A Pawn of the Mullahs By Sohrab Ahmari..A review of The Lonely War-One Womans Account of the Struggle for Modern Iran By Nazila Fathi
http://www.wsj.com/articles/book-review-the-lonely-war-by-nazila-fathi-1422489804
In 1992, Nazila Fathi was working as a fixer for Western journalists when she was approached about keeping an eye on ‘suspicious’ reporters.
Security forces in July seized Jason Rezaian, the Washington Post’s Tehran correspondent, and his wife, Yeganeh Salehi, from their home in the Iranian capital. Ms. Salehi, a journalist for an Emirati newspaper, was released in October, but Mr. Rezaian, a U.S. citizen, still languishes in a Tehran prison. After six months of detaining him without charge, the regime announced earlier this month that Mr. Rezaian had been indicted, though the substance of the charge remains a mystery.
The timing—a year and change since Hasan Rouhani ’s election as president of Iran—was no coincidence. It signaled that, for all of the new president’s rhetoric about moderation, the regime wasn’t about to ease the press of its boot against the throat of Iranian civil society. Since Mr. Rouhani came to power, journalists have routinely been imprisoned. Thirty were behind bars in Iran last year, according to the Committee to Protect Journalists.
The Rezaian arrest was a reminder of the contradictions and perils of reporting from one of the Middle East’s least free societies. Nazila Fathi, a long-time Tehran correspondent for the New York Times , grappled with those contradictions and came dangerously close to sharing Mr. Rezaian’s fate. In “The Lonely War,” Ms. Fathi returns to her files, notebooks, old sources and searing memories to paint a revealing and often exhilarating portrait of her life as a female reporter in the Islamic Republic.
Ms. Fathi was born to a secular and affluent family in Tehran in 1970. Nine years later, Ayatollah Khomeini deposed the shah and turned Iran upside down. The pious and the poor inherited the new order. “The revolution had given them an identity and a chance to dominate their fellow Iranians,” she writes. “They felt they must use force to lead the rest of our society toward the path of God, and they waged a war of terror to show us their strength.”
The Islamic Republic’s first decade was marked by revolutionary bloodletting and the Iran-Iraq War, which claimed a million lives. By 1990, Khomeini was dead, and Iran was shattered. The clerical regime was now fully entrenched, but it was desperate for infrastructure and foreign investment, and this required better press coverage than it had thus far received. The mullahs needed journalists.
by Nazila Fathi
“We think we can trust your judgment in case you come across a suspicious journalist,” Mr. X told Ms. Fathi at that first meeting. “Sometimes spies disguise themselves as reporters. It is not a secret that the West has wanted to overthrow the regime ever since its formation.” “Of course,” she recalls replying. “Iran is my homeland too.”
Journalists aren’t normally expected to keep an eye on their colleagues for the government, and the notion of a writer agreeing to do so might strike many Westerners as repugnant. But revolutionary Iran isn’t Manhattan. Ms. Fathi’s career would likely have ended right then if she hadn’t acceded, and every reporter working in the Islamic Republic today faces similar dilemmas. Readers beware.
Everyone had to compromise in the post-Khomeini era. Throughout the 1990s, the regime carried on its founder’s mission to liquidate the opposition, including by conducting a campaign of assassinations abroad. The brutal repression achieved its intended effect, as many Iranians concluded that the best course was to seek change within the regime’s parameters.
Thus emerged the “reform” movement. Led by Mohammad Khatami, the Hegel-quoting, fashionable cleric first elected president in 1997, the movement enjoyed broad support among students, women and the emerging urban middle class, including the author, who was genuinely hopeful that things could change. Ms. Fathi cut her teeth reporting on the reformists, first as a stringer and later as a full-time contract reporter for the Times. Her bright vision of the reformist movement shaped the Times’s coverage of Iran.
The reformists tried to press for modest changes while hewing to the principles of Khomeini’s revolution. The odd lexicon they developed (“Islamic human rights,” “religious democracy” and the like) reflected their earnestness—or deceit and delusion, depending on whom you ask. Ms. Fathi’s sympathy for the reformists is everywhere evident, and the book’s most troubling passages uncritically relay the reformists’ self-flattering rhetoric. She quotes Khomeini’s granddaughter, then serving as an official in the interior ministry, saying in 2000 that the revolution was “meant to install a democratic system in Iran.” Elsewhere she calls two Khatami ministers “liberal politicians,” which is like calling Vladimir Putin a democrat. She makes excuses for Mr. Khatami’s refusal to side with the students who rose up in 1999 and neglects to mention that Mr. Rouhani, the current standard-bearer of moderation, cheered the crackdown that followed their revolt. This is particularly striking considering that Ms. Fathi was beaten by regime forces while covering the student uprising.
In the following decade the regime’s hard-line faction would twice defeat its more moderate figures at the presidential polls. The second of these elections was widely seen as rigged, triggering the 2009 Green uprising. Yet Ms. Fathi was unable to report on the election’s aftermath for long. Already the subject of intense surveillance—her tyrannical maid was spying on her family—she was warned that regime snipers had her photo. Much like Mr. Rezaian today, she had likely become a pawn in the factional fights that define the Iranian regime. Mr. X could no longer protect her. With her family in tow, she escaped to Canada.
The subtitle of Ms. Fathi’s book is “One Woman’s Account of the Struggle for Modern Iran.” But “The Lonely War” is really a eulogy for the dream of Iranian reform.
Mr. Ahmari is a Journal editorial-page writer based in London.
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