Is This Your First War? (16 page)

Behrouz was arrested. He was thrown back in Evin Prison, section 209, where he had been held and tortured during his first incarceration that began in 1999. I wrote about his detention, and he was released, for a while. In July he was arrested again in the clashes leading up to the five-year anniversary of the 1999 student protests. Dozens of dissidents were detained in advance of the anniversary as a pre-emptive measure to prevent large-scale demonstrations. Behrouz eluded capture during the initial wave of arrests. When he was finally caught and jailed, some seventeen activists were in the midst of a hunger strike. He joined them.

Bina Darabzand was arrested in August when he, along with several other dissidents, held a protest to ask the United Nations to help Iranian political prisoners. He too was jailed at Evin. A few months later, in November, Behrouz managed to get a letter out of the prison. He said that he had been held in solitary confinement for two months as punishment for his hunger strike, and was then released into a wing with other political prisoners. Freezing and mentally anguished, he went to the prayer room, where another prisoner gave him blankets. Behrouz later learned the man, a member of the banned People's Mujahideen organization, had given him all the blankets he had and slept without them so that Behrouz could be warm.

“The people in this section are so kind and loving,” he wrote. “I feel so happy to be among such people. We are very friendly and we are all very close to each other. Almost everyone here is a political prisoner. They are all very rich in culture and knowledge. There is always a political discussion going on and the younger prisoners are always learning from the elders. Here, whenever you want, you can find the best people to talk to, professors, doctors and even lawyers. I have to confess that here I have learned how uneducated I am compared to all of them.

“We are all friends, despite the rumours of the intelligence service, who try to make it look otherwise. Those who are pro-democracy, People's Mujahideen, and monarchists are all friends and don't have any problems with each other. I wish the four years that I suffered in the Karaj Prison I could have spent here. I am sure in that case I would have learned so much more.”

Behrouz's release from solitary confinement into the general prison population put him back together with Bina Darabzand. He said that he and some of the other younger political prisoners spent a lot of time talking with Bina and other veteran activists, “to learn from them and enjoy their company.” His time in prison also introduced him to the American revolutionary Thomas Paine, whose writing had somehow made it to Evin.

“I wish he was also here with us,” Behrouz wrote. “He would probably have been charged with endangering national security and have been imprisoned for a very long time.”

Behrouz spent most of the time since he wrote that letter in prison. I occasionally got word from him through a friend. Even in Iranian jails, prisoners sometimes have access to cell phones. Behrouz also wrote letters from prison. He once described an older inmate, nicknamed Reza Penguin because of the way he walked, who tried to lift his fellow inmates' spirits. One day the inmates fashioned makeshift musical instruments. Reza Penquin danced in the centre of the room until guards mocked him for dancing like a woman and broke his hand in three places. The musicians were beaten, doused with water, and shocked with electric batons while the guards laughed.

“I don't understand what kind of pleasure they could get out of this situation,” Behrouz wrote. “Maybe they need to see a psychiatrist.”

He also described confronting a prison warden to ask why he was not given a day pass to attend a memorial service for his mother. He was beaten and dragged to the solitary confinement wing, shouting “Long live freedom!” and “Down with religious dictatorship!” until he lost consciousness. He said he had witnessed many suicide attempts. Behrouz was finally released in December 2011.

Kianoosh Sanjari was arrested and jailed several times after I met him, usually because of reports he wrote on his blog. He fled to Iraqi Kurdistan, and from there to Norway and eventually America, where he continues his democratic activism.

Ahmad Batebi also escaped, crossing into Iraq when he was temporarily released from prison to seek medical attention. He now lives in the United States, where, on his blog, he posted a photo of himself in front of the Capitol in Washington with the message, “Your hands will never touch me again.”

Saeed Kalanaki remains in Iran and works as a journalist exposing human rights violations. In March 2010 he was released from Evin prison after a three-month detention. He had been accused of “propagation against the regime to serve the interests of opposition groups” and “insulting the Supreme Leader.”

About a year after I met with the Iranian dissidents, Seyed Mohammad Hossein Adeli, then Iran's ambassador to the United Kingdom, spoke at Oxford. When I asked him about Zahra Kazemi, he admitted she was murdered. “I don't support the killing by some shrewd security forces of that lady,” he said. “We are sorry for it.”

I wrote about Adeli's confession in a story for the
Citizen
. It also ran with a banner headline across the front page. Adeli denied his comments — although they were heard by thirty or forty students. He was sacked as ambassador eight months later.

Zahra Kazemi's son, Stephan Hachemi, lives in Canada, where he has been actively pressuring the Canadian government to take action to bring Saeed Mortazavi and other Iranian officials involved in his mother's murder to justice. When I spoke with Hachemi after I came back from Iran, he described his efforts to keep his mother's memory alive as a duty.

“She was my only family. It's not like I can forget, or I want to forget,” he said. “What happened to my mother is still happening to other people in Iran. But not many people have the opportunity to talk about it. So I need to do it.”

An Iranian friend who recently immigrated to Canada and who has contacts in the Iranian Foreign and Interior ministries let me know that I was on a list of journalists considered to be “subversive” and possible “spies or stooges of foreign governments.” He warned me not to go back to Iran, at least “before we overthrow them, which, I promise, is not a long time to go.”

I had heard similar bravado many times before. I had wanted to believe it, and for a year or two after visiting Iran and encountering so much dissent, so much scorn directed toward its government and religious establishment, and such a longing for more basic freedoms, I did. Iran, I thought, had reached a tipping point. But then religious hardliner Mahmoud Ahmadinejad won the 2005 Iranian presidential election. Like all Iranian elections, it was neither free nor fair. Only approved candidates could run. There was evidence the Islamic Revolutionary Guards and Basij militia had illegally mobilized on Ahmadinejad's behalf. And some voting results were suspicious. Nevertheless, it seemed undeniable that substantial support existed for the type of Shia Islamism that Ahmadinejad represented. I grew depressed about Iran's prospects.

Then, in 2009, a blatantly rigged election returned Ahmadinejad to power, and the country exploded in anger. Demonstrations that were sparked by demands for an honest election grew into opposition to the regime itself. Massive crowds chanted “Death to the dictator!” and “God is great!” — turning the slogan of the 1979 Islamic Revolution against the theocracy it created. Whereas previous uprisings — such as the student protests of 1999 — had involved only subsections of the population, the opposition movement that erupted in 2009 brought in even leading clerics and other members of the country's establishment. It was a seismic shift. The regime and its allies in the Revolutionary Guards and Basij responded with ever increasing repression. They shot unarmed protesters dead in the streets and raped teenaged boys in jail. Show trials followed. Saeed Mortazavi, now deputy chief prosecutor of Iran, played his usual role. Iran's parliament later blamed him for the deaths in jail of detained dissidents.

Such brutality succeeded in suppressing the most visible expression of dissent, but protests continued despite it. Though media freedom is severely restricted, videos from Iran are regularly posted on the Internet. They show spontaneous acts of dissent and more defiance. Police or Basij who abuse citizens on the street are confronted and chased away by ever-growing crowds. It is impossible to know exactly how this movement will develop, but it seems a line has been crossed and the future of Iran's theocracy is precarious. There are too many young and angry Iranians who desire freedom, who now know many of their compatriots feel the same way, and who have experienced the power and potential of their numbers. “I have never seen such a thing in my life,” Mastaneh, a twenty-three-year-old Iranian woman, said of one of the June 2009 demonstrations. “We could hear shooting, but people weren't afraid. We kept shouting, ‘Don't be afraid. We are all here together.' For years I would say that I didn't have hope in my people and that they would never move like they did in 1979. But I was proven wrong. We have finally learned to fight.”

Being designated a subversive stooge by the Iranian government meant it was impossible for me to visit the country again, so in 2010 I travelled to eastern Turkey, where hundreds of Iranians who have fled the recent repression in their homeland now live. Many work illegally for little money. Most are waiting for passage to the West. I spoke to Makan Akhavan in a one-room below-ground apartment in the city of Agri. “It seemed like an uprising. We felt free to do what we wanted, like a revolution,” he said, recalling the energy coming from the crowds that gathered to protest the election results. Akhavan was briefly detained during the post-election demonstrations and left Iran with a few belongings stuffed in a backpack when he learned security forces were coming after him. He showed me a plastic tub beside his mattress full of antidepressants. “All of us refugees have nerve problems and need these just to function,” he said.

In Van, another city close to the Iranian border, I reunited with Bina Darabzand. I had last seen him in Tehran when police stopped us, and he pledged to take the blame for any problems that might arise from us being caught together. The two years Bina subsequently spent in Evin and Gohardasht prisons had done nothing to diminish his enthusiasm and hope that Iran would soon free itself — though he now found it too risky to stay there. It felt good to see him again. Bina was living alone, waiting for his son and wife to join him in Turkey. She had grown up in post-revolutionary Iran. “It's the first time I'll be able to take her dancing,” he said. “We've been married twenty-five years. It's about time.”

Genocide

L
ives
cut violently short are rarely valued equally by Western politicians and journalists. Compare the coverage given to the Liberian civil wars of 1989 to 2003 with the conflicts that engulfed the former Yugoslavia during roughly the same period. More died in Liberia, but fewer paid attention. Even among the habitually overlooked peoples of Africa, Asia, and the Middle East, there are those whose suffering is documented and others who are ignored. Conflicts in Israel and Palestine are obsessively chronicled by legions of reporters. Stories from that tiny slice of land captivate and enrage the world. Others don't even make it into the newspaper.

In the summer of 2005, riots and protests swept through the Kurdish regions of northwest Iran after security forces shot Kurdish activist Shwane Ghaderi, dragged him through the streets, and then tortured him to death. At least twenty more people died in the uprising, including when the government deployed helicopter gunships against protesters who had attacked a military outpost. If this had happened in Jenin, in the Palestinian West Bank, it would have been front-page news everywhere. But since the dead were Iranian Kurds, it wasn't. An Iranian friend, in exile in London, described the events as a Kurdish
intifada
and lamented, “If only it had half the media coverage as the Palestinian one.”

Other times our attention and affections shift, depending on global politics. Prior to Saddam Hussein's invasion of Kuwait and his subsequent expulsion by an American-led military coalition, many on the left, especially in Britain, threw their support behind Iraqi trade unionists and socialist opponents of the dictator. After the war, when Saddam became an enemy of America, Western leftists abandoned their Iraqi comrades, whose struggle was now championed by the conservative hawks who had previously shunned them. The Taliban in Afghanistan were the same brutes before September 11, 2001, but it wasn't until after the terrorist attacks on America that Western politicians and journalists had much to say about Afghans living under their regime.

In 2006, the African tribes of eastern Chad suffered from the multiple disadvantages of being black, far away, home to no one who plotted violence against Western capitals, and living on land that barely held water, let alone oil. They experienced terror but didn't export it. They were easy to ignore. Yet when the race-based ethnic cleansing that had swept the Darfur region of Sudan washed over their borders, they died just as dead as did Bosnian Muslims the previous decade, or the Lebanese, Palestinians, and Israelis that same year. The only difference is nobody cared.

Darfur's slow-motion genocide has long and twisted roots, but many lead back to the unlikely source of Colonel Muammar Gaddafi, the megalomaniacal and likely unhinged former dictator of Libya. In the 1960s and 70s, a racist ideology of Arab supremacism took hold in North Africa, and Gaddafi become its primary advocate. He dreamed of an “Arab belt” that would span the Sahel, that arid swath of land that stretches across Africa south of the Sahara, and eventually grow into a united Sahelian empire. To this end he founded an “Islamic Legion” and set up training camps in the Libyan desert that attracted Arabs from all over Africa. He also armed and funded various Arab and Islamist movements. Gaddafi never achieved his grandiose plans and moved on to champion other causes. But the Arab supremacism he supported found fertile ground in Sudan.

In the 1980s an organization calling itself the
Tajamu al Arabi
, or the Arab Gathering, emerged in Darfur, a sprawling expanse of land about the size of France that is inhabited by both Arab and black, or “African” tribes. The former tend to be nomadic herders, while the latter are more often sedentary pastoralists. Distinctions between black and Arab are blurry, however, and are often based as much on a tribe's culture and the lifestyle of its members as on their ethnicity. And while tensions between Arab and black tribes always existed, so did intermarriage and other harmonious interactions. The Arab Gathering disturbed this uneasy peace with propaganda claiming that the “slaves” had ruled Darfur long enough. Violent attacks on non-Arabs soon followed.

Environmental factors intensified the simmering dispute. As the Sahara Desert expanded southward, there was less arable and grazing land available. Competition over diminishing resources added to ethnic hatred. Herders and farmers have opposed each other in the Sahel for centuries, but access to modern weapons made these conflicts deadlier. Finally, religious bigotry played its role. While almost everyone in Darfur is Muslim, God is said to have revealed the Quran to the prophet Mohammad in the Arabic language. For Arab supremacists, this is proof of their religious as well as racial superiority.

The conflict escalated in early 2003, when rebels from the Sudan Liberation Army, consisting of fighters from black tribes in Darfur, attacked the airport in El Fasher, North Darfur. The Sudanese government responded by recruiting members of Arab tribes into militias known as janjaweed. Together they unleashed a campaign of ethnic cleansing on the black tribes of Darfur, killing at least 200,000 and displacing another two million — hundreds of thousands of whom fled to Chad, where many are still housed in refugee camps the size of small towns. Sudanese army and janjaweed attacks on civilian populations might have been crudely justified by the support given by black villagers to the SLA and other Sudanese rebel groups, such as the Justice and Equality Movement. But janjaweed leader Musa Hilal was more honest and explicit in an August 2004 directive issued from his headquarters: “Change the demography of Darfur and empty it of African tribes.” Tellingly, Hilal described his campaign of rape, murder, and arson against fellow Muslims as “jihad.”

Chad, the eastern region of which abuts Darfur, was never immune to the violence next door. The frontier that separates the two countries is mostly unguarded and essentially meaningless for those who live and die there. The same tribes and ethnic groups straddle the border and are connected by family and commerce. The same divisions between Arabs and blacks, farmers and nomads, define eastern Chad as much as they do Darfur. Both presidents Idriss Déby of Chad and Omar al-Bashir of Sudan exploited these divisions to pursue their own political and military goals. Darfur rebel groups found shelter in Chad, where Déby recognized their usefulness as proxy militias to pressure Sudan. Al-Bashir armed and funded Chadian rebel groups for the same reason. The janjaweed his government recruited included from the start Chadian Arabs in its ranks.

Sudanese janjaweed began openly ranging across the border to attack and burn Chadian villages in 2005. The violence followed a familiar pattern. A settlement inhabited by a black tribe would be ransacked, its occupants raped and murdered, while an Arab village only a few kilometres away was left untouched. The Sudanese janjaweed were joined by Chadian Arabs, who formed what can be accurately described as Chadian janjaweed. Occasionally, complex tribal and personal rivalries, as well as fear and self-preservation, meant that black tribes aligned with the raiding Arab fighters against other black tribes and villages. Some Arab tribes also suffered at the hands of their black neighbours. But the violence was largely one-sided, directed overwhelmingly against blacks. The janjaweed were armed with assault rifles and other modern weapons provided by the government of Sudan, whose bombers also attacked across the border. The black tribal fighters had spears and poison-tipped arrows.

Dozens of Chadian villages were burned, their occupants murdered or driven out, in the spring of 2006. The rainy season, which makes travel in the Sahel difficult, brought a respite. No one expected it would last. The janjaweed came back in the fall. They murdered hundreds and drove thousands more from their homes before the year was up. I had by now been hired as a full-time correspondent for
Maclean's
. I arrived in Chad in November, along with photographer Donald Weber, as the janjaweed were renewing their onslaught.

The dog looked as if it might have been some sort of terrier. It had shaggy grey hair falling off its muzzle that gave it the appearance of an elderly man as it stood in a vacant, garbage-strewn lot beside the road. Donald and I were crawling through traffic in a taxi with Mubarak, a local guide and translator I had hired on the recommendation of Omer, a contact in Boston who had emigrated from Darfur years earlier. Mubarak's friends usually called him Mohammad, and soon so did we. He was understated, confident, and relaxed. He had a way — common among the best fixers — of convincing you that all problems can be solved. I liked him immediately. We were spending a couple of days in N'Djamena, the capital of Chad, establishing relations with some senior members of the Sudan Liberation Army who were based in the city and sorting out the logistics of our travel to Chad's border region with Darfur, some 700 kilometres away.

The dog faced a small group of shirtless boys, maybe nine or ten years old, who circled it, laughing, about three or four metres away. Its back was to a corner formed by the twisted remnant of a broken fence. It took me a few moments to realize what was happening as we rolled past, and I caught glimpses from between other cars and holes in the fence. Then I noticed that the dog's jaw hung broken from its skull, slack and bloody.

A boy took a few steps forward and hurled a rock. It missed. The dog lurched backwards and to the side, but it was trapped with nowhere to go. A second boy was already throwing another rock or piece of broken concrete. This one connected. The dog yelped and cowered, ears flattened and tail curled between its legs.

“What are they doing?” Donald asked, though I suppose what he meant was “why are they doing it?”

“They're playing,” said Mohammad.

Our taxi rounded the corner. The dog and the boys disappeared from view.

The office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees in N'Djamena was a busy, cluttered affair. The agency had been overseeing camps in eastern Chad that had housed and fed hundreds of thousands of refugees from Darfur for several years, and now the disintegrating security situation in Chad itself was complicating relief efforts as villages along the border emptied and burned. Officials in the office sat at desks covered with stacks of paper, old desktop computers, and electrical fans that whirred and clicked at top speed as they panned back and forth across the room. The heat clung to our skin, even indoors. Most of the staff seemed to have come from French-speaking countries in Africa and Europe. I had been in touch weeks earlier to let them know we'd be coming and were hoping to hitch a ride with them to the border region.

After a few minutes, a woman I had last spoken to from Canada ushered us into her office. She spread a map on her desk and beckoned us to examine it. It was colour-coded to indicate which parts of the country were safe to travel through.

“We can get you on a World Food Program Flight to Abéché tomorrow,” she said in accented English. “That's the largest population centre in the east and is a hub for a lot of our activities there. If you want to go farther east, you're on your own. The road to Adré should be safe during the day, though I wouldn't stray from the main path or stop anywhere for too long.”

She traced a finger south from Adré to where a cluster of refugee camps was located near the town of Goz Beida.

“This is where a lot of the recent violence has been happening. Many Chadians from closer to the border have fled to Goz Beida for safety. They're not in proper camps and aren't being fed or protected. They're just gathering for safety in numbers. But villages are being attacked deeper and deeper into Chadian territory. Some of our staff visited a recently burned village here” — she pointed at a spot on the map about ten kilometres south of Goz Beida — “and were shot at. You can get there from Abéché with a good vehicle. It's risky. We only fly.”

A week or two earlier, there had been a major battle between the rebel Sudan Liberation Army and the Sudanese army just across the border from the town of Bahai in Chad's remote northeastern desert, far from either Adré or Goz Beida. I knew the nearby Oure Cassoni refugee camp was thoroughly infiltrated by the SLA and the Justice and Equality Movement, another rebel militia. I had made tenuous contacts with people affiliated with both groups. There was next to no Chadian government or army presence there, and if we were to illegally cross into Darfur, this was the place to do it.

“You can't drive there,” the UNHCR official said when I asked about Bahai. “It's desert, unreliable roads, and lots of bandits. Check in with our office in Abéché. We might be able to fly you in.”

She held up the colour-coded map with its broad warning swaths of red and orange everywhere we hoped to travel.

“Do you want copies of these?”

“Sure.”

Before I left Canada, Omer, my Sudanese contact in Boston, had given me the satellite phone number of Adam Ali Shogar, a political leader with the Sudan Liberation Army. Shogar had been involved with Darfur opposition groups in Chad since the early 1990s. He was based in N'Djamena when we arrived in the capital. I reached him around noon, and he invited us to come over that evening. We had some time to kill and spent it in the city.

N'Djamena is typical of places in the developing world that are home to large numbers of diplomats and international aid workers. Almost everyone there lives in crushing poverty. Roads are not paved. Buildings are single-storey. It smells of garbage and sewage, and both types of filth fill drainage ditches beside the road. But there are isolated bubbles of comparatively obscene wealth. There's a mosque — pristine, architecturally beautiful, several storeys high. Saudi money pays for it, and it's a safe bet that the brand of Islam promoted there isn't of the moderate and mystical Sufi variety that has deep roots in Chad. There are a handful of hotels — gated and guarded. No one from N'Djamena can afford to stay there. But journalists and aid workers need a place to sleep and swim. They also need somewhere to eat, so there are a few expensive restaurants. Outside these establishments on any given night are parked rows of white Land Rovers and other SUVs, which seem to be the only vehicles anyone from the United Nations will drive. French cuisine is popular. I accidentally ordered a plate of lamb's brains sautéed in butter and garlic in one restaurant when I failed to recognize the French word for brain on the menu. Mohammad eyed the listed prices and wouldn't order a thing until I made it clear he didn't have to pay. He was the only black man in the place other than the waitstaff.