Children of Paradise (31 page)

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M
ANOUCHEHR AND
A
KBAR
M
OHAMMADI
, brothers from a village near Amol in the southern Caspian province of Mazandaran, were among the unlucky ones. They led a nationalist student group that, because it was secular, could not shelter even among the reformists. Manouchehr, whose great arching brow lent him a sorrowful look, impressed foreign journalists at times as grandiose, at other times as fragile; when his ordeal came to an end, he would be described by one of his fellow exiles in the shared shipwreck of Washington, D.C., as “a child reporting a tragedy.”

Manouchehr’s father, a rice farmer, was one of very few men in his village who could read and write. His wife, thirteen at the time of their marriage, bore six children, including Akbar and Manouchehr. Villagers came to the Mohammadi home to present their disputes for resolution, or when they needed help writing a letter. The Mohammadis were the first in their village to own a refrigerator that ran on gasoline. Most families stored their perishables in ditches. Manouchehr’s mother made ice in her refrigerator and gave pieces to neighbors, who would line up outside her home.

Manouchehr grew up with anxiety and prayer—prayer that he might wind up in paradise, anxiety that he might fail to avert his eyes from women, that he might stumble into sin. He washed his hands and face in the ritual way before praying. He tried to train his mind away from temptation. The village school went no further than fourth grade, so after that he walked an hour each way to lessons in a neighboring town. His father wanted him to be a doctor.

Manouchehr adored his younger brother, Akbar, and like younger brothers everywhere, Akbar looked up to Manouchehr. Akbar was compassionate, principled, humane. He was proud and obstinate as well. In later years Manouchehr would speak of his brother as of a sainted alter ego.
His Akbar sought to help children, the handicapped, beggars, the injured. As boys, the brothers peered together into a grown-up world that often repelled and frightened them. State television in the 1980s seemed to celebrate killing and violence in the name of Islam. The Mohammadi brothers were ashamed to see their religion marshaled to such ends. In time they became not only secular but nonbelievers.

When Manouchehr registered for his studies in economics at the University of Tehran, he refused to join the Islamic Students Association, which he distrusted as an arm of the government. He and Akbar decided instead to form an organization of their own. It was independent of the state, nationalist and secular, and they held meetings and recruited members in secret. Their frank opposition to theocratic rule rendered them marginal to the politics of the era, but Manouchehr talked himself up to whoever would listen, to the point that a
New York Times
reporter described him as a “
fast-talking self-promoter.”

Manouchehr’s youthful grandstanding may not have convinced Iranian students of his importance, but it provided the regime with a useful scapegoat after the Eighteenth of Tir, as the campus crisis in July 1999 came to be known. Hard-liners in the regime could accomplish many things at once by arresting the Mohammadis. The brothers were at once well-known and isolated; like the victims of the serial killings, they had little recourse inside the system because they were secular. By making an example of these young men who had often claimed to speak for the student movement, but whose role was in reality very limited, the security apparatus could declare victory after the unrest but without waging war on student groups with deeper social and institutional roots. And so state television pronounced Akbar and Manouchehr the ringleaders of the student uprising; it also pronounced them foreign agents who sought to overthrow the Islamic Republic under the guidance of the United States and European powers.

The Revolutionary Court found Manouchehr and Akbar Mohammadi guilty of waging war against God. First they were sentenced to death; then the sentence was commuted to fifteen years in prison. In the end, the brothers served seven years and two months, but there was no mercy in this. The
Mohammadi brothers were tortured with the special savagery reserved for the condemned. Their interrogators lashed them with cables, suspended them from the ceiling in stress positions, dunked their heads in toilet bowls, ruptured their eardrums with deafening noises, and deprived them of sleep twenty-three hours a day for days on end. They tortured Akbar in front of Manouchehr and Manouchehr in front of Akbar. They put the brothers through mock executions and convinced each in turn that the other was dead. They beat the sides of Manouchehr’s body with an iron rod until some of his vertebrae fractured.

Manouchehr gave a forced televised confession early on. He copped to being the leader of the student demonstrations and to inciting unrest on behalf of the United States and other foreign powers. Other students, under similar duress, implicated Manouchehr in confessions of their own. The official narrative took shape through this theater of coercion. It remained only for Akbar to fulfill his role. Day after day, interrogators demanded that Akbar implicate his brother in a foreign plot against the state. Akbar refused. In the end Manouchehr could have suffered no worse torture than his brother’s resistance.

Their mother did not recognize Akbar the first time she visited him in prison. He weighed less than a hundred pounds. He bled internally, from his kidneys and stomach; his feet were purple from the lashings, and some of his toenails had fallen off. A disk in his spine had ruptured. He had lost much of his hearing and some of his eyesight from blows to his head. One surgeon who operated on the injuries to his head and face discovered blood clots moving swiftly toward his brain. Akbar mounted his last hunger strike as a plea for access to medical care in July of 2006. According to Amnesty International, he “
was administered an unspecified ‘medicine’” on July 30. His condition worsened. By one of the family’s accounts, Akbar was taken not to the intensive care unit, where he belonged, but to a general prison ward, where he was left on a stretcher to die.

Under pressure from the media and international human rights groups, the judiciary granted Manouchehr a twenty-day furlough to attend a memorial for his brother. On the eighteenth night, with the help of Iran’s Kurdish
Democratic Party, he slipped over the Iraqi border. Kurds ferried him through the mountains into Turkey, from where he fled to the United States.

Manouchehr, with his bruised vertebrae, his haunted psyche, would become his brother’s evangelist. Together with his sisters, he would make a secular martyr of Akbar, in Shiite fashion. The Islamic Republic, perhaps the world, had never been equal to Akbar’s presence. Manouchehr would have his brother’s prison memoirs translated into English, he would start a foundation in Akbar’s name. He would escape Evin Prison but never again see the forests of Mazandaran.

He came to report a tragedy—to the vast, indifferent American West, where he settled in Las Vegas, because it was cheap, and to an Iran that grew more ghostly to him than Akbar ever would.

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I
N THE DAYS THAT FOLLOWED
the student unrest, Khatami was quiet. He gave no special remarks and made no public appearance for two weeks. The students and their supporters were dumbstruck, then angry. They were the president’s constituency. Surely he could spare a word of support for them, a word of condemnation for those who had arrested and beaten them, those who would sentence the Mohammadis and two others to die.

Ayatollah Montazeri, barricaded in his home, had shown no hesitation. Montazeri called the students “
the true children of the revolution” and “the eyes and the light of the nation.” The hardline forces that beat them back, said Montazeri, had “betrayed the religion and the nation” by yoking violence to Islam. Akbar Ganji voiced his support for the students as well. But it was Khatami the students longed to hear from, and Khatami who eluded them.

The president did have a long-scheduled speaking engagement in the western city of Hamadan on Tuesday, July 27. As that date approached—a full two weeks after the hardline counterdemonstration at the University of Tehran—what would have been a routine provincial appearance became a test of Khatami’s mettle. Tens of thousands of spectators crowded into Hamadan’s soccer stadium.

The president praised students and faculty as “
among the best supporters for the progress and advancement of our nation,” and he criticized the police and militias involved in the dormitory attack. That nastiness, he suggested, was hardline payback for his prosecution of the serial killings. But he also stressed his support for the revolutionary state and asserted that there was no daylight between him and the establishment’s conservatives. “
There is no split between the government, the presidency and the Supreme Leader,” he said; any appearance to the contrary was an “illusion.”

Alas, Khatami lamented, the student demonstrations had devolved into rioting, which Khatami condemned as “
an ugly and offensive incident.” He blamed the violence on evil outsiders intent on making trouble, but he left ambiguous whether these were hardline provocateurs or foreign conspirators. “All persons and elements responsible for the recent riots in Tehran will get tough punishment no matter who they are,” he declared. And he praised the restraint of the security forces: “
My dear ones, today in order to put down the riots and in order to put out the flames of violence for the nation, others use tanks, armored cars, and heavy weapons. Our forces did not use firearms to tackle the rioting. The disturbance was put down calmly and without resorting to firearms.”

The speech seemed written to placate two audiences, and it was only partially effective. The more radical students came away convinced that, between the students and the Supreme Leader, Khatami had chosen the Leader and could never be trusted again. How foolish the students had been to expect that Khatami would act as anything other than an official of the regime he served. But the reformist student activists, like Ali Afshari, had not yet run out of patience for political maneuvers, and they continued to extend Khatami the benefit of the doubt. Khatami, Ali believed, had shifted his focus to two achievable ends, both of which deserved the students’ support. The president was determined to commute the death sentences of the Mohammadi brothers and the others. And he was looking ahead to the parliamentary elections, which the reformists were poised to win.

Ali and his friends pressed Khatami on the matter of the imprisoned students. They wrote letters and attended a meeting of the National
Security Council. They could see that the reformist government was locked in battle with the Revolutionary Guards, the police, and the judiciary, all of which believed that the demonstrators should not be treated as students but as the agents of foreign countries determined to overthrow the Islamic Republic. That the Mohammadis were not hanged that summer was a victory, but it was not enough.

With the help of student campaigners, the reformists carried the February 2000 parliamentary election by a landslide. Khatami could not be better empowered than he was now. His faction commanded both elected arms of government—executive and legislative—as well as the support of the populace, twice proven through elections. But within the system the reformist faction stood alone. Akbar Ganji, in the essays that had landed him in prison, fingered Rafsanjani as a key node in the network responsible for the serial killings, and in retaliation Rafsanjani had withdrawn his support for Khatami and his colleagues. Ali Afshari and his fellow student activists were pleased. They had always distrusted Rafsanjani as an opportunist with no enduring interest in political liberalization, and they opposed him on principle on economic matters. They were happy to support a reformist faction positioned solidly on the economic left. But Rafsanjani, never one to linger in the cold, swung his weight behind the clerical conservatives on the Expediency Council, which he ran, and the Guardian Council, which had veto power over parliamentary legislation.

The reformist deputies drafted legislation reversing the press law that had inspired the student riots, and they had the numbers to pass it. But the Leader ordered the new speaker of the parliament, the reformist cleric Mehdi Karroubi, to withdraw the new press bill without a vote. Revolutionary Guards surrounded the parliament and threatened to storm the building and arrest the deputies if they disobeyed. Karroubi withdrew the bill, and the campaign of arrest, intimidation, and closure continued against the reformist press. Most of the bills the parliament passed after that, the Guardian Council struck down.

Ali Afshari and his friends asked Khatami to call them to the streets. They wanted to stage demonstrations in front of the parliament,
demanding that the Guardian Council stand down before the people’s representatives. But Khatami declined. He did not want a showdown.

By now Ali Afshari understood that electing reformists was not enough—not when the elected representatives were accountable to the Leader rather than to the people. At an activist conference in Gurgan, in the north of Iran, Ali proposed a new strategy that he called “Beyond Khatami.” The students should come to the streets and press, without violence, for fundamental institutional change. Daftar Tahkim suddenly looked less like a Soviet youth group than like Polish Solidarity. Ali Afshari became the spokesman for the group’s new strategy, declaiming the need for what he called “encompassing criticism,” a posture of dissent that did not exempt Khatami from its sights.

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S
HORTLY BEFORE THE MEETING
in Gurgan, Ali had spent nearly two months in prison, nineteen days of it in solitary confinement. He was one of several activists arrested for participating in a conference of Iranian opposition activists in Berlin, organized by the German Green Party. His interrogators insulted and threatened him for eight hours at a stretch, then sometimes sent him to swelter in a glass room that overheated in the sun. He was released on bail. When his trial concluded with a five-year suspended prison sentence, the students at Amirkabir held a protest. Ali Afshari would exemplify the stance of encompassing criticism: he gave a speech criticizing Khamenei and the reformists who’d caved in to him. Two weeks later he was summoned back to court, this time accused of trying to overthrow the regime.