My father and many other Iranians who’d supported Khomeini’s revolution without knowing what would happen next paid a heavy price. Within a short time after coming to power, Khomeini set out to establish a fundamentalist government more repressive than the shah’s. The Islamic government began its systemic repression by summarily trying and executing many leaders of the shah’s army on the rooftop of Khomeini’s residence. Some days, while the revolutionaries were inside, having lunch or dinner with Khomeini, dozens of the shah’s security and military personnel would be murdered on the roof. Deciding that a new military organization was necessary to defend the newly established Islamic government against its enemies, Khomeini established the Revolutionary Guards. With their help, he began to crush opposition groups one by one—members of the shah’s former regime, ethnic minorities, and political dissidents. Many of the very people who’d helped bring Khomeini to power perished during his purges.
The revolution’s violent aftermath disrupted many lives and deeply affected my family; it utterly destroyed others. My father was immediately fired from his job and replaced by a young revolutionary with very little experience. Unable to find a job for years, he eventually had to retire and live on a small pension. That humiliation and shock affected my father far more than the torture he had had to endure in prison. He became a bitter and broken man, exasperated and easily agitated. He started to hate Khomeini and everything he stood for.
· · ·
The second member of my family to be imprisoned was my sister, Maryam. In April 1983, when Maryam was twenty-six and I sixteen, my parents received a phone call saying that Maryam had been arrested in the southern city of Ahvaz. Maryam had supported the Islamic Revolution from the beginning. She’d believed in Khomeini’s promise that the end of the shah’s reign would usher in an era of greater democratic values and freedoms. Maryam would quickly discover how wrong she had been.
It never surprised me that Maryam so vigorously supported the revolution. Like our father, she put everything she had into her beliefs. She was passionate about people, and wanted to help them. She was also very passionate about the arts. She took ballet lessons and loved to draw and paint. Maryam and I were two different people: she was compassionate and expressive, whereas I have always been reserved. Still, she was my best friend.
Even though Maryam was ten years older than I, we had an uncanny understanding of each other. We were so close that we could communicate with just a look, a sigh, or by a certain movement of our hands. Her taste in music, films, and books influenced me greatly, and our shared love for the arts brought us closer together. Maryam loved Al Pacino, and I have seen every movie of his, beginning with Dog Day Afternoon, which I saw when I was eight. She loved Stravinsky’s music and ballets, and throughout my life, I have tried to see every performance of The Firebird and The Rite of Spring I could get to.
In 1979, at the age of twenty-three, Maryam followed in my father’s footsteps and became a member of the Tudeh Party, which, despite the regime change and Khomeini’s promise of tolerance, was still illegal. Two years later, she fell in love with Mohammad Sanadzadeh, an engineer who had recently graduated from Tehran University. They married in 1981 and moved to the city of Ahvaz, in the southern province of Khuzestan, where Mohammad had grown up. Soon after, their son, Khaled, was born. A year earlier, the Iran-Iraq War had begun, after Saddam Hussein’s army attacked Khuzestan. Iraq’s border dispute with Iran had started in the shah’s time, but in 1975, the shah had forced the Iraqi government to accept an accord, which had brought the dispute to an end. After the revolution, with the Iranian army having, in effect, been destroyed by the Islamic government, Saddam Hussein decided that he could use this opportunity to occupy parts of Iran and settle the border disputes. But within a short time, ordinary Iranians, the remaining members of the army, and the Revolutionary Guards repelled the Iraqi army; they took back most of the Iranian territory by early 1982.
When Maryam and Mohammad moved to Ahvaz, many cities in the region had been ravaged by Saddam’s army. Many lives had been ruined, and thousands of people had lost their homes. Maryam and Mohammad had chosen Ahvaz so they could help the refugees of the war. They also worked hard—she as a teacher and he as an engineer—in order to provide for their son, Khaled. Maryam decided to teach in one of the poorest areas in southern Iran, the city of Shadgan; it took her three hours every day to travel there and back by bus. Maryam never complained about the wretched conditions in which she had to live and work. She was proud of what she did, and thought it was her duty to help the people.
In Ahvaz, Maryam and Mohammad both joined the local Tudeh Party cells. They were low-ranking members, responsible only for attending meetings, distributing literature, and helping the refugees. At the time, the Tudeh Party still supported Khomeini, and some of its members even helped the Revolutionary Guards suppress other political groups that were against Khomeini, in the hope of preventing the return of a pro-Western government.
But in early 1983, Khomeini began to arrest and jail Tudeh Party members. Soon the tortured party leaders, some of whom had spent more than twenty years in the shah’s prisons and all of whom had supported the revolution, were paraded on state television, confessing to spying for the Soviet Union and acting against the Islamic government.
Mohammad was picked up by the Revolutionary Guards in the spring of 1983, in the second wave of arrests. A week later, they came for Maryam. She was sentenced to fifteen years in prison (which was eventually reduced to six), in a sham trial before a judge and no jury. She wasn’t allowed a lawyer, and when she tried to object to the charges against her, the judge refused to let her speak. Though a six-year sentence was wholly unjust, at the time, my family and I were relieved that her life had been spared. The leaders of the Islamic regime were executing many political prisoners, and my parents knew many people whose children had been killed, including one young man who’d been put to death simply for writing to a friend that he feared the regime was on its way to becoming a fascist government.
With both of his parents incarcerated, Khaled came to live with my mother, my father, and me in Tehran. He was a cute, curly-haired toddler with a lot of energy and big, curious eyes. I was sixteen at the time. Part of me was excited—I had suddenly gained a younger brother. But on the first day he was with us, as my mother led Khaled by the hand through our house, it broke my heart to see how, from one room to the next, Khaled looked in each closet and under every bed for his mommy and daddy. He was not yet two years old.
My mother took Khaled into our home with her usual silent courage. For the next six years, while Maryam served her sentence for the crime of moharebeh, acting against Allah, my mother raised Khaled. And just as she had done three decades earlier with her husband, every month she would board a bus with Khaled and travel seventeen hours to visit Maryam in Ahvaz.
Maryam was released in 1989, once the Islamic government had killed most Tudeh leaders and was satisfied that the party no longer posed a threat. What Maryam told us about the beatings and torture of prisoners horrified even my father. Many of the torturers of the Islamic regime had been prisoners under the shah and knew exactly what methods of interrogation and torture could break a person. “It will take Maryam years to get rid of the prison memories, the nightmares,” my mother told me a week after Maryam was released. I am not sure that Maryam ever fully recovered.
· · ·
I thought I had done everything I could to avoid this suffering, and yet now the authorities had come for me. Since I’d first begun reporting in Iran, in 1997, making independent documentaries and writing for Newsweek magazine, I had taken every precaution and even censored myself in an attempt to stay below the radar. I’d chosen not to write about such sensitive subjects as separatist movements or ethnic and religious minorities. I’d made every effort to be honest and impartial, but I’d never been too critical of the regime, and certainly never of Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, who had taken over in 1989, after Ruhollah
Khomeini died. I was very careful about whom I socialized with, dealing infrequently with foreigners—whom the government, as a rule, mistrusted. I had rarely dated in Iran to avoid provoking the country’s moral police. I was acutely aware of the government’s level of tolerance for things, and was careful not to cross any lines.
I detested revolutions; I believed, instead, in reconciliation and reform. I accepted the complex—or, perhaps, oppressive—steps I had to take to keep the government from becoming suspicious of me, because the most important thing to me was to be able to continue to do my work as a journalist. Having grown up under the despotic regime of the Islamic Republic—a regime under which information was controlled and severely limited—I understood that a lack of information and communication among a populace leads only to bigotry, violence, and bloodshed. Conspiracy theories about unknown “others”—the West, multinational companies, and secret organizations—being in charge of Iran’s destiny had stunted my nation’s sense of self-determination and, as a result, its will, leaving generations of Iranians feeling hopeless and helpless. I felt it was my job to provide accurate, well-reported information and, in doing so, help the world to have a better understanding of Iran and in my own way build a gradual path toward a more democratic future.
My loved ones—particularly my mother, my sister, and my fiancée, Paola—had worried for years that I would be the next person in my family to be arrested, but I’d repeatedly assured them that I would not risk my life for any cause. That morning, however, as I sat silently at the breakfast table with my mother and watched Rosewater walk angrily out of my bedroom with a box of my notebooks in his arms, I saw that in the eyes of such men, despite all my caution, I was a danger to the authoritarian rulers of the country and, by extension, to the Islamic Republic itself. I knew then that as much as I had tried to avoid my father’s and sister’s fate, I was about to pay the same price, or perhaps a higher one.
PART ONE
The Tunnel at the End
of the Light
Chapter One
“Are you sure you’re pregnant?” I had asked as I leaned down to kiss Paola’s stomach. “Maybe it’s something you ate.”
Her voice sounded tired as she walked me to the door. “Just get back home as soon as you can,” she said. She had had more than enough of my traveling. I had spent the last several weeks in Iran, reporting on the upcoming presidential elections for Newsweek and producing a film for the BBC, and now, after just a week in London, I was heading back again. Her patience for my silly jokes was running thin. We gave each other a long kiss good-bye, and when I finally pulled away from her, her eyes were full of tears.
In the taxi from our flat in north London to Heathrow Airport, I couldn’t ignore the pangs of guilt I felt for leaving Paola alone again. I had promised her I’d be with her during her pregnancy, but in the five months since she’d found out she was carrying our first child, I’d already broken that promise twice. As much as I wanted to be with Paola in London, reading the pregnancy books piled near our bed, I knew that I had to get back to Iran to report on the historic elections just days away. I needed to witness for myself the choice my nation was about to make. There was so much at stake. There were four candidates in total, but two of them—Mehdi Karroubi and Mohsen Rezaei—didn’t stand a chance. The main battle was between the incumbent, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, and his chief opponent, Mir Hossein Mousavi.
I believed that the reckless policies of President Ahmadinejad’s government were ruining Iran. His economic mismanagement had caused high rates of inflation and unemployment, and his irresponsible rhetoric had created far too many enemies. But even more disturbing was that by the end of his first four-year term as president, and with the well-known support of Ayatollah Khamenei, the country was well on its way to becoming a dictatorship.
A former member of the Revolutionary Guards himself, Ahmadinejad had bestowed on the Guards a dangerous amount of power. When the organization was created, in 1979, the Guards was mostly a voluntary force with very few resources, led by guerrilla fighters who had been active against the shah. In the years immediately following the revolution, the Guards had effectively become the new government’s trusted army and police force, tasked with crushing the groups they deemed anti-revolutionary. But in the thirty years since—and most notably under Ahmadinejad’s presidency—the Guards’ political power had grown to such a degree that it surpassed that of the Shia religious leaders who had been ruling Iran for years. In addition to operating ever more effectively as a military force, the Guards had also gained control of much of Iran’s economy and, most alarmingly, had taken over the nation’s nuclear program. In fact, by the time of the June 2009 presidential election, it appeared that Ahmadinejad and the Guards, with Khamenei’s blessing, were trying to tighten their grip on the country and return Iran to the claustrophobic days of the 1980s, where any voice of dissent would be brutally suppressed.
According to the Iranian Constitution, the supreme leader makes the final decision about all affairs of the state. The president, as the head of the executive branch, is in charge of the day-to-day running of the country. Even though the president has to listen to the supreme leader’s directives, a strong president—one who has the support of the public and knows how to manipulate the loopholes in the system—can attain a level of independence that allows him to challenge the supreme leader.
From 1989, when Ali Khamenei became the supreme leader, until Ahmadinejad’s election in 2005, Khamenei had two strong presidents: Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani and Mohammad Khatami. At times, they harshly, albeit privately, disagreed with him, so in order to keep the public’s support, Khamenei tolerated these differences of opinion and did not speak out publicly against Rafsanjani or Khatami. The presence of these relatively independent presidents curtailed the supreme leader’s power and kept Iran from becoming a totalitarian state, even though it always remained, in essence, a brutal authoritarian regime.
Now, with his handpicked president, Ahmadinejad, in place, Supreme Leader Khamenei could gain absolute power and snuff out anyone who sought to challenge him. While to many Iranians this was a terrifying prospect, to many of those who supported Ahmadinejad, there could be no higher goal. For they didn’t think of Khamenei as merely the leader of the country; to them, he was Allah’s representative on earth, a god-king who should have absolute control over the citizens’ lives.
Though the supreme leader is supposed to remain impartial when it comes to elections, it was clear that Khamenei supported Ahmadinejad in his quest to amass power. A month before the elections, in a speech in the province of Kurdistan, Khamenei had criticized “those who exaggerate problems in Iran” and asked Iranians to vote for “the candidate who lives more modestly, is not corrupt, and understands people’s pain.” Khamenei did not mention any names, but there was no doubt that he was urging people to support Ahmadinejad.
With the help of Khamenei and the Guards, Ahmadinejad had taken every measure to secure his reelection. With the rising price of oil, which accounts for 80 percent of Iran’s revenue, the government had billions of dollars to spend. Ahmadinejad had been unabashedly using quite a bit of this money to hand out unguaranteed loans for anything that could secure him a vote: mortgages, college educations, even weddings. The amount and the number of loans granted had been steadily rising in the months before the election, as Ahmadinejad traveled around the country and reminded the anxious crowds that only he would continue to support the poor like this. Should anyone else come to power, he claimed, loans would be cut and the poor would suffer. Ahmadinejad was, in effect, trying to buy his reelection.
In many ways, Mousavi was Ahmadinejad’s opposite. He had served as the prime minister of Iran from 1982 until 1989, though the office was never clearly defined by Iran’s Constitution and was abolished after Khomeini’s death, in 1989. Mousavi was now one of the leaders of Iran’s reformist movement, part of a generation of ex-revolutionaries who wanted to bring an end to the extremist policies
and rhetoric of the recent past and move Iran more progressively toward greater respect for freedom of expression and human rights and rapprochement with the rest of the world. Mousavi believed in a more open and democratic interpretation of Islam than Khamenei and Ahmadinejad, and was campaigning on the promise to bring more accountability and transparency to the Islamic Republic. Those who supported him hoped that under his leadership, there would be less government and religious interference in the personal lives of Iran’s citizens, giving them more freedom in matters ranging from the way they dressed to how they conducted business. What this meant, it was quietly understood, was that Mousavi would do what he could to curtail the power of the supreme leader.
Of course, among the many unknowns in the upcoming election was the question of how, exactly, Mousavi would accomplish this goal. He could not talk in specifics. The election supervisory councils, whose members were selected by Khamenei, could easily disqualify Mousavi if he ever criticized the supreme leader openly. In Iran, only candidates who are approved by the supreme leader and his selected officials can qualify to run for office. In fact, Mousavi was the reformists’ main candidate only by default; all the other candidates had either been disqualified by the supervisory councils or had chosen not to register because they knew they would be disqualified.
Then They Came for Me: A Family’s Story of Love, Captivity, and Survival Page 2