Tehran dispatch: Basijis for Mousavi | Salon News

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Tehran dispatch: Basijis for Mousavi

Editor's note: For personal safety, the author chooses to disguise his name. He used "Anonymous" in previous Salon stories, as well as this pseudonym.

By Shane M.

Aug. 19, 2009 | Basij madreseye eshq ast (Basij is the school of love) -- Basij wartime motto, attributed to former Iranian Prime Minister Mir Hossein Mousavi.

The framed portrait of the late Imam Khomeini loomed over us in the school's office. The principal, a disabled Basij veteran of the Iran-Iraq war and campaign organizer for presidential candidate Mir Hossein Mousavi, was visibly shaken. "I thought that when the Imam died there could be nothing worse. But what has happened these past few days ..." A week after the disputed Iranian presidential election, many of Omid's friends and fellow campaign workers had already been arrested or brought in for questioning, men he had served with at the front lines during the war a quarter century earlier. They had worked together to bring in the vote for Mousavi, a campaign seen by them as nothing less than as a defense of the Revolution, a chance to prevent Khomeini's legacy from being lost forever. Now, with the vote over and almost certainly stolen, and facing the possibility of arrest, Omid had lost hope. He no longer felt safe in the country he had once defended as a teenager. " Bad berim. Bayad az Iran berim. " 'We have to leave Iran."

Voices such as Omid's are rarely heard in the coverage of Iran's presidential election, no doubt because they do not fit the accepted storyline coming out of Tehran. According to this narrative, promoted in part by the Western media, the opposition is comprised primarily of young, well-educated urban dwellers tired of clerical authority and committed to separating religion ...

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