Then They Came for Me_ A Family's Story of Love, Captivity, and Survival - Maziar Bahari [8]
Now, with his handpicked president, Ahmadinejad, in place, Supreme Leader Khamenei could gain absolute power and snuff out anyone who sought to challenge him. While to many Iranians this was a terrifying prospect, to many of those who supported Ahmadinejad, there could be no higher goal. For they didn’t think of Khamenei as merely the leader of the country; to them, he was Allah’s representative on earth, a god-king who should have absolute control over the citizens’ lives.
Though the supreme leader is supposed to remain impartial when it comes to elections, it was clear that Khamenei supported Ahmadinejad in his quest to amass power. A month before the elections, in a speech in the province of Kurdistan, Khamenei had criticized “those who exaggerate problems in Iran” and asked Iranians to vote for “the candidate who lives more modestly, is not corrupt, and understands people’s pain.” Khamenei did not mention any names, but there was no doubt that he was urging people to support Ahmadinejad.
With the help of Khamenei and the Guards, Ahmadinejad had taken every measure to secure his reelection. With the rising price of oil, which accounts for 80 percent of Iran’s revenue, the government had billions of dollars to spend. Ahmadinejad had been unabashedly using quite a bit of this money to hand out unguaranteed loans for anything that could secure him a vote: mortgages, college educations, even weddings. The amount and the number of loans granted had been steadily rising in the months before the election, as Ahmadinejad traveled around the country and reminded the anxious crowds that only he would continue to support the poor like this. Should anyone else come to power, he claimed, loans would be cut and the poor would suffer. Ahmadinejad was, in effect, trying to buy his reelection.
In many ways, Mousavi was Ahmadinejad’s opposite. He had served as the prime minister of Iran from 1982 until 1989, though the office was never clearly defined by Iran’s Constitution and was abolished after Khomeini’s death, in 1989. Mousavi was now one of the leaders of Iran’s reformist movement, part of a generation of ex-revolutionaries who wanted to bring an end to the extremist policies and rhetoric of the recent past and move Iran more progressively toward greater respect for freedom of expression and human rights and rapprochement with the rest of the world. Mousavi believed in a more open and democratic interpretation of Islam than Khamenei and Ahmadinejad, and was campaigning on the promise to bring more accountability and transparency to the Islamic Republic. Those who supported him hoped that under his leadership, there would be less government and religious interference in the personal lives of Iran’s citizens, giving them more freedom in matters ranging from the way they dressed to how they conducted business. What this meant, it was quietly understood, was that Mousavi would do what he could to curtail the power of the supreme leader.
Of course, among the many unknowns in the upcoming election was the question of how, exactly, Mousavi would accomplish this goal. He could not talk in specifics. The election supervisory councils, whose members were selected by Khamenei, could easily disqualify Mousavi if he ever criticized the supreme leader openly. In Iran, only candidates who are approved by the supreme leader and his selected officials can qualify to run for office. In fact, Mousavi was the reformists’ main candidate only by default; all the other candidates had either been disqualified by the supervisory councils or had chosen not to register because they knew they would be disqualified.
Iran’s labyrinthine system of government puzzles foreigners and Iranians alike. The complex structure is derived from the fact that “Islamic Republic” itself is a contradiction in terms. On the one