TEHRAN – Despite its arid climate, Iran's capital city is green. It enjoys an abundance of spacious parks flowing with fountains and verdant landscaping lining its highways. Optimistic eyes could see Tehran as an enormous garden, but skeptics are likely to view it more as an overgrown prison yard. One can scarcely drive for 20 minutes without seeing armed guards on the watchtowers of army bases and Revolutionary Guard centers, with their "No Photo" warnings in bilingual signage.
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Men in olive drab uniforms carry automatic weapons as they scan the ubiquitous picnickers at Park-e Mellat, a leisure complex near the foot of the Alborz Mountains. The state television broadcaster Seda va Sima, an ostensible source of public information, sits high on a rocky hill, behind a barbed wire fence. The walls of Evin prison -- an active remnant of the shah's regime -- climb high into the mountains for all to see. Having returned to Iran for the first time since 2008, I am chilled by the heightened police-state atmosphere that now pervades. But aesthetically, Tehran is much the same as it was before 2009.
Two years after the nationwide protests dubbed the "Green Revolution," a chasm has opened in Iranian public life, between the public's prosaic pursuits of pleasure and routine, and the government's neurotic displays of force. Ecstatic splashes of green paint can still be seen high on the walls of apartment buildings and office blocks, but at ground level, pro-government graffiti artists have transformed defiant green Vs into occultish black triangles. The green inscriptions of "Death to the Dictator" have been effaced by black admonitions of "Death to the traitor."
Most normal political activity has disappeared. Many Iranians are filled with regret -- regret that the Green Movement fell short of securing them a say in Iran's future and regret that neighboring Arabs seem to be racing ahead of them in opening new possibilities.
On the eve of June 12 -- the second anniversary of the 2009 presidential election likely rigged by hard-liners in favor of the incumbent Mahmoud Ahmadinejad -- a taxi driver, a bearded man in his 50s, told me he had seen security forces gathering all over the city in preparation for the following day.
"People are exhausted," he said. "If not for those already martyred and the people sitting in prison, everyone would have given up by now."
"Nothing," he added, "has hurt Islam more than 32 years of this government." He accused Iran's supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, of betraying the (apparently worthwhile) legacy of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini. But moments later, he offered a theory whereby Khomeini, the founder of Iran's Islamic Republic and its first supreme leader, had intentionally provoked war with Iraq in the 1980s in order to rid himself of a generation of young Iranians who would have opposed his post-revolutionary policies.
Such malleable attitudes toward Khomeini's legacy -- as well as the temptation to indulge in conspiracy theories and speculative counterfactual history -- are characteristic of the political fog in which Iranians unhappy with the status quo still struggle to orientate themselves.
His mention of the regime's show of force was no fantasy, however. The security in Tehran on the afternoon of June 12 was extravagant. The atmosphere in city parks was tense, with numerous bands of police roaming in groups of five or 10, often with cudgels in hand. The main roads were lined with police, revolutionary forces, and paramilitary Basij in what appeared to be government-issued riot gear. Riding low in the back seat of a friend's car -- he had advised me, plausibly, that as a foreigner I'd be arrested if I was seen anywhere near demonstrations -- I could see the various security organs massed in rank and file in the city's major roundabouts: Valiasr, Ferdowsi, Hafte Tir. Opposition groups had announced a "silent protest" for that day, but though major news outlets reported some clashes and arrests, I failed to catch sight of any protesters.
The Green Movement may well be spent. The last substantial street protests in Tehran -- which drew impetus from the regional elation associated with the Arab Spring -- took place on Feb. 14. Later the same month, the government imprisoned Mir Hossein Mousavi and Mehdi Karroubi, the diffuse movement's symbolic leaders, along with their wives, in their homes, and they haven't been heard from since. There are no signs that anyone is willing to replace them.
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