Children of Paradise (38 page)

The Islamic Azad University was the brainchild of the Rafsanjani administration, which had established a network of campuses across the country, charging tuition and making higher education available to Iranians in more localities than ever before. Unlike the public universities, which were traditional hotbeds of activism with all the attendant dangers, including militia clashes and layers of surveillance, the private university’s campuses were run in classic Rafsanjanist fashion: under a heavy hand that rendered them functional and peaceable at the cost of forbidding student associations and political activism. Roozbeh’s intellectual hungers were
political, so he slaked them with his reading, above all with the work of the secular leftist sociologist Hossein Bashiriyeh.

Roozbeh had read Bashiriyeh since his high school days in Rasht, when a magazine about economics and politics carried some of Bashiriyeh’s essays. The essays opened a window on a world of political philosophy that few Iranian teenagers had reason to visit. Roozbeh was particularly intrigued by Bashiriyeh’s essay on tolerance. He had begun writing essays of his own, and when he went to Tehran he nurtured a fantasy that he would meet the sociologist who had ignited his intellect. One day he gathered up an essay he had drafted on democratization and ventured onto the University of Tehran campus in search of Bashiriyeh’s office. He presented himself to the professor as a student from another university who wished, nevertheless, to learn from Bashiriyeh himself. Would Bashiriyeh read Roozbeh’s freshman effort and tell him where he was right and where wrong?

Bashiriyeh accepted. He told Roozbeh to leave the essay and come back in a week’s time. He critiqued the essay generously and honestly. And Roozbeh asked for one thing more. Bashiriyeh taught a PhD seminar in comparative political science, and Roozbeh wanted to sit in on it. Bashiriyeh welcomed him, and Roozbeh made him his mentor. He followed the course on Western philosophy with Bashiriyeh’s course on Iranian sociology, and he followed that by reading all of Bashiriyeh’s books. To Roozbeh, there was more in this literature than in anything he had tasted through
Kiyan
. Soroush, Kadivar, Shabestari—they were scholars of Islam, Roozbeh reasoned, who sought above all to liberate the religion they loved from the political system that was smothering it. Bashiriyeh was a man not of religion but of politics. And for Roozbeh, too, politics and history, far more than religion, were the spades with which he hoped to unearth the deepest truths.

• • •

T
O
R
OOZBEH
, growing up in the Islamic Republic sometimes felt like coming of age in a house whose corridors were lined with locked doors. Behind those doors lay rooms whose contours he could see as though
through frosted glass: the hostage crisis, the prison massacres, the Iran-Iraq War, the expulsion of Bazargan’s government. But to truly enter into those rooms, to understand not only the details of that history but the motives of the men who’d shaped it, required keys.

Ebrahim Asgharzadeh, a pugnacious city councilman who had been the leader of the hostage takers back in 1979, held a key to one forbidden room that Roozbeh longed to explore. Through him, Roozbeh imagined he could reconstruct the logic and atmosphere around the embassy seizure—the rupture of relations with the United States, which had so much set Iran’s course in Roozbeh’s lifetime. But he also wanted to publish an interview in which Asgharzadeh would admit that the hostage taking had been a terrible and costly mistake. According to Roozbeh, Asgharzadeh came close to such admissions privately, but would not renounce publicly the activities that had catapulted him to prominence.

And so Roozbeh kept worrying the knobs of those locked doors. Once, he and a colleague from the paper went to Qom to interview Sadegh Khalkhali, the hanging judge of the 1980s—a cleric by whose direct order hundreds, perhaps thousands, of dissidents, Kurds, monarchist elites, generals, and others were executed by firing squad during the reign of terror that followed the revolution. Saeed Mortazavi would be no match for the elder cleric, in deeds or in psychopathy. Khalkhali’s very face—round and crowded beneath his white turban, with unnaturally small eyes and a cruel twist to his upper lip—was an object of fear for Roozbeh and other ordinary Iranians. But the man Roozbeh encountered in Qom was someone diminished, nearly comical.

Khalkhali would die within the year. He had always been small, but now he seemed shrunken. Instead of his turban he wore a peaked cap that reminded Roozbeh of a baby’s hat. He had entered the late stages of Parkinson’s disease, and his answers to the reporters’ questions were often bizarre and off topic. But his long-term memory seemed intact. Sure, Khalkhali told Roozbeh and his friend, he’d signed more than a thousand execution orders. “Many of the people fled,” he recalled. “If I could have gotten them, I’d have executed them, too.”

• • •

R
OOZBEH WAS NOT A REBELLIOUS YOUNG MAN
. He yearned for older figures he could unreservedly admire, if not revere. The problem was that they were hard to come by. Roozbeh fastened on to Abbas Amirentezam, the debonair deputy prime minister under Bazargan who had been charged with treason on the basis of documents seized in the American embassy and so had been in prison as long as Roozbeh had been alive. Amirentezam had published two memoirs during a brief furlough in 1997. Roozbeh saw them in a shop window and hastened to buy them before they were banned. He had a lot of books he’d bought like that—in eagerness to squirrel them away before the censors caught on to their existence. But these books were something special. Roozbeh devoured them in just two days.

Roozbeh had heard about Amirentezam since he was a child. Like most ordinary Iranians, he knew of him as a prisoner, not as a thinker or actor on the political stage. But precisely because he was the Islamic Republic’s longest-held captive, Amirentezam enjoyed a kind of popular goodwill along with his celebrity. He was often called Iran’s Nelson Mandela. Like Mandela, he would serve some twenty-seven years in prison or under house arrest. He had witnessed horrors in that time, including the massacres of 1988. And he had never left prison because he never confessed.

During Amirentezam’s 1998 furlough, the former Evin warden from the bloody 1980s, Asadollah Lajevardi, was assassinated in the bazaar, where he had retreated into private life as a merchant of women’s underwear. Khatami and other regime officials eulogized the man who had presided over the most abusive era of the modern Iranian penal system. Privately, many Iranians cheered that justice had been done. But Amirentezam gave a remarkable interview to a radio station. “Terror does not solve any problem,” he said. “I’m not happy at this news. A man probably exceptional for his ruthlessness, his violence, his vices and his atrocities is made a hero, a martyr, a people’s servant.” For these and other statements critical of Lajevardi, Amirentezam was sent back to Evin.

Roozbeh seized a rare opportunity to write about Amirentezam in
2002. In one of his books Amirentezam all but identified a reformist intellectual as the hostage taker who had interrogated him shortly after his arrest. That intellectual now wrote an angry screed disputing Amirentezam’s recollection. Roozbeh replied with an unsigned article in
Etemad
. In it, he noted that even though many of Amirentezam’s former accusers now stood closer to him politically than to the conservative elite, they seemed incapable of admitting past mistakes.

One day not long after this article appeared,
Etemad
’s editor in chief summoned Roozbeh to his office. Amirentezam’s wife was on the phone. She wanted to know who had written the piece about her husband. When Roozbeh took the receiver, the woman told him that her husband had asked her to thank him for writing what he did.

Roozbeh was astonished. He hadn’t even known that Amirentezam had left prison for medical treatment and was now living under a sort of intermittent house arrest. He asked if he could come and see the former deputy prime minister. Amirentezam lived under lock and key, with a kiosk at his door where guards monitored his visitors. Roozbeh would draw attention to himself by going there; he would come under surveillance and suspicion. But he had an opportunity to meet one of his heroes, someone he’d never dreamt anyone could meet.

Amirentezam agreed to meet weekly with Roozbeh, who compiled their conversations into a book he would publish years later. But the conversations were more than a journalistic exercise for Roozbeh. Amirentezam impressed Roozbeh with his improbable equanimity, his lightness of spirit. How was it possible for a man who had spent most of his life in prison to be happy? And yet, Roozbeh was certain that Amirentezam was not only happy but optimistic, his mind fixed always on better things to come. Moreover, Amirentezam was a patriot. He had spent his time in prison thinking earnestly about his country. He contemplated the revolution and its aftermath; he drew up plans, in his mind, for the future of Iran, down to the Tehran metro system. He had unburdened himself of rage by forgiving his adversaries. Roozbeh admired Amirentezam like a father, and he felt that Amirentezam loved him like a son.

Roozbeh began to interview Amirentezam’s critics for
Etemad
. He found
public figures who disliked Amirentezam’s books or disagreed with his views, and he published them in order that he might then publish Amirentezam’s replies. Roozbeh hoped in this way to smuggle Amirentezam’s words into the paper and to drive his readers to Amirentezam’s books. In the meantime, he helped Amirentezam organize his documents into files. He helped him locate information he needed in books and newspapers. A conservative newspaper took note of their relationship, publishing an article stating that Roozbeh Mirebrahimi, political editor of
Etemad
, had become Amirentezam’s manager. Roozbeh’s colleagues warned him to be careful. But Roozbeh had never done anything so meaningful, and he was not about to stop.

One day Amirentezam told Roozbeh that he’d gotten a call from student activists at Amirkabir University. They wanted him to come and speak. He was delighted but also suspicious. Did Roozbeh know this student group? Was it a religious one? Roozbeh knew that Amirkabir was the campus under the influence of Ali Afshari, the liberal reformist student leader. Afshari was in prison at the time, but the activists on his campus shared his orientation. Roozbeh urged Amirentezam to go.

On May 5, 2003, Amirentezam and a small entourage were ushered into an amphitheater packed with students Roozbeh’s age and younger. When the host uttered Amirentezam’s name, the amphitheater erupted into whistles and applause that lasted a good fifteen minutes.

Amirentezam spoke for two hours. He spoke of his arrest and the charges against him, some of which made the students laugh. Amirentezam had been convicted for, among other things, having American officials address him as “dear” in their letters; being a Bahai who was also a Jew; and being extremely rich. He talked of the past but he also spoke about the new generation. It seemed to Roozbeh that everybody loved him. A quarter of a century earlier, student activists had consigned Amirentezam to prison for life. Now student activists had made him a totem of resistance to the state their elders had wrought.

• • •

K
HATAMI’S PRESIDENCY WAS AT FIRST
a springtime for young Iranians who believed in incremental change, in the process Saeed Hajjarian
had called political development, and in the capacity of reasonable people to bring moderation to the institutions they served. Khatami’s response to the serial murders had demonstrated that reformists in government were far from powerless. Where else in the world had an intelligence agency been forced to take responsibility for killing opposition figures? But at the same time it was clear that Khatami could not restrain the judiciary, parts of which, including the Tehran prosecutor’s office and the Special Court of the Clergy, appeared to operate out of the Leader’s pocket.

Ayatollah Montazeri remained under house arrest. The Special Court of the Clergy indicted two of Khatami’s cabinet ministers on political charges. In February 1999 it arraigned Mohsen Kadivar, the dissident cleric who had argued that
velayat-e faqih
shared more with Iran’s tradition of monarchy than with its tradition of Shiism. Kadivar was charged with undermining the Islamic system, insulting Khomeini and Khamenei, misleading the public, supporting Montazeri, and advocating the separation of mosque and state. In April he was sentenced to eighteen months in prison. Students protested, carrying banners that read, “
We think like Kadivar, so you can arrest us too.”

By the time Khatami’s first term was over in 2001, the state had shut down 108 periodicals, and Mohsen Kadivar and Akbar Ganji languished in prison along with numerous student activists and journalists. The reformist coalition strained at its seams. Liberal students called for civil disobedience and a referendum on the entire system of government. Reformist clerics, like parliamentary speaker Mehdi Karroubi and the president himself, called on voters to be patient while they continued negotiating with a conservative faction that appeared increasingly intractable.

A group of lay reformist politicians struck a middle course that was muscular but not inflexible. The deputy interior minister, Mostafa Tajzadeh, was one of its leading figures. He was both an intellectual and an effective political operative. Tajzadeh was Khatami’s protégé—they had worked together in Ershad under Rafsanjani—and when the elder cleric became president, he handed Tajzadeh the sensitive portfolio of security and political affairs, which included overseeing elections. It was the
election for the parliament in 2000—swept by the reformists, particularly in Tehran, where they took all thirty seats—that made Tajzadeh a lightning rod for conservative fears. The Guardian Council alleged irregularities and annulled some seven hundred thousand votes. Tajzadeh pushed back. These were the “cleanest and freest elections” in the history of the Islamic Republic, he protested. The Guardian Council took Tajzadeh to court, and Tajzadeh responded in kind, filing a largely symbolic lawsuit against the council’s powerful secretary general.
In 2001 the court handed the deputy interior minister a suspended one-year sentence and barred him from government work for three years.