Then They Came for Me_ A Family's Story of Love, Captivity, and Survival - Maziar Bahari [18]
Areas like Robat Karim are called hashieh, or the margins, and the migrants themselves are commonly known as hashieh neshin, the margin dwellers. Each major city in Iran has a large hashieh. Most candidates ignore hashieh residents, but Ahmadinejad aggressively campaigned in these areas, warning that Mousavi was out to cut government subsidies. Since the start of the Iran-Iraq War, in 1980, the Islamic government had been selling many basic items, including rice, sugar, flour, and gasoline, to citizens at subsidized prices. This service costs the government billions of dollars every year. Though on its face the policy is intended to help the poor, consecutive governments in Iran had used it to buy people’s loyalty. But no Iranian official had ever used the system as aggressively as Ahmadinejad was doing.
Additionally, since the beginning of the revolution, the regime had also placed almost one million families—or about five million people—under the protection of the Imam Khomeini Relief Foundation. Through this charity, families receive around the equivalent of $50 per month. Targeting people’s economic fears and simultaneously offering short-term solutions, Ahmadinejad’s teams throughout the country had been stirring up fears that, if elected, Mousavi was going to make poor Iranians even poorer.
Rasool, a young engineering student I met in the crowd, told me that Robat Karim was sharply divided between the educated and the uneducated. “The educated vote for Mousavi and the uneducated vote for Ahmadinejad. When you’re poor and ignorant, you can be easily manipulated.”
For an engineering student, Rasool had an impressive knowledge of social problems in Iran. “According to the government’s own statistics, out of seventy million Iranians, ten million live in absolute poverty,” he said. “We have almost two and a half million drug addicts. Percentage-wise, that’s more than any other country in the world, and there are five million officially unemployed young men and women. This government doesn’t want people to know about what’s going on in the country. It wants to keep the people uninformed.”
I wondered where Rasool had gotten his information. He took me to the rooftop of a three-story building and showed me satellite dishes sprouting like mushrooms from many roofs in Robat Karim. “There are an increasing number of satellite television and Internet users in the area,” he said. “They are the only way we can have correct and uncensored information in Iran.” Many sites, including The New York Times’ and CNN’s, are filtered in Iran, but Rasool’s family and friends—like so many Iranians—had found ways to buy satellite antennas on the black market and used filter busters to access the forbidden Internet sites. In the period before the election, BBC Persian television, broadcasting out of London, and Voice of America, from Washington, D.C., had become the main sources of information for many Iranians. “Most people with the Internet and satellite can learn about the lies of the government and they’ll vote for Mousavi,” Rasool told me. “But the ignorant will vote for Ahmadinejad.”
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Back on the street, the enthusiasm of the Mousavi supporters was intoxicating. I was so excited about the desire for change in Robat Karim that it was hard for me to pull myself away from the area. But I knew I had to visit Ahmadinejad’s campaign headquarters on the southern part of Vali Asr Avenue to gain a better understanding of the situation. Davood reluctantly agreed to take me there. It was after seven P.M. when we arrived. The sun had already set, but it was still hot.
There is a clear class divide in Tehran. The rich live in the northern part of the city, in tall high-rises on wide streets. In the southern part of Tehran, the streets are crowded and narrower, the houses significantly more modest. The building that held Ahmadinejad’s campaign headquarters could have belonged to any factory worker