It was June 15, 2009 — three days after Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was declared the winner of Iran's presidential elections.
Three million people gathered for a silent protest in Freedom Square at the centre of Tehran, the country's capital city and home to more than eight million people. Among the silent and peaceful crowd was journalist Naeim Karimi. He marveled at the spirit of resistance crackling across the square.
“There was a sea of people,” he says. “Everything was beautiful.”
Then, something distorted the scene. Smoke was rising in the distance. Karimi and his cameraman pushed through the crowd to get closer. They began to hear gunshots. As Karimi rounded the corner of an alleyway, their source became clear.
Government paramilitaries were shooting at scattering protesters.
“I saw three of them die right in front of my eyes,” Karimi says.
His human instinct told him to run, but his journalism instincts made him stay.
“If you don't stand your ground now, if you do not record this, this whole situation could be forgotten and peoples' blood will have been shed in vain,” he told himself.
Karimi kept recording. Shortly after, his cameraman grabbed him by the waist and carried away from the bullets and the blood.
“He saved my life,” Karimi says. “And that wasn't the first time.”
Thinking back to that day two years ago, seeing people get shot in the streets for standing up against oppression, he says, “In that moment, I really felt that I had become a journalist, and it was already 14 years into my career.”
More than two years have passed since that day in Freedom Square, but the memory is still fresh enough to make Karimi's eyes glisten with tears as he sits and retells his story in the Unicentre atrium at Carleton, where he's currently doing his master's degree in journalism.
Raised in Tehran, Karimi first came to Canada in 1983. His father studied for his PhD at Queen's University in Kingston, Ont. Karimi flew through the Canadian high school system, beginning a degree in computer engineering at Queen's when he was 16 years old.
But before Karimi could finish his degree, his father got called back to work in Iran and the whole family returned home. While waiting for his credits to transfer to an Iranian university, Karimi got a job as a radio announcer for Iran's state broadcaster.
This is when Karimi started to see the problems with journalism in Iran — from the inside.
“The more pressing need for my society was not engineers, but it was good journalists,” he says. “We needed a revolution in the media sphere.”
So he stuck with journalism. Soon, he began working for international news organizations, covering the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, and events like the 2003 earthquake in central Iran for audiences from Dubai to Japan.
At the same time, he worked to finish his engineering degree.
“If I start something I always finish it,” Karimi says.
In 2005, Ahmadinejad, a conservative who would soon begin suppressing dissent, was elected as Iran's president. The media environment changed, Karimi says, but journalists were still able to do their work.
He even got the chance to interview Ahmadinejad, whom he describes as "probably the smartest man [he’s] seen in [his] life" for his ability to dodge questions and trap journalists with his populist charm.
After the 2009 elections, "things changed dramatically," Karimi says.
The protest on June 15, 2009 was only one part of a massive social movement against the Iranian regime. Known to many as the Twitter Revolution or the Green Revolution, after the campaign colours of opposition leader Mir-Hossein Mousavi, the protests lasted for months but ultimately failed to get Ahmadinejad to step down or hold new elections.
International journalists were kicked out of the country.
“I was probably one of the very few foreign correspondents that was still inside Iran,” Karimi says.
Because the government controlled the country's media infrastructure, it could cut off communication through the Internet or cell phones. They also began arresting journalists.
That's when Karimi decided to leave Iran to study in Canada.
“A jailed journalist is no good,” he says.
But leaving his family, homeland and job was one of the hardest things he's ever done, he says.
He came to Carleton with three goals: to build on his own skills as a journalist, to help young Canadian journalists understand the difference between the Iranian people and the Iranian government, and to prepare himself to go back and start an independent journalism school in Iran.
That's how he hopes to change his country. The more professional journalists working in Iran, the harder it will be for the regime to lock them up, he says.
Karimi is also finding his background in computer engineering helpful as he researches how bringing together traditional journalism with new media and technology can shake up governments and other centres of power.
He talks about protesters in Cairo's Tahrir Square during the recent Arab Spring revolutions, watching themselves on big screens, the same images being broadcast out to the world, while interacting with that coverage through social media.
“Events in the world have proven that liberation and freedom is really the love child of the marriage between old media and new media,” Karimi says.
But he won't be going back to Iran any time soon.
"I don't intend to just go to jail. I really intend to do some journalism and hopefully some training . . . Until the ground for that is prepared, I really don't think it would be wise to go back,” he says.
Meanwhile, Karimi is taking something his father taught him years ago very seriously. He was taught to never leave himself without any occupation.
On top of his studies, he works as a teaching assistant and represents journalism students on the Graduate Students’ Association.
“I wanted to get involved because I have a real appreciation for democracy," he says.