Children of Paradise (58 page)

Asieh had never considered herself a feminist. She saw her activist work in the frame of children’s rights. Iran had a nasty habit of sentencing juveniles for capital crimes, holding them in prison, and then executing them once they turned eighteen. Iran also had one of the highest rates of execution in the world, second only to China. But as her work on death penalty cases became better known, women’s rights activists pulled her increasingly into their orbit. They included Asieh in a gathering to discuss what should be done to mark Shirin Ebadi’s return to Iran with her prize.

The meeting impressed Asieh with its breadth of representation. Some of the women there were strict Muslims and Islamists; others were secular. Their work spanned a wide gamut of concerns. They turned out an enormous crowd at the airport when Shirin Ebadi’s flight touched down. Their presence was celebratory, but it was also protective. No harm could come to Shirin Ebadi under such a glaring light. And the very work of organizing that display was the start of something. Iran’s women’s rights activists had forged a network. The same group would go on holding those meetings weekly or biweekly for the following year and a half. Through them, they came to a consensus that the most important overarching issue facing Iranian women was the discriminatory nature of the law.

Under Iranian law, women did not have equal rights in marriage, divorce, or inheritance. Men could marry multiple wives and engage in something called temporary marriage that was a kind of legal prostitution. Children inherited their nationality from their fathers but not their mothers. A woman’s life and limb were worth less, in blood money, than a man’s; a woman’s testimony weighed less than a man’s in court; honor killings, in which a male relative might kill a woman for bringing dishonor to her family through her sexual behavior, were not regarded as murders under the law. Then there was the six-year gender difference in the age of criminal responsibility.

At the very end of Khatami’s presidency, in the summer of 2005, the women’s rights activists who’d first begun convening to honor Shirin Ebadi organized a silent protest. Thousands of demonstrators massed in front of the University of Tehran. Javad took photos; Asieh wrote. This was the first demonstration for women’s rights in Iran in twenty years. The last one had been to protest Khomeini’s imposition of mandatory hijab. This one set itself against the fundamental inequities in the law.

• • •

A
SIEH
A
MINI WAS NOT AFFLICTED
with the anguish that troubled those who had believed in Khatami’s promise. But more than in 1997, she found that she cared very much who won the presidential election in 2005. She wasn’t expecting a miracle: democracy, a free press, a liberated civil society. She didn’t imagine a coordinated confrontation with the hard-liners from within, or a showdown between human rights supporters and the judiciary. She just wanted a government she could work with—one that left a few threads loose for her to tug, a few pinpricks in the heavy lid of the state that would allow activists like her to breathe. Her work—for women, for juveniles, for the sanctity of life under Iranian law—was a long, slow trudge through territory that would be hostile no matter who was president. For that very reason, it made a world of difference if the presidency was hostile, too.

Nobody wanted to vote for Mostafa Moin, Khatami’s education minister and the candidate of the reformist party, Mosharekat. If Khatami had accomplished so little, Asieh’s friends and relatives told her, what might they expect from the far less charismatic Moin? What strength could he possibly martial that Khatami had not already eclipsed, to little avail? Still, Moin did something Asieh respected. He had his campaign invite women’s activists, human rights activists, and journalists to come and consult with him. Asieh was there in all three roles. And she saw the candidate listen while the activists voiced their frustrations and their desires.

He had begun by pontificating on gender equality, quoting from the Quran in its support. But a very young women’s rights activist interrupted him.

“Stop talking to God,” she said. “Answer me, instead. You aren’t a messenger from God to us. If we vote for you, you have to do something for us.”

After the election, Asieh heard from a friend of Moin’s that the candidate called the meeting the best thing that had happened to him during his campaign. From the women’s rights activists, he told his friend, “I heard something that in thirty years I never heard.”

Asieh felt certain, after that meeting, that a Moin presidency would offer the space she needed to continue her work, and that it would be far more congenial than a return to the Rafsanjani era she remembered so well. At a time when die-hard reformists called for an election boycott, nonpolitical Asieh Amini implored her friends and family to vote, with her, for Moin. But she couldn’t persuade Javad or any of her sisters. When Ahmadinejad squeezed into the second round, she turned on her loved ones in anger. They, and the others who’d boycotted the first round, were responsible for the terrible choice before them now, she insisted. They should hold their noses and vote for Rafsanjani, because the alternative was intolerable.

• • •

W
HEN
A
HMADINEJAD ASSUMED THE PRESIDENCY,
a chill descended almost immediately on the remaining reformist press. As Asieh would recall, some censorship was internal and anticipatory. This was not the time to do battle with the prosecutor’s office. Asieh’s editor told her to stop publishing so many things about women;
Etemad
was not a feminist newspaper. After several disputes, Asieh left
Etemad
to work for the same nongovernmental group Omid had once worked for, promoting civil society. She would organize its website and go on researching death penalty cases on her own time. Now she had fully emerged as more activist than journalist. And her work lay all the more squarely within the new administration’s sights.

Ahmadinejad’s intelligence minister was the former head of the Special Court of the Clergy, Gholam-Hossein Mohseni-Ejei—the man by whose direct order Atefah Sahaaleh’s judge had been protected from prosecution.
Shortly after his appointment, Mohseni-Ejei announced that “civil society” was nothing short of a strategic tool of the enemy, by which he meant the United States. Activists like Asieh knew by now that this was how the security forces laid their groundwork for a coming sweep.

Shirin Ebadi called Asieh shortly after Mohseni-Ejei’s statement. “We know each other from afar,” the Nobel laureate began. But Iranian rights activists now needed to draw closer. Ebadi gathered a group of about ten leaders, including Asieh, in her office. They and their organizations were the remnants of the once vital civil society scene cultivated and marooned in Khatami’s time. Now they were isolated and imperiled. They would need to defend one another if and when they faced arrest. They organized a secret network that met regularly in Ebadi’s office until they couldn’t, and then they met online.

For Asieh, that network was a source of strength and sustenance. She went on with her research and her advocacy despite the gathering gloom. She took on cases of minors charged with capital crimes. She could not adjudicate the defendants’ guilt or innocence. She simply believed that whatever these young people had done before the age of eighteen, the state should not kill them. Under international law, if not Iranian law, they were children.

Delara Darabi, in the city of Rasht, was a painter from the age of four, intelligent and favored by her father. But at seventeen she’d taken up with a nineteen-year-old boy named Amir Hossein Sotoudeh. He wanted to marry her, and he was anxious to raise the money to support their life together. By Delara’s later telling, one night in 2003, Amir Hossein lured her to the home of her father’s wealthy female cousin. There, she claimed, he drugged Delara with a sedative so that she could not resist while he killed the cousin and burglarized the home. If they should be caught, Amir Hossein pleaded, Delara should confess to the crime in his stead, because she was only seventeen and could not be executed. At nineteen, he would surely face the death penalty.

A friend of Amir Hossein’s tipped off Delara’s father. Mr. Darabi called Delara before him and demanded to know if what he’d been told was true.
It was, she admitted. Her father, incensed, did not wait to hear another word. He called the police to have his daughter and her boyfriend taken away. For two weeks he heard nothing from Delara. And then he heard that she had confessed to committing the murder.

Delara’s father went to see her in prison. Was it true that she had murdered the cousin?

“How can you believe it?” Delara replied. “Am I capable of killing someone?”

Contrary to Amir Hossein’s alleged prediction, when the case came before a judge in February of 2005, Delara’s age at the time of the crime earned her no mercy. Although she retracted her confession, she was sentenced to death. Her lawyer pursued a retrial for the three years that followed, and he brought Asieh to Rasht to research and publicize the case.

Every time he talked to Asieh about his daughter, Delara’s father cried. If only he had listened to Delara and dissuaded her from that first and fateful confession to what he sincerely believed was her boyfriend’s crime. Asieh asked to see Delara’s paintings, expecting little more than a competent adolescent display. But the paintings, many of them made in prison with nothing but Delara’s fingers for a brush, most of them in black-and-white with accents in red, were brilliant and terrifying. The figures that populated them were skeletal or blindfolded, incarcerated or facing the noose; they were incandescent in darkness, penned in by barbed wire and bars, their faces full of wreckage. Delara painted death, prison, and her impression of injustice, and she would have been a prodigy anywhere in the world.

“I can write about your daughter,” Asieh told Mr. Darabi at length. “But I’d prefer to show her paintings to people. They’re better than any explanation of mine.”

• • •

I
N
M
AY 2006
, Asieh got a baffling phone call. An old friend in Mashhad had read about Asieh’s work on juvenile execution. Did Asieh work on
other forms of judicial killing? the friend wanted to know. For example, stoning?

Stoning was an antiquated Islamic punishment, usually for adultery, that involved burying a married woman and her lover in pits with their hands tied behind their backs and pelting their heads and torsos with rocks until they died. Surely the Iranian penal system authorized nothing so barbaric. In fact, Asieh had asked Shadi Sadr about it once, as she’d seen this sentence noted on some case files. Shadi assured Asieh that, in 2002, Ayatollah Shahroudi, the chief justice, had ordered a moratorium on stoning. Maybe some prisoners still carried this sentence, Shadi said, but it was an empty threat, impossible—indeed, illegal—to fulfill.

Asieh explained to her friend in Mashhad what Shadi had explained to her. The couple could not possibly have been stoned. But the friend insisted. Asieh should come to Mashhad and see for herself.

Friends and colleagues warned Asieh to let this one drop. If there had been a stoning, it had been done in secret, and whoever had ordered it would go to great lengths to keep it hidden. But Asieh went to Mashhad and found a source. He was the neighbor of an old friend from her year in Mashhad. He worked for the intelligence service of the Revolutionary Guard, and he had witnessed everything.

Asieh and a colleague invited him into their car and had him lead them to the location of the stoning. The guardsman had a wireless radio for the Revolutionary Guard intelligence service. Every time it crackled, Asieh felt her skin prickle. She had no way of knowing if she could trust this man. But then he spoke. He used to be a very serious Muslim, the guardsman told Asieh. After that day at Behesht-e Reza cemetery, he didn’t know if he believed in anything anymore.

The couple’s names were Mahboubeh M. and Abbas H. The judge who had sentenced them sent a letter to the Revolutionary Guard’s intelligence office, to the governorate, to the Basij, and to the local bus depot, announcing that there was to be an Islamic ceremony at the cemetery and asking for volunteers. Many people registered. Some were Revolutionary Guardsmen and Basijis; some were bus drivers. None knew what sort of ceremony this would be.

Abbas H. and Mahboubeh M. were brought to the spot alive, but dressed for burial. They were lowered into pits that had been dug into the ground. But the woman’s pit was not deep enough: it was important that her breasts be concealed by the earth. So she was removed and the hole dug deeper.

A high-ranking cleric who was an important judge in Mashhad addressed the crowd with poetry. Each stone they cast at this couple, he informed them, was a stone to build their own homes in paradise. He cast the first stone himself.

Abbas H. was silent. Maybe he was already dead. Or maybe his soul had taken leave of his still-living body. But the woman cried, and she spoke. “Please cut off my hands,” she said, “cut off my feet. But don’t do this to me.”

They had arrived at the cemetery. Asieh’s colleague stumbled from the car and vomited. The guardsman continued his story. He had not wanted to participate, he told Asieh. The judge called to him and told him to cast a stone. The guardsman protested that his job was to protect the crowd. He was not a volunteer and could not abandon his post. But what he really felt was something else. This judge, this cleric, was talking about God and the Prophet. And the guardsman did not know what to do with such a God or such a prophet.

“There’s a film of the stoning,” the guardsman told Asieh.

“Where is it?” she asked. “I’ll do anything for access to it.”

He said, “I have a copy. If you can guarantee that a country will give me and my family safe refuge, I will give it to you.”

Asieh had no means of making such a guarantee. But she was afraid of the guardsman. Now he knew her, and knew what she knew. She told him that she would look into it. But she was never able to meet his demand.