The Millimeter Revolution

Folks,
This is a great article about Emad Baghi one of the most dedicated reformers in Iran. I think you will find this to be an interesting read. I believe that change in Iran will come through internal reformers such as Emad NOT the LA Party Grouplets and little Reza junior who are not willing to make the sacrifices its takes to make their country a better place. Well this is unless someone else is willing to do the suffering for them! These are the people along with AIPAC that are encouraging the US to attack Iran next so they will keep dreaming as Emad and his likes keep on fighting for their country.
April 6, 2003
By ELIZABETH RUBIN
Newyork Times magazine

In the winter of 1979, one day after the Iranian revolution extinguished the reign of the shahs, the gates to the notorious Evin prison in northern Tehran were thrown open, and Emadeddin Baghi went in to have a look.
All around him, people in cars, on motorbikes and on bicycles were touring the stone compounds of the hillside prison. They inspected the emptied cellblocks where the tales of cruelty they had grown up on had unfolded. Baghi, who was 17, knew that his religious and political mentor, Ayatollah Hossein Ali Montazeri, had been locked up and tortured at Evin, along with other opponents of the shah.
It was a thrilling moment for Baghi. Just three days earlier, he left his home in southern Tehran with a group of friends to join the army of thousands moving east toward the headquarters of the Iranian Air Force. The shah’s guards fired at air force personnel inside their air base for flaunting their loyalty to Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini. Outside the air force headquarters, people were piling up sandbags and digging trenches. Baghi and his friends made Molotov cocktails. In the afternoon, motorcycles swung by with placards announcing Imam Khomeini’s request to the people: stay in the streets and ignore martial law. They stayed all night.
Stocks of weapons and ammunition were looted from the air base. Baghi touched his first gun nervously. It was heavier than he expected. But when his friend test-fired a bullet, Baghi’s hesitation vanished. For the next two days, they were armed Islamic revolutionaries, assaulting garrisons and firing upon police stations. ”We imagined ourselves Islamic Che Guevaras,” one former revolutionary reminisced. The shah’s army put up little defense and surrendered after two days. When Baghi finally returned home, his mother, who had thought he was dead, fell to the floor and cried. His father jested: ”You have come back! Why weren’t you martyred?”
Wandering through Evin prison was the culmination of those febrile revolutionary days. ”The symbol of the shah’s power was under the feet of the people,” Baghi recalled recently when I met him in Tehran. ”I was wondering, What will they do with the place, turn it into a park?”
Smiling in his earnest, affable way, he went on: ”Of course, I never imagined I’d end up in the same cell where Ayatollah Montazeri and the others were imprisoned under the shah.”
After the shah’s ouster, Baghi devoted his life’s energies to studying Islamic thought and practice, and to realizing the dream he and so many young revolutionary ideologues had of creating the first free and just Islamic republic on earth. Instead, more than two decades after the revolution, Baghi has only recently stepped out of Evin prison, where he was locked up for three years, accused by the ruling clerics of apostasy and endangering the security of the Islamic state.
The Iranian revolution is nearly a quarter-century old. Its children, now in their 20’s, are discontented, impatiently awaiting the day the ruling clerics will go back behind their seminary walls and let the people breathe freely. Most Iranians want the same thing. They just haven’t figured out how to get there.
Iranians are living under the surreal rule of two parallel governments, locked together in a battle that has paralyzed the country’s political development. One is the popular government that was elected in 1997 by an overwhelming majority of Iranians. It is led by President Mohammad Khatami and the reformist Parliament. It has no real power. The other is led by the supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, who has absolute power, holds his position for life and disdains the voice of the people. He controls the judiciary, the revolutionary guards, the Information Ministry and the Council of Guardians, who must approve all candidates for election and any amendments to the Constitution.
Baghi belongs to the ”religious intellectuals,” a circle of former revolutionary ideologues whose ideas inspired the country’s fledgling reformist movement and brought the moderate President Khatami to power. Despite the unrelenting persecution these reformists have suffered over the last five years at the hands of the ruling clerics, they are continuing to try to resurrect the original ideals the revolution aspired to, before it swerved down the path of religious dictatorship.
Some reformists have swung radically away from Islam as an organizing principle in public life. They are believers in Gandhi-inspired civil disobedience who want a brand-new constitution. Others are religious and politically more moderate. They are resistant to the idea that political Islam is incompatible with democracy. Baghi is somewhere in between.
A few days after Baghi’s release from Evin in February, I joined a flurry of visitors at his mother-in-law’s apartment, all of whom came with flowers and cakes, eager to welcome him home and hear his prison tales. His eyes and cheeks were flushed with the feverish energy of his first days out of prison. Now 41, Baghi still has a full helmet of black hair, dusted only at the back with a white bloom of prison stress. He is a short man with a warm, easy manner and boundless enthusiasm, laughing, popping up to answer the door, narrating stories with anger, tears and agitation. He is convinced that he is just on a temporary vacation, that soon he’ll be sleeping back in Evin prison.
But despite that threat, Baghi seems unconcerned. A contemporary historian and author of 19 books (6 of which have been banned), he knows that history moves slowly — and that the path to freedom sometimes takes detours, even detours behind bars. ”We went to prison, the newspapers were all closed down — some might judge everything we’re doing a failure,” he said. ”But from the beginning, I assumed the democratic procedure has to progress millimeter by millimeter. Those who are tired and disappointed, they expected kilometers.”
Kilometer democratization is attainable in one of two ways — through revolution or through invasion, like the one now under way in Iraq. Some in the Bush administration have suggested that Iraq is just the first of any number of Middle Eastern countries that might soon experience ”regime change” one way or another. Policy makers have billed the war in Iraq as a grand opportunity not only to topple a murderous dictatorship and eradicate weapons of mass destruction but also to create a ”free Baghdad that becomes a magnet for Arab democrats everywhere,” in the words of one former consultant to Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld. The administration has come around not only to nation-building, it would seem, but also to region-building. Iranians, who are not Arabs but are one of the region’s biggest powers, know where they fit on the Bush axis of good and evil, and they are anxiously wondering whether they are the next target.
There are plenty of university students across Iran who will say in whispers that they hope Iran is next on America’s democratization hit list. But delve a little deeper, and they’ll admit it’s a pipe dream — that no matter how much Iranians may hate the regime oppressing them, if they saw American soldiers advancing across the Iranian border, they would take up arms to defend their soil and their history.
Iranians judge American intentions today through the lens of history, and thus with deep suspicion. Those who lived through the war with Iraq in the 1980’s and watched Saddam’s chemical weapons incinerating and suffocating their families remember well that it was America and the West that supplied those chemicals. Older Iranians remember how America plotted what amounted to a coup in 1953 against their most progressive political leader, Prime Minister Mohammad Mossadeq, and eventually installed the shah.
One of Baghi’s colleagues, Ali Reza Alavi-Tabar, who also began as a radical Islamist and wound up a democratizer, told me that, yes, people in Iran will be happy if Saddam’s regime falls. But getting rid of Saddam, he insisted, ”doesn’t mean democracy in Iraq will be strengthened.” Nor would American-imposed democracy in Iraq necessarily spread through the Middle East. ”If we want real democracy in Iran,” he said, ”it must be an indigenous democracy.”
The story of Baghi’s millimeter evolution from Islamist revolutionary to tempered democratizer offers a window on an alternative way forward in the Middle East, a method and a movement that welcomes external influence but does not want the United States military to midwife its democracy. Just as the Iranian revolution was a beacon for radical Islamists throughout the last two decades of the 20th century, reformers like Emadeddin Baghi say they believe that their patient struggle for religious reform and an indigenous democracy can serve as an example for the region — one that may ultimately have a more lasting and progressive impact on the Islamic world than the West’s war against Islamic terror.
baghi’s Islamic journey began the day he was born, in exile, in the southern Iraqi city of Karbala, one of the holiest cities of the Shiite faith. Baghi’s grandfather, an Iranian Shiite cleric, was the caretaker of the shrine of Hussein, the grandson of the prophet Muhammad. Baghi’s father was a merchant and a religious activist, living in exile in Kuwait and Iraq. When Baghi was born, his father took him to the senior Shiite clerics in Karbala, who blessed the boy and called on the congregants to pray for his future.
When the family returned to Iran in 1963, Baghi’s father was detained by the shah’s secret police, but he was not deterred from his activities. He was a follower of Ayatollah Montazeri and worked under his auspices, visiting political prisoners in the shah’s prisons and distributing the ayatollah’s funds to prisoners’ families. Baghi trailed along in his father’s shadow, intoxicated by the subversive political and religious conversations among the holy men. Montazeri, especially, had a profound influence on Baghi.
While he was in high school, Baghi was inspired by revolutionary lecturers like Abbas Abdi and Saeed Hajjarian. The former would soon help lead the charge of radical students who scaled the American Embassy walls and set in motion the 444-day hostage crisis. The latter would help to establish the Ministry of Information (essentially the Ministry of Propaganda, Intelligence and Control) of the new Islamic republic.
By the age of 15, Baghi, with his friends, had formed small mosque squads of religious intellectual guerrillas. They urged the students of every grade to pummel their desks and shout revolutionary slogans and shut down their schools. Soon, clerics, students, striking workers, Islamists and Communists had started one of the most popular revolutions in history. Within a year, the shah was gone, and Ayatollah Khomeini flew back from Paris into the welcoming arms of millions.
Baghi finished high school and, following family tradition, embarked on religious training. He traveled to the old desert city of Qum, where Khomeini set up his revolutionary government. Ayatollah Montazeri became a member of Khomeini’s secret revolutionary council. Khomeini adored the modest Montazeri and anointed him the heir to his own supreme leadership. Under the wings of Montazeri, Baghi immersed himself in seminary life. He began writing history booklets and propaganda to inculcate high-school students and the young revolutionary guards in Khomeini’s cultural revolution.
In the early days, Khomeini’s young followers were ruthless toward the political opposition. But as the war with Iraq dragged on through the 80’s, and Khomeini’s executions of his opponents increased, Baghi, along with his teacher, Montazeri, began to doubt that Islam sanctioned so much bloodshed.
Montazeri assigned his followers to monitor and review the cases of thousands of political prisoners and to tend to their families. But right after the war with Iraq ended, in 1988, Khomeini issued an order to his guards to kill every Iranian political prisoner who would not repent antirevolutionary activities. No one knows the number, but many say that thousands were swiftly put to death inside the prisons. That same year, Montazeri’s representatives were all discharged from their jobs in the prisons.
Baghi turned back to his studies. His first book, ”A Study About the Clerics,” argued in favor of an Islam that was open to individual understanding rather than clerical interpretation. Montazeri was worried about the reaction of the other religious leaders and told Baghi sarcastically, ”You have the right to write against God or against the Prophet, but in this country they won’t let you write a book against the clergy.” Montazeri’s fears were justified. Ayatollah Khomeini banned Baghi’s book as soon as it was published.
Montazeri was embroiled in his own struggle with Khomeini, particularly over the executions of political opponents. By the late 80’s, Montazeri, who was on the verge of inheriting the supreme leadership of the country, began writing letters denouncing Khomeini. In 1989, shortly before he died, Khomeini disavowed Montazeri and stripped him of his place as his designated successor.
In Qum, Baghi was outraged by the way Montazeri was treated. ”I understood that I had to do something to defend him,” he said. ”It wasn’t right to leave a man who is supporting the rights of the opposition alone and exposed.”
In 1991, an anonymous and illegally published book titled ”Realities and Judgments” began circulating among the religious intellectuals in Qum and Tehran. The book contained a private letter Montazeri wrote to Khomeini denouncing the executions. It detailed the violent treatment of the opposition by the clerics, describing the interrogators and their methods. The books were hunted down and destroyed or hidden away by the religious police. Anyone who had had anything to do with distributing the book was arrested. ”Who wrote that book?” the secret police demanded to know. Though no one confessed, word eventually slipped out that the author was in fact Baghi, and he later withstood hours of interrogation by the judges in the Special Clerical Court, never admitting authorship.
After several of his friends were interrogated, Baghi was warned to get out of Qum, and he left for Tehran, emerging out of the seminary walls after 12 years and onto the campus of a Tehran university to study sociology.
The 90’s cracked open Iran’s dark and xenophobic theocracy. ”We were so depressed by all the black chadors and paintings of mourning martyrs that haunted the city,” one university student told me recently. ”Even the sociologists realized the whole country was in deep depression.” Color crept out of the closets and appeared on women’s scarves. Khomeini had died, and Ayatollah Khamenei, his handpicked successor, became supreme leader. Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, the smiling, boyish pistachio merchant turned arms dealer, was elected president and vowed to inject optimism and international commerce into the economy.
Under Rafsanjani, the press grew bolder. Newspapers were published by leading dissident clerics and professors who disagreed with the idea of a theocratic government and included writing by former revolutionaries like Abbas Abdi, the hostage-taker; Akbar Ganji, a muckraking investigative journalist; and Baghi. The newspapers became Iran’s agora — the place for whining, for serious complaint, for venting against the greed of the clerical clique and for debating the future hues of the Islamic republic. Reform-minded editors and publishers called for democratization.
After Rafsanjani’s two terms were up (the limit), the Islamic reformists backed the presidential campaign of Khatami, the former minister of culture and Islamic guidance. Khatami beat his opponent, an authoritarian conservative cleric, garnering 70 percent of the votes. His supporters hoped that through legal means and democratic elections they could bring to fruition the revolution’s original ideals of independence, justice, freedom and Islam.
Art, literature, dress codes and newspapers all began to blossom with a sense of new possibility. Within a year, Iranians had hundreds of publications — newspapers, magazines, intellectual journals — to choose from. The work of foreign intellectuals like Karl Popper and Hannah Arendt circulated freely. Even secular Iranian activists had a voice.
But then the government of Supreme Leader Khamenei lashed out at the brazenness of the reformers. At the end of 1998, Dariush and Parvaneh Foruhar, a married couple who were democratic activists, were assassinated. Thousands marched through the streets of Tehran following their coffins and holding aloft posters of them. The two were among more than 80 secular writers, intellectuals and political activists who were killed in mysterious circumstances during the 90’s. Iranians began to refer to the killings as the ”serial murders.”
Baghi wrote for the reformist press throughout the 90’s. But it was his articles on the serial murders that thrust him into the public light — and showed the young the benefits of a free press. From 1999 through the beginning of 2000, Baghi and Akbar Ganji, the muckraker, wrote a variety of investigative reports that dared to expose the untouchable clerics and accuse powerful elements within the Ministry of Information of murder. Their readers loved it, and their books became best sellers.
The pressure from the press was so intense that the information minister was forced to issue an apology for some of the killings, blaming a rogue gang within the police department for them. ”This was the first time in Iranian history that the secret police admitted that people inside their forces were responsible for killing the opposition,” Baghi told me. But Baghi worried that the religious intellectuals were treading on dangerous ground. ”I knew they’d take their revenge on us,” Baghi said.
On March 12, 2000, the revenge began. Out on the streets of Tehran, in the middle of the day, Saeed Hajjarian, a close friend and top adviser of President Khatami, was shot in the face by a gunman who rode off on a high-powered motorcycle. Baghi had old ties to Hajjarian, dating from before the revolution when Hajjarian’s brother Ali taught Baghi in high school. Rumor had it that Hajjarian was a Deep Throat behind Baghi’s and Ganji’s articles.
Two weeks later, Baghi walked out of the hospital where he was visiting Hajjarian and was surrounded by journalists wanting to know who was behind the assassination attempt. Distressed by Hajjarian’s condition, and blunt by nature, Baghi gave the press what it wanted. He said the responsible parties were inside the Revolutionary Guard, the Ministry of Information, the National Radio and Television and the police forces. A day after his statement hit the papers, Baghi was summoned to court.
One by one every reformist newspaper was shut down. Licenses were revoked and editors were summoned to court or put behind bars. Baghi’s colleague Ganji was arrested and sentenced to 10 years in prison. It was called the autumn of the Iranian press, the culmination of a frontal assault by the ruling clerics.
the trials of Baghi and other former revolutionary ideologues riveted the country. At the time, Westerners compared the scandal caused by Baghi and Ganji with Watergate — though a Watergate in which Woodward and Bernstein were fired and imprisoned instead of Nixon being impeached. Baghi was apoplectic. The first day in court, the former minister of information, Ali Fallahian, whom Baghi and Ganji had accused of being a mastermind of the serial killings, sat in the gallery smiling at Baghi. ”I was so angry, I shouted, ‘This isn’t right,”’ Baghi recalled. ”’Our places should be switched. He should be the accused. He should be on trial. And I should be the accuser.”’ Baghi was sentenced to seven and a half years in Evin, reduced to three years on appeal.
Political prison was bleak. For the first two months, Baghi lived in a solitary cell that was five feet by six feet. To fend off depression and passivity, Baghi and other political prisoners in Evin began converting prison into a laboratory for the reform movement. Baghi asked his lawyer for the manual of prisoners’ rights, and when he found out that prisoners were entitled to newspapers and books, he pressed the prison authorities for free newspapers. He discovered that the prisoners were being cheated of their legal daily meat ration, and he encouraged them to refuse the food. As Baghi said earnestly, ”Although the reformist movement has failed outside the prison, I can say it succeeded inside.”
Last year, in February, Baghi was told that he was about to be released. Instead, his lawyer showed up with a message from the director of the Special Clerical Court, Gholamhossein Mosheni-Ezhei, saying that Baghi would be released only if he apologized to Fallahian. Baghi was furious. ”I’ll stay double the time in prison, but I’ll never accept such a shameful act,” he said. ”So Ezhei phoned the director of the prison and told him not to let me out for another year,” Baghi recalled. Finally, two months ago — and nearly 24 years to the day after he wandered so excitedly through the emptied grounds of Evin prison — Baghi bid goodbye to Ganji and walked out of Evin’s gates.
When I visited Baghi a few days after his release, he was surrounded by his family. He has three daughters. The youngest, who is 14, sat by his side. His family would clearly love Baghi to stop his work and stay home with them. ”But sometimes,” he said, ”you just can’t stop.” He pulled out two new books he said he would publish in the coming days. One book was a revisionist look at the events leading up to the revolution. It is possible that it will bring a new rash of crises on his head. Until now, part of the revolutionary propaganda machine has always claimed that tens of thousands were killed under the shah. After years of collecting interviews and data, Baghi has concluded that in fact from the time of Khomeini’s exile in 1964 until the downfall of the shah in 1979, the number killed was about 3,000. In a country of secret truths and public deception, his claim will be viewed as propaganda for the shah and his son, who is in exile.
Baghi’s willingness to expose the truth has earned him the respect of the next generation. In November, when demonstrations rippled across university campuses, one banner students waved read, ”Those Who Revealed the Truth Should Be Released.” Next to the slogan were pictures of Ganji and Baghi.
The demonstrations erupted after Hashem Aghajari, a history professor and disabled hero of the war with Iraq, was sentenced to death for a speech in which he advocated an Islam that wasn’t dependent upon the clerics. The death sentence provided the university students with an opportunity to unleash their pent-up anger upon the regime, and they didn’t hold back.
”Death to dictatorship,” they cried. ”Death to the Taliban in Kabul and Tehran!” They carried signs criticizing ”Khamenei Who Stole the Smiles” and shouted, ”Khamenei should be ashamed.” And finally, they lashed out at Khatami — the man they had campaigned so passionately for just a few years earlier — demanding that he resign. They were furious that he had been unable to reverse the conservatives’ crackdown on the press laws, that he was doing nothing to defend the reformists who had brought him to power.
To many, Khatami is Iran’s Mikhail Gorbachev, a transitional figure on the way to the real future. Just as Gorbachev could not dismantle the institutions of Communism, Khatami, they say, is not the man who can unlock the chains of enforced religion imprisoning the country.
The students may wave banners and rally to the defense of older, more cautious reformers like Baghi, Ganji and Aghajari, the makers of the revolution whom some students now refer to as ”our reformed sinners.” But the students themselves have no psychological block against stating the obvious — that religion must be removed from government, that you can’t have half a democracy. While Baghi concedes that ”there should be a separation between religion and the state,” his statement comes with a big but: ”But in Iran, religion is part of people’s way of thinking. Sometimes it occurs to me there’s an inborn pattern in people’s minds which is mainly formed by religious concepts.”
Baghi’s millimeter evolution comes down to the will of the people. ”If the majority of people are Muslim — and if and only if they want an Islamic state — the president of the country should be a person who knows about Islamic codes,” he said. ”This person could then be the president and supreme leader at the same time. But he should be elected every four years by the direct vote.” The students know, however, that under the present conditions, the hard-liners would never allow such a vote to take place. And that’s where the unfettered students may decide to pick up the mantle of change.
Taxi drivers, shopkeepers, students and professors are all quick to tell a visitor that Iran is not like the rest of the Middle East. In Arab countries, the governments are allies of the United States, and the people are anti-American. But in the Islamic Republic of Iran, the government may be anti-American, but the people have a thing for America. And it drives the hard-liners mad. In November, Abbas Abdi, famous for helping to lead the charge of radical students who scaled the American Embassy walls and so begin the 444-day hostage crisis, was arrested. The charges? Spying for foreigners. He had helped to conduct a Gallup poll commissioned by a parliamentary committee, and the ruling clerics didn’t like the results. Nearly 75 percent of those polled favored dialogue with the United States, and 46 percent said they felt that American policy toward Iran was ”to some extent correct.”
As radical and impatient for democracy as the students are, however, most of them do not want to lead Iran into another bloody revolution. I asked Mehdi Aminzadeh, a 25-year-old student leader studying civil engineering, if there was anything brewing in Iran equivalent to Yugoslavia’s Otpor, or ”resistance” — a grass-roots movement spread by Serbian youth that defeated the dictatorship of Slobodan Milosevic. (One of the opposition satellite television channels that are beamed into Iran by the Iranian diaspora in California constantly replays the chronicles of Milosevic’s destruction of Yugoslavia and Otpor’s destruction of Milosevic, as if trying to suggest a script for the students to follow.) No, he said. For now there is no social movement or political party tough enough and well financed enough to organize such mass demonstrations.
As for American designs to democratize the Middle East, the students are intrigued but wary. They are puzzled by Bush’s religious and ideological rhetoric. ”We’re trying to move from ideology to modernity, and Bush is moving from modernity to ideology,” one student leader told me. The Bush administration’s Middle East adventure, they say, is for Israel’s benefit, and for the economic and oil interests of the United States. Bush’s speeches about defending human rights and promoting democracy around the world resound in their ears like superpower hypocrisy.
The students have inherited the wisdom of experience from their predecessors. As Aminzadeh put it: ”One of the myths created in people’s minds by Khatami’s reign was that Khatami could easily change the system and achieve democracy. But the Iranian problem can’t be solved so quickly. There’s no alchemy. So we should be patient.”
Baghi will test the temperature of the clerics again next month when he releases a paper that disavows Khomeini’s interpretation of execution in the Koran. He knows he’s provoking the clerics in their most sensitive spot — their monopoly on interpreting the Koran. But, he says, ”if putting me in prison for three years has pushed the project of democracy forward even a millimeter, I’m ready to go back.” He has trials pending on new charges linked to articles he wrote before entering prison. ”It’s a sword of Damocles over my head,” he said, ”to keep me from talking.”
Baghi continues to thrive on the same optimism that fueled his revolutionary fervor. He knows that political evolution is unsatisfyingly slow, but says he believes that ultimately no one can stop the will of the people. When I asked him why he was so opposed to the radical option, he chose to talk about history. ”The Iranian revolution was among the most popular in the world at the very beginning,” he said. ”We expected the objectives of the revolution would be reached. We were the generation of the revolution, brought up with these deep feelings supporting it, and that stopped us from rationally criticizing what went on around us. And we were captured by the charisma of Imam Khomeini. We never expected that such a popular revolution could turn out to be against the will of the people. We never expected the same injustice to be reproduced in a new form. After this experience, you do not want another revolution.”
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