Children of Paradise (36 page)

Conservatives took fourteen of Tehran’s fifteen seats. They did it by carrying between 85,000 and 190,000 votes in a city with four million eligible voters. The winners were not conservatives of particular national renown. Rather, they came from a previously unknown group that called itself Etelaf-e Abadgaran-e Iran-e Eslami, or the Alliance of Builders of Islamic Iran, and which announced itself dedicated to “
safeguarding the achievements of the Islamic Revolution” and preventing “materialistic people” from influencing decisions. Abadgaran claimed to belong to no faction and to disdain partisanship altogether. President Khatami welcomed that stance,
urging the new Tehran City Council to steer clear of national politics and to remember that low voter turnout limited its mandate.

While the reformists held meetings and round tables to determine what had gone wrong, the new Tehran City Council set about consolidating conservative control of the capital city. Within a month, it had appointed Tehran’s new mayor. He was a former governor of Ardabil, a little-known traffic engineer with ties to the Basij. Upon his confirmation with twelve out of fifteen votes, he vowed to fight corruption and ensure transparency. If the reformists had not established local government, and then flubbed the first Tehran City Council, he might never have emerged into the hard light of Iranian politics. His name was Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

  ELEVEN  

T
HE
M
IRACLE
R
OOM

Z
AHRA
K
AZEMI,
known as Ziba from the age of two, belonged by middle age to that small and sturdy tribe of international photojournalists who turn up wherever there is conflict. She had loose, unkempt curls and a face both delicate and rugged, with a generous mouth and knowing, guarded eyes. She was Iranian, born in Shiraz, but she’d left to study in France before the revolution and returned only to visit. She became a mother and a Canadian citizen. Her work took her to Africa, Latin America, and the Middle East. Sometimes she lived in refugee camps to draw closer to her subjects. She was fifty-four in 2003, the year she went to Iraq to photograph the consequences of the American invasion. From there she planned to go to Central Asia, but her visas for Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan were slow in coming. She decided to wait for them in neighboring Iran.

Like all dual citizens, Kazemi entered the country using her Iranian passport. Like all visiting journalists, she applied for press credentials from Ershad, which licensed her to photograph ordinary residents of Tehran going about their daily lives. On June 23, 2003, she photographed a scene outside Evin Prison’s gates. Family members of people arrested in demonstrations earlier that month were holding a vigil there. A guard at the prison
entrance noticed the foreign woman talking with protesters and occasionally snapping photographs. He asked a lieutenant if this was allowed. The lieutenant said it was fine so long as Kazemi was an authorized journalist and causing no unrest.

But someone had alerted the head of prison security, who strode into the crowd with another prison official. The officials accosted Kazemi personally. Couldn’t she see the sign on the prison wall stating that photography was prohibited? Witnesses, including the sentry in the guard tower, saw the head of prison security demand Kazemi’s bag. When she refused, he pinned her arms and wrested it from her, dealing a blow to her head so violent that Kazemi fell to the ground, where she sat stunned for a prolonged moment, seemingly unable to get up. Then the photojournalist was ushered through the prison gates.

The guards and drivers who handled Kazemi inside the prison complex would later recount that she was barely conscious when she entered. She fainted in a car, could not stand, and had to be carried limply into a cell block. Neither her alarming injury nor her trivial offense—taking photographs where they were prohibited, which was not even a crime—afforded her the slightest clemency. She was taken not to the prison clinic but to a solitary confinement cell.
By later accounts, she was hardly ever alone there. Tehran’s chief prosecutor, Saeed Mortazavi, together with his deputy, hurried to the prison, where they interrogated Kazemi for four hours in the middle of the night. For four days Kazemi would be traded off between Mortazavi’s custody, that of the intelligence unit of the police, and that of the Ministry of Intelligence and Security.

• • •

S
AEED
M
ORTAZAVI HAD A PROSPEROUS LOOK
. His face was full, his dark hair gleaming, his mustache meticulously groomed. He wore rimless glasses and shiny gray three-piece suits. He had colorless lips and a mild, patronizing manner of speech. Before taking over the prosecutor’s office, he ran a special court for press offenses, where he’d earned the moniker “the Butcher of the Press” for his role in shutting down newspapers
and jailing journalists. Many journalists and editors knew him personally, because he was inclined to deliver his threats firsthand. He had liaisons in every newsroom and could dictate the terms of censorship according to his whim. To those he sought to convince of his rectitude or bend to his will, Mortazavi described a world laced with malevolent conspiracies, one in which journalists, both domestic and foreign, were operatives in an international web of spies determined to bring down the Islamic Republic.

These claims were outsized but not altogether incredible in a country that understood itself to be beset by powerful enemies. The United States under President George W. Bush had invaded two neighboring countries and declared Iran a member of an “Axis of Evil.” It had also adopted an explicit policy of “regime change” in Iran and expressed a desire to distribute money to Iranian opposition groups. What preoccupied Iranian hard-liners most of all were the bloodless revolutions in former Soviet satellites, where opposition forces, sometimes overtly or covertly supported by Western foundations and government affiliates, had succeeded in removing repressive regimes unfriendly to American interests. The Islamic Republic was not wrong in imagining itself a potential target of such efforts. But the determination to stave off a “velvet” overthrow would become both paranoid fixation and carte blanche for internal repression.

Mortazavi wasted no time in declaring Kazemi a spy. He could furnish no evidence, because the photojournalist had exposed her film to light upon her arrest, rendering it unreadable. Moreover, although Mortazavi denied it, her papers were in order, approved by both Ershad and the intelligence ministry, which demanded that the accused be relinquished into its custody for questioning by counterintelligence. The prosecutor refused. Rather, Zahra Kazemi was first in the custody of the prison and the prosecutor, then the intelligence unit of the police; then she was given back to Mortazavi and finally, on June 26, to the Ministry of Intelligence. But by then she was in no condition for questioning. She began vomiting blood and was transferred to a military hospital, where she slipped into a coma.

The doctor who examined Kazemi on admission to the hospital noted extensive bruising all over her body, including on the soles of her feet, her
breasts, and the backs of her arms. Some of the bruising on her arms may have been defensive, forensic experts later speculated—as though she had sought to ward off blows from a blunt object. Her nose and fingers were broken, several toes and nails crushed; she had “deep parallel linear abrasions” on her neck and stripe-like wounds on her back; a pelvic examination revealed bruising consistent with “a very brutal rape.” A scan of her brain showed multiple contusions on different sides of her head that were bleeding internally; one final blow to the jaw, probably administered on June 25, had snapped her head fatally back from her spine, fracturing her skull at its base. She was brain-dead.
On July 10 she was removed from life support.

• • •

T
HE MURDER OF
Z
AHRA
K
AZEMI
, and the political circus that was to follow it, revealed with terrible clarity the limitations of Khatami’s reform of the security apparatus. The intelligence ministry was at long last under the control of the elected government; but, through parts of the judiciary, the Leader’s office sustained networks of intelligence and enforcement that were ultra-hardline and accountable to no one. Incredible documents would emerge from the Kazemi episode: reports pitting the intelligence ministry against the prosecutor’s office, letters from otherwise apolitical figures alleging pressure to participate in a cover-up. But most of these documents would remain unavailable to the Iranian public, thanks to the heavy-handed censorship of Saeed Mortazavi.

Zahra Kazemi had suffered a stroke, Mohammad Hossein Khoshvaght, the head of foreign press at Ershad, told the public in a written statement that July. Later, Khoshvaght would disown this statement, saying that Mortazavi had called him to the prosecutor’s office and threatened him personally. After all, his name was on Kazemi’s permissions; he was an accomplice to her spying, Mortazavi told him, and could be sent to prison himself. Didn’t Khoshvaght understand that all those Anglophone reporters he admitted were actually operatives sent to distribute money to the opposition? Mortazavi dictated the press release, had Khoshvaght type it
on ersatz Ershad letterhead Mortazavi had made on his photocopier, and forced Khoshvaght to sign it and distribute it to the press. But Mortazavi had miscalculated. Khoshvaght had a measure of immunity, because his sister was married to the Supreme Leader’s son. (His father was an ultra-hardline ayatollah rumored to be among those whose fatwas authorized the serial killings.)
He became a key outspoken witness to Mortazavi’s cover-up of what was surely a crime.

The doctor who had examined Kazemi upon her admission to the hospital also refused to keep silent. Kazemi’s body had been buried in haste, her medical history obfuscated with claims that she’d suffered a stroke, or a head injury occasioned by a single accidental fall. “
In view of Ms. Zahra Kazemi’s inhumane treatment and considering the efforts of Islamic Republic authorities to swiftly bury her to conceal the evidence of torturing her, and considering that I was the night shift emergency resident physician on June 26, 2003 and that I was her examining physician at the hospital,” Dr. Shahram Azam wrote, “I consider it my moral and human duty to give testimony and pronounce my observations to international human rights organizations with regard to injuries inflicted on her through torture, assault and battery and, in this regard, play a small role in exposing the inhuman and brutal nature of the Islamic regime.” Having no relation, by marriage or otherwise, to the Supreme Leader, Azam fled the country and found asylum in Canada. His family members issued a statement, almost certainly under duress, claiming that he was mentally ill, had never worked for the hospital in question, and was being used politically by the Canadian government.

President Khatami designated a committee to investigate the Kazemi murder. It consisted of the ministers of intelligence, justice, interior, health, and Ershad. All of these ministries were in one or another way implicated in the events under investigation. The presidential commission met seven times and pieced together records from each member’s domain. Its report furnished a timeline of Kazemi’s custody and asserted that the fatal blow had to have been struck sometime on June 25 or 26. Anyone who had come into contact with Kazemi during that period, the commission noted, should
be investigated. Oddly, the commission did not reference its own timeline to state the obvious, which was that this narrowed the suspects to the prosecutor’s office and the Ministry of Intelligence, with the prosecutor and his lieutenants spending the greater share of time interrogating her.

There were oddities about the presidential commission’s report. It suggested more than once that Kazemi was a disagreeable person, rude and argumentative, as though this might explain or justify her harsh treatment. It claimed that Kazemi had chosen to stay at Evin rather than be parted from her camera and other belongings. Surely, one prominent Iranian human rights lawyer pointed out, prisons were not like hotels, where one stayed electively. Why hadn’t she been told to leave? Moreover, the report neither clarified nor questioned why a woman with no criminal record, picked up for nothing more serious than taking pictures in a restricted area, should have been interrogated for hours on end by the prosecutor’s office or anyone else.

Zahra Kazemi’s mother viewed the body once before burial and saw plainly that her daughter had been beaten. She was forced to sign papers authorizing a swift burial, but she also brought her concerns to the parliament. Under Article 90 of the Iranian constitution, anyone with a complaint about legislative, executive, or judicial actions could request a parliamentary investigation with publicly reported findings. These requests had availed Iran’s citizens little in the past, but now that the parliament was in the hands of reformists who claimed to uphold the rule of law, Article 90 seemed a promising recourse for the Kazemi family. The commission set to work on the most far-reaching inquiry into Kazemi’s case. Its report was blunt and disturbing.