Then They Came for Me_ A Family's Story of Love, Captivity, and Survival - Maziar Bahari [120]
Unlike Atrianfar, Shariati, and me, Arabsorkhi had refused to apologize and appear on television. He said that because of this, his interrogators had practically abandoned him, and had left him in limbo for weeks. He wasn’t sure what charges were going to be brought against him. But though he was the only one of us who had refused to work with his captors, he still believed that the Islamic regime could be reformed. Atrianfar and Shariati, on the other hand, had each pledged their allegiance to the regime in their televised confessions, seeming to know that the system was rotten to the core and that it wasn’t worth their lives to try to reform it. They were no longer risking their lives for their ideals—they just wanted to get out of prison. We were all caught in that uncomfortable zone between trying to save our lives and betraying ourselves.
Mohsen Safaei Farahani was our fifth cellmate. Farahani had been a member of parliament, deputy minister, and the head of Iran’s football federation. When Safaei entered the room later that night, he gave me a sad smile. We had met on a few previous occasions, and he had also known my father. In fact, he was the revolutionary who’d replaced him as CEO of Mana Construction Company after the revolution. “How are you, Mr. Bahari?” Safaei asked. “I’m so sorry I didn’t call you after your father passed away.”
Safaei had gotten to know my father well after taking over his job. I remember him calling our house seeking my father’s help in managing the company’s ten thousand employees. Even though my father was bitter about getting kicked out of his job for no good reason, he still felt responsible for the company he had built from scratch. My father spent hours explaining the company’s operations and personnel.
Unlike other new revolutionary leaders, Safaei wanted to learn from the experience of others, and this impressed my father. But he was still surprised by the naïveté of Safaei and many of his generation, how they thought they could change the world within a few years.
“It’s going to take a few decades for them to learn,” my father would say after each call with Safaei.
In 2000, when Safaei was elected as a reformist member of the parliament and spoke out against the hard-liners in the government, my father said with a sad smile and even sadder cynicism, “It took the reformists two decades to learn from their mistakes, but I’m sure they will be forced out of the government and will be replaced by a new group of idiots.” My father’s prophecy came true in 2005, when Ahmadinejad came to power and stripped Safaei and other reformists of all official positions.
I sat next to Safaei on the carpeted floor. He held my hand in his as he asked about my father, and I could sense his regret for dedicating his life to a government that had paid him back by putting him behind bars.
I asked him if he knew why we had all been transferred to a communal cell and, more importantly, why I had been put in the same cell with four politicians.
“They had a scenario that didn’t work,” Safaei said as he stretched his back. “We were all arrested according to a plan, a scenario. But their plan was too complicated for the Revolutionary Guards to execute, and it didn’t work.”
Over the next several hours, happy and relieved to have others to speak with, we talked incessantly about the circumstances behind our arrests. We eventually came to the shared conclusion that the Guards had been planning the arrests months in advance and the postelection turmoil had provided a perfect excuse to execute them. Trusting in Khamenei’s words to the very letter, the Guards leadership truly believed that the green movement was led by a few dozen reformists who were aided by the West. By arresting those reformists and those who connected them with the West, the Guards’ higher-ups thought, they could finish people’s demands for reforms and put a stop to the greens.
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