by Jared Cohen
From the Khomeini shrine, my escort took me to the Behesht-e Zahra martyrs’ cemetery, which was just a ten-minute walk from the shrine. Along the way, young teenage boys offered me tea and biscuits. They refused to accept my money, which I later learned was a customary charade not to be taken literally, so when I learned this after the fact, I felt really guilty. Behesht-e Zahra cemetery is a powerful sight. The cemetery is gigantic, filled with tombs commemorating the martyrs. Cement tablets with the names of the martyrs fill thousands of rows throughout the cemetery. The cement tablets are protected by raised metal sheeting that form a canopy over the deceased. Each martyr is granted a shadow box that is decorated by the family. I could have spent days walking from shadow box to shadow box looking at what was inside. There were pictures of children, pictures of religious clerics, pictures of houses, and pictures of wives. I had never seen death as celebrated as it was at Behesht-e Zahra.
The mood of the cemetery was somber. This was not surprising, given where I was, but in Behesht-e Zahra death is both advertised and celebrated. It was not a quiet setting, either, as this seemed to be a gathering place in addition to a graveyard. There were plenty of women hunched over tombs in tears, but there were also groups of men just hanging out and laughing with one another. When I asked my guide if it was normal for so many people to hang around the cemetery, he explained that this is what they do on a Friday. After Friday prayer, hundreds of Iranians come to engage in celebrations to commemorate the martyrs as well as funerals to honor the fallen victims of war. Some come for the grief, others come because it is a fun afternoon activity and it is something to do.
Americans often refer to Operation Desert Storm, the 1991 war with Iraq, as the first Persian Gulf War. Behesht-e Zahra is a powerful reminder of what was truly the first Persian Gulf War, the Iran-Iraq War that raged throughout the 1980s. In September 1980, Iraqi president Saddam Hussein invaded Iran and began a conflict that would last eight years and achieve nothing on either side.
The war was bloody. Use of chemical weapons, torture, and brutal violations of human rights were frequent methods employed by both sides. The eight years of fighting claimed an “estimated four hundred thousand deaths and one million wounded on the Iranian side and three hundred thousand deaths and nine hundred thousand wounded on the Iraqi side,” although some estimates actually suggest an even higher death toll. As a comparison, the number of Iranian casualties actually exceeded the number of American casualties in the Second World War. In addition to the bloody consequences of the war, it was also financially draining. According to reliable sources, “by 1986 the economic costs of the conflict were already as high as $600 billion,” including loss of oil sales.*
For Iranians, this was the first Persian Gulf War. I never would have understood this had I not seen the kilometers and kilometers of tombstones and the weeping women in chador falling onto tombs. In later conversations I had with young people in Iran, the Iran-Iraq War would always come up. They spoke of the magnitude of the horror, the death toll, the impact, and the humiliation Iran experienced during this period. While I can never truly understand what it was like to have lived through that war, just Behesht-e Zahra alone made me appreciate that it was no mere footnote in history, as the Western world tends to view it.
Shapour saw I was moved by Behesht-e Zahra, by its emotionally stirring shadow boxes and the haunting rows of tombs. He was careful to show me the tombs of the unknown soldiers, which consisted of small, unmarked cement squares. Shapour wanted me to see the death toll and the anonymity of those who died in the war. Intertwined with the rows of unmarked tombs were carefully planted shrubbery and poles adorned with flags for the Islamic Republic. Shapour placed his own Islamic Republic flag on one of those poles. I found the cemetery moving; this war I had only read about in books became a visual reality. I saw the pain of those who had lost; I saw the magnitude of the casualties in the sheer number of tombs; I saw the importance of this to Iranian society by bearing witness to the mourning rituals of Iranians who had come to pay their respects. But Shapour may have pushed his luck when he took me to a nearby museum where I could see posters declaring, “USA Is the Biggest Terrorist.”
Both the Khomeini shrine and Behesht-e Zahra affected me, and the fact that the government wanted me to see these sites did not reduce the impact. They were not, however, the “beautiful sights” Shapour had promised. That was still to come.
Shapour told me that our next stop would show off Iran’s beauty. He failed to mention that it would take almost two hours to get there and that most of that time would be spent in traffic. When we finally arrived, I found myself in an environment that I would hardly call beautiful. We were in the mountains, but all I could really see was the huge cloud of black smoke that seemed to form a fluffy tent over the city of Tehran.
On some days, the pollution is so bad that people start coughing up black smoke.
We left the “viewing” area and headed to what Shapour claimed was a really good restaurant somewhat nearby. His motive, of course, was to keep me out of downtown Tehran and distract from the prospects of interviewing officials. We soon arrived at an isolated small pizza café. Without realizing it, however, Shapour had made a crucial mistake that gave me a glimmer of hope for my time in Iran: He had brought me to Iran’s youth.
It was at this mountaintop café that I got my first view of an Iranian experience unfiltered by my government escorts. And I have the charged hormones of a few pairs of Iranian teenagers to thank.
As I first saw at that café, Iran has a lot more than religious shrines, martyrs’ cemeteries, and the regime. It also has a bunch of kids, who constitute nearly 70 percent of society, having the same kind of fun that we enjoy in America. All that other stuff—the regime and its trappings—just makes it a little bit harder for them.
The youth bulge in Iran is not random. The massive human-wave attacks that took place during that war wiped out a substantial portion of an entire generation. The memories of the Iran-Iraq War are deeply embedded in the minds of Iranian youth, not just because they grew up with this violence, but because it is the very reason for the size of their demographic.
In Iran, boys and girls are not permitted to show affection in public, and there is a morals police that strictly enforces the rule. When the Islamic Republic was established in 1979, the intent was to exploit nationalist sentiments and remold society in accordance with the Shi’ite interpretation of Islamic law. Drinking, public relationships, and dancing were all viewed as blasphemy. But, as I learned during my time at that dismal café, even the most repressive measures are no match for teenagers on a mission to get some.
I ate my lunch and I watched couple after couple after couple sneak off into the nearby bushes for some “privacy.” Every five minutes or so, the morals police would go into the bushes and roust the canoodling teens from their love nests. The teens would then wait a few minutes before heading right back into the bushes, where they’d stay until chased out again. It was a total charade. Still, I loved it. I was entertained, but I was also sympathetic. I remembered the anxiety of middle-school birthday parties, seventh-grade couples trying to sneak kisses every time an adult’s back was turned. We may not have had the Revolutionary Guards or the morals police watching over us, but we had our parents. At the time, it seemed just as bad.
While Shapour finished his pizza at the café I got up to walk around. I had a difficult time approaching people, but I did catch up with one couple immediately after the morals police had caught them. Happy for the chance to talk to somebody other than my escort, I struck up a conversation with them. I tried to talk to them about politics and Iran, but they seemed eager to end the conversation and sneak off again right in front of the morals police. When I was younger and kids would sneak off at parties, they would just get grounded; in Iran, there were potential consequences. I was amazed by this. I felt I had seen another Iran; a more liberated and vibrant Iran.
On the ride back to the hotel, my gu
ide, Shapour, was not quite so jubilant. He remained silent on the entire drive back, clearly unhappy about something. Back at the hotel, Shapour and I sat down in two green cloth chairs in the lobby. During the conversation, I leaned back and he leaned forward; it was clear who was in control. He looked at me with his big piercing eyes and a stern look that I would become all too familiar with.
“You know, you have to mind what you ask people. This is not America, we do things differently here.”
“And why is that?” I managed, after a few minutes of stony silence. I knew it was the wrong thing to say, but I was frustrated.
“I think I will call up Mr. Sorush and have him tell the ministry that you are breaking the law.”
I felt myself losing it. This was ridiculous. I had done nothing wrong and I had acquiesced to every demand made of me. Was threatening me really that entertaining?
“What law?” I snapped.
Shapour took out his cell phone and dialed Mr. Sorush. For about two minutes, they exchanged words in Farsi, but I caught none of it. He didn’t tell me what was said in their short conversation, but he led me to believe that I might get arrested. I didn’t know what to do. My phone was almost certainly tapped and people were likely reading or filtering my e-mails.
I had been in plenty of life-threatening situations before and had always found a way to stay strong. At that moment, however, it wasn’t Shapour’s threat of arrest or any fear of imminent danger that scared me so much. It was something different, a completely new feeling that I had never experienced before. For the first time in my life, I felt captive to psychological intimidation. My travels in Africa had put me in physical danger, but I’d never experienced anything quite so terrifying as my dwindling sense of personal freedom. All my phone calls, e-mails, conversations, and actions were closely monitored. People watched over my shoulder. Even when I thought I was alone, someone was always following me. I began to feel as if I could not think my own thoughts. Having always had the luxury of being able to express myself, I was devastated to have it all stripped away from me. I just lost it. It was that feeling I remembered all too well from when I was younger; eyes tearing, every ounce of energy focused on holding those tears back. In another context I might have started yelling at him, or I would have just stormed off; but, in Iran I just sank my head into my lap. I didn’t want him to see how hard this was for me, but no matter how hard I tried, it was almost impossible to hold back.
I just got a glimpse of it. Iranians deal with Big Brother watching them on a daily basis. I truly sympathized with their situation. I tried to reflect on this as much as possible. In some ways it made things easier for me. As hard as things got, I could always find some kind of comfort in my departure date, the much awaited moment when things would return to normal. Most Iranians don’t have this luxury. Without an escape, they simply find ways to coexist.
It was my weakest moment. I was alone in one of the most repressive countries in the entire world, and I had just broken down in front of a hostile intelligence agent. There was no sympathy from his end. Up until that point, I had considered myself strong. After all, I had snuck into the Congolese civil war under a pile of bananas, had stood face-to-face with perpetrators of the Rwanda genocide, and had met child soldiers in Africa hopped up on so many drugs that they easily could have viewed their guns as toys, not weapons, and ended my life right then and there. While these experiences were reckless, they did not even compare to the fear and helplessness I felt when I had been stripped of my freedom in Iran. It nearly broke me.
As if things couldn’t have gotten worse, I realized then that I was out of money. Nobody had told me that I wouldn’t be able to access my bank from Iran; I was told that Iran had ATMs and that even if my debit card didn’t work, I would be able to take withdrawals off of a credit card or have money transferred to an Iranian bank. None of this was possible. Iran did have ATMs, but they only accepted Iranian credit cards (and most of them didn’t even work for that). Because of economic sanctions, no American bank could transfer money into Iran. For the same reason, Iranian banks could also only give cash advances on Iranian credit cards.
I owed my guides and the appointed intelligence service money. I owed my hotel money. I had entered Iran with a combination of dollars, euros, and British pounds that amounted to no more than seven hundred dollars. Tehran is not a place to be broke and in debt, especially when I had already been threatened several times with imprisonment for nonexistent crimes.
The unfriendly faces grew less friendly still. My escort and the hotel manager both wanted me to pay them for the privilege of being intimidated and harassed, and I wasn’t holding up my end of the bargain.
I tried calling my family, but my phone would cut out every few minutes or random voices would come onto the phone and make it impossible to speak. My family and I had decided that if I got myself in some trouble and was in physical danger, I would ask her if my sister had heard from one of her ex-boyfriends. This was our code.
My financial situation did not place me in physical harm and didn’t warrant my drawing on the code, but the situation was nonetheless immediate. I connected with my mother down in Florida, where they were for Hanukkah. It took five days for me to get the money my parents sent. The transfers were complex and involved banks in London and random Iranian businessmen. Later I learned if you go to the central city of Esfahan and purchase a Persian carpet, you can route a credit card transaction through Dubai and get a cash advance off your credit card. For some reason, this transaction can only be made when buying carpets and only when they are purchased in Esfahan.
On the third day, Shapour once again greeted me in the lobby of my hotel and informed me that we were taking yet another trip to see Mr. Sorush. Mr. Sorush again threatened me and informed me that he had spoken to the ministry about me. He then advised me to spend the rest of the day at the hotel.
Would I be returning to the hotel to await arrest? If I were jailed in Iran, I could be held indefinitely, tortured, or worse. But that wasn’t what scared me the most. If I were arrested in Tehran, there’d be no American Embassy to call and no diplomatic relationship to cite. I was totally alone.
Shapour put me in a taxi and told me not to leave my hotel. What a disaster this trip had been: I had run out of money, my research—which would rely on my ability to interview as many as fifty Iranian government officials—had failed within the first week of my trip, and now it appeared that I was about to be arrested for unauthorized journalism. After another emotional outburst, I was put in a taxi and told to return to my hotel. I would no longer be able to leave for any reason.
The taxi ride back to my hotel was the turning point of my time in Iran.
In the backseat, certain that I was being delivered to a fate whose terror I could hardly begin to imagine, I listened to the driver trying to make small talk. I wasn’t exactly in the mood to chat, and I certainly wasn’t in the mood for the elaborate game of charades that would break our language barrier. This young man, probably no older than twenty-seven or twenty-eight, was persistent and very interested in talking to me.
As we drove, I looked out my window and saw a gigantic picture of Ayatollah Khomeini on the side of one of the buildings. Willing to humor the driver’s talkativeness, if not necessarily indulge his desire for conversation, I pointed to it and said simply, “Khomeini.”
“Khomeini is very bad,” he said.
“Well, what do you think about Rafsanjani?”
“He is very, very bad.”
“Jannati?” I asked. Ayatollah Jannati is the cleric who notoriously declares “Down with USA, God willing,” during his Friday prayer sermons.
“Very, very, very bad.”
“What about President Khatami?”
“Medium bad.”
It went on like this as I ticked through at least ten members of the Iranian leadership. Finally, I asked him what he thought of Ayatollah Ali Khamanei, the country’s spiritual leader and the most powerful man
in theocratic Iran.
He turned around to look at me. “He is like animal,” he said.
I couldn’t believe what I’d just heard. Had the harsh censorship and threats of the regime bypassed this candid, honest young man?
Out of curiosity, I asked him about the American leadership. I wasn’t expecting anything positive
“What do you think of Condoleezza Rice?”
He smiled, “She helps us, very good.”
“What do you think of George Bush?” I asked.
He looked at me with an air of pride and said, “He is like real man.”
His hatred for Khamanei and admiration for George Bush slightly stunned me, but also excited me. I’d only heard the government line since arriving in Iran, but this young taxi driver gave me confidence that there was more to hear. When we arrived back at my hotel, I wanted to embrace the driver.
“How much do I owe you for the taxi?”
“Where are you from?”
It didn’t appear that he had understood my question, but I answered his anyway.
I extended my arm to give him four ten-thousand rial bills (roughly four dollars) but he pushed my hand back ever so gently. I thought this was my second experience with what Iranians call taroof, a concept I had first learned of after I graciously accepted the free biscuits from the children in Behesht-e Zahra. Taroof involves offering something as a gift to demonstrate courtesy, when in actuality money is expected. There is usually a charade that follows, whereby three or four offers and refusals take place. Taroof is sometimes looked at as a cultural characteristic of saying one thing and meaning another. While some will argue this is the essence of this cultural tradition, most Iranians suggest that it is a politeness and a courtesy that they extend to one another.