To counter this, democratic activists are kept in solitary confinement, or those they love most are threatened to break their will. When Bina was arrested, they brought his wife in and sat her down in front of him. “I got their message. And I answered their questions,” he said. “They would have done it. Don’t think they wouldn’t.”
Around midnight we reached Evin Prison, where Zahra Kazemi was murdered and where some of the Iranian democrats I was with that night were held. The stone walls, which rose more than ten metres above the ground, were thick and topped with rolls of barbed wire. Chips of stone and concrete had crumbled and fallen off. They lay scattered on the ground.
Behrouz spent ten months inside Evin before he was transferred to Karaj Prison. “I have bad memories of this place,” he said, glancing upwards at the barbed wire above him. “My worst times were here, in the first few days after I was arrested.”
Behrouz drew on a cigarette. It glowed red in the darkness. Evin is located in a residential neighourhood, but street lighting is poor. “I’m only twenty-six years old,” he said. “I’ve spent four of those in jail.”
We drifted away from the prison walls, onto the sidewalk of a nearby street. An elderly man, hearing voices outside, opened his door and glowered at us. He was wearing a faded undershirt and leaned on a walking stick. He focused on Behrouz and berated him.
“What are you doing smoking? You’re wasting your youth.”
In the small hours of the morning we parted company and made plans to meet again in a week, on my last day in Iran. I wanted to see Behrouz, Bina, Saeed, and Kianoosh again, and to confirm some details about Zahra Kazemi’s murder. I spent the intervening days travelling elsewhere in the country, returning to Tehran late in the morning on a day when the spring sunlight was harsh. The rising temperature made my skin sweat as I walked along a street where Bina said he would meet me, outside Tehran’s Museum of Contemporary Art. A car honked, and Bina pulled up in a hatchback. Behrouz, the tallest, was in the passenger seat. Saeed and Kianoosh were crammed into the back. I opened the rear passenger door and climbed in.
Immediately I started questioning the former detainees on what they knew about Zahra Kazemi’s detention and murder. Frustrated with trying to take notes while Bina navigated Tehran’s chaotic traffic, I asked if we could stop. Bina pulled over to the side of the street while I hunched over and scrawled in a notebook held on my knees. We had been stopped like that for a few minutes when a man stepped close to the car and took a photo of the five of us together. I hadn’t seen him, but a shopkeeper signalled to Bina to let him know what had happened. The area around the museum was popular with those opposed to the government and was frequently patrolled or under surveillance by plainclothes members of Iran’s security services. Many of the shopkeepers were sympathetic to the opposition and kept their eyes open for agents and informers, which is why one of them tried to warn Bina.
“Don’t worry,” Bina said. “The guy took the photograph because of us, not you. We’re all watched all the time. But they’re incompetent. They won’t even develop the film for days, and you’ll be out of the country by then.”
Bina’s face was drawn, though, and his lips were pursed tightly together. “Let’s go,” he said. “It was dangerous to stop.”
Moments later a police car’s lights flashed behind us. Bina grimaced and breathed out sharply through his nose.
“This is it.”
I stuffed my notebook away.
“What do I tell him?” I asked.
“Say you met us by chance,” Bina said. “Say that we stopped you. It’s us that they’re worried about. You’ll be fine.” My skin was prickling with more sweat. I was ashamed that Bina was ready to take the blame for us being together, but I didn’t have the courage to protest. I could feel a flush rising over my face.
It turned out that the police officer had pulled us over for a routine traffic violation, but everyone was a little shaken up as we pulled back into the slow-moving traffic. A young girl, maybe ten years old, obviously poor and wearing clothes that were dirty but brightly coloured, was weaving her way between the gridlocked cars with a pan of burning seeds. Bina called her over and dropped a few coins into her tiny hand. She waved smoke over the car’s windshield and through its open windows. The smoke smelled like incense.
“It’s an old Persian tradition. It brings good luck,” Bina said. He smiled thinly. “We could use some.”
We spent the afternoon in Behrouz’s apartment with several other dissidents who met us there. I was already worried about getting stopped by Iranian security, either back at my hotel or at the airport. Bina tried to comfort me. Even in the midst of my panic, I knew that whatever might happen, neither Bina, nor any of the other Iranians who put themselves in danger by talking to me, could get on a plane to avoid it.
When the interviews were finished, we again left the apartment and dispersed in different directions. Behrouz and I took a taxi to shopping plaza, where I could disappear in a crowd before taking a cab back to my hotel without him. Behrouz got out of the cab and tried to give me a reassuring smile. He made a small wave with his fist and said something in Farsi that sounded like “Up with Iran!” We hugged and kissed each other three times on both cheeks. “Khoda Hafez,” he said. Go with God.
Inside I bought conspicuous souvenirs to show the hotel clerks and, in my nervousness, knocked over and shattered a glass lamp. “Okay. Don’t worry,” the shopkeeper said in broken English. My heart was racing. A knot was tightening in my stomach that didn’t loosen, even when I got to my hotel and found nothing amiss. I ripped out and destroyed several pages from my notebook containing names and phone numbers of people I didn’t want to implicate if I was searched. I disguised other numbers, including Bina’s, with a rough code. My flight didn’t leave until three o’clock in the morning. It was a long wait.
When I got to the airport, however, I boarded the Lufthansa flight to Frankfurt without incident and finally began to relax as the plane accelerated and drove my back into the seat as it roared down the runway and into the air. Tehran was lit up below us. The women around me removed their headscarves. I tried to sleep.
I called Bina from a café in Berlin the next day to let him know that I was safe.
“Have a beer for me,” he said. “Make it a Budweiser. That used to be my drink.”
I returned to Canada and called Scott at the Citizen to tell him what I had learned about Zahra Kazemi’s murder from the Iranians who had been jailed with her. He agreed to buy the story, and I took some satisfaction from the fact that the price we settled on was significantly higher than what it would have cost the paper had they stuck to our original agreement. The story ran with a banner headline across the front page of the Citizen and was picked up by other newspapers in the chain. As Bina, Saeed, Kianoosh, and the other dissidents had requested, I published their full and undisguised names. Reaction in Iran was swift. Five days after my first article appeared, in late May, Behrouz was tipped off that that secret police were coming to arrest him. He dashed off an email message: “I’m fine for now, but they have arrested some of our friends, and the homes of our colleagues are under surveillance. Probably I will be arrested tonight. Farewell … With hope and freedom.”
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 di
dn’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.”
Seven
Genocide
Lives 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.
Is This Your First War? Page 13