A State of Fear (30 page)

These conditions encouraged the emergence of Tavabiat, as many prisoners were overwhelmed by an entirely new situation that they did not know how to confront.

International human rights organisations focused on the Islamic regime’s prison record, as news of the show trials, summary executions, doomsday and quarantine filtered through to the outside world. This was stimulated by the emerging organisation of the prisoners’ families, demanding to know what was being done to their incarcerated relatives. Khomeini’s heir apparent, Ayatollah Montazeri, was particularly sensitive to such pressure, as he made great play of listening to the opinions of the people. (This proved to be his Achilles heel: after the prison massacres of 1988-89, Montazeri wrote to Khomeini criticising this butchery as ‘un-Islamic’. Such outspoken opinions were not well received and Montazeri found himself supplanted by the more pliant Khameini, a student of Montazeri who didn’t then even hold the religious rank of ayatollah.)

The war was ebbing and the regime was not challenged by internal opposition. Consequently, it felt able to make concessions to the prisoners’ families and human rights organisations. Figures associated with the recent prison regime, such as Haji Davoud and Haji Lajiverdi, were quietly shunted sideways. A new prison leadership associated with Montazeri was installed. The institution of Tavabism was discredited and prisoners were given limited freedom of movement and organisation, although no right of political expression was conceded.

Political organisations within the prisons attempted to utilise these opportunities not only to organise within themselves, but to coordinate essential actions with other groupings. This included not just political resistance within the blocks but sporting activities. The new atmosphere also began to encourage political discussion among individuals and groups. This level of
co-operation is unique in Iranian prison life under both the Shah and the Islamic regime. The effects of this were not entirely beneficial. With the lifting of the intense pressure, some groupings which had been forced to co-operate by the previous conditions again became openly hostile.

By this time, most of the Tudeh and Fedayeen Majority prisoners had become integrated within the prison resistance, as most had now been in jail for four or five years, and had dropped any support for the regime.

The main forces of the left – Fedayeen Minority, Rahe Kargar, Komoleh and the remnants of Peykar – formed the core of resistance. Alliances were forged with Mojahedin prisoners when possible. The relationship with the Tudeh and Majority proved more rocky, as the left in some prisons refused to associate with organisations that had previously given full support to the Islamic regime.

Structured discussions began to take place on the reasons for the defeat of the revolution, the nature of the Islamic regime and the like.

The Mojahedin leadership attempted to insulate its rank and file from political discussion which threatened to undermine their organisation, as its membership was younger and far more politically inexperienced on average than that of the left. Instead, they attempted to fill their time with handicrafts, physical exercise and the like. In addition, their members were kept on the boil by being told that the regime’s collapse was imminent. Optimism substituted for balanced political judgement as they waited for their tank battalions to roll in from Iraq.

The resistance which was successfully organised through this period would not have been possible without the wide scale
co-operation
between the diverse political organisations
throughout
the prisons of Iran.

Prison authorities attempted to clamp down on the freedoms won during the previous period. This led to the systematic elimination of those considered to represent a threat to the Islamic regime – especially if they ever saw the outside of a prison compound again.

Unified prisoners’ organisations were attacked and the prison authorities refused to recognise prisoners’ representatives. A process of identifying activists began. Collective actions were forcibly smashed. Individual prisoners were screened through weekly interrogation. Questions and answers were all recorded in writing. Those identified as troublemakers were removed from their blocks and put into solitary. All prisoners were under permanent 24-hour a day lockup – the effective reintroduction of quarantine.

In early 1988, there was huge prison reorganisation on the basis of the information gathered. Great care was taken to separate the Islamic from the prisoners of the left. Once begun, this reshuffling went on for four months. It had the effect of dispersing the prison activists, destroying their organisations.

The regime then embarked on the mass execution of political prisoners. As a result of the constant moving of prisoners, news of the massacres was slow to spread, as the prison grapevine was destroyed. Most reports estimate that between 10,000 and 12,000 prisoners were executed at this time. The Mojahedin was the hardest hit by these massacres and, for the first time, the Tudeh party also lost the majority of their leaders and cadres to execution.

The massacres had the obvious effect of forcing prisoners back into themselves – having prison contacts once more carried the death penalty.

The regime denied any massacre, trying to force prisoners to
write declarations that no such event took place. Pressure from prisoners’ families built up, understandably as they were worried at not seeing their sons and daughters for months. Political exiles bought news of the massacres to world attention.

The regime screened its remaining prisoners to see if it was possible to allow some out on a short-term discharge to alleviate the accusations.

The massacres brutally illustrated to those in the hands of the Islamic regime’s prison authorities that they were no more than hostages to be used in bargaining when possible, slaughtered when not. The immediate effect of this was to further limit prison activity – aware that they can be shot at any time, the priority for each individual was not to attract attention. The cohesion between political groupings was consequently not rebuilt.

T
he modern prison system in Iran came into existence with the establishment of the centralised state after the 1907 constitutional revolution. Before this, each feudal fiefdom throughout Persia would run its own system. Justice was administered by the Islamic sharia courts, overseen by mullahs. There was no standard and unified legal code, and each judge dispensed judgement in accordance with their own interpretation of the Koran and other Islamic authorities.

A basic demand of the 1907 revolution was the removal of the sharia courts and the enactment of a centralised judicial system similar to the Napoleonic code of France. But in 1922, Reza Shah established a one man dictatorship: the Pahlavi dynasty. This arrested the development of the wider potential of civil society, while maintaining the concept of a unified judicial code. The establishment of Soviet power in northern regions of the country in the wake of the 1917 Russian revolution was met with repression from the Shah, to try
to prevent Iranian people from sympathising with the Russians after their revolution, and, in 1931, the anti-Communist act was passed. The maximum penalty for violating this act was death.

In 1936 the ‘Group of 53’, led by Dr Taghi Arani, were arrested, charged with conspiracy to overthrow the government through a ‘Bolshevik revolution’. Substantive evidence included circulating and translating proscribed books, plus contributing to the illegal theoretical magazine,
The World
. One defendant was accused of sending money to aid the Republican side in the Spanish civil war. The group, made up of academics and professionals, had no wide support, so Reza Shah had a free hand to dispense with them as he wished.

During their trial, each defendant was provided with a book detailing the court proceedings, and how they could enact their own defence, should they wish to do so. Each was provided with their own defence lawyer by the Ministry of Justice. Arani commented that some of these defence lawyers inflicted more harm on the accused than the prosecution. This was not universally the case. One lawyer in particular, Dr Aghayan, put forward a strong and courageous defence of his client. Every defendant was allowed to address the court. The trial took place in open court, with each side allowed to call witnesses. Representatives of the national and international press were present, and the case was widely reported.

According to one of the imprisoned 53, Bozorg Alavi, (considered the founder of modern Iranian literature), fresh eggs, cigarettes and even opium were allowed into the prison of Komiteh Moshterak. The prisoners were given daily deliveries of hot food. Dirty washing was handed to the prisoners’ families, who returned it clean. The guards were most amenable to bribery and, if the price was right, acted as couriers for the prisoners.

There was an exercise period each day, which the 53 were
allowed to organise as a group, without interference from prison officials.

Arani, the leader of the 53, said to visualise a bayonet point under your chin during interrogation. If you nod your head, you stab yourself; if you shake your head, you remain unscathed. In other words, admit to nothing. He attempted to organise a hunger strike and, as punishment for this, was sentenced to 300 lashes. As a response, over 100 prisoners took up the hunger strike.

T
he major industrial city of Ghazvin is just over 150 kilometres northwest of Tehran. In late October 1994 it erupted. The population took to the streets en masse, arming themselves as their numbers grew. Crowds were drawn to the headquarters of the Islamic guard. The building was attacked and the demonstrators rebuffed under heavy fire. Undeterred, they attacked again – and again, like waves against a rock until, suffering great losses, they were at last successful in seizing the building. It was ransacked and put to the torch, after which the crowds moved their attention to other buildings belonging to the security forces.

With the initial victory over the Islamic guard to encourage them, other offices fell and the streets were stripped of billboards bearing pictures of Khomeini and Islamic slogans. Once the security forces had been driven out, attention was turned to the banks, who had their funds redistributed, and municipal buildings, which were occupied by the demonstrators and
became organising centres for what had become a
city-wide
uprising.

A citizens' defence militia was organised, and brigades of between one to two hundred people secured the major roads into the city. Vehicles were only admitted through the checkpoints if they bore banners with slogans such as ‘Down with the Islamic regime!' on them. The city was cleansed of the regime's paraphernalia. The citizens were in control of their own city.

Local armed forces were deployed against the population. However, after a couple of initial clashes, these forces in effect mutinied: they refused to be deployed against civilians. The government had to resort to deploying its crack troops from Tehran and other cities further afield.

After three days of bloody fighting, in which Ghazvin's defenders were strafed from helicopter gunships, the Islamic regime won back the city. But its troops had been forced to fight for every street, every house, as the citizens' militia fought bitterly for their city. House-to-house searches and arrests continued for over a month throughout Ghazvin. As a direct response, three brigadiers and a colonel representing opinion from the armed forces and Islamic guard submitted a letter to the regime, deploring their use against those who ‘have committed no crime except to speak out the common demands of the people'.

Ghazvin was no isolated event. In 1993–94 alone there were massive, spontaneous uprisings in the cities of Mashad, Arak, Tabriz, Zahedan and Shiraz. Six revolts, all in provincial capitals, in two years. The frequency with which they were occurring was increasing, as was the number of people involved.

All these revolts were important. But I have dwelt on events in Ghazvin because at the time it bore the closest resemblance to the revolutionary upheavals which precipitated the
overthrow
of the Shah in 1979. In Ghazvin, the masses were at their
most determined, the most conscious of their goal – the overthrow of the regime. Undoubtedly, the experience of those who participated in the earlier revolution was well-employed to prepare the ground for a new one.

When I, and many others, were jailed, we were told that we were nothing more than isolated intellectuals, infested with Western corruption. The regime believed that by physically eliminating us, it eliminated the ‘cancer' of dissent and dissatisfaction. The events of the mid-1990s show what a hopeless project this was.

No one protested when I was arrested. Yet when I was released, I was bowled over by the welcome from those same neighbours who had been glad to see the back of the troublemaker ten years before. Our whole country learned painfully – through unemployment, poverty, repression and war – exactly what Khomeini's promise of the kingdom of God on earth meant. And they were angry – red with rage – at how they have been lied to, and the millions of lives this lie has cost.

Khomeini's promises of 1979 did not square with the reality. The gulf between Islamic utopia and reality filled up with more corpses by the day. And when the dead number your mother or brother, when you can be the next in the war zone where years later we were still finding the dead, you cannot ignore it. In fact, you cannot live with it: this grotesque Islamic behemoth threatens your life at every turn and lurch. Eventually, your very survival demands that it goes or you do. Until the fundamentalist regime is consigned to the dustbin of history, all our lives in Iran are threatened.

So forcefully have the dictates of survival impressed themselves on the minds of millions now, that they are prepared to risk their lives in uprisings like those of Ghazvin, Mashad, Arak, Tabriz, Zahedan and Shiraz.

And so we come to the present day and little seems to have changed but that doesn't mean that things can't change.

First of all, let's make clear just who is President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. He is nothing more than a puppet in the hands of the leader of the Islamic regime, Ayatollah Seyed Ali Hoseyni Khamenei, who has been Supreme Leader of Iran since June 1989 and who claims to run the country on the basis of God's law. His whole structure of government is based on ministers from the counter-revolutionary force of Islamic Jihadists who have fought in Afghanistan, Iraq and Lebanon.

At the moment most of the ministers are former generals in the army whose only present fight is to see who can get the lion's share of property, oil and revenues in Iran. The whole structure is based on fascism, much like the Nazis, with
black-shirted
forces in the streets running around and arresting everyone from workers to intellectuals and students. Workers are still being killed because they want the simple things their counterparts in the West take for granted – the right to organise, bargain, and if needs be, strike.

Apart from the Shia hierarchy, of which Khamenei is the head, and Ahmedinajad's government, there is a third segment– the security arm which is responsible for international terrorism, drug smuggling and trading in arms and ammunition to African states.

The present regime faced its most important challenge with the protests following the 2009 presidential election. Protests have erupted ever since, again in February 2011 concurrent with the Arab Spring and it is my belief that as the people overthrew the Shah in 1979 they can overthrow this present regime. It won't come with an attack from the West because I don't believe the people, and there are nearly 80 million of them, are in favour of foreign military intervention. We have seen the chaos that resulted in Iraq and Afghanistan and the damage done in Libya. If the West really wants to help smash
this regime then they should firstly stop buying any Iranian oil and then more importantly stop selling refined products like petrol back to them. If these two things happened the regime would be finished within months. It may sound simple but if millions and millions of Iranians suddenly found themselves without any petrol for their cars the protests of 2009 would seem tame by comparison.

And finally the question I am asked probably more than any other: Is Iran really building a nuclear bomb? When I was a professor of economics at Tehran University right at the beginning of this story I was arguing for a non-nuclear Iran. Why should a country which has the second largest gas supplies in the world and the third or fourth biggest oil reserves suddenly need nuclear power? There was no economic justification for it then and there is none now, unless of course the aim is for more than simply nuclear power. So my answer is yes, they are trying to create nuclear bombs.

Were we right to stand up and oppose the regime when we did? Did we achieve anything as a result of all the sacrifice? History will be the judge of that, not the mullahs who passed death sentences on innumerable women and men who wanted no more than a better world. But history fights no battles, creates nothing, destroys nothing. History is no more or less than the sum of the efforts of real women and men. Judgement will be informed by those who experienced the regime at its worst: the many thousands who survived the prison system and helped form the backbone to opposition.

I have tried to write a testimony to all those who resisted the Islamic regime in its foul prisons; a tribute to all those who died, like my friend and comrade Firooz Alvandi. But this will not be the tribute… though it is coming. The only tribute worthy of the fallen is the realisation of the sort of society they gave their lives in the struggle to build: pluralistic, democratic and just.

In 1979, our people made the mistake of overthrowing one ruler, only to hand power to another. The result was a tragedy. If that tragedy is not to be repeated, then the power that the workers take must be held for themselves, in the bodies they create. Only the masses can guarantee the rights of the masses: rights for workers, women, nationalities and all the others that have been denied for so long.