On television the next day, Ahmadenijad, to the stirring strains of orchestral music over footage of Iranians at the polls, was proclaimed the winner by such a large margin that there was no need for a secondary, run-off vote. I rang a local journalist to get his thoughts. His voice came down the line hard and sharp. ‘It’s obviously rigged,’ he said, adding that the results were simply unbelievable, that the numbers were way off.
I was unconvinced. My contact was, I knew, a Mousavi supporter who was appalled and embarrassed by what the pro-Mousavi camp saw as the attention-grabbing incumbent’s laughable statements, adventurist foreign policy and economic mismanagement. Perhaps he was just incapable of accepting the fact that his compatriots had rewarded this behaviour with a second term.
In any case, a win in the first round of voting meant I didn’t have to spend another week in Tehran. I could get away and see the Meidan of Esfahan, Persepolis and perhaps a few of Iran’s eight other UNESCO World Heritage sites, and talk to the ordinary people – particularly the young – about their lives and their hopes for the future.
To do that, I needed to extend my visa. I went through the bustling streets to the Laleh International Hotel, which was housing the offices of the Ministry of Culture and Islamic Guidance-approved Ivan Sahar ‘news services agency’. The visa extension was supposed to be a formality, but on arrival I was shown a notice from the ministry that read: This is to inform you that since the presidential election results have already come out and there is no second round, therefore there will be no extension of visa at all. Please convey this message to all the foreign press people.
Annoyed, I got talking to journalist Toshiharu Tanio and cameraman Masaichi Asai from Japan’s Nippon TV. Toshi asked me what I thought would happen. I said, thinking of the empty streets over the last two nights, that I didn’t expect anything much would. In fact, I thought the Mousavi supporters would go home and bitch about it on the Internet as they made their applications for visas to America, Europe and Australia.
In short, I didn’t believe they had the courage.
Just then, my phone rang. On the other end, his voice largely drowned out by shouts, was a computing student I had stayed with. Eventually, I managed to make out one word: ‘Vanak’. It was enough. The Japanese crew and I piled into their hired minibus and headed to the Vanak square.
As we approached, the traffic thickened and slowed to a crawl. Something was happening up ahead. By the time we arrived, it seemed the khaki-clad riot police had managed to mostly clear the central square. Protesters still lined some of the streets that fed into it, and groups spilled out from the openings into the square itself. On cue, a line of police charged at one such surge, smacking wildly with their batons as soon as they were in range. The protesters scattered, some ran around the corner, onto Valiasr, others were reabsorbed by the main group. It reminded me unsettlingly of a cattle round-up.
As we prepared to get out of the van, Asai removed one tape from his camera and inserted a new one with military efficiency. I didn’t want to hold things up by fumbling in my bag to look for my spare memory card, but neither did I want to lose my photos if the police decided to look at my camera. I left it in the van and turned on my little digital voice recorder, then put it in my bag between the pages of a magazine.
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