A State of Fear (19 page)

I sat down to talk to him, asking him about his book. ‘I’m not interested in it, really,’ he answered, ‘It’s just there’s nothing else to do’.

His face was dark, and he looked unwell. ‘Are you sick?’ I asked.

‘There’s nothing wrong with me’, he said.

When I got up the next morning I was told that he was extremely ill, that he could not even breathe properly. We tried to get the guard to take him to the infirmary but this was refused. We persisted in this all day: within hours he was vomiting blood. Eventually he was carried to the infirmary. By the time he got there he was unconscious. The doctors tried to force him to vomit but were unable to help him.

Upon hearing of Hassan’s death, several friends and comrades met to discuss what could be done as a mark of respect. The concept of some sort of ceremony took shape. Not only to commemorate Hassan but also as a show of defiance to the authorities for allowing him to die and as an opportunity for prisoners to gather in solidarity.

This was our proposal: a short speech about Hassan’s political struggle and his opposition to the authorities within the prison system, followed by some songs and poems. And then perhaps
messages from individuals and organisations. We would hold the ceremony in the prison block’s prayer room which could hold up to 200 people at around 3pm – at this time most guards would be asleep after a hefty afternoon meal and so security would be at its laxest.

Some comrades were asked to contact the other political groups, cell by cell, to explain the need for such an occasion and to win support for it. I was to obtain support from the Mojahedin and Tudeh prisoners. In all I had to speak to 18 cells – eight Mojahedin, five Tudeh and five Majority members.

I first approached the cell representative, asking for an opportunity to put forward a proposal. They would then give me a time to return to put my proposal, as each cell would have its own agenda for discussion each evening. I would then talk briefly about our comrade Hassan and our plans to commemorate his death. I was then asked to leave the cell while the prisoners discussed the proposal. The discussion was thorough and intense. They would debate the proposal, hearing arguments both for and against. Each cell would then vote on the proposal and then tell me the outcome.

At the end of this week-long period of consultation, out of 22 cells, 20 had voted in favour of our proposal. In each of these 20 cells, the great majority of prisoners were in favour. One cell, that of the passives, was not approached as their non-participation was anticipated. The last cell, made up of Minority and some other leftists including Maoists, voted against the proposal. Ironically, Hassan was from this very cell. We were given a brief summary of the debates from each cell by the cell representative, but we were especially interested in the arguments in this last cell. They felt participation in such a large scale event would allow the prison authorities to identify prisoners who were prepared to take part in acts of resistance and defiance. Prisoners would thus be at a personal risk of identification and punishment – this they considered too dangerous.

This argument was put forward in other cells, but was mostly defeated by the Mojahedin who argued, incorrectly as it happened, that such a ceremony or commemoration would have religious overtones and would not annoy the authorities or unduly attract their attention. This issue continued to be a topic of debate throughout the block even after cells had made their decision.

The ceremony was held, as planned, in the block prayer room. Of 200 prisoners within the block, 170 attended as requested. The ceremony was held promptly at 3pm on a sunny afternoon, exactly two weeks after Hassan’s death. His family had already collected his body and, under orders from the prison authorities, arranged for a discreet burial with no ceremony. Some of our families had been made aware of Hassan’s death so the prison authorities knew that they had to be careful or there would be an international ruckus about his death inside the prison. With this in mind, we knew that we could push our luck a little bit further than usual with the authorities with our daring commemoration.

The prayer room was a large square room with a stone floor which rarely fulfilled its intended purpose of Islamic prayer. On this occasion, the room would again not be used for prayer. Everybody filed into the room and sat on the floor in one large circle. The ceremony started with a call for a minute’s silence for Hassan. In order to avoid being seen from outside, we remained seated.

I had prepared a short statement on Hassan’s life and death entitled ‘A Prisoner of Two Regimes’. I described Hassan’s life, of which 14 years had been spent in the prisons of the two regimes – seven under the Shah, seven more during the Islamic regime.

Hassan had been captured while a member of the Mojahedin by Savak just as he had entered the University of Tehran as an engineering student and been put through the
most vile torture. He was said to have been the most resistant captive that Savak had ever known. His refusal to even identify himself for a long period had brought upon him the most savage torture methods.

This bravery had become widely recognised among opposition groups inside the prison. During the revolutionary upheaval he was released from prison by thousands of people who stormed through the walls of Evin and other prisons to free the Shah’s political prisoners.

Hassan then joined the nucleus of Rahe Kargar upon its formation. He was given responsibility for organising among students at the university. Shortly after the Islamic ‘cultural revolution’ he was again arrested. He was brought to Evin for a second time, after again suffering a period of severe torture. To his amazement, he found that some of his interrogators and torturers had been his fellow prisoners under the Shah! He was given ‘special’ treatment as he was not only an opponent of the regime but had also turned his back on Islam on leaving the Mojahedin. He had become at once an unbeliever and an apostate. He was, in fact, lucky not to have been shot while in Evin.

We had assembled to commemorate Hassan’s murder by the prison regime and to remind ourselves that Hassan took his life as the prison authorities had given him nothing to live for. He had become a martyr because the Islamic regime would not respond for a full 24 hours to treat him to save his life. For this reason, we held the Islamic regime responsible for his murder in Gohardasht.

I read this tribute in a loud, clear and emotional manner. The meeting was taut with restrained emotion. Some comrades began to weep. There then followed a revolutionary poetry recital by Karim, a young Mojehad who had been jailed when aged just 15. During a six-year period of torture and interrogation he had become a Tavab (under Haji Davoud’s
Golden Fortress prison regime) but since the period of increased resistance and the demise of the Tavab system, he had once again become an active member of the Mojahedin.

Upon hearing of the proposal for the ceremony, he had asked me to allow him to recite poetry. I consulted with others before answering him. Some were concerned about his past Tavab activities, but the commemoration organising committee was prepared to accept my recommendation to allow him to recite his poetry. It was possible that more Mojahedin would be attracted as a result. In security terms, he would be jeopardising his own rather than ours.

Karim chose three political poems, well-known by most prisoners. One was written by Said Sultanpour, who had also been a prisoner of both regimes – he had been arrested at his wedding ceremony by Islamic guards and was executed almost immediately after reaching Evin for a second time. The poems were recited with great conviction and emotion and many people remarked later how moved they were. Karim was to be executed in 1988-89, despite his prior activities as a Tavab.

A third section had been planned in which messages from organisations and individuals could be read out. But although one Rahe Kargar comrade read out his personal message to Hassan, understandably no other message was delivered. To have done so would have identified individuals with specific organisations – something that no one was prepared to do. Thus the ceremony ended with one comrade standing up and thanking everyone for attending. People were then asked to leave the room discreetly so as not to attract undue attention.

The whole ceremony, its organisation and the period of consultation brought about a new mood of unity and
co-operation
in the level of resistance offered to the prison authorities. Hassan’s death had acted as a spur for us to organise ourselves better to oppose the regime’s oppression of all prisoners.

The prison authorities increased the pressure from then on. There were mixed reactions from the prisoners. Some would look back to the Golden Fortress – the Tavabs, quarantine and doomsday – and retreated back into themselves, fearing a return to such conditions. Others felt it was even more important to show the utmost resistance, to make it hard for the officials to reassert their total authority over us.

Even with this division, the mood in favour of fighting back was strong. The flash point occurred in the spring of 1987. The officials cut our paraffin ration in the wake of a suicide and the same week prison guards confiscated all our paraffin cooking stoves. This was a significant attack on our living standards. Prison food was not enough to live on, so we had to supplement our diet with food from the prison shop. But if we could not cook it, we could not eat it.

Even those who wanted to finish their sentences with the minimum of fuss reacted angrily to this. There was no point keeping your head down if it meant starving to death. This brought together prisoners in a way the exercise issue, which could be seen as a Mojahedin-only problem, had not. The provocative action of the officials united prisoners in all blocks, without exception. Each block, according to its capabilities, organised its own way of resisting. The officials tried to defuse the anger by telling us that they would pay for the stoves, but under no circumstances would they return them.

In the discussions about the way to proceed, a number of proposals were submitted from our cell. A block-wide hunger strike was proposed by the left. The right countered with a
wait-and-see
attitude. Some of us suggested that on the visiting days, we refused food and explained the situation to our families, to involve those outside. This was eventually accepted by the cell, and forwarded to the block.

Other cells proposed that we should boycott the prison shop, apart from washing and cleaning materials. It was also proposed
that we should refuse to use the exercise yard. We decided to leave the shop boycott and use of the exercise yard to the discretion of each cell, as many prisoners needed to use either or both for health reasons. The proposal from our cell was adopted by the block, with the addition that the first ten prisoners called for a visit would not go, and the next ten would go to explain why this was the case. We hoped that this would lead families to put pressure on the officials immediately – which is what happened. So this struggle between the prisoners and their jailers broadened out to include our families, who acted as the backbone for our resistance.

During the first week of our co-ordinated fightback, we crowded round the big iron door to the block, hammering on it and demanding to see the officials. Every trend and organisation was keen to be represented in this campaign, which continued day after day, in the hope of wearing down the authorities.

We have met Amou – Mohammed Abrandi – already in the Golden Fortress. An old worker, weathered from the sun of the oilfields and bent from a lifetime’s labour and living in shacks constructed out of oil barrels. He’d never been to school, but taught himself to read in Persian and Arabic so fluently that he could write poetry in both.

When he was young, he was a giant of a man –
wide-shouldered
and long-limbed, with a reputation as no mean fighter. He had taken part with other oil workers in strikes in southern Iran after WWII, and remembered bitterly the capitulation of Tudeh at this time. Amou brought his experience to bear in the development of the movement that overthrew the Shah. The oil workers played a crucial role in this opposition movement. Their strikes and protests cut off the regime’s life blood.

With the consolidation of the Islamic government, Amou joined the Fedayeen, the largest left group in Iran. When the
organisation split, he sided with the Minority, which refused to support the regime. He was still active among the oil workers, despite his advanced years. His troubles began when
Time
magazine photographed him addressing a meeting of striking oil workers and printed it in full colour on their front cover. The Islamic regime took this as irrefutable evidence that he was inciting workers.

When the regime cracked down on the left, the Minority encouraged the development of armed cells in factories and towns and Amou was associated with one such group. Within a year, in 1983, he had been captured. He was tortured in 209 and, in unimaginable pain, he gave information which led to the capture of the woman who was the secretary of his cell. She was shot.

Amou was sentenced to seven years and sent to the Golden Fortress. Many captured with him from the Minority refused to speak to him and asked others to ostracise him as well. Ironically, according to what Amou told me, this boycott was organised by a member of the Minority who agreed to be part of a firing squad in Evin. When Amou, further down the same line, had been asked, he excused himself as being ‘too old and too frail for that kind of stuff’. This person, Amou said, was trying to cover his own tracks by maligning the old man but because Amou had shown weakness under torture, few would listen to his story. He was blanked and became lonely and isolated. He lived as an intransigent throughout, refusing to associate with the Tavabs. But he met a blank wall of hostility from many fellow prisoners.

When I arrived at the Golden Fortress, he told me the circumstances in which he had given information in an effort to win my sympathy. ‘I’m a typical working class activist,’ he told me. ‘There was no way I could be effective in the Minority’s armed cells, disconnected from the workplace. We were just waiting to be captured there – fish out of water, flapping about
on the beach. In effect, I got burned out. I only really began to read Marxist works after the overthrow of the Shah. I got arrested too soon – I was only just beginning to get to grips with the essentials of Marxism. I needed to learn this. I was a good speaker, a good activist – the form was good but I lacked the content that Marxism could give me. I really felt the lack of this talking to workers during our oil strikes.’ He would fall into despondency, which accentuated his hunched appearance and sigh, ‘I don’t think we will live to see the daylight of revolution and socialism in Iran.’