FUGITIVES.(Iran)

One afternoon in June, three days before Iran's Presidential elections, thousands of young reformists gathered in Tehran University's soccer stadium. Their candidate, Mustafa Moin, was sure to lose, but the crowd was jubilantly defiant. "Free the political prisoners!" people shouted, in a country where citizens are often afraid to speak openly on their private telephones. "Democracy and freedom are on the way!"

Saeed Hajjarian approached a podium that was covered in Persian carpets. The crowd broke into applause. Hajjarian had once been an Islamic revolutionary and a top intelligence-ministry official, but as Iran's autocratic regime hardened he had grown more liberal, becoming a key architect of the reform movement, which rose to prominence in 1997. That year, Hajjarian had helped secure the election of Mohammad Khatami, whose two-term Presidency was now ending. In the late nineteen-nineties, a string of Iranian dissidents were mysteriously murdered, and a few journalists linked those murders to the intelligence ministry, which was still controlled by hardliners; Hajjarian's adversaries, fearing the extent of his knowledge of the regime's inner workings, presumed that he was the journalists' informant. In March, 2000, Hajjarian was shot in the face outside Tehran's city council. He survived a long coma but awoke paralyzed. He recently started to walk again.

As Hajjarian prepared to speak, a chant rose from the crowd: "Down with political assassination!" Hajjarian implored the crowd to remember Akbar Ganji--a dissident journalist who was in prison, on an extended hunger strike--and others "who can't be here because they are in prison or in Heaven." The crowd whistled in approval. In the distance, behind the city's veil of smog, were the austere peaks of the Elburz Mountains, which loom over Tehran, a Middle Eastern Los Angeles of low-lying sprawl and traffic-choked boulevards.

I sat on the soccer field, behind a bale of folded carpets. Two boys of eleven or twelve, who wore headbands with campaign slogans in their gelled hair, flung themselves, belly first, onto the rugs, laughing. On either side of the podium were vertical banners with images of Moin--a gray-haired man with a narrow face and an expression of kindly intelligence. Moin had been the country's minister of higher education in 1999, when, at Tehran University, Iranian security forces attacked students who were protesting the closure of a newspaper; several students were killed and dozens wounded. In protest, Moin offered his resignation. President Khatami, however, had been nearly silent--an act of submission that left many young Iranians cynical about the reform movement.

After Hajjarian finished speaking, a pop band took the stage. "The song I'm going to sing is against fascist dictatorship, assassination, and torture," the singer announced. "It's dedicated to Akbar Ganji and Saeed Hajjarian." In the bleachers, a man in a blue short-sleeved shirt, with an Iranian flag tied around his head, swung his arms extravagantly above him, clapping to the music.

I left the rally as dusk fell. The streets surrounding the stadium were packed with police and members of the Revolutionary Guard Corps--the regime's paramilitary force. The guards, in dark-green fatigues, were armed, and policemen stood near parked vehicles filled with riot gear.

An Iranian friend once told me, "We have freedom of expression. We just don't have freedom after expression."