Letter to Home: Tanks at every corner, August 14, 1978

I took this photo of a boy playing amongst sandbags in Isfahan. Solders had set up checkpoints and mini-battle stations at street corners. The letter to home that you see below mentions conditions that look eerily similar to what we’ve seen in the media following the recent presidential elections in Iran.

Greetings,

I just want to write, first of all, to let you know we’re okay. I don’t know how much of this chaos is being mentioned by the very “selective” US news media, but riots have broken out in Isfahan and marital law has been declared. There are tanks and armed guards at every corner or major intersection of the city. Banks have been burned, as well as nightclubs and hotels—banks because they’re owned by you-know-who (note: the Shah) and cinemas, nightclubs, etc, because they’re “immoral.”

An 8:00 pm till 6:00 am curfew has been enacted in Isfahan. Anyone out after 8:00 is either arrested or shot. Oddly enough, the reaction among the people is that they’re cooking huge meals and having picnics in their back yards, (which are all walled in, incidentally.) Each night you hear people singing, or watching t.v. or just goofing around. The curfew will last for one month, the reason being that this is the month of Ramadan, or religious fasting. During any religious observance, the natives get restless. But we’re just hanging around the house and reading, etc. We’re avoiding the mosques and bazaars because they are the center of the dissident movements.

Note: the first person to be shot in our neighborhood, the Jolfa section of Isfahan, was a sixteen-year-old boy who seemed to have simply forgotten about the curfew. The singing and relaxation didn’t last for long. Indeed, the biggest anti-Shah, pro-Khomeini march involved hundreds of thousands, and took place on the ‘Eid, the day that culminates Ramadan with prayers and a feast. While that march was peaceful, it served to raise the resistance to the Shah up another notch and set the revolution on a path of no return. By that time, people were ready to openly defy the injunction against marches, and risk their lives for political change. (Deja Vu anyone?)

About the reference to “you know who”: Making openly anti-Shah comments was risky, to say the least. Keep in mind that he was our ally, and had been reinstated to power by the CIA’s Operation Ajax after being ousted in 1953, so the American media was, at first, reluctant to admit that “our guy in the Middle East” was spinning out of control and using his army to gun down opposition to his rule.