Eating Mud Crabs in Kandahar (14 page)

Modern statues made of bronze and stone are interspersed among the trees and flower bushes. A cozy art gallery in the corner displays the latest artwork of the budding artist community that has emerged under the rules of the Islamic Republic, which mandate that artistic expression fit religious sensibilities. Nude and sensual images are forbidden in paintings, so artists have become creative in expressing their true intent while superficially abiding by the rules.

The Islamic Republic's strict social rules mandate that young men and women not socialize publicly, and schools and even some university classes are segregated. However, youth have consistently bent the rules by finding friendly places, such as the Artist House Café, in which they can mingle. Tehran's mountain trails, parks, and cinemas are other popular destinations for young people. The first time I ate at the café in 2002, student members of the Office for Fostering Unity had invited me to attend one of their weekly meetings over dinner. In Iranian culture, the exchange of information—from family gossip to political secrets—centers primarily on a meal.

I happily gorged on the creative, strictly vegetarian menu prepared from classic Persian recipes. The food was a kind of experiment in fusion Persian; each little dish was its own political statement, the culinary expression of the shifting mood of the young people. The tofu replacing lamb chunks in the classic favorite
ghormeh sabzi
stew seemed like more than just a postmodern interpretation of Iranian cuisine. In that atmosphere, it also reflected the yearning for change in Iran's society—not the kind of change that forsakes tradition, upends cultural norms, and throws out your grandmother's best recipe for fried chicken, but a slow-cooking, reformist version of Iran in which, ideally, religion and tradition could complement democracy, not stifle it. The students, a group of a dozen young men and women, sipped fresh pomegranate juice and planned for a campus sit-in to protest the death sentence handed down to a professor who had said that people should not “follow religious teachings blindly like a monkey.”

A young woman named Setareh read out bullet points of a speech she was preparing for the sit-in. She touched on the importance of free speech in an academic environment and how a new wave of student arrests had sown fear and panic on campus. Another student, Sajad, suggested that they also enlist a few reformist-minded professors to back them up with their own speeches.

I listened with fascination and envy. I had also attended college in Iran, at the very same university as some of these students, in the early 1990s.
But our college years were completely devoid of political activism. In fact, a kind of apathy ruled back when I was a student. Unlike the students sitting before me, with their lofty ideals of reform and practical ideas about how to execute them, my generation believed we were powerless to change the status quo. The reform movement, which took Iran by storm in 1997 with the election of President Mohamad Khatami, had not been born then.

During my college years, mornings and afternoons were withered away sipping cappuccino and café glacé at the-then popular Café Theater. We didn't even bother reading the newspaper, because back then our choice was between two government-owned papers, one more dreary than the other. We discussed love affairs, parties, and also literature and art. But mostly my friends and I plotted our escape from Iran. Mine would be easy, a return to the United States, where I was born and had lived for a decade after the revolution.

Our food options in the early 1990s were no more exciting than our newspapers. Our beloved Café Theater did not serve food. It was strictly a coffee joint, but thanks to the growing patronage of lingering hungry students, the owner—a shabby, chain-smoking, long-haired artist we called Uncle—finally put one item on the menu: an unimaginative cheeseburger and fries, served with a side of Iranian-made ketchup and mayonnaise.

It wasn't uncommon for Uncle to walk over to a table of young men and women, especially nonregulars, and segregate them by sending the girls upstairs. Or he would ask women to put their cigarettes down. He feared the morality police, who sometimes made the rounds in popular cafés and threatened to fine the owners or close their shops.

At the Artist House Café, however, change was everywhere. A stack of more than a dozen daily newspapers carrying a colorful array of political views, from ultraconservative to reformist, was available to read. Young men and women mingled freely for hours and often tables merged, forming one big party.

The vegetarian menu changed daily, based on the season and market availability. The restaurant was Iran's answer to Chez Panisse. The manager
was a cheerful Iranian yogi who kept a basket near the café's entrance with leaflets advertising spiritual lessons, meditation, and yoga classes.

He served an exquisite sampling of six courses in small glass bowls placed tastefully on a large round copper tray for each individual. A typical meal included a lentil soup; diced salad of cucumber, tomatoes, and mint; a mini bite-size eggplant-cheese pizza; saffron rice with lentils and caramelized raisins; a tofu stew cooked with chopped fresh herbs such as cilantro and chives. Dessert might be custard with Persian mulberries. No alcohol is served in public in Iran, so to drink you would get a healthy glass of fresh watermelon or pomegranate juice decorated with a bright paper umbrella.

I had precisely this platter in mind that July day when I spotted the first gunman. He looked almost obese, his fat tummy bulging against the buttons of his checkered shirt, which was untucked over his baggy gray pants. His movements were swift, as if he was in a hurry, and his eyes darted around. I noticed him because he looked out of place.

He grabbed one of the students by throwing an arm around the student's neck. With his other hand, he pointed a gun at the student's head.

The student's black leather pouch dropped to the ground with a thump. His scrawny body wiggled, his legs jerked, his arms flapped. The man tightened his grip on the student's throat to still him. The student's cheeks flushed. He gasped for air and gagged.

We were standing on the sidewalk of Mottahari Avenue, one of central Tehran's busiest intersections. Shops were open all around us. Traffic whizzed by. Passersby crossed the streets.

When the student finally let out a scream, I also screamed.

“Shut up, shut up. Do you hear me?” the man yelled at me, briefly removing his gun from the student's forehead to point it toward where I was standing with my journalist friends.

Two other gunmen emerged from a car dealership next door. They abducted two other students in the same fashion as the first one, with guns pointed at their foreheads. The students were dragged and shoved inside
two unmarked cars parked at the curb. One of the gunmen kept glancing back at us, waving his gun in the air.

Although they wore plainclothes, it was easy to identify them as members of the Basij paramilitary force. They had that stony expression of hate and rage in their eyes. I had seen that look many times before when Basij members waved their daggers, batons, and chains to disperse crowds of anti-government protesters.

The Basij are a voluntary task force, estimated to be between one million and three million, who act as the Islamic regime's chief enforcers. The Basij's official—they are under the command of the Revolutionary Guards—and yet unofficial, nonuniform status allows officials to play a charade of accountability. The government claims ownership of the Basij when it wants to show high numbers of supporters on election days and at government-sanctioned demonstrations, but then it disowns them if their brutal actions come back to haunt or embarrass the regime in any way.

In July 2003 the United States had just invaded Iraq. In less than two years, the United States had successfully removed two of Iran's top enemies, Saddam Hussein in Iraq and the Taliban in Afghanistan. But the Islamic Republic was now sandwiched, from east and west, between borders that housed massive American military bases.

At home, reformists were deadlocked in a political battle with conservatives. After years of unsuccessfully trying to reform the Islamic regime, reformers, long viewed as part of the establishment rather than as challengers, were morphing into a serious force of internal opposition.

The regime felt understandably nervous and vulnerable. Perhaps emboldened by the events in Iraq and Afghanistan, large protests and riots erupted spontaneously in Iran. Night after night, thousands of people poured out, on foot and in cars, near the campus of Tehran University to shout anti-government slogans. Anti-riot police, Basij, and the regular police were dispatched nightly to battle the unruly crowds, who threw bricks and set fires to keep the cops away.

Student activists were at the forefront of these street demonstrations. For the first time, I heard the roar of “Death to the Dictator,” which protestors said was meant for Iran's supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. And then more shocking words: “Mr. Bush, where are you?” Although Iranians did not wish for war, at that early stage of the American occupation of Iraq, when the depth of the fiasco had not yet materialized, many wondered if Iran was missing out on an American-imported democracy and economic prosperity.

I had been quickly dispatched by the
Wall Street Journal
from Baghdad, where I was based, to my childhood hometown, Tehran. In the midst of street battles, speeches, and mass protests, meals (especially those lovingly prepared by my grandmother) had become a refuge for me, stolen moments of normality and appetite in a city where nothing much else seemed normal.

At night, as my cell phone rang with news of riots, clashes, and arrests, my grandmother hovered around me insisting I finish a plate of lamb shank and green rice, made from fresh dill and fava beans, before I headed out the door.

The charged environment of that summer was the backdrop of the student activists' press conference. They wanted to tell us they had canceled their annual campus demonstration in light of recent crackdowns because they were afraid violent clashes would result. They did not suspect what awaited them outside the door that day.

After watching the abduction, I remember feeling shocked and then confused. This wasn't what I was used to seeing in Iran. Yes, dissidents and critics were routinely jailed and tortured, but rarely did the regime put out its iron fist in broad daylight for all to see, in front of a group of foreign journalists. Something was changing. The regime seemed to have acquired a sudden willingness to resort to open violence.

Iran captured the world's attention in the spring of 2009, when millions of people poured into the streets contesting the reelection of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. But for those of us who had been covering Iran
for decades, the country's downward spiral from the path of reform to dictatorship began that summer of 2003, with the protests and the arrests of students.

On that day, many thoughts ran through my mind:
Is it safe to linger around to gather more information, or should I ditch the scene?
As I pondered, the students who were still inside the building called to us from the window.

“Please don't go. Please come back inside and stay with us. If you leave us they will raid the building and take all of us away,” pleaded one of them from the second-floor window.

The students believed that the presence of international journalists would grant them some protection. And so I didn't eat that day. We didn't go to the Artist House Café. I spent nine hours, along with about half a dozen other journalists, acting as human shields to the student activists hiding inside the building. Lunch could wait.

While gunmen waited for us outside, we worked the phones calling reformist Parliament members, the president's office, and Tehran's police chief. Although Iran's shadow power structure allows for Basij to operate independently from the police, we still thought the police chief had the power to intervene. Eventually, teams of police officers were dispatched to escort us out of the area. They told us to head straight home and not stop on the way.

It turned out that our efforts bought the students time, but not safety. In the weeks that followed, nearly every one of the students present at the press conference and the activist leaders with whom I had dined at the Artist House Café would be arrested and jailed. They were picked up, in more or less the same unofficial, brutal manner, by plainclothes men with guns.

At my family's home late at night unable to sleep, I combed through my notebooks, ticking off the names of the detained students. I imagined them confined to tiny cells in solitary confinement at the notorious Evin prison. I wondered how they coped with the lengthy interrogations and the torture they would inevitably face. I felt guilty for quoting them in my stories—even with their consent—and knew those published comments would be used
against them in court. When these thoughts became unbearable, I remembered the students' faces as they laughed and drafted speeches about freedom while passing around a bowl of saffron rice pudding, digging in their spoons with delight and insisting that I must have a taste.

I didn't have the heart to go back to the Artist House Café that summer. But on future trips, I did go back. A new generation of student activists, more seasoned and angrier, has emerged, and they still go there to eat lunch and share their dreams of a freer, more democratic Iran over a perfectly delicious dish of walnut and pomegranate stew.

MATT REES

ARIEL SHARON WAS ASHAMED OF HIS WEIGHT. I COULDN'T TELL YOU
exactly how heavy he was; the jacket of the light-gray business suit he usually wore disguised the extent of his belly and the dangling mass of his upper arms. Only when he walked could you make out the way he lifted his thighs around each other instead of moving them directly forward.