Captive in Iran

by Maryam Rostampour

  We had to have a new lawyer and decided to try to get Mr. Aghasi, a famous lawyer in Iran. Our sisters met with him, and we talked with him by phone. He agreed to take our case, but as before, he had to get our written permission to represent us. With all the interference from the prison and the court, it had taken poor Mr. Soltani months of fruitless trips, calls, and cajoling to try to complete even that simple step.

  Marziyeh asked the social worker at Evin exactly what the procedure was and who should be involved. She told us each to write a letter giving our permission, sign and fingerprint it, and give it to her. A social worker would pass it to Mr. Aghasi in the prisoners’ visiting hall. He couldn’t visit us to get the letters because without the letters he couldn’t visit us. (This, we later learned, is what Americans call a “catch-22.”) It wasn’t even clear if the court would let us have a lawyer. The “investigations” were still going on, and the intelligence ministry had still not given permission for us to be represented in court.

  Also about this time, we had our first contact visit with our sisters since our arrest. Usually, only prisoners who had close ties with the authorities or spent time in the cultural center were allowed these visits, and we had been banned from the center by the director. Even so, we had asked Mrs. Rezaei for permission to have contact visits, and they were approved.

  It was so exciting! The morning seemed to drag by more slowly than ever as Marziyeh and I put on our veils, waited in one line after another, and finally got to the visitor area. The few prisoners who were allowed contact visits met their guests in a different place than where normal visits occurred, a big room downstairs furnished with tables and chairs. The guards did what they could to intimidate us and make themselves feel important. One gruffly told us that if we talked to anyone except our visitors, he would cancel our visit. They criticized our chadors and said other things to make sure we remembered how important they were and how unimportant we were.

  None of that mattered as we entered the room and ran to our sisters—we wrapped our arms tightly around them and never wanted to let go. “Be strong!” we said. “Don’t cry!” But we all cried with happiness anyway. We had just sat down together, the four of us, when another self-important guard came over and told us we could only sit in pairs. So we split up, Marziyeh with Elena and me with Shirin. They told us the good news that they had received our letters of permission for Mr. Aghasi and everything looked fine. We should expect to hear from him soon. Knowing that our contact visits would only be once a month for ten minutes each, we talked like crazy.

  A guard walked up and stood beside my sister and me. After listening for a moment, he looked at Shirin and said, “If your sister did no wrong, she would not be in jail now.”

  Shirin stopped talking long enough to look him in the eye and say, “I take pride in my sister!”

  This guard had been extremely rude to us in the beginning, but he had softened his attitude over time to the point where he was almost friendly. He looked at Shirin and then said to me, “Well, it wasn’t so bad for you to come to prison. You’re famous now! A few nights ago, I saw you on the Voice of America, and that was the first time I knew what your charges were.” He leaned in a little. “I hope you will get your freedom. Good-bye.” Then he walked briskly back across the room.

  How many other guards and officials felt the same way, but never had the courage or opportunity to say so? How many have a heart hungry for Christ right now as we write this? O God, keep them safe and reward their longing with Your loving presence in their lives.

  CHAPTER 19

  BEYOND COMPREHENSION

  Marziyeh

  There was one other kind of visit available by special request from prison authorities. A shari’a visit was a private meeting between a prisoner and her husband. If they could show a marriage certificate, or had a sigheh temporary marriage, they were allowed to spend the day together in a large suite in a separate building near the main visiting area. Little Zari, the towering ex-basketball player, missed her husband terribly and was very afraid he would divorce her for being arrested. When she learned that she could have a private meeting with him, she was very happy. She hoped it would make their separation easier and that he would be less likely to leave her.

  Too often, unfortunately, a private visit also gave the husband a chance to criticize or threaten his spouse. Naseem had become our friend before we left for 209, and we had grown even closer after we came back. She had been to private visits with her husband, and she explained to Little Zari how the process worked. She had a private visit the same day that Zari did, but hers brought her to bitter tears. Afterward, we saw her sitting in the corridor, crying. We knew she had been imprisoned for murdering her mother-in-law, but we hadn’t heard the whole story.

  Naseem sobbed, “Everybody tells me, ‘You are a simple, stupid woman. Can’t you see your husband is betraying you?’ But I love him and will do anything for him, even if he’s the worst person in the world.”

  “Dear Naseem,” I said, “why do they say that? What has your husband done?”

  “He’s the real murderer—he killed his own mother! I confessed for his sake because he can’t stand prison. He promised to get a pardon for me from his family.”

  “How could this happen? How could the police not know the truth?”

  “One day, he got into an argument with his mother. In a rage, he picked up a kitchen knife and stabbed her, then ran out of the house like he was crazy. The police investigated us both and forced a confession out of us by torture. My husband had always quarreled with his family. Because he had a bad relationship with his brothers and sisters, he knew they would never pardon him, but he was sure they would pardon me. So I took the blame. Now I’ve been in prison for two years.

  “Recently, the police decided to reopen the investigation, because by the way I described the crime scene they suspected I wasn’t really there and that my husband was the murderer. I changed my statement so that they know I didn’t do it. My husband wouldn’t visit me or take my calls for a year. Now that the police suspect him, he visits me every week, and we have a private visit as often as possible so that I won’t tell them he’s actually the guilty one.”

  Maryam and I prayed for her and from then on tried to be close when she was lonely and upset. What seemed like an obvious solution to everyone else was hard for her. She couldn’t bring herself to accuse her husband, believing it would mean certain death for him.

  So many of the women of Evin were imprisoned unfairly. There were countless stories of women who were only trying to protect themselves, who had been pushed to the breaking point by the ruthless laws that gave men unlimited control over women or who, like Naseem, were locked up because of a convoluted family situation that pressured them into sacrificing their freedom to protect the guilty.

  Even some murderers didn’t belong there. In any civilized country, these women would be recognized for what they were: mentally ill people who had no idea what they were doing and could not be responsible for their crimes. In Iran, they were treated like animals. They should have been somewhere where they could do no harm and where they could get help for their sickness, not condemned for behavior they couldn’t understand or control. Of all the murderers we met at Evin, one is burned into my mind and heart like no other.

  Maryam and I heard one night that Soheila Ghadiri had been taken to a solitary cell. This was standard procedure on the night before an execution. It wasn’t the only reason for going to a solitary cell, but when anyone went to solitary, we all held our breath. Sometimes one friend from the cell block was allowed to accompany the accused, and sometimes not. Would she come back? Or would we hear of her death the next morning?

  Soheila was a disheveled woman who wore filthy rags. Everyone assumed she was insane. She had come to Tehran when she was fourteen with a man who promised to marry her. Once they arrived in the city, he abandoned her. Afraid to return home in disgrace, she lived a vagabond life on the streets, supporting he
rself by prostitution. After accepting the offer of a seventeen-year-old customer to live with him, she got pregnant and decided to move back onto the streets.

  The police arrested her for vagrancy and took her to a health care center because she was pregnant. When the baby was born, Soheila felt she could not allow him to live a life of miserable deprivation as she had, but she saw no way of offering him anything better. She told the health center nurses to keep the baby away from her because she might hurt him. Tragically, they ignored her warning.

  When her baby was five days old, Soheila stumbled into the health center office, her hands and arms streaked in blood.

  “See,” she said in a flat, expressionless voice, “I told you you shouldn’t have left him with me.” Opening her palm, she handed them her infant son’s tiny heart.

  Because the boy’s father was not available to give his consent that Soheila should live, the court sentenced her to death. She had no family and no one to defend her. In some cases, the court assigns a public defender to help indigent prisoners, but this was not done for Soheila. Finally, the organization One Million Signatures provided her with a lawyer. He found the drug-addicted father, who gave his consent for a pardon. However, Soheila had been with so many men that the court ruled it wasn’t possible to know whether the young man was actually the father.

  Her lawyer advised her to claim she was insane. Instead, she told the court about living on the streets since she was fourteen, the many men who had abused her, the health care workers who had ignored her warning not to leave the baby with her.

  “I’m not insane,” she declared. “But I could not stand the thought of my child suffering as I have suffered, enduring the misery and pain I have endured. I was relieved when they put handcuffs on me and took me to prison, because at least now I had a roof over my head and food to eat. I wish I were a turtle. He always has a roof over his head and food for himself. In this world, I’ve never had a roof. I have nothing to live for.”

  The morning after Soheila was taken away, we learned that she had been hanged before dawn. Her nightmare of a life was over. She was twenty-eight.

  Farah was an unrepentant murderer of a very different sort. She was a short girl of twenty with a round face, large dark eyes, and a beautiful smile.

  “I killed my husband,” she said matter-of-factly. “And I do not regret what I have done. I’m just happy that he no longer lives in this world.”

  At fifteen, she had been forced to marry a wicked cousin that no one liked, in order to get him out of his parents’ house. After sex, he regularly beat Farah, leaving scars and broken teeth. She put up with his abuse until he made plans to sell her to one of his friends as a prostitute. On their way to his friend’s house, she jumped out of the car, trying to escape. Her husband stopped the car, caught her, beat her unconscious, and left her by the side of the road.

  She told her mother that her husband was a psychopath and that she had to have a divorce. “Women have to bear with their husbands,” her mother declared. “All married couples have disagreements, but that’s no justification for divorce.”

  She then went to her mother-in-law, who was also her aunt, to beg her for help. “He beats me every day, and one day he’s going to kill me!” Farah warned.

  The aunt realized that if they divorced, her violent and despicable son would be back in her house. She didn’t want that, so she told Farah that her husband was still young and immature, and that with time he would turn into a good family man.

  Once the husband heard that Farah was asking for a divorce, he beat her worse than ever. The next time he attacked her, she stabbed him to death with a knife.

  “He was lying in a pool of blood in the kitchen,” she recalled. “I neither regretted what I’d done nor feared the consequences.” She was in prison waiting to see whether her family would agree to forgive her.

  Her eyes filled with tears as she finished her story. “Do you believe I’m a murderer?”

  “Dear Farah, I don’t think you’re a murderer,” Maryam said, stroking her hair. “You just tried to defend yourself. You are a strong girl who can smile even though she has been so badly tormented.”

  We told her about Jesus and how He could help her in these hard times. Hers was one of the stories that made us ask hard questions about God. Why should a sweet-spirited, innocent, fifteen-year-old girl have to suffer so much and be driven to murder to save her own life? God’s wisdom is always right, always greater than our own, but sometimes it is beyond our comprehension.

  MARYAM

  A steady stream of prisoners came and went through Ward 2 at Evin Prison. The courts had resumed their work—even seemingly hopeless cases like Tahmasebi’s were resolved—yet our case went nowhere. We knew that there was an international outcry against our arrest and demands from Amnesty International, the United Nations, and other groups that all charges be dropped; that the government of Iran would not risk losing face by acquitting us; that, unlike most other defendants, we refused to change our story or retell it in a way that would give the government an excuse to let us go. The result was an impasse in the courts that had now gone on for months.

  One night, with no warning, our names were called on the loudspeaker and we were told to be ready to go to court the next day. Shirin and our other friends worried that we would be convicted or sent back to Ward 209. Marziyeh and I did our best to console them, telling them not to worry and that we were happy to be doing something at last. We still had no assurance that a lawyer had been secured for us, so we assumed we would have to defend ourselves.

  The next morning, we reported to the office at 6:00 a.m., wearing our long chadors and the silly slippers prisoners had to wear to court. We weren’t allowed to have shoes because they were another place to store contraband and also because wearing the oversized, goofy-looking prison slippers was humiliating. We waited in a small, filthy building with other prisoners on their way to court that day, including one who clearly had a bad case of swine flu. The stale air was made even worse by the stench of dried vomit from where drug addicts had thrown up on the walls and by the smell of cigarette smoke. Prisoners didn’t all go to court in a group. Instead, we were handcuffed to guards one at a time and driven across town to the courthouse. Marziyeh and I went together because our hearing would be with one judge. We had called our sisters to tell them about our court appearance, and as we pulled out from the prison gate, we saw them waiting in the street to follow us.

  We went to the same place as before, Revolutionary Court, Bureau 2, which heard national security cases. As we waited on a bench, wearing our handcuffs, a man with a thick mustache came toward us. We recognized him from photos in the news.

  “Are you Miss Rostampour and Miss Amirizadeh?”

  “Yes, we are.”

  “I am Mr. Aghasi, your new lawyer. I’m sorry we haven’t met yet, but I’m still trying to get the judge’s permission to visit you in prison. Today you will probably only hear the charges against you. The actual court hearing will be another day. I will go in and speak privately with the judge first.”

  He disappeared into an office and came out a few minutes later. “You don’t have a court hearing after all,” he explained. “You’re here because the deputy prosecutor, Mr. Haddad, wants to speak with you. I told him I was defending you and said I wanted permission to visit you in prison. He said I had to put the request in writing, and I told him I had already done this. He told me I could get the authorization paper for a visit tomorrow. When you go in, be sure to insist that you want a lawyer and that you have given me permission to represent you.” Mr. Aghasi then wished us well, said good-bye, and left the building.

  Shortly after, Marziyeh and I were called into an office with a sign on the door reading “Deputy Prosecutor.” It was a huge room. Like other rooms we’d been to in the courthouse, it was lined with photos of bloody soldiers in battle, martyrs for Islam. Not a good spot for two Iranian girls accused of following Christ. It was a frightening place
that knocked the wind right out of our bodies; we could scarcely breathe.

  An old man seated behind a desk on a raised platform—the place of power—told us to sit down. We recognized Mr. Haddad from television, with his long gray beard and mustache and penetrating eyes. Like all other government officials, he had a circle marked on his forehead from touching it to a clay tablet for long periods during Muslim prayer. Beside him on the desk were what looked like hundreds of files marked “Post-Disturbance Cases.” Evidently, every person in the country had been arrested during the demonstrations following the sham elections.

  Mr. Haddad asked us if we were Christians. We said that yes, we were.

  “I believe in Jesus Christ, too, but I am not a Christian,” he said. “Do you still insist on your beliefs?”

  When we said yes again, he went on, clearly perturbed. “I wanted to see you today to warn you that if you continue with your resistance, you will have a terrible future. Two prosecutors have issued indictments for your execution, and they are insisting that these sentences be carried out. They have forced me to confirm the sentence and send it to the court for a final order. I can’t help you much or others will pressure me. You can simply write down that you renounce your belief in Christ, and I will be able to sort the situation out for you. Otherwise, I will send the case to Mr. Salavati in Bureau 15, and then I won’t be able to help you at all.”

  Without hesitation, we both answered, “We will never renounce our faith.”

  “But how can you be so sure you’re right?” Mr. Haddad asked. “We Muslims believe in Jesus, too, but we do it without renouncing Mohammed or the other prophets. No one changes his or her religion just like that.”

  “I personally met with Jesus, and the Lord revealed this truth to me,” Marziyeh said.

  “God never speaks to people!” Mr. Haddad roared, his voice filling the room.