Why I'm not in Iran

This is a long and not particularly interesting story, but maybe cathartic for me to write.

The original summer plan was Afghanistan for thesis research, looking at the way the huge international presence (UN, US/NATO military, USAID, NGOs, contractors, etc) was distorting the job market for civil servants and crowding out the Afghan state. I was all set to go with an internship lined up and my prospective thesis adviser Wolfgang F. Danspeckgruber (who looks and talks and is as jolly as you would expect of someone named Wolfgang F. Danspeckgruber) was all gung-ho until the second week of May, when the head of my dept's undergrad program dropped a bomb by informing Wolfgang that the school would reject my thesis if I went to Afghanistan for research. A new university policy designed especially for me, and they didn't bother telling me until 1 week left of classes and all the deadlines for alternative plans passed.

I was going to just say screw it and go ahead anyway, but at the last minute a flustered Wolfgang F. Danspeckgruber sat me down and offered the bribe of a job in New Delhi working on Afghan things (actually a good location for it--many members of the Afghan political elite actually have homes in Delhi where their families stay, and commute between Delhi and Kabul regularly--which of course the Pakistanis are thrilled about) and a spot at a bigwig conference on Afghanistan in Vienna.

The carrot worked where the sticks didn't and I ditched my plans for Afghanistan. Spain for a couple weeks and then Turkey because I'd already bought my ticket there with plans to buy my Istanbul-Kabul ticket when I arrived. I was in Istanbul the day of the Iranian election and Berlin as the post-election protests got under way. I decided that this was the real story and I had much better access and connections to do something about the post-election movement than some boring standard international relations thesis on Indo-Afghan relations (the Delhi job I'd been promised had failed to materialize despite all assurances). So I bought a ticket to Iran for June 26, the day after the Vienna conference ended.

By the way my reason for going to Berlin is a whole other story: by early June there was still no good news on India and a growing suspicion that Wolfgang F. Danspeckgruber had promised this to me simply to placate me and prevent me from going to Afghanistan, and now that I had burned my bridges for the Kabul internship--by emailed them saying My bad, can't come, after they'd put weeks of effort into finding me a place and writing me a letter of support for my visa/residency--actually following through on getting my a job was of secondary concern. So the Plan C I came up with was hanging out in Germany starting a comparative documentary photo project on assimilationism vs multiculturalism policies towards Muslim minorities in Europe (to be completed over a year after I graduated). See my next post for more details on this.

Anyway, I was bound for Vienna and then Iran but made the mistake of once again mentioning my plans to my school--asking Wolfgang if his Lichtenstein Institute for Self-Determination (that's right) would pay for me to go to Iran as my return trip from Vienna. It's against U policy for the school to pay for students to TRAVEL to state dept warning list countries or sponsor their travel there, but I figured that because I'm an Iranian citizen, this could be written off not as sponsored travel but as return to my home country. Big mistake. Another bureaucratic imbroglio, bigger than the Afghanistan one with ever more administrators I'd never even heard of cc'ed every new email of threat/warning. The head of my dept and the Dean of the College for all of Princeton even sent me an email (faxed to my parents as well) letter in which they basically substituted the word Iran for Afghanistan from a previous warning email (I'm very popular with U administration by now), to now read "there is a significant chance that you will be detained, severely injured, or killed." hmm. Maybe if I joined protests and threw rocks at Basijis, but then again the same could be said of joining a May Day socialist rally in Taksim square in Istanbul.
And again, that novel policy of threatening to reject any thesis work "informed" by travel to Iran.

Wolfgang was again there to play good cop, and offered me a vaguely-defined job with Austrian (German-language) newspaper die Presse and LISD funding for my stay for the next few weeks. Of course another delaying tactic by him, I guess hoping the Iran bug will run it's course and as with Afghanistan. I had a long incoherent talk with wfd--who also was for some reason in Vienna--about plans and then crashed a birthday party were I met and was surprised and impressed by the die Presse writer Thomas Seifer's knowledge of Iran.

Despite the tipsy bearhug I got from wfd at the end of the evening (I stayed and argued about Iranian politics and the meaning of life until the wee hours with very knowledgeable and well-connected Thomas and a bunch of Austrian and Iranian students/hangers-on at the party) there were still a couple emails the next morning forwarded from my parents, which in turn were forwarded emails tracing office gossip from various pton administrators completely unrelated to the issue at hand (eg dean of study abroad, Woodrow Wilson School "institute manager") about how I'd been rude and dismissive to wfd the wrong night. Despite the vicious university rumor mill, I actually accepted the job in vienna for 2 weeks, which if why I'm not in Iran.

I still intend to go to Iran in a couple weeks, but with the purges of journalists, reformists, etc going on these days I think it's not a bad idea to wait. My dad's cousin Ardeshir, legal adviser to Moussavi, was arrested a couple days ago, which shouldn't effect my odds of getting in trouble, but I don't want want to leave my fate to some low-level customs officer who may remember my (uncommon) last name from a newspaper article about the latest roundup of mohareban.

Everybody I meet in Vienna seems to be Iranian and I've actually gotten 2nd or 3rd hand reports from a bunch of people who have passed through the airports in the past few days. Apparently they're sending all foreigners to the Gasht-e Ershad headquarters straight from the airport for questioning, but people are getting through okay without being detained or questioned for very long if they have a reasonably story for entering the country. I'll be studying Persian and if I can get a document from the school (they say that only foreign students need official documentation, but these are of course not normal times and I'll ask my dad's secretary in Tehran who's handling this to demand documentation more insistently) saying so I should be fine.

I think I'm sworn to secrecy as far as details of the Afghanistan conference, but it did not instill a terrible amount of confidence in the people running the show or of the prospective for a real rethinking of the whole state-building project. That's all I'll say.

It actually turned out to be quite lucky in a way I changed my plans. I headed to the Turkish Airlines office the day before my 26 June flight, only to discover that my flight had already been canceled because my uncle's German credit card I'd used for the purchase was rejected (for some reason Turkish Airlines didn't email me any notification of this so I would have just gone to the airport only to discover I had no ticket). Did the EU or Germany just slap instantly effective new sanctions on Iran that are preventing the credit card from working? Is the problem on the Iranian side, with foreign credit cards rejected as part of the effort to keep foreign media/observers out? Or some other weird problem? I think I'll have to pay cash for my ticket next time around.

As far as the Vienna job, I'm not totally sure how I'm going to make myself useful, and certainly don't want my name to appear anywhere in the paper's Iran articles right before I go. Thomas--who talks a lot and always politics but is usually interesting nonetheless--also set me up with trend magazine, a weekly with an office on the floor about die Presse. So between the two papers I think I'll be able to keep myself busy as a research assistant the next two weeks.

Thomas suggested yesterday that I do a photodocumentary on the Turkish community in Vienna over the next 2 weeks, bringing things full circle except I no longer have my big camera with me.

I've got a whole container of malaria drugs for India with lovely psych effects (insane wonderful vivid dreams every night) that I won't have an excuse to use.

Future posts will be more exciting and/or educational, I promise.