Video Offers New Look at the Day Iran’s 2009 Protests Turned Deadly
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Version 0 of 1. The Iranian-born journalist Maziar Bahari, who was detained in Tehran in 2009 and accused of espionage for covering the postelection protests in Iran that summer, has released nearly 40 minutes of previously unseen footage he recorded during the first deadly clashes between protesters and the security forces. Mr. Bahari, whose account of his four-month detention was adapted by Jon Stewart into the docudrama “Rosewater,” posted the footage on YouTube last week, to provide more historical context for the killing of protesters by members of Iran’s Basij militia on June 15, 2009, an event that was recreated in the film. In a telephone interview this week, Mr. Bahari recalled that he was recording video that day of hundreds of thousands of opposition supporters marching through central Tehran to demand a recount when he heard shooting nearby and ran toward it. When he arrived on the scene, he turned his camera on a small number of demonstrators hurling Molotov cocktails at a base of the Basij paramilitaries in a residential neighborhood close to Azadi Square. He was filming as some of the protesters tried to storm the base and Basij militiamen, who had been firing tear gas and warning shots, began “shooting indiscriminately into the crowd.” Forty-seven seconds of Mr. Bahari’s graphic video of protesters being killed, the first documented deaths in the dispute over the election, was broadcast that night in a report from Tehran by Lindsey Hilsum of Britain’s Channel 4 News. Although Iranian activists and bloggers also provided witness accounts and some vivid images and extremely graphic footage of the clash at the base that day, the most complete documentation of the deadly face-off was Mr. Bahari’s video. Some of that footage was used in the recent film adaptation of Mr. Bahari’s book, in which actors recreated the abrupt shift from peaceful protest to violent confrontation at the Basij base that day. In the wake of the film’s release, as Mr. Bahari explained in a post on his news site IranWire, he decided to make all of the video he shot that day available online because of its historical importance. “People are emotional about that day,” he said in the interview. In an account of the day in his book, Mr. Bahari reported that intelligence ministry sources close to the opposition candidate Mir Hussein Moussavi said later that the young men who had instigated the violence by attacking the base that day were agitators from a banned Iranian exile group, the Mujahedeen e-Khalq, or People’s Mujahedeen, known as the M.E.K. or M.K.O. That group, which was at the time on the State Department’s official list of terrorist organizations, has been described by its critics, like Trita Parsi of the National Iranian American Council, as “a cultlike Iranian terrorist organization with a history of violence and no support among the Iranian people.” While his sources offered no hard evidence, Mr. Bahari said, the young men who stormed the building were chanting slogans — like “Death to the Islamic Republic” and “Death to Khamenei,” Iran’s ruling cleric — that are associated with the anti-Islamist M.E.K. That led to arguments and even physical fights with older protesters outside the base, who urged the younger men to refrain from violence and call for reform, not revolution. In retrospect, Mr. Bahari said this week, “I think that moment really played into the hands of the government.” The large and completely peaceful protest that came before the violence that day, Mr. Bahari said, was far more threatening to the authorities. “That peacefulness really scared the government,” he said. The attack on the base, however, “gave an excuse to start cracking down.” Reflecting on the apparent role of the M.E.K. in transforming a peaceful protest into one marked by deadly violence, Mr. Bahari suggested that there was something of a feedback loop between the authoritarians within Iran’s Islamic Republic and their enemies. “They need each other,” he said. “A violent government needs a violent opposition in order to survive.” |