Then They Came for Me_ A Family's Story of Love, Captivity, and Survival - Maziar Bahari [36]
“Khamenei will pay for this. He will pay for this,” she said, crying gently.
Feeling utterly helpless, I went back home. At nine P.M., I sat down weakly in front of the television. Ahmadinejad’s victory speech and Khamenei’s message congratulating him were playing on a repeating loop. The extent to which this government was willing to publicly humiliate its people was revolting.
Before long, my phone rang. It was Davood. He said that he and his buddies had been drinking since the election results. “I feel much better now. We spent the evening fighting the local Basij members,” he told me. “We staged our own revolution here last night.” He agreed to pick me up around eleven P.M. and take me to his neighborhood.
That night, the streets in Poonak were covered with garbage and the plastic trash bins were on fire. “Welcome to Palestine,” Davood said. I watched a group of young people attack a local Basij base—an anonymous-looking office building—with sticks and stones. “Basiji bia biroon,” they yelled to the Basij members, daring them to come out.
Davood introduced me to his friends in the crowd. They told me that the night before, ten people wearing green had smashed the windows of neighborhood shops. “They had covered their faces so no one would recognize them,” one young man said. “They wanted to blame it on the greens, but when we searched them, three of them had Basij cards on them.”
As I listened to these stories and watched Davood and his friends throw rocks and pieces of a destroyed sidewalk railing at the base, I was speechless. How had we gotten here? These were the same kids who had demonstrated peacefully in the days leading up to the election, who had gone to vote peacefully on Friday. Now, all their dreams were shattered.
Davood told me that they were not sure whether anyone was in the building but they were happy to throw stones at it anyway, just to let off steam. Davood could see that I was uncomfortable. He put his head close to mine and screamed over the noise: “What do you want me to do, Mr. Maziar? They’ve kicked me out of school. I’m unemployed. What can I do?” When he pulled back, he had tears in his eyes. I had no answer for him. “I’m going to buy a gun tomorrow,” he told me. “We’ll show them what we’re capable of.”
During the annual hajj, Muslims’ pilgrimage to Mecca, pilgrims throw stones at a pillar that represents Satan. Like those pilgrims, the young people in Poonak were throwing stones at the Basij, who, for them, symbolized the evil in the country. I began to wonder when this kind of symbolic attack would turn into real attacks against Basij members, not only with tree branches and stones but with guns and Molotov cocktails.
When I got home, I tried to find out what was going on in different parts of the country by contacting some of my friends on Facebook. Despite the government’s effort to block Facebook, many Iranians used Freegate, a filter buster developed by Chinese dissidents to circumvent government censors; they used Facebook and Twitter to communicate with the outside world and with one another. In fact, Iran had the largest community of bloggers outside of the United States and China. There were more blogs in Persian than in any other language except English. The Iranian government’s long-standing monopoly on information was being challenged not only on the streets but also in cyberspace.
By this time, Facebook was the most reliable source of information. There were reports of sporadic demonstrations all around the country, but it seemed that the police had succeeded in intimidating ordinary people in most cities and preventing them from taking to the streets. The police warnings had