Go anywhere in Tehran north of the Imam Khomeini square and you were liable to see the glass fronts of state-owned banks smashed in and, particularly at night, groups of police and Basij, often together, on foot or tooling around on motorbikes, and the groups of protesters they were looking for. The protesters, though they sometimes fought back, in most cases would disperse to regroup elsewhere to start another fire, a process made more difficult – but not impossible – by the regime’s shutting down of mobile phone SMS services.
I learnt that people were arriving from regional centres near Tehran to take part in the protests and reports were coming in of unrest breaking out in Esfahan and other major cities. The regime’s response was to escalate the violence. Reports emerged of the Basij storming university dormitories, killing two young women and three young men. Veteran Middle East correspondent Robert Fisk later reported that they then carried the bodies away and buried them in unmarked graves.
On my way to the airport, we stopped to buy water at a shop in south Tehran. The polite and friendly storekeeper asked me in broken English where I was from and if I was a tourist. When I said I was a journalist, he told me to write that ‘Ahmadinejad is motherfucker. He is motherfucker!’
As I noted at the time in my final blog entry for The Diplomat, I finally finished reading Michael Axworthy’s Empire of the Mind on the plane. The book, a recent edition, covers Iranian history well into Ahmadinejad’s first term before closing with a thoughtful passage that reads:
‘Since 1979 Iran has challenged the West, and Western conceptions of what civilisation should be. That might have been praiseworthy in itself, had it not been for the suffering and oppression, the dishonesty and disappointment that followed. Could Iran offer more than that? Iran could, and should.’
As I finished reading, a young Lebanese-Canadian boy called Ahmed who was sitting next to me asked, ‘Good book?’
‘Yes,’ I replied, ‘but it needs another chapter.’
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