Tehran Ignites

September 23, 2009

By Austin Mackell

On hoardings, garish depictions of half-dressed women advertised the latest films. Status, and the lack of it, is not just about money – it is also about sex and desire. Tehran was a place of aspiration, but in the late ’70s it became a place of resentment, frustrated desire and frustrated aspirations for many.’

This pent-up sexual anger, which Axeworthy credits as one of the motivating forces for the unemployed young men in Tehran who, along with students, merchants, unionists and leftists, would become the foot soldiers of the 1979 revolution against the brutal US-backed regime of the Shah has clearly not dissipated. It is, however, by no means the only source of tension.

The disparity of wealth in Iran, while not massive by world standards, is also a factor, as is the embarrassment of the more educated and worldly Iranians at being represented on the world stage by a man who flirts with holocaust denial, denies outright the existence of homosexuals in his country and has repeatedly invoked the Mehdi, an apocalyptic figure in Shia Islam, in public discussions.
There is also an overriding sense amongst the reformists and moderates – the globally oriented classes - that they are sick of being intimidated. The ones I spoke to were sure they could win the intellectual debate, but were fed up with waiting for their chance. The election had offered them a glimmer of hope, the announced results had dashed expectations, and they were keen for someone to take their anger out on – like the unfortunate Basij caught on his own on Valiasr.

I turned to Iman and said, ‘But there are some Basij who are with Mousavi’ (I had interviewed one at length a few days earlier). He was sure I was mistaken; being a foreigner I must have been confused about the constellation of alliances within the country.

‘No, the Basij are with Ahamdinejad,’ he corrected me. After I explained, more than once, that I had actually spoken to one, he told me that he was definitely an exception.

Soon after this, Iman managed to call a friend of his who lived nearby and told me he was heading to his house. I had had enough, too, and, fearful of what would happen when the police returned with reinforcements, was tempted to ask if I could come with him, but decided that braving the chaos until I got to the travel agent was the lesser of two dangers and set off on my own.

It was only then that the scale of the uprising became apparent. Angry crowds of varying sizes and incorporating people of all ages were everywhere. Skip bins were dragged into the centre of intersections and set ablaze, along with anything else people could find. By the time I reached a street where the traffic was still moving, the sky was masked by a brown haze. I took a taxi to the travel agent and booked my flight to Lebanon.

In my remaining three days, stories of police brutality against journalists became commonplace. (I would later get an email from Toshi revealing that during his brief arrest the police had ‘bit [him] really hard’. I thought he must be misspelling ‘beat’, but he assured me he meant bitten, with teeth.) I stuck to a policy of staying in the car.