Then They Came for Me_ A Family's Story of Love, Captivity, and Survival - Maziar Bahari [138]
Davood still plans to travel, and possibly study, for a while outside of Iran. “I already have a gift for your daughter, Mr. Maziar,” Davood told me affectionately. “I can’t wait to give it to her myself.”
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Since Ahmadinejad’s reelection, many of those who opposed him have turned their anger against Khamenei as the main culprit behind the fraudulent election and the atrocities committed in its aftermath. Whereas during the postelection protests people chanted, “Where is my vote?” and “Death to Ahmadinejad,” these days one can rarely hear anti-Ahmadinejad slogans. People overwhelmingly blame Khamenei for the rapes, tortures, and murders. According to the people who know him, Khamenei recognizes that the gap between the people and his government is widening. But rather than looking for a long-term solution or listening to his people, he is trying to narrow that gap through brute force. The supreme leader is becoming ever more isolated and deluded about his own powers.
My friend Amir no longer uses honorifics when he talks about the supreme leader. “Khamenei thinks the current situation is temporary,” Amir told me when I spoke with him on Skype soon after my release. “He thinks that by jailing a few people, he can put a stop to the green movement. He is incapable of understanding that many Iranians cannot accept a god-king and want to be in charge of their own destiny in the twenty-first century.”
These days, Amir is a worried man. He is in what he likes to call “a contemplative period.”
He has very little choice. Like those of many other reformists, Amir’s actions are carefully watched by Khamenei’s henchmen, just as, like many despots before him, Khamenei now seeks revenge against former friends and allies who have broken ranks with him.
Amir says that he has received several threatening messages by phone or through friends, warning him that he should watch his actions and words. Even so, he continued to visit Mousavi until February 2011, when the regime put Mousavi and his brave wife under house arrest. Since then, only Mousavi’s two daughters can visit them. On March 31, 2011, Mousavi’s 103-year-old father died. Mousavi’s father was a distant cousin of Khamenei and had given him shelter before the 1979 revolution, when Khamenei was fighting against the shah. After hearing the news, I asked Amir on Skype if he was going to attend the funeral. “An intelligence officer called one of our friends only a few minutes ago and warned me against going there,” Amir told me. “I don’t think they’re going to let the funeral proceed peacefully.” Amir was right. With Khamenei’s tacit approval, the funeral was disrupted and several people were arrested and imprisoned.
“Before the 2009 elections we thought we could persuade him to change, but we were wrong. Khamenei and his regime cannot be reformed. This regime is like an old car that can’t be repaired anymore. You might be able to use it for spare parts, but the car itself should be scrapped.”
Amir says he is “like a father whose son has become a drug addict and a thief.”
In April 2011, I flew to Dubai for a few days to meet Amir. We sat in the lobby of a luxurious hotel, smoking Havana cigars, as the music of the Lebanese diva Fairouz played in the background. I asked him whether rising up in revolt against the shah’s dictatorship under the guidance of Khomeini had been the right thing to do, and if he supported the idea of another violent revolution in Iran.
He couldn’t have responded more quickly: “No and no.”
He then paused for a few minutes as he quietly puffed his cigar. “To tell you the truth, Maziar, we were young and immature at the time of the revolution. The shah’s government was no doubt a corrupt dictatorship, but we didn’t even think once about what kind of government we wanted to replace it with. We kept on talking about an ‘Islamic government,