A State of Fear (29 page)

A month passed while I lived in this crowded Ankara apartment. During this whole time, it was not possible for me to phone my family and tell them where I was, or even that I was still alive. At this precarious stage, I could afford no footprints. But I did receive a call from a contact in Germany, telling me that he had made arrangements for me to move there. Though my situation in Turkey was not good, this didn’t seem an attractive prospect. This was at a time of frequent riots outside refugee hostels in Germany instigated by the far right, and petrol-bombing of immigrants’ houses. Germany wasn’t exactly rolling out the welcome mat. I didn’t want to escape political persecution in Iran only to swap it for racial persecution in Germany.

I neither spoke nor understood the language and realised through my experience in Turkey how isolated that would make me. After much hesitancy, I decided to hold out for an English-speaking country. So, the night before I was due to go to Germany, I phoned my contact there and explained my decision.

He was not best pleased, especially so late in the day. He expressed concern that I was ducking the political issues, as Germany was at this time the European centre of political opposition to the Islamic regime. I said that the opposite was the case. I wanted to be somewhere I could communicate.

He asked if it was the US I wanted. I replied, ‘No’. I’d lived in the States for quite some time before, and knew that the political scene was pretty dead, especially within the refugee community. The affluent monarchists liked it, to the extent that the Beverly
Hills area of Los Angeles became known as downtown
Irangeles
. They even have their own round-the-clock radio and cable stations. The radical Iranian political refugees were spread so thin that you couldn’t really call them a community in the US. Furthermore, America’s distance from Europe left it totally cut off from the main focus of Iranian exile protest. As far as refugee politics went, it was a backwater. Canada and Australia were out of the question for the same reason.

I wanted to get to Britain. I asked Omar, my contact in Ankara, to try to get the documentation that would make this possible. It turned out that this would prove more costly and time-consuming. Britain would take another month. I waited until one of my Turkish contacts turned up with a forged Spanish passport and other travel documents, to make it possible for me to get out of Turkey, through Germany and to Britain. I was to leave that day.

Three hours before I was due to go to the airport, I took a look at my passport. My hair colour was apparently ‘light brown’. There was no way that this passport was going to get me through, unless the immigration control in Turkey, Germany and Britain all happened to be colour blind. I told Omar that I was not going to risk travelling with these documents. ‘No problem’, he said. ‘I’ve dealt with worse cases than this. Just be glad it’s not the colour of your eyes that’s wrong’, he said with a smirk. Off we drove, looking for a hairdresser with
light-brown
dye to spare.

‘Quick,’ Omar explained to the bemused hairdressers as we burst through the door, ‘this man’s getting married in an
hour-and-a-half
. As you can see, he needs emergency treatment!’ (Thanks for the compliment, I thought). They went to work, dying my hair, moustache and eyebrows light brown. I walked out of the shop with a new head of lustrous locks, hoping that the colour definition on my passport photo was poor enough to let me get away with it.

With no time to spare, we drove like fury to Ankara airport. Omar had his foot to the floor, fist constantly thumping the car horn at anything that came anywhere near our path. We got to passport control with minutes to spare. Hot and flustered with nervous tension, I stood in front of the passport booth as the policeman stared at me and my photo. I just hoped the sweat wouldn’t make the dye run. But he nodded me through and I was soon on the plane. The flight transfer in Germany went smoothly – almost blissfully at this stage – as did my clearance through customs at Heathrow ten hours after leaving Ankara.

I was just a bit disappointed that nobody remarked how nice my hair looked.

B
efore I was arrested I had become accustomed to standing in queues for bread, meat and rice, fat, soap and practically every other essential of life. All of these became scarce and only found on the black market for 20 to 30 times more than the official price. One would not expect to experience the same queues in prison. But in the Islamic regime’s prisons, I had to queue to get in, queue for the toilet, for the infirmary, for food, queue to be tortured. There was even a queue for the firing squad.

This was a reflection of what was going on in Iranian society as a result of the war with Iraq: queues for bread and water, for trains and buses, in the towns and in the cities; queues in battle to go to the frontline, queues for burial plots for the victims of the war and the victims of torture and repression.

The policies pursued in the prisons were symptomatic of the wider political aims of the government, as developments inside paralleled the wider perspectives of the regime.
What we were subjected to within the prison walls was a microcosm of Iran, illustrating how the regime viewed the society it ruled.

Our experiences showed the inability of the regime to understand the reciprocal and dynamic relationship between the individual and society. The mullahs’ outlook could not countenance change in either the individual or society. For the religious authorities, the world was immutable, governed by divine laws which they saw themselves as bound to guard and implement. In a very real sense, all of Iran is one huge jail; the prison regulations being religious dogma.

A general characteristic of the Islamic regime is that it constantly distorts the reality of its own existence and of those under it. It paints human rights as wrong, clerical reaction as progress and democracy, counter-revolution as the only true revolution.

Look at the name ‘Islamic Republic’. It is a contradiction in terms. A republic is governed by its people, whereas the Islamic regime is ostensibly the rule of God, through a fraction of the religious hierarchy. The leader has full and ultimate power over the judicial, executive and legislative spheres of the state. He is the commander-in-chief of all armed forces. Society is run by the interpretation of the Koran by one – unelected – man. He has jurisdiction over your whole life, private and public: how you conduct yourself, who you marry.

The structures of a republic, whereby a government would be checked and guided by the populace, are absent. This individual gets his instructions from God; his job is to enforce these on earth, and there can be no interference in this. All this and more constitutes what is called the Vali-Faghih – the absolute rule of the prime religious authority. In 1979 we overthrew a secular monarch and were rewarded with the imposition of a clerical one.

There is no clearer example of this theocracy’s disdain for the
people than that which we lived out in prison. Guards, interrogators, torturers and state prosecutors are not called by these names. The prisoner is forced to call her rapist, mutilator and butcher ‘brother’. The places in which all this takes place are not called prisons. No: I spent three years at the ‘Islamic University of Evin’.

Conditions in prison changed according to the political priorities of the regime. When it felt threatened, as in the summer of 1988, we paid a terrific price. But this was preceded by a period of relative liberalisation as Ayatollah Montazeri emphasised the need for religious indoctrination rather than terror. Below is a breakdown of these distinct periods:

This was the honeymoon period. Most prison officials had spent years in the jails under the Shah – two examples well known to Iranians being the first governor of Evin under Khomeini, Haji Kasha, and his successor, Haji Lajiverdi. Most political prisoners
were officials of the old regime: Savak torturers, royalist army brass, deposed ministers and the like.

Some left-wing and Mojahedin prisoners were jailed, in particular from areas where struggle continued after the revolution along emerging class or national lines, as in Kurdistan or Turkmensahra, where the peasants seized the land and organised peasant shoras under the leadership of the Fedayeen. Workers’ shoras that seized control of factories and refused to concede power to the Islamic regime also found their militants being arrested.

Censorship had not been tightened yet, and prisoners could still freely obtain literature within the jails, whether Marx’s works or the papers of the left organisations. Such practices as blindfolding had yet to be introduced and were derided as ‘Israeli’ by prison officials. Relations between political prisoners and guards was cordial and those I knew in prison at the time went so far as to describe prison food as excellent.

This was a time when political discussions not only took place between prisoners, but between prisoners and guards. The honeymoon, however, proved to be short-lived.

The regime began to attack democratic freedoms systematically: women’s rights, workers’ organisations, Kurdish national rights – the list became ever longer. It was inevitable that those who stood against this tide and defended the gains won through the overthrow of the Shah would be swept into prison.

All freedom of expression was crushed under the weight of Khomeini’s interpretation of Islamic orthodoxy – just six months after we had swept away the Shah’s censorship. Khomeini gave the order to ‘break the pens of the ungodly writers into pieces’. Those who had given voice to the revolutionary sentiments of February 1979 were denied access to the media and often jailed. Many papers were closed down,
from communist to liberal. Newspaper offices were razed to the ground by mobs of Hezbollah. And, in the hallmark of totalitarian regimes, mass book burnings were organised. Huge bonfires of critical works appeared where once had stood bookstalls. The biggest were piled up in front of the University of Tehran. In the lowest pit of Hell, Hitler must have danced with glee.

The regime was preparing the ground for a frontal assault on the left and all opposition. It needed a pretext, and this was provided by the Mojahedin’s poorly-prepared putsch. After they blew up the headquarters of the Islamic Republican Party, killing around 120 leaders of the regime, and the second bomb attack on the prime minister and president, the mullahs gave the green light to wipe out the opposition. People were killed indiscriminately. The regime declared martial law and closed down every road entering every city. Groups of Hezbollah rampaged throughout the country, interning thousands of innocent people.

Hundreds and thousands were killed in these clashes. The Hezbollah would assemble in the city centres, block all surrounding roads and round up all the people in the streets. Sometimes they would round up even more people later that day, at other times they would move to other areas of the cities. People were manhandled into police vans or other vehicles commandeered by the Hezbollah, including buses stopped and emptied mid-journey, and driven to local headquarters of the Hezbollah. Here, captives would be interrogated and despatched to Islamic revolutionary guard prisons or Islamic Komitehs. Few were released after interrogation.

The first member of Rahe Kargar to be killed in these events was a young student arrested near Tehran University as she tried to make her way to a street protest. Taken to Evin, she was tortured and summarily shot with a copy of
Rahe Kargar
as evidence. It took us three years to find out for certain what had
happened to her, as the only thing she gave under torture was a false name. Like so many others, she lies in an anonymous grave somewhere in Tehran.

The Prosecutor General, Mousavi Tabrizi, said that those wounded in these street clashes should not be taken to hospitals. He echoed the views of Khomeini, who believed these events constituted a threat against Islam, God and the Islamic regime. According to him, such wounded were at war with Allah and ‘the Imam of the epoch’, Khomeini. As a result, the law decreed their lives were worthless, or ‘dangerous on earth’ and so they should be killed whenever they were found. Although no official figures are available, unofficial estimates put the number of wounded who were summarily killed at several hundred in Tehran alone. You can imagine, if this was the regime’s way of working in the open arena of the cities, how atrocious life was hidden behind the walls of the prisons.

Contact between political groups was minimal. The groups in prison focused on day-to-day survival, leaving no space for political discussion with others. Even within a particular organisation, discussion was brought to a standstill, especially within Evin and the Golden Fortress. Any kind of interpersonal contact was dangerous and each individual fought desperately to save himself and his comrades.

Tudeh and the Fedayeen Majority were the smallest of the groups within the prisons because their support for the regime had temporarily shielded them from its assault. But this also cut off their prisoners from the rest of the left in the jails. In 1983 the number of inmates from Tudeh and the Fedayeen Majority in the Golden Fortress was only about 40. Haji Davoud concentrated them in section 3, Mujaradi block 3. Their behaviour was not uniform and their relations with others varied according to the individuals. Some were active Tavabs,
working closely with the prison officials. Others just wanted to keep their heads down, survive from one day to the next and get out as soon as possible, while some would actively resist. Some prisoners toed the leadership line, that the regime was ‘popular, anti-imperialist and progressive’, and that the war with Iraq was for ‘the defence of the homeland’. Others would in practice break with this line by working with those their leaders called ‘counter-revolutionary’ in defence of prisoners’ rights and conditions. For them, this exposed the contradiction between their organisations’ line and their own experiences. Unfortunately, they made up only a small percentage of the Tudeh and Majority prisoners as yet. But the number and the outlook of these prisoners was to change radically from 1984 on, after the arrest of hundreds of leading cadres.

The Mojahedin had most members behind bars and was singled out for special treatment, as it had a very young and inexperienced rank and file. About 80 per cent were under 18. The regime put them under extreme pressure in an attempt to break as many as possible and create an army of Tavab youth in the prisons. The regime was encouraged in this policy by the forced defection of many prominent militia activists in the Mojahedin’s failed rising of 1981.

One successful militia leader, Mehran Asdaghi, became a Tavab, and a focal point for the recruitment of many other young Tavabs from the same background. In the Golden Fortress he organised a Tavab ‘flying column’ that would maraud from block to block, leaving a trail of blood and broken bodies after it.

The prison officials tried to attract the youth and so isolate the intransigent Mojahed. By creating a strong pole of Tavab attraction in this way, the regime wanted to win over the passive majority and destroy the core of the Mojahedin. Most Mojahedin who did not capitulate, attempted to defend themselves by feigning passivity, or becoming tactical Tavabs.
Having accepted this fetid swamp for expediency’s sake, some were soon submerged in it. Haji Davoud relied on his ability to attract young people – ‘Good Islamic kids who have been fooled by the counter-revolutionaries’. The Tavabs were his way of ‘helping them to save their souls’. Those Mojahedin who resisted went through quarantine, doomsday, solitary and were often executed.

The ranks of the left-wing organisations were peppered with Tavabs, but not to the same extent as the Mojahedin. Often they took on the role of advisors to Hajis Lajiverdi and Davoud, and executed their own comrades.

After the Mojahedin, the left-wing organisations made up the largest prison body. Although much smaller than the Mojahedin, they resisted the pressures much better. The mainstay of the intransigents was the left, which provided the greatest proportion of its overall numbers to prison resistance than any other category.

Conditions at this time fomented distrust between one prisoner and the next. Contacts between the left and the Mojahedin were minimal. The Mojahedin’s leaders within the jails were keen to limit their members’ links with the left in order to preserve their Islamic credentials in the eyes of an increasingly murderous regime. They also sought to limit the influence of the left on their young and inexperienced members.

As a result of all this, the left, Tudeh and Majority and the Mojahedin, ignored each other. This was the period of the greatest hostility and least co-operation between organisations in the whole history of prison in Iran. This played into the hands of the regime, which was eager to foster alienation and mutual mistrust. If prisoners did not trust each other, it was impossible for them to organise together, and the work of the prison authorities became much easier. It was probably the only way that the massive influx into the prisons at the time could have been handled without an explosion.