Iran Witness: Talking to Ahmadinejad...and the Opposition (Anderson)

Jon Lee Anderson writes in The New Yorker of 10 days in Iran, including an interview granted by Mahmoud Ahmadinejad granted before his autumn trip to the United Nations in New York:

Early this summer, while walking in the Alborz Mountains outside Tehran, I came across three members of Iran’s reformist Green Movement. It was a parching-hot afternoon, and they had taken shelter from the heat in a cherry orchard next to a stream, where fruit hung glistening from the branches. The Alborz Mountains have long provided refuge, clean air, and exercise for the residents of north Tehran. The northern districts are more prosperous than the rest of the city, and their residents are generally more educated and aware of foreign ideas and trends. North Tehran was not the only locus of the Green Movement, but support there was particularly intense last summer after the conservative hard-liner Mahmoud Ahmadinejad claimed victory in the disputed Presidential elections. One of the most popular hiking trails begins just outside the walls of Evin Prison, where in recent decades thousands of dissidents have been tortured, killed, and buried in secrecy. A few hundred feet away, just across a wooden bridge over a narrow river canyon, the last paved streets of the city end. Along the river’s banks are open-air teahouses, where nostalgic music is played and people drink fresh cherry juice and smoke narghile waterpipes. Such places offer a respite from the restrictions of life in the Islamic Republic, away from the roving units of religious police and the paramilitary Basij, the plainclothes zealots who attacked Green Movement supporters in last year’s protests.

Since the government crackdown, street demonstrations have been rare, and so, too, have foreign journalists in Iran. I had been given a visa to come interview Ahmadinejad, and during my stay was watched closely by the government. Even a hike in the mountains did not insure privacy; as I climbed, I saw, among the other hikers, several pairs of men who wore the scraggly beards, nondescript clothing, and tamped-down looks of Basijis. At one point, I passed a unit of soldiers. They were out hiking with everyone else, but it was apparent that they were there to make their presence felt. The women on the trail were flushed and sweating in their chadors and manteaus, the black tunics that Iranian women are obligated to wear over their clothes.In the orchard, though, women had taken off their head scarves and were laughing and talking animatedly. People greeted me politely, obviously recognizing me as a Westerner, a rare sight in Tehran these days. One man struck up a conversation; in excellent English, he made it clear that he was a reformist. Three other men who were sitting together nearby looked over appraisingly, then raised their voices enough to be overheard. Quoting the late Iranian poet Ahmad Shamlou, one of them recited:

They smell your breath,

lest you might have said I love you.

They smell your heart.

These are strange times, my darling.

The butchers are stationed at each

crossroads with bloody clubs and cleavers.

Gesturing toward Tehran in the distance, he said, “There are the new butchers. They sniff out everything, not only in public but in private life, too.” His friends nodded. One of them said, “The people’s frustrations will find an outlet once the cracks in the monolith begin to appear.

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Comments

[Catherine]

Rami Khoury also recently spent 10 days in Iran and has this te report:

It’s the intangibles that count with Iran
... this week in Beirut, when I read reports that US President Barack Obama had briefed journalists on Wednesday about US-Iranian issues, especially the possibility of resuming nuclear negotiations, I juxtaposed that against the realities and sentiments I encountered in Iran a few weeks ago. The balance sheet was mixed.

My main conclusion is that the Iranian-American tensions and their ramifications will not be resolved mainly through technical negotiations that reflect cost-benefit analyses by both sides. Rather, they will be resolved when both sides achieve their bottom line national interests, but also sufficiently understand their common intangible fears and occasional irrational manias, which relate to power on the US side and dignity and respect on the Iranian side.

Read more: http://www.dailystar.com.lb/article.asp?edition_id=10&categ_id=5&article_id=117944#axzz0vucalje7" rel="nofollow">http://www.dailystar.com.lb/article.asp?edition...

[Dissected News]

Great piece.

I was struck by the comment by Shariatmadari (advisor to Khamenei) that:

"The Green Movement, he said, was part of a grand conspiracy—conceived by, among others, Michael Ledeen (a veteran foreign-policy hawk), Richard Haass (the president of the Council on Foreign Relations), Gene Sharp (an authority on nonviolent resistance), and George Soros (the financier and philanthropist)—with the aim of overthrowing Iran’s government."

What a cohort! I've never seen such a consortium in one place.

Though he has nothing to do with the Green Movement, Shariatmadari was probably right about Michael Ledeen being part of a conspiracy to overthrow the Islamic Regime. He's the neocon pit-viper.