The pair of Iranian women, clad head-to-foot in black chadors are sitting on the floor in the ante-room waiting patiently, hopefully, desperately for the audience with their president that they hope might lift a tiny corner of the curtain of poverty that had enveloped them. Hours had passed and they are becoming increasingly frustrated.
“I swear on the Koran, I can’t afford strawberries,” moans one. “I swear on the Koran, my child wanted strawberries. I had to save three weeks to buy them.”
“You have to put on a strong face for your children,” says her friend. “Like a movie actress.”
Then it all begins pouring out. The frustration, the panic, the desperation.
Three weeks to wait for strawberries, and then $4 a kilo. I wait three weeks to go to the government subsidized store. It’s cheaper. Bananas are $2 a kilo. No milk, no yogurt, no meat. What should we eat? Yesterday, I was on the bus. Someone had bought some meat. And I wanted it. I asked her ‘how much’? She bought it for $17. That little meat in her hand cost $17. We are retired with just $200 a month. So Mr. Ahmadinejad, what should we eat?”
This dialogue was at the heart of an extraordinary documentary record assembled by the international filmmaker Petr Lom, whose “Letters to the President” will be shown on June 10 on HBO. That’s two days before voters will go to the polls in Iran to elect their new president, or re-elect the incumbent. The documentary revolves around one central component of the re-election strategy of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad—the letters that two million or more people have sent, e-mailed, or simply flung at him in his barnstorming trips around the nation.
Nearly all the letters have one overwhelming theme: help me. I have no money, no job, my family is in desperate straits. Few receive any help or even real encouragement. Most will receive a reply. In a handful of cases, there is money attached. But for most, it is like the lottery. A few win. Most lose. But will hope spring eternal?
Clearly, Ahmadinejad has been seeking a way of distinguishing himself from his predecessors, who rarely ventured outside the capital, rarely pressed the flesh of the least-deprived of their people. He hit on the system of “letters to the president.” Of course, it’s hardly a new process. The White House has had a letters office for years, and President Obama insists on seeing and answering 10 letters a day, every day, before he calls it quits and heads home.
But there’s no promise at all that a check might accompany any of these letters. Not so in Tehran. There, a few, fortunate souls have actually received as much as $2,000 in largesse—a princely sum indeed for the most deeply impoverished. Everyone has at least heard of someone who’s been on the receiving end of this good fortune. But Petr Lom was unable to find a single such individual. So, as the filmmaker documents with stunning impact, this whole strategy could very well backfire—badly.
Part of it is the level of cynicism rife in the country—decades of broken promises and broken dreams. At one point, on a presidential visit to a remote, poverty-stricken region, villagers ask, indeed beg, for a well. “Next year,” the president promises. They continue prodding him. Five minutes later, the time frame has been compressed. “Later this year,” says Ahmadinejad. After he’s left the village. And, though unspoken, after the elections in June as well, when promises may be long forgotten.
Broken promises seem to be the currency of life and death in Tehran, as voters are on the verge of deciding whether the refrain they’re familiar with is better than a new tune, as yet untried.
“May God do something for my children, to find them a job,” weeps one of the two women in the black chadors waiting to see the president. “We have to wait to see how bad our children’s future will be. What will become of them? We should leave this destroyed country.”
Minutes later, the word comes. The president can’t see them that day. Come back the next.
David A. Andelman is the editor of World Policy Journal and The World Policy Blog. A veteran domestic and foreign correspondent and editor of The New York Times, CBS News, and most recently Forbes.com, he is the author of A Shattered Peace: Versailles 1919 and the Price We Pay Today.