Then They Came for Me_ A Family's Story of Love, Captivity, and Survival - Maziar Bahari [143]
I am often asked if the green movement is dead. My answer is no. People may not be able to demonstrate their anger at the government, but the movement is getting stronger every day. The protests I witnessed in the streets of Tehran in June 2009 were part of a civil rights movement, through which people peacefully demanded their rights as citizens of the country. Those who expected the green movement to topple Khamenei’s government and bring a Western-style democracy to power were wrong.
The green movement is a collective cry among Iranians for a normal life. In fact, for the first time in the history of Iran, this political movement is based on a fundamental respect for life, rather than an ideological notion that people must sacrifice themselves for a cause. My parents’ and even Maryam’s generation believed that there was nothing more sacred than martyrdom, but the new generation of young Iranians do not believe that any idea or cause is worth dying for; they want to remain alive and celebrate life.
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Soon after my release, many of my friends and more than a few strangers with connections inside the government started to contact me to tell me the details that had eventually led to my arrest and the arrest of hundreds of other people. Fearing the government’s reprisal, they contacted me by email and Skype using pseudonyms, or called me from temporary cell phone numbers so that their identities could not be tracked. In some cases, they risked losing their jobs or being incarcerated to tell me what they knew; they did it, they said, because they felt that what happened to me was wrong.
According to these accounts, the Revolutionary Guards came up with a plan to incriminate the reformists a year before the election, and received Khamenei’s blessing to carry it out. The Guards’ plan was to crack down on the reformists by connecting them with Western powers. The Guards knew that many Iranians resented Western interference in Iran and the Middle East region, and they shrewdly wanted to take advantage of it.
By getting rid of reformists through a smear campaign, the Guards hoped to guarantee the survival of Khamenei’s regime for the foreseeable future. “In fact, many of the Guards did not think they were concocting a plot,” a government insider told me. “They genuinely believed that the reformists received money and guidance from the West, and that under sufficient pressure they would spill the beans.”
This information, which was told to me off the record, was later corroborated by certain courageous, anonymous Iranian journalists and regime insiders, who exposed the Guards’ secret plan on the Internet.
According to the Guards’ scenario, three people would act as interlocutors with the West: Hossein Rassam, a political analyst with the British embassy, was supposed to be the diplomatic contact with the West; Kian Tajbakhsh, the Open Society Institute’s representative in Iran, was given the role of nongovernmental go-between; and I was the connection between the evil Western media and the reformists.
The half-baked script didn’t work, because there was no such connection between the reformists and the West, and most Iranians simply did not believe the regime’s propaganda. Within a few months of our arrests, therefore, the Guards gave up the plan and had to release all three of us. Rassam and Tajbakhsh are still prohibited from leaving Iran. “You were lucky your wife was pregnant,” a friend told me. The Guards were worried that Paola could die because of the stress of my incarceration. “The last thing the Guards wanted was to have a dead British mother or baby on their hands. That’s why they let you leave the country.”
Since my release