“In Iraq, she’d arrive, stay one night in a hotel, and then move in with local people,” Richard Amiot, Kazemi’s editor at Recto Verso, said. “Systematically, she’d do that. Other journalists would stay in big hotels. She would never do that. And of course, as a result, she’d get different stories.”
In Herat, Afghanistan, Kazemi was there with other international reporters to cover the supposed grand opening of a new school. Unlike everyone else, she stayed there for months to document that it never opened. She also confronted the local warlord, Ismail Khan, to demand why women journalists were not allowed to work.
“It takes courage,” Amiot said. “She was defiant, but not stupid. She was not a fanatic. She could navigate and negotiate her way around military men from different places.”
Still, her son worried about her when she left on overseas assignments. “It scared me a little bit, the way she would stand up to everybody,” he said.
Typically, when Kazemi was preparing for a trip, she would pack a bag full of Hachemi’s old clothes for people in the poor countries she was visiting. “And you have to remember that my mother was fifty-four years old, and she was very small,” said Hachemi. “She would get tired. But this didn’t matter to her. She thought it was important.”
Hachemi respected his mother for this, and also for her photography. “It was a responsibility for her. It was her profession and her life. She showed people in everyday situations — common crimes, common injustices. She showed women and children in a beautiful way, with an artist’s eye. In this way she made a difference.”
Kazemi never forgot Iran, the country of her birth. Her son said she wanted to capture on film the way that Iranian women would push back against their government in subtle ways — “by wearing their headscarves a little farther back on their heads, or by wearing a little bit of makeup. She’d show their resistance.”
In June 2003, Kazemi was back in Iran with permission from the Iranian government to work as a journalist. Hundreds of Iranian students and activists had been arrested for protesting against the government and had been taken to the Evin prison in northwest Tehran, where political prisoners are incarcerated. Worried family members gathered outside to demand the release of their loved ones or at least to learn what had happened to them. Kazemi was there, too. It was the sort of story she liked to cover: weak and marginalized people defying the powerful. She began snapping photos. Prison staff demanded her camera. She refused to hand it over and was arrested. State-controlled newspapers soon ran stories describing her as a spy. On July 11, less than three weeks after her arrest, Kazemi was dead.
Iran’s official explanation changed several times over the following days and weeks. They claimed she had suffered a stroke, that she was on a hunger strike, or that she had fallen and hit her head. A fuller story emerged in the testimony of Shahram Azam, the Iranian doctor who examined Kazemi’s unconscious body in the military hospital where she eventually died. Azam sought refuge in Canada in 2005. He reported extensive injuries to Kazemi that indicated a severe beating and brutal rape. Her body was so broken, there was little he could do for her. She died of respiratory arrest.
Amir called me on my hotel’s lobby telephone. I had returned to Tehran as he had instructed.
“Check your email.”
I opened my inbox to find a detailed message from Amir instructing me to wear a red shirt and go to an address in a Tehran suburb. He gave me a password and the response I should expect to hear. I was supposed to be there in two hours. I called a cab and had the driver drop me off nearby.
The man who approached me was tall, with deep-set dark eyes, thick eyebrows, and a loosely parted flop of hair. He seemed friendly but reserved, even sad. Feeling a little self-conscious, I repeated the password I had memorized — a Farsi word I didn’t understand — and shook his hand. “Behrouz,” he said, introducing himself, and smiled with his mouth. His eyes didn’t change. I followed him into a nearby house.
Inside, about a dozen mostly young Iranians sat in a circle on cushions near the wall. Several smoked cigarettes. A few stood up to shake my hand. All were dissidents — activists and democrats, mostly current and former students, but also the parents of two political prisoners.
Among them, only Bina Darabzand, a barrel-chested man with dancing eyes and a quick smile, was older than thirty. He had been arrested for the first time in 1971 at the age of thirteen for protesting rising bus fares. A family friend got him out of prison and urged his parents to send him out of Iran. The worried friend could tell already that Bina had a rebellious streak in him. If Bina didn’t leave Iran, maybe it would be best if he spent a bit of time in jail, the friend thought, just so he would know the consequences of standing up to the authorities before he got himself in more serious trouble. Bina didn’t stop. He campaigned against the shah as a young man, and now, with flecks of grey in his moustache and thick, curly hair, he wanted to bring down Iran’s theocracy.
Many of those present had been jailed at Evin prison, in some cases for years, usually for protesting against the government and demanding democracy and greater freedom in their country. Several had been in Evin when Zahra Kazemi was held there. They wanted to tell me what they knew about her murder.
“When Zahra Kazemi was in section 209, my father would listen to her screaming,” a young, pony-tailed man named Ali Tabarzadi said. “At first he didn’t know who it was. But the agents told him. He could hear her moaning and weeping.”
Ali’s father, Heshmatollah, a journalist and founder of the Democratic Front of Iran, was serving a seven-year sentence for various alleged crimes, such as disturbing public opinion and insulting Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamanei. Section 209 is run by Iran’s Ministry of Intelligence, and it is where some of the worst abuses at Evin are inflicted on political prisoners. Heshmatollah was still incarcerated when I met with his son, but the two had spoken, and Heshmatollah had passed on what he knew about Kazemi’s detention and murder.
The presence of the Canadian woman at Evin was well known, although she was kept in solitary confinement and wasn’t seen. Prison staff and inmates would discuss her case frequently. Several of the guards were on friendly terms with the political prisoners. They would bring the prisoners kebabs before their trial hearings and share jokes about the interrogators and prosecutors at the prison. Kianoosh Sanjari, a student leader, had a frank conversation with one of his guards before he was released. The guard told him that a soldier had noticed Kazemi taking photographs of the protests from a parked car. He told his boss, who ordered her arrest.
“Right from the start, she insisted on her rights,” Kianoosh said. “Then she stood in front of the guards and ripped the film out of her camera. But they took her anyways.”
Bina Darabzand.
Kazemi was brought inside the prison, where she was interrogated and, we now know, beaten and raped. Saeed Kalanaki, another young anti-government activist, was also incarcerated inside. “The interrogators were visibly nervous. Usually they conduct their interrogations calmly, but in those days they were very agitated,” he said. “From the commotion outside the cell, I knew something wrong had happened.”
The guard who spoke with Kianoosh told him two nurses had noticed that Zahra Kazemi was barely conscious in her cell. They alerted prison authorities, who took her to the prison’s emergency clinic. But according to the prison guard, Kazemi was already near death and was taken to the Baghiyyatollah al-Azam military hospital. “The guard told me that she had been beaten, that her head was smashed,” he said. “They didn’t cover that up.”
Kazemi was officially admitted to the hospital with “intestinal problems,” and when she died, two weeks later, Iran’s chief prosecutor, Saeed Mortazavi, declared she had suffered a stroke. Meanwhile, government officials at the prison began to cover up the murder. Separate guards told both Kianoosh Sanjari and Saeed Kalanaki that prison personnel who had been involved in the case were taken to section 209 and instructed on what t
o tell investigators who would be looking into the circumstances of Kazemi’s death. Kianoosh’s guard acquaintance also told him that relevant documents were altered or destroyed — an allegation that was later supported by Iran’s parliament.
Iran’s then-president, the reformist, Mohammad Khatami, ordered an inquiry. A junior-level Intelligence Ministry officer was eventually charged with “semi-intentional murder” and acquitted. The former Evin prisoners believed that the accused man, Reza Ahmadi, was a scapegoat anyway. The story that circulated in the prison was that Iran’s chief prosecutor, Saeed Mortazavi, was responsible. Mortazavi had, and has, a fearsome reputation among political prisoners, often interrogating them personally. “Everyone knew that Mortazavi is a butcher, but we were still shocked,” Kianoosh said. “We knew this couldn’t be a normal death.” An Iranian parliamentary commission accused Mortazavi of attempting to cover up Kazemi’s beating and of forging documents pertaining to her case. It condemned his refusal to appear before their investigation. Khatami’s presidential commission concluded that Kazemi had died because of a blow to the head that resulted in a skull fracture and brain hemorrhage. Getting to the bottom of Zahra Kazemi’s murder and holding those responsible to account was a priority not just for Iran’s outlawed democratic dissidents, but also for some reformers within the political system. Even so, the former prisoners with whom I met were taking an enormous risk by speaking to me — a journalist who was working in Iran without the permission of the Iranian government. All knew what punishments might await them. Yet most insisted that, when I was safely outside Iran, I quote them by name.
“We’re already in trouble,” said Bina Darabzand. “We can’t get in any more trouble than we are. If the government wants to execute us, it will.”
Saeed Kalanaki added that most of them had outstanding charges against them that the security forces hadn’t yet acted on. “It’s a sword over our heads. We know that at the next demonstration they can pick us up. It’s like a game of chicken. I’ll go as far as I can and see when they stop me.”
One of the dissidents sitting on a cushion and smoking crossed his legs and sat upright, so that both his hands were free. He took an orange off a table, broke it open, and displayed one of the pips inside on the blade of his knife.
“Consider a seed,” he said. “Heavy soil can be heaped on top of it, but it still pushes through to the surface and brings flowers and fruit. This is the pressure we’re trying to bring on the government in Iran. We can see this pressure from those students protesting and from people sentenced to death. These are the signs that the pressure is growing.”
He knew there was a cost, that, as he put it, more soil could be piled on Iran’s democratic seeds, that budding sprouts could be cut down. “In all times there must be people who will sacrifice themselves for others.”
The activists were willing to take these risks because they saw little alternative. Mohammad Khatami had been in power for more than six years. His election, in 1997, had brought with it hope that Iran might be reformed, that it could evolve into a more democratic state. But any democratic ambitions Khatami might have had were shackled by hardliners in Iran’s unelected power structure, whom Khatami was unwilling to challenge. “Reform has been a dead end,” said Kianoosh. “The reformers think saving the system is more important than the needs of the people.” Kianoosh, however, like every other democrat I spoke to in Iran, wanted to change his country peacefully.
Saeed felt the same way. “We are living in a country where for no reason they jail, kill, and torture people,” he said. “They have shaped society to their own purposes, and they don’t allow views other than their own orthodox thinking. For us young people, it has reached a point where we can’t tolerate it any more. But even though the government has shown it does not understand anything but force, our struggle will never come to violence. The people of Iran have been through a lot of wars and are tired of violence. We’re also strategically opposed to violence. Our struggle against this government is a struggle against all forms of violence. We believe we can change it through civil disobedience. The era of violent revolutions is over.”
The parents of these young activists were once much like them. They had raged against the shah and tried to bring about a more humane and decent system of government. “At those times, almost everyone supported the revolution,” the father of one imprisoned activist said. “We believed we could reach freedom and democracy this way. If we knew what would happen, that our sons would be behind bars, we wouldn’t have done it. It was a mistake.”
The father of another jailed activist, a doctor, moved about the room in a slow and painful shuffle. He, too, had opposed the shah, whose security forces arrested and stomped on his back with such fury that he was now virtually crippled. Two decades later, his son was in jail for protesting the shah’s successors’ dictatorship. The doctor was visibly distressed but stoic: “My son is thirty-five years old. He is independent. It doesn’t matter what I might tell him, I can’t stop him. And why should I? He believes he is doing the right thing. As a father, yes, I miss him. But as a militant, he must do what he sees as right. I’m proud of him.”
Much later that night we left the townhouse in pairs and walked off in different directions. The house where we met belonged to a prominent activist, and those inside assumed that it was under surveillance. At a busy street corner a few minutes later, a car pulled up and several of us climbed inside. We drove a short while and then got out again.
I fell into conversation with Behrouz Javid Tehrani, the tall man who had met me on the street and with whom I had exchanged passwords that evening. Five years earlier, in 1999, he was a university student and had taken part in the mass protests that shook Tehran that summer. Security forces and the pro-regime Basij militia stormed Tehran University’s dormitories, arresting hundreds of students and murdering at least one. Behrouz was thrown in solitary confinement in Tehran’s Evin Prison. Guards there hanged him from the ceiling by his hands and whipped his feet.
“They wanted information about the other members of the movement. I didn’t want my friends to be punished like me, so I said nothing.” Behrouz was kept in solitary confinement for two months. It ended with his trial.
“The judge saw me for three minutes and sentenced me to eight years in prison,” Behrouz said. His sentence was later reduced to four years, which meant that Behrouz was released only a few months before I met him. The worst part of his incarceration was the death of his mother. Behrouz’s jailers refused to release him to be with her during her final days or to attend her funeral. He was crushed.
“My mother’s death was a gift to all people. She sacrificed herself, but I was heartbroken. She was the last thing in my life. Now there is nothing. It doesn’t matter if I go back to prison. They can take nothing more.”
Behrouz’s convictions were reinforced in prison, partly because of his mother’s death, and partly because his time in jail forced him to confront his tormentors every day. “Those four years strengthened me,” he said. “It made me more motivated to face challenges, especially the cruelties of this government.”
It was striking how many of the dissidents I met that night and later had been repeatedly jailed without recanting their beliefs or scaling back their activism. They knew what the consequences of opposing the government would be, yet they did so repeatedly.
“When your goals become your loves, you’re willing to die for them,” Kianoosh said. “In jail, we feel the oppression directly. It makes you more eager to fight it. We’ll stand before the walls of the solitary confinement cells until they crumble. We won’t crumble first.” Kianoosh was then only twenty years old. He had been arrested for the first time at seventeen and had spent twenty months since that first arrest in jail, more than seven months of it in solitary confinement.
Behrouz Javid Tehrani.
“Our friends in jail are proof of why we need to struggle. There is no way to free ourselves from this dictatorship withou
t struggle. This leads someone to protest. And then by protesting, you can’t help but ask yourself more questions: Why are my friends being attacked for protesting peacefully? Why does the government send thugs to attack students when they are asking for the smallest changes at their university? Why should the price of being politically curious in Iran be so high? Why can there be no opposition?”
Kianoosh was only sixteen during the 1999 student protests at which Behrouz and hundreds of others were arrested. These events were dramatically captured in a photograph that ran on the front page of the Economist magazine of protester Ahmad Batebi holding up the blood-splattered T-shirt of a fellow protester. The photograph became an icon, and Batebi was sentenced to death for the crime of reflecting Iran’s cruelty to the wider world. His sentence was reduced to fifteen years, during which time he was beaten with cables, kicked, cut, suffered mock executions, and had his face forced into raw sewage. “Why should students like Ahmad be in jail for holding up a bloody shirt?” Kianoosh said that night. “I joined the movement to take Ahmad’s place in the struggle.”
This solidarity among Iranian democrats was something the regime tried and tries to break down. “Their totalitarianism has made us bond together. When Ahmad is being tortured, we all feel the pain,” Saeed said.
Is This Your First War? Page 12