In the afternoon of July 8, 1999, a small group of students staged a demonstration in North Kargar Avenue, in a neighborhood near the dormitories of Tehran University. They were protesting the closure of the reformist newspaper Salam after it printed an exposé revealing the role of the Intelligence Ministry in drafting the new Press Law to stifle the media. The report was a bold and perhaps reckless move in the long-standing atmosphere of fear created by the ministry.

At midnight on the same day, a group of Islamic vigilantes known as Ansar-e Hezbollah, or “the supporters of the party of God,” attacked the students’ quarters. From that moment Tehran descended into a crisis and until July 13, the city was effectively controlled by the Revolutionary Guards. In the subsequent events at least one student was killed, around 300 were injured and thousands were detained.

The following is a review of how the media reported these events, which became known as the “Students Quarters Disaster” at the time when reformists were in charge of the executive branch.

Fire and Fury

The air outside the university’s mosque is filled with tear gas. The shouts coming from the south side of the university are getting louder. The few students who have remained inside the compound resemble a defeated army. They have been bloodied and injured in the mayhem and seek shelter inside the mosque. Inside, injured students and those overcome by tear gas are laying on the carpet here and there. A number of medical students are tending them but some are seriously wounded, and what they need is not available. It seems that the widespread student protests in Tehran and across the country, triggered by the vigilante attack on the Tehran dormitory, are dying down after four days.

The PA system at the university is reading a statement by Mostafa Tajzadeh, Deputy Interior Minister for Security, saying that the only safe way out is a small gate to the north of the university campus. The students who can walk carry out the wounded over their shoulders. Their names are taken down at the gate to be dealt with later. A few badly injured students are left behind.

Before leaving I phone in two reports. One is about the fire set to the stands for Friday Prayers. The other is about a city bus that had been set on fire on Qods Street, east of the campus, but I do not expect them to be published. Both events are later used as propaganda weapons against the student protesters.

This kind of inaccurate reporting is not just for blotting out news of an event, but is meant to distort the event so that a propaganda machine can use it to suppress the truth.

 

Exploiting Fake News

“Students burn down Friday Prayers’ Stands” was how Iranian media reported the first event. But the facts told a different story. For hours the students resisted club-wielding vigilantes from behind the railings around the campus. Eventually the security agents backing up the vigilantes lobbed hundreds of tear-gas canisters into the campus. To protect themselves against respiratory injuries, the students proceeded to light small fires. Until the moment the students left the campus, a number of them tended the fires to ensure they wouldn’t spread. But an hour after the students put out the fires and retreated, the radio announced that students had set fire to the Friday Prayers stands. But the video clip of the fire broadcast by state TV had a time stamp hours after the students had left.

The second event was even more fake. At the height of the resistance by students, I wanted to take a short rest and get a little fresh air free from tear gas. I used my IRNA (Islamic Republic News Agency) press ID to get out of the blockaded campus onto Qods street. This narrow street was in total control of the security forces. I noticed a video journalist for the Islamic Republic of Iran Broadcasting (IRIB) about to enter a building at the corner of Taleghani Street, overlooking the university, protected by a group of uniformed and plainclothes agents. As a joke I told him that he could find no news where he was going and he better go inside the campus to record impressive shots. “The news is right here,” he said without missing a step.

I looked up from the street until he reached the roof of the building and set up his tripod. The direction of the camera surprised me. The turmoil was happening inside the campus and was hidden by towering trees inside the university compound, but the camera was pointing to the southwest towards an old bus. A little later a fire engulfed the bus—on a street where you could not see a soul besides security agents. It was clear that the fire was caused by incendiaries.

I immediately wrote down this fabricated event and sent it to IRNA, and as expected they just put it on their confidential wire, but state TV news programs repeatedly broadcast the fake story.

 

Students Stage Rally against IRNA

I left the university campus with a crowd of scared and wounded students. As we were walking north towards their quarters I reviewed the events in my mind. I had submitted close to 200 reports but only a few modified ones were posted on IRNA’s portal. Now that they were seeing how IRNA’s website was reporting the news, the students were becoming increasingly suspicious of me and two other colleagues. They had witnessed how we were reporting the events, but IRNA’s portal told a different story. They had witnessed our reporting, and perhaps that was why they did not feel threatened by our constant presence around the dormitories, in the streets and in the campus. But IRNA’s portal was something else and they expressed their anger by staging a protest rally outside IRNA’s offices.

Hundreds of students gathered and shouted slogans against IRNA. Mohammad Reza Sadegh, a then IRNA official who is today media advisor to President Rouhani’s administration, asked IRNA’s reporters who had been with the students to do something fast to convince them to leave. The students only left when reformist newspapers came out and we pointed out that they had published the news that IRNA had kept confidential.

 

The Revolutionary Guards Suppress Students

The dark of the night brought peace to the city in crisis, but not to students and the residents of North Amirabad who were neighbors of the student quarters. For days and nights, the residents had been beaten and breathed tear and pepper gas, just like the students. There was not going to be any peace for them.

North Amirabad was under the 24-hour control of the police, and the students only controlled a stretch north of Jalal Al-e-Ahmad Highway. Shops and business were closed by orders of the police, and the students had to walk southward to buy necessities. Even so, at nights residents turned their homes into a large kitchen to cook dinner for students who worried about another attack on their dorms and would not leave the street, which was their first line of defense.

The commander of the anti-riot police used bullhorns to announce that their orders were to restore security by returning the students to their quarters. But the students were fearful and did not trust him, because the police had participated in the July 8 attack. The reports about the local residents helping the students were censored as well. Some officials had accused IRNA of supporting the students and the news agency was under pressure to prove that such was not the case.

Midnight passed and tired students returned to their quarters. The guards were now more seriously controlling those entering or leaving the compound. Outside the dining hall, students had spread the newspapers on the ground and were looking for news about their protests. They looked happy because the papers had printed almost every bit of news about what was happening in Tehran around the university. The eyes of the few reporters from the newspapers who had dared to print the reports sparkled in response to students’ approving looks.

The students arranged a nighttime tour of the dorms for reporters who did not know exactly what had happened in that midnight raid by the vigilantes. The buildings close to the main gate and two buildings behind them, which were now empty, provided a visual narrative of the horrors they had endured. There were bloodstains here and there, in the hallways, on pillows and blankets. Doors and personal belongings of the students were broken and torn books and notebooks were scattered around. The smell of smoke clung to the air. The students had left things as they were so that an impartial panel could rely on them as evidence. As usual the story from the Students Quarters was reported only on IRNA’s confidential portal.

Outside the central garden of the quarters, the students had set up a small exhibition of what the attackers and police agents had left behind—batons, chains, bats and the remains of tear-gas grenades, some of which had failed to go off and had “Made in USA” engraved on them. The manufacturing date on unexploded grenades preceded 1978, and some medical students whose quarters were nearly wiped out in the attack were discussing the harmful effects of expired tear gas.

In that tense atmosphere, the nighttime for students started with sunrise. In the light of the day the people of the neighborhood could guard the quarters and they had a chance to rest. It was also a chance for us to rest a bit by laying down on the cool grass of the quarters.

Around noon, university students from across Tehran and provincial universities who had defied obstacles to visit this real-life exhibition were preparing to leave the Students Quarters. Their destination was the University of Tehran. Many members of students’ Islamic societies tried hard to talk them out of it but eventually hundreds of students poured into North Kargar Street and started towards Tehran University.

I received information on the phone that the night before, Iran’s Supreme Security Council had granted the Revolutionary Guards (IRGC) the power to put down protests. The editor-in-chief implied that I must not accompany students further than the periphery of a certain arbitrary circle around the university. He said that IRGC had the authority to shoot to end the unrest.

The angry crowd of students, agitated over their loss of control over the campus, reached Revolution Square, near Tehran University, chanting extreme slogans. There they met a multilayered barricade of anti-riot police. The outsize presence of the police pushed back the students towards that dangerous arbitrary circle. Now it was no longer clear who among the crowd were students and who were not. They started chanting slogans against Ayatollah Khamenei and the crowd was drawing closer to the flash point. Ten minutes before they got there, I hastily separated myself from the students and got to the perimeter. Units in new khaki uniforms wearing sneakers and brandishing identical bats that looked like pickaxe handles were sitting on the pavement waiting for the protesters.

They had IRGC Ground Forces badges attached to their caps. Now the indistinct sound of the chanted slogans was turning into more distinct shouts of anger, and the security forces violently emptied the street of people. One could repeatedly hear the name of Commander Zolghadr coming from their noisy walkie-talkies, and for a few moments I was able to see him in person. He was wearing a cap exactly like those under his command. It was pulled down over his eyebrows and he had draped an Arabic shawl across his shoulders. To get an unobstructed view, I knocked on the door of a house overlooking the street and they allowed me to view the scene from the window and transmit my reports from there. From that height I could see some units with firearms in the alleyways, hiding from the eyes of protesters who were coming closer and closer. Then the soldiers attacked them and beat them so hard with their bats that those beaten were incapacitated and spilled their blood over the pavement.

“Ground Forces of the Guards Disperse Demonstrators” was the title of IRNA’s report on its confidential portal. Later the dailies Kayhan and Ghods used the report to claim that IRNA’s journalists who had prepared the reports about student affairs were enemies of the Islamic Republic. The IRGC soldiers easily and violently cleared out the street and moved towards Tehran University, which was the center of clashes, but left guards every 10 or 20 meters along the way. A quick tour of the city showed that unformed and armed soldiers of IRGC were stationed across town and they were not going to allow further demonstrations and protests.

 

Forced Leave of Absence and IRNA’s About-Face

That night, Tehran was controlled by IRGC soldiers from Sarollah Base. The only clashes were taking place at Khajeh Nasir Tousi University. I quickly got there and was looking for a way to enter the university when I was called back to IRNA for an immediate meeting. From outside of the railings it was quite clear that the students were fighting against plainclothes agents. I could not believe it but now IRNA was under the control of agents from the Intelligence Ministry, even though it had published over 300 reports about the student protests only on its confidential portal. Earlier all news about the events at the Students Quarters had been published on IRNA’s public website.

Shortly after I arrived, I learned that IRNA and the journalists who had covered the July 8 attack were now accused of fanning the flames with their minute-by-minute reporting. The editor-in-chief was now helpless and they even moved the computers to another floor. An individual who presented himself as the agent from the Intelligence Ministry took over the meeting and performed a post-mortem on IRNA’s reporting. In the end, he gave it a grade of almost zero. In a threatening tone he told us that to make reparations, IRNA had to do some “positive” reports to prepare the atmosphere for a pro-regime rally on July 14.

His insulting tone, his rude behavior and his unreasonable demands became so unbearable that I left the meeting and went up to gather the equipment I needed to report from the field. I had not yet reached the equipment desk when Gholam-Hossein Eslami Fard, IRNA’s news director, handed me a piece of paper. It was a “bonus” leave for one week. He chided me for leaving the meeting and told me that it was not prudent for me to stay in the building. He added that after my day-and-night reporting I needed to rest for a while.

It was unbelievable. Every official and every editor at IRNA had been approved by the security establishment. Those 300-plus reports were only seen by officials with security clearance but now they were sending their own reporter home because he had not followed a propaganda scenario. My forced leave of absence was extended for four more days and then they transferred me to the night shift, which actually was not a bad deal because I had to work only 12 hours in a 72-hour period. I could not understand the reason behind IRNA’s change of behavior until three years later when a reformist team took over the news agency.

 

Protesting IRNA’s “Negative” Role

After the afore-mentioned meeting, IRNA’s confidential portal became inactive for a while. All reports were now published on the public portal and they consisted of exaggerated news about the readiness of groups and personalities for participation in pro-regime rally on July 14. IRNA did not even get a chance to report the end of the student protests through its confidential telex.

But what was behind the story? For ten days after IRNA was occupied by the Intelligence Ministry, agents came in to arrest certain reporters, but the executive manager arranged it with high security officials that instead of arresting them, they should only open cases against the reporters and change their assignments. A few weeks later, an analysis prepared by the IRGC-affiliated Imam Hossein University claimed that IRNA had lied in its reporting about the student protests due to the infiltration of “counter-revolutionary” elements. Newspapers Kayhan and Ghods followed by claiming that IRNA had provided cover for “agitators” and tried to exonerate them.

But the reports that IRNA did not publish publicly did not remain entirely confidential. Editors of newspapers who at that time had access to IRNA’s confidential portal used large portions of them inside reports prepared by their own staff. But soon enough all publications were cut off from the confidential line except Kayhan, Ettela’at and the newspaper Islamic Republic.

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Journalism is a hazardous profession in Iran, and it can be even more dangerous when trying to report the truth about the government and Iran’s establishment figures. Censorship, Iranian Style is a collection of stories by 18 Iranian journalists, writers and cartoonists who have experienced censorship — under the Islamic government, as well as under the Shah’s regime prior to the 1979 Revolution. Their tales of being silenced, harassed and imprisoned provide a solid understanding of the everyday bravery and courage of Iranian journalists, and give a new perspective on the menacing and warped mentality of Iranian censor officials. 

 

More stories in this series:

“I could not document history”, by Hasan Sarbakhshian

When Stories Kill, by Niloufar Rostami

The Seven Obstacles to Publishing Books in Iran, by Ebrahim Nabavi

All Beards Are Sacred, by Touka Neyestani

The Working Journalist in an Atmosphere of Terror, by Isa Saharkhiz

The Midnight Watch, by Ehsan Mehrabi

Censorship, As Ordinary as Breathing, by Mana Nayestani

The Tragicomedy of Censorship in Iran, by Masoud Behnoud

The Islamic Sex-Ed Calendar, by Reza Haghighatnejad

Here Today, Gone Tomorrow

The Story of a Tea Server

My Husband Was a Tasty Morsel for the Regime, by Mehrangiz Kar