[FREE IRAN Project] In The Spirit Of Cyrus The Great

[stefania]

Iran Filled with Fear and Frankness
San Francisco Chronicle - By Robert Collier
Dec 21, 2003


Tehran -- In late October, as the Iranian government was plunging into a high- stakes dispute over allegations that its nuclear energy program covered up a secret weapons program, I wangled a much-coveted press visa, which U.S. correspondents rarely receive.

Why me? Tehran officials must want to do some public-relations spinning with California in a bid to undercut the Washington hard line against Iran, I assumed.

But PR, I quickly found out, was the furthest thing from the minds of the Iranian government's bureaucracy.

During my four-week stay in Iran, I received no answer to my repeated requests for interviews with government officials. Not even the Foreign Minstry spokesman would deign to speak with me. Despite being next on the regime-change list for some Washington conservatives, Iran seems curiously uninterested in explaining its case to the media.

The reformist government of President Mohammed Khatami, which won elections in 1997 and 2001 amid high hopes that he would reduce the hard-line ayatollahs' grip on everyday life, seems increasingly paralyzed and resigned to its imminent demise.

"Nobody wants to talk, especially to an American journalist, because nobody knows what the real policy is, and they're afraid they'll get it wrong and will get into big trouble for it," said one reformist member of Parliament in a private conversation.

On the streets, however, there's a peculiar mix of fear and extreme frankness and almost no consensus. In scores of interviews conducted at random in Tehran, Qom, Esfahan, Yazd and the Caspian Sea coast, I found almost as many opinions as people interviewed.

Radical reformers, who advocate an end to religious rule and want cultural liberalism, talk in language eerily reminiscent of leftist revolutionaries whom I met when I was covering Central America's civil wars in the 1980s -- except that these Iranians are militantly pro-American.

Some look forward with glee to legislative elections scheduled for February, when the more moderate Khatami faction is widely expected to lose its parliamentary majority to the religious conservatives allied with Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.

"I hope the reformers lose, because only then will people get out of their heads the ridiculous hope that incremental change is going to get them anywhere," said one opposition activist in Tehran. "The only way is to force a confrontation, like in the protests last June, except for people not to be able to back down."

The student-led protests in June were crushed by the police and conservative vigilante groups after several days of clashes, with hundreds of protesters arrested and scores injured.

On the other extreme are the religious conservatives, who have been showing a pragmatic image in recent months, yet continue to espouse hard-line Muslim conduct that is rejected by most Iranians.

In the downtown Tehran bazaar, long a bastion of support for the religious fundamentalists, conservatives whip themselves into a fervor with lurid stories, perhaps apocryphal, of the moral depravity of the reformists.

Farhad Ranjbar, a cooking ware merchant in the Tehran bazaar, explained the inevitable chaos that leads from too much reform, as he saw during a recent bus trip to Turkey. "As soon as we crossed the border into Turkey, all women took off their hejab (veil) and even their shirts and were dancing in the aisles singing." His voice shook. "Just their, you know, their underthings. It was horrible. It made me so furious."

Sometimes, the stories are so far-fetched it's hard to know what to believe. A foreigner can hardly get through any conversation about current events without being fed a somewhat tortured worldview -- for example, how the United States and Britain are conspiring simultaneously with the ayatollahs, Israel and Iraq's Saddam Hussein to prevent democracy and maintain religious rule in Iran.

"I've never served in a place with more conspiracy theories or more wacky ones," a Western diplomat in Tehran told me. "Many Iranians certainly are free thinkers, though that isn't always a good thing."

What is definitely not a good thing is the Kamikaze craziness of Iranian drivers. Iran has one of the world's highest rates of traffic-related fatalities, and it's easy to see why. At nearly every intersection, you're likely to find swarms of motorcyclists driving in every direction, driving the wrong way down streets, flooding through red lights with not a care or caution in the world.

But Iran is also a proud, refined country with a high Persian culture dating back 7,000 years. The few Western tourists who visit the country -- mostly groups of middle-aged and elderly Europeans -- find gracious people, relatively sophisticated and worldly wise, coexisting with an almost medieval social conservatism, in which women cannot show a bare ankle or shake a man's hand in public.

There is also a strong sense of grandeur, past and present. For example, anyone who travels to the city of Esfahan, 400 miles southwest of Tehran, will be awed by the Islamic architecture, the palaces and even the graceful riverfront promenade.

The best tourist site, however, is open to the public only a few weeks per year, around the holy month of Ramadan. The former U.S. Embassy in downtown Tehran remains just as it was left after the hostage crisis in 1979- 80, when students held American diplomats for 444 days.

There are predictably dreary exhibits about the evils of U.S. imperialism, but the former CIA section is worth the trip. Dozens of 1970s-vintage machines for eavesdropping, encrypting and transmitting rest there. There are also giant shredding machines with what appears to be bins full of original embassy and CIA documents, open for any visitor to grab a handful as souvenirs.

The most subversive influence on the local population is not the Great Satan, however, but right next door, in Dubai, the ultra-prosperous emirate just a short plane flight away from Tehran and other major Iranian cities where rich Iranians go to consort with Bulgarian and Iranian ladies of the night.

The skyscrapers and the glittery airport -- jam-packed all night with travelers and chic boutiques -- are a symbol of what Iran could become (for better or worse) if and when the ayatollahs relinquish power. It could be glorious, perhaps excessive, but a thrill to revisit.
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Referendum AFTER Regime Change

"I'm ready to die for you to be able to say your own opinions, even if i strongly disagree with you" (Voltaire)

[Spenta]

Very good piece.

To answer some of his questions.

1. Why did they grant him a visa?

Because the SF Chronicle is an extremely liberal paper, and US liberals have been very good to the IRI

2. Why are Reformists incapable of talking to him, because they haven't been given an official policy script ?

Because the Reformists have been taking their orders from the Mullah$ since day one. They have no thoughts or ideas of their own, their job is to follow orders from the Mullah$.

3. Why are Iranians so full of conspiracy theories?

Cause they have been so f.u.c.k.e.d by the west who actually have been supporting the Mullah$ for decades! And the Mullah$ truly are h.e.l.l.

3. Why is the driving so homicidal?

Its road rage, the only outlet people have for getting out their frustrations. If you think LA road rage is bad, try 30% unemployment, nothing but dead Palestinians and religious mourning as TV, no beer, Islamic vigilantes ready to crack your skull open for talking to a member of the opposite sex, no music or dancing, no bars or clubs, no fun and joy ... then see what road rage in LA looks like

4. Why is Dubai so prosperous?

Because of Capital flight from Iran. Iran heads the international charts for capital flight in addition to Brain Drain. The majority of the wealth of Iran is invested by the Mullah mafia in Dubai. Most international businesses run by the Mullahs and the Bazari mafia have their headquarters in Dubai.

So you might say the wealth of Iran is funding the good times in Dubai.

And all the rich in Iran are heading to Dubai as we speak for Christams and New Years parties, while Iran's one million homeless children have to spend another cold and hungry night out, while thousands of homeless freeze to death in Tehran, and 80% of the population lives under the poverty line in the world's third biggest producer of oil and gas as European companies own 60% of the oil output of many oil fields in Iran in perpetuity! Now you know why they support the Mullah$ , and no Iranians aren't crazy with their conspiracy theories!

Just look at the contempt with which the western diplomat complains that there are free thinkers in the Iranian colony. I can just hear him say: "What horrors, who the hell do they think they are, free human beings with rights? Tell those Mullah$ to whip the Iranian slaves back into shape again Jeeves, they're really getting out of control again!