By Roshanak Taghavi

I spent my last few hours in Tehran having drinks with close friends at my apartment as I packed a few weeks’ worth of clothes for what was supposed to be a temporary working stint in Dubai. My editors had told me just a few hours before that they wanted me to leave Iran that night and stay in the Emirates for anywhere up to a month until the government began to cool down the pressure that had been mounting on foreign journalists since the country’s traumatic June 12 presidential elections.  As one of the few foreign media journalists left in the Iranian capital who still had press credentials, I had acquiesced to my editors’ demands reluctantly, convinced that my departure in the midst of the post-election tumult was not only an unreasonable violation of my professional duties as a journalist since I had the legal right to remain in the country, but also a betrayal to the Iranians who had so eagerly trusted and depended on me to report how they felt and what was happening on the ground.  But there had been rumors that the offices of some foreign news organizations had been raided by security agents earlier that late June day, and my editors were adamant that I leave, if only for a short period. I even had to leave my computer and mobile phone in Tehran.  “Plan to stay for a month. You’ll be back,” my editor assured me. But my friends looked at me forlornly as we sat around the table saying our final goodbyes.  “We’re afraid you’ll never come back,” they said. 

        As I walked through passport control later that night, I wondered if I would get stopped for questioning, as many of my colleagues had been as they tried to leave the country.  The three journalists I left with that night were tense as we awaited our departure, wary that security officials would enter the plane right before take-off and take us in.  They were among the last of a wave of foreign journalists exiting the country after Iran’s Culture Ministry had refused to extend their press accreditation.   But no one tried to stop us—no one even said a word.  I breathed a sigh of relief when the plane landed in the Dubai airport early the next morning, but I was eager to return, and later came to regret having left the country at a time when other journalists were no longer being allowed to come in.  But as I continue to wonder whether now is the right time to go back and resume reporting, I know deep down that the life I had built and the job I had come to love in the Islamic Republic will not be the same upon my return.   

        There’s no turning back from the changes that took place throughout Iran and in our daily lives after the presidential elections. Beneath the semblance of calm in the streets, which are no longer teeming with protesters, there remains a sense of certainty that some sort of change is sure to happen. But with the crackdown that has ensued against the opposition–including prominent regime insiders, former government officials, activists and journalists—that sensation  is now accompanied by a bleak feeling that in the near-term, there is no one in the opposition strong enough to utilize and direct the potential for change. “Whoever has the guns has the control,” an analyst friend living in Tehran said recently.   

       The paranoia that had always lurked in the background of state consciousness has escalated into a full-blown obsession with security. Armed with the certainty that the aim of “western” governments is to penetrate and overthrow the Islamic regime, the state has sought to fortify its hand over public life in the wake of the unprecedentedly high level of post-election protests.  “Intelligence truly believes there’s a foreign plot to overthrow them with a velvet revolution,” a former revolutionary once close to the government said to me right before I left Iran.  “They really think this way.”  

       The purge of once-prominent regime insiders and reformists who had supported change within the context of the country’s Islamic system and better ties with the outside world has brought with it the start of a discourse among the country’s ruling elite promoting the systemic purification of social sciences taught at Iranian universities. “Passionate defenders of Islam” must review social sciences and humanities that promote “secularism” and “materialism,” Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei said in late August.  Instruction of these sciences “leads to the loss of belief in godly and Islamic knowledge,” he said. 

       Outside of Iran, journalists like myself find themselves torn between resuming work in a country they had come to call their home, or struggling to continue reporting on developments in Iran outside of the country, where internet access is not filtered, phones aren’t tapped and don’t have service problems, and a freer discourse doesn’t put us at risk of arrest.  But as I recall the late night phone calls I would get from students who had managed to find my number in their desperation to get the news out that university dorms were being raided, and continue to be told that there is a sense of hopelessness that new sanctions against the country are inevitable, I find myself yearning to go back.  “Isn’t it my professional duty to be there and report on developments as they happen, no matter what the risk?,” I find myself asking over and over again. “How can I report the truth if I can’t be there to see it?”  My friends in Iran tell me that street protests are now few and far between, and life appears to be “back to normal.”  But there are now deep divisions between family members and friends about the unrest that took place after the elections and the way the government responded to it.  The fissure that took place inside the government has seeped into Iranian society, and it is permanent.  As the government continues to make deep changes within the state and security apparatus, no one knows what the implications will be for the foreign media.  Will we be allowed to report freely amidst continuous public allegations by top officials that foreign journalists are spies?  

       The tragedy about the way events transpired after Iran’s presidential elections is that the protests began not as a movement to overthrow the regime, but with the hope that peaceful opposition could instigate reform within the confines of the country’s governing establishment, to bring change slowly and organically.  The opposition, which was spearheaded by regime insiders who never intended for changes to move the country beyond the Islamic ruling system, is weak.  And Iranians –devastated and deeply scarred by the country’s violent eight-year war with Iraq –are not willing to take up arms to bring about reform, as they were willing to do in the run-up to Iran’s 1979 revolution.  The situation is being pushed towards an extreme in which many people are continuing to live their daily lives, but with the underlying fear that the economic and social situation in the country may become unbearable and the only way to feel free and achieve economic prosperity may be by leaving.  People are unsure of what will happen and how things will improve, but everyone knows the situation can’t remain the way it is.  “So many of my friends got arrested and were beaten in jail,” the young son of a respected former government official told me just a week after the election.“Why did (Ayatollah) Khamenei let this  happen?,” he said over and over again.  “It didn’t have to be this  way.”