Roger Cohen About Iran's Exiles

Roger Cohen in today's NY Times:

First Negar Azizmoradi contacted me and then I read about Mohammed Reza Heydari: two Iranians, two exiles, one truth of a people defrauded and denied.

I’ll take Heydari first. He’s the brave Iranian diplomat in Norway who defected, having been asked to change the vote tally he’d certified: 650 votes cast at the Oslo embassy, of which 540 (or 83 percent) were for the opposition leader Mir Hussein Moussavi, a result consistent with cable traffic he saw from other embassies.

The will of the people was clear Heydari told The Wall Street Journal’s Margaret Coker. I believe it was. Change this number, change that number — and soon enough you can pluck President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s fantastical 62.63 percent from the air.

Three days after that result in Iran’s June 12 election was announced, I met Negar for a few minutes. She was beside me by chance on the avenue between Enghelab (Revolution) Square and Azadi (Freedom) Square in central Tehran. Side by side we walked in a crowd later estimated at over two million people, an Iran that had arisen to protest the theft of ballots.

Seldom have dignity and indignation coalesced in such resolve as on that Monday, June 15. Where is the 63 percent? asked one banner. I turned to Negar. There has been a big cheat, she said. We were hoping that after 30 years we might have a little choice.

Negar smiled and was gone — forever I thought.

Nine months have since passed, time enough to birth the largest popular protest movement in the Middle East, time enough for killings and mass arrests, time enough for hope to surge and recede, and time enough for many who were not there last June to opine that the protesting crowd was smaller or that Ahmadinejad’s triumph genuine.

Sometimes you have to smell the truth, breathe it. Heydari lived it. Something was rotten then in the state of Iran. It still is. A historic mistake was made. It gnaws at the Islamic Republic’s core. The crowd has dispersed but not changed.

That dispersal has been hard. I’d like to talk about Negar’s nine-month odyssey. There’s been time enough, too, for the upending of lives.

Iran chatter gets very abstract, all those words molded around so much opacity, theories mushrooming in inverse proportion to facts. Bombing Iran can begin to sound like a decision with all the moment of going down to Chinatown for lunch. Put the words nuclear and Iran together often enough and the notion the place is atomically armed (it’s not) self-propagates.

But after Iraq we should be very careful, try to stick to what we know, not what we imagine or is fear-mongered. Here’s something I know. Iran is full of people like Negar. She’s 32, a movie editor. She hates the regime. She doesn’t want her country to be attacked, a return to the wailing sirens of the Iran-Iraq war of her youth (in which Israel supported Iran.)

Negar contacted me the other day from a town in central Turkey. She lives there in limbo as her application for refugee status is processed by a U.N. agency. Her story returned me to the road from Revolution to Freedom.

It’s just an ordinary Iranian story — of waste.

On July 17, 2009, she was in a protesting crowd when security agents grabbed her, rammed her head into a water channel, broke her hand. Her camera and bag were taken. I knew they would come for me.

She managed to get her passport renewed, flew to Istanbul, and decided to seek asylum in Britain. Her parents borrowed money and she paid $10,000 for a fake Italian passport. The people-smuggler said she should travel to Nairobi, and from there to London: That way she’d look like a tourist.

So Negar headed for Africa, spent four days wandering Nairobi — and was arrested at the airport. Deportation to Iran loomed. No, said Negar, a convinced atheist, they might kill me. She was put on a plane back to Istanbul via Dubai.

In Dubai, the authorities wanted to deport her to Iran. She prevailed again and proceeded to Turkey, where she was detained and held for five weeks. Under the terms of her release she had to move to central Turkey to await the result of her refugee application.

History’s whirlwind got her.

Negar’s heart is in Iran. It was a great moment, changes came, she told me. People are motivated, this stupidity cannot continue. Before we were hidden, now we have found each other. The day I met you was incredible, so much serenity. I realized: Iranians care about their destiny.

Negar now wants to come to the United States, pending the new Iran she considers inevitable. I asked why. Because there I can be the way I am.

Negar does not want her country bombed. It would be a big, big mistake. All Iranians would unite in anger.

Her own government stifled Negar’s voice. But the world must listen. It’s her country after all — and the ballot-counting Heydari’s.

(Zoon Politikon)