One year on, Iran’s battered opposition endures in terror

The Times

A year ago today Bahareh Maghami, 28, a primary school teacher, was arrested at Ghoba mosque, Tehran, during the huge demonstrations that followed Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s disputed election victory. She was beaten and raped. She fled to Germany and recently posted an open letter on the internet because, she said, “there is nothing left of me and no reason to hide my name any more”.

She recalled: “There were three of them. All were dirty and wore beards. They had a terrible accent and foul mouths. Even though they saw that I was a virgin they accused me of being a whore and forced me to admit I was a prostitute.” She still wakes in terror at night, still smells their sweat.

Her father “shattered into pieces” when he learnt her fate, and her mother “aged a hundred years overnight”. Because of her shame “relatives, friends, neighbours and everyone cut off relations”. The family was driven from Tehran, and then from Iran. As for herself, it is “as if my whole humanity is taken away from me. My womanhood was destroyed. I will never be able to love a man. I’m like the walking dead.”

Ms Maghami is not alone in her wretchedness. Tens of millions of Iranians turned out to vote for Mir Hossein Mousavi on June 12 last year, encouraged to believe by the huge and exuberant opposition rallies of the previous week that they really could oust Mr Ahmadinejad’s repressive regime.

It was an illusion. That night their excitement turned to terror. State television pre-emptively declared Mr Ahmadinejad the winner. The internet and mobile telephone systems went down. Security forces poured on to the streets, beating anyone in sight. Within two days most foreign journalists had to leave Iran and the regime unleashed a campaign of singular brutality.

It took eight months but the demonstrations were eventually snuffed out. More than 100 protesters were killed, including Neda Soltan, the student who became a global symbol of the regime’s inhumanity. Others died mysteriously, among them Mr Mousavi’s nephew and a young doctor who witnessed the deaths of inmates in an infamous detention centre. More than 5,000 demonstrators have been arrested, and that is the official figure. Many more — lawyers, rights activists, academics, students, artists — have been held in an attempt to decapitate the “Green Movement”.

Mr Mousavi and his co-leaders, Mehdi Karoubi and Mohammed Khatami, the former President, have escaped arrest only because the regime fears the eruption that would follow. Many detainees have been tortured. Amnesty International reported this week that they have suffered “severe beatings, using hands, feet or cables; electric shocks; confinement in tiny spaces; hanging upside down by the feet for long periods; rape of both men and women, including with implements; death threats, including mock executions”.

Hundreds have appeared at televised show trials and have made forced “confessions”. At least 16 political prisoners have been condemned to death, and two hanged. In total, 115 Iranians have been executed this year “to make it absolutely clear that those who express any form of dissent ... will face the harshest penalties”.

More than 100 journalists have been forced to flee the country and 23 newspapers have been shut down, according to Reporters Without Borders (RWB). About 170 journalists and bloggers have been arrested; 22 have been sentenced to terms totalling 135 years, while 85 await trial or sentencing.

“An entire profession of journalists, political observers and social activists ... has been eradicated,” said RWB. The Committee to Protect Journalists said that Iran was the “world’s worst jailer of journalists”. Thousands more Iranians have fled abroad but the regime’s efforts to silence its critics do not stop at Iran’s borders. Tehran-based relatives of outspoken exiles such as Shirin Ebadi, the Nobel peace laureate, and Arash Hejazi, the doctor who tried to save Neda Soltan’s life, have been harassed or arrested.

Shahab Mossavat, 40, a former television presenter, fled to London after being beaten in prison. He has received five threatening calls from Iranian intelligence agents. “They say things like, ‘Your wife is too pretty to be a widow so young’,” he told The Times. Other Iranian refugees in Britain declined to talk for fear of reprisals against relatives at home. Iranian diplomats film demonstrators outside the London embassy.

The regime suppresses any challenge to its own narrative — that the Green Movement is a creature of Western powers determined to destroy the Islamic Republic. As a result, the regime blocks websites, monitors e-mails and telephone calls and jams foreign satellite channels such as the BBC Persian service. The families of those killed are denied mourning ceremonies and are offered blood money to drop their complaints.

Football matches have been broadcast without sound to thwart anti-regime chanting. Ministries and universities have been purged. The hated “morality police” are suppressing deviant Western behaviour — even dyed hair and painted nails — with renewed zeal.

In a sense the strategy has worked. The regime has survived, for now, the worst crisis in the Islamic Republic’s 31-year history. Some people still shout defiance from Tehran’s rooftops at night, daub slogans on walls and deface banknotes, but the capital is so saturated with security forces that opposition leaders called off a rally today in order to “protect people’s lives and property”.

The Green Movement has lost momentum and some supporters bemoan its lack of strategy and leadership. There is, however, a widespread conviction that the regime has won only a pyrrhic victory and has sown the seeds of its own eventual collapse. A Government that claims to champion Islamic values has lost all legitimacy and moral authority, with Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the once-revered Supreme Leader, now widely reviled. The economy is deteriorating, and the political establishment is divided. Last week a hardline crowd shouted down Hassan Khomeini during a speech commemorating his grandfather, Ayatollah Khomeini, founder of the Islamic Republic.

Karim Sadjadpour, of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in Washington, said: “Government brutality and intimidation can withstand the march of history for years, but not indefinitely.”

David Miliband, the former Foreign Secretary, told The Times: “You’ve got to believe a country which is repressing its own people is going to get its comeuppance, and that’s quadruply so in an educated, civilised country like Iran.”

Ms Maghami urges other victims to speak out. “They must write so that those who come after us and live in a free Iran know what price was paid for their freedom.” Of Ayatollah Khamenei she asks: “You consider yourself the father of this nation? I was a daughter of Iran. Your sons raped me. Who will pay for my lost dignity?”