God!). I turned around and saw maybe 40 men wearing
camouflage vests, helmets and carrying batons heading towards Haft-e Tir, ostensibly coming from the direction of Enqelab or Valiasr
Squares.

I hurried down the steps and made my way forward, gaining another few blocks when people starting screaming and running back towards my direction. I asked what happened and in response received “Run! Go! Run, Run! They’re beating people!” I looked at the street and saw a young man trying to flee from two older, much bigger men who had grabbed him by the neck and were screaming at him to stop moving. The young man kept trying to run away but the other two wouldn’t give. It was now apparent that they were plainclothes police or part of some other security apparatus. They were both wearing earpieces and had revolvers at their side. One started kicking the man, who by now had his shirt ripped off. He kicked him in his stomach and he keeled over. The crowds kept running back, there was more screaming. I ducked into a bookstore and the owners shut the door and pulled down the metal gate down. Students were walking back, all dressed in black and telling others standing on the sidewalk and the street to go to the university. They were going to take their mourning there; this was one day after a young woman was killed.

About a half an hour later I left the store and made my way to Haft-e
Tir Square. The traffic and slowly started to make its way down the street and taxis were picking people up. I hopped into one heading in my direction and looked at the massive security presence at the
square. There were dozens of Basij in the square itself, and probably
hundreds on the streets. Trucks full of men in camouflage, all with
batons standing around the square, some stopping cars. The riot police in full body armor and armed where stationed along the other side of the street. The woman in the back of the taxi asked if the driver or I had seen what just happened. Did they beat people? Did you see the man being pounded by the police? Did the basijis start beating people? Will there be a strike tomorrow? The woman was talking and taking pictures on her phone at the same time.

I looked back at her, “Be careful with that! They’ll kill us all if
they see you.”

I turned my head around and saw that our car had been stopped. There was a Basiji in front of us screamed at us to stop taking pictures. He opened the front passenger door where I was sitting and started screaming at me, “What are you taking pictures of! Get out of the car! What’s in your bag!?! Get out!” I remained seated. A second later someone else had opened the back door and screamed the same questions at the passengers seated in the back. “It was the woman! That woman!” one of them said. They pulled her out of the car. I still didn’t get up. The man who had opened my door looked the other way for a split second and I pulled by camera out of my bag and tossed it under the seat. I didn’t take any pictures, but I didn’t want to deal with questions and I don’t think that my excuse of being an American student studying in Iran was going to fly over so well with these people. They pulled the woman over to the sidewalk and the driver sped off. “Oh God! She’s going to be stuck there until night…God knows what they’re going to do to her.”

That’s all for now. There was a call for a strike today, but I don’t
think it happened, though I have no idea since the media here would
never talk about it and most other news outlets have been scrambled or blocked. Apparently there is also a protest planned for tomorrow in front of the Guardian Council’s building. Again – I don’t know if it’s true. I don’t even know who told me as it came from one of those emails. The sense that I get from people about what is going on now and where, when and how this will all end can generally be summed with the sentence "I don’t know."

Call me a cynic, but I somehow doubt most of the experts and pundits on the other side of the Atlantic have a much better sense of what’s going to happen.