by Lois Pryce
I remembered Omid making a similar comment, about how Iranians cannot easily make new confidants, how they cannot risk exposing their opinions or behaviour to anyone they don’t know intimately, preferring to stick with their close groups of truly trusted friends. It was as if all the openness and tolerance I had witnessed was reserved for outsiders, but could not be extended to their fellow countrymen.
‘Then, nine years after Mehdi, we had Amir. So there is a big gap between them but they are very close.’ She ruffled her son’s hair. ‘He misses his big brother, now he has gone away to university, don’t you?’
Amir looked up from his latest sketch of a Kalashnikov-wielding figure and gave another of his dazzling smiles, nodding and expressing his love for his absent brother before cuddling up against his mum and adding the finishing touches to his drawing – a cascade of bullets flying out of the muzzle of the rifle.
The Yazdani residence was a spacious but homely apartment with framed pictures of family members on every wall and surface, and decorated with antique Persian handicrafts and traditional soft furnishings. After the rigours of the road, I revelled in the simple comforts of a family home, full of food and warmth and affection. I thought about the lonely, opium-smoking neighbour on the other side of the wall with his single pair of worn-out shoes, and felt a wave of gratitude for Mr Yazdani’s natural empathy and his kindness, which had brought me here into his home.
On a shelf, among the family photos, was an old grainy snapshot of Mr Yazdani in his youth. His arm was slung around the shoulders of another young man who looked so similar I guessed them to be brothers. They were bearded and bare-headed but dressed in the army uniform of the 1980s that I had come to recognise from the martyr portraits I had seen throughout Iran. These portraits had become one of the defining features of my road trip, appearing literally everywhere. In the smallest mountain village, on the most remote desert highway and in every street of every town and city, each one of the boys or men who had died in the Iran–Iraq War of the 1980s was officially commemorated by a portrait in their home town. It was a lot of paintings; the total number of Iranian deaths during the eight-year conflict was estimated at half a million. I had vague memories of the war from the news bulletins of my childhood, and was aware of its scale – eight years of fighting, making it the longest conventional war of the twentieth century, with a million fatalities across both sides. But what I had not been aware of was this graphic phenomenon of the Iranian martyrs and their significance in the nation’s consciousness.
Over the course of my journey I had found myself strangely affected by this unrelenting parade of strangers’ faces that accompanied my ride. Sometimes the portraits took the form of a vast mural accompanied by a revolutionary message, especially if the deceased had been a high-ranking official, but the majority were simple painted portraits of regular soldiers, the conscripts, reservists and the thousands of teenage volunteers who had signed up to fight against Saddam Hussein. Their faces appeared mounted on lamp posts and fences, in rows along central reservations or on roundabouts, painted on the walls of cafés, shops and government buildings or on the sides of family homes. Very occasionally, in rural areas I had seen framed or laminated photographs tacked on to wooden posts, but this was rare; more often the images were excessively decorative with soft-focus backdrops of doves, roses and fluffy clouds. The war martyrs were accorded the greatest respect and their portraits, shrines and cemeteries were always kept in tip-top condition by the authorities. Like the vintage propaganda of the DOWN WITH USA murals in Tehran, there was a retro charm about the airbrushed eighties style of the portraits, which, combined with the fact that Iranian men are on the whole a handsome bunch, made for a compelling spectacle. A million soulful brown eyes and chiselled cheekbones lining the highways and byways of Iran.
‘Is this your brother?’ I asked Mr Yazdani.
He nodded, picking up the framed photograph, looking at it with an inscrutable expression. ‘Yes, we were twins. He was martyred. In the Imposed War. This is 1981; we were nineteen years old in this picture.’
Like all Iranians, Mr Yazdani referred to the conflict as ‘the Imposed War’, a reference to Saddam Hussein’s initial invasion. Iran had not been in prime fighting condition in 1980; the country was in post-revolutionary chaos and Khomeini had publicly executed most of the army’s leaders, fearing their loyalty still lay with the Shah. Across the border in Iraq, Saddam saw his neighbour’s moment of military weakness as an ideal opportunity for an easy land grab along the frontier. What he hadn’t counted on was the revolutionary fervour that burned in the hearts of so many young Iranian men at that time.
‘We all wanted to be part of it,’ said Mr Yazdani, still staring at the photograph. ‘I was lucky, just my foot.’ He motioned to his bad leg. ‘From a landmine, this was very common. My brother, he was not so lucky. Operation Ramadan, in 1982, many Iranian martyrs from this battle, thousands. It was a terrible thing, with the Iraqis using chemical weapons, you know, mustard gas?’
I nodded. Mr Yazdani added, ‘We did not use chemical weapons. Khomeini said it was un-Islamic.’
I found this a peculiar notion, that certain weapons of war were acceptable in Islam but others not so much. And what of the tear gas used on the Green Revolution protestors just a few years ago – was that considered to be ‘Islamic’? Who made the rules? There were so many aspects of this story, of this nation’s mindset, that confounded me. Indeed, the very concept of martyrdom was almost impossible for me to comprehend. Did people really believe in it? Had Mr Yazdani and his brother believed it? Much had been made in the western media at the time about the Iranian child soldiers who went not just willingly, but enthusiastically, to battle, believing that if they died fighting for the Islamic Republic, they would be granted a place in heaven. Pictures showed troops praying in the trenches and corpses lying on the battlefields with the Quran and other holy books tucked in the pockets of their uniforms. Footage showed Iranian child soldiers in their thousands, charging towards the Iraqi army, shouting ‘Allah Akbar!’ in the infamous ‘human wave’ attacks. It has been said that Iraqi troops were so appalled by the phenomenon of thousands of young, often unarmed Iranian boys marching towards them in a state of religious ecstasy, that it affected their morale and ultimately their defence; they simply couldn’t stomach it.
In Iran, these men and boys, some paid-up members of the Revolutionary Guards but most volunteers of the Basij militia, became not just heroes of the war but symbols of the revolution. As I now saw all across the country, the Islamic Republic has never stopped promoting this image with its relentless stream of soft-focus glorification; the martyr portraits, the endless documentaries and feature films about the war, books and photo exhibitions, television shows, concerts and parades. In only a matter of weeks, I had seen references to all of these, still being churned out, thirty years after the event.
I asked Mr Yazdani about the ‘plastic keys to paradise’, a story that had taken hold in the western news during the war and come to symbolise the Iranian child martyrs. Thousands of golden plastic keys were supposedly manufactured by a toy company in Taiwan on the orders of Khomeini. He had issued them to the young basiji, on the promise that if they wore them around their neck as they charged in their human waves, should they be killed, these keys would ‘unlock’ the gate to paradise. It was a suitably horrifying and provocative image for the western media, who leapt upon it as a perfect example of the inhuman ‘otherness’ of the Iranians. Britain and the US were still reeling in shock from the revolution, and this only added fuel to their anti-Iranian fire. The plastic keys entered western popular culture, they even had songs written about them, but the reality is that there is no evidence of them having existed. They do not appear in any photos or footage from the war. Were they a reality or just a piece of propaganda invented and exaggerated by a western media hungry for stories that further demonised Iran? Mr Yazdani was listening carefully as I spoke, silently chewing at his bottom lip, br
ow furrowed in one of his great expressive frowns.
‘I have heard something like this once before but no, I never saw such a thing. We had metal ID tags around our necks of course but no, no plastic key.’
I wanted to ask him if he and his brother had truly believed the propaganda, if they believed that they would go to heaven. He had referred to his brother being ‘martyred’, but the word was so much part of the vernacular in Iran that I wondered if it no longer implied true belief in the concept of martyrdom. So much of Iranian speech was emotive, infused with dramatic, religious language; even the surviving war veterans were referred to as ‘Jan bazan’ – ‘those who risk their souls’. I feared digging into these deeply entrenched beliefs was too delicate a subject. I was still wary of discussing religion unless someone else laid their cards on the table first, but Mr Yazdani saved me the awkwardness.
‘It was not like this for us, about going to heaven,’ he said, shaking his head, as if he could sense my bewilderment. ‘Maybe for some people, yes, but we just wanted to be part of it. All our friends were going to the war. We did not want to be left behind. We had no idea of what would happen, how it would be. Of course, we heard people talk about being martyrs, but I did not really understand what this meant. It is hard to believe now, but we had no fear. No fear at all. We thought it would be a good game, yes?’
‘This is how boys think!’ said Sara, shaking her head.
‘The Imposed War,’ said Mr Yazdani, ‘it was a terrible thing. Because it touched everyone. Everyone in Iran still, they will know someone who fought or maybe died, a relative or a friend. But it was also a great time for Iran. It is hard to remember that now.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘It made Iran strong. In all of history, for hundreds of years, thousands of years, Iran has been invaded, controlled. The Arabs, the Turks, the Soviets, the Americans, the British …’ He smiled at me. ‘Sorry.’
I smiled back.
‘The revolution had just happened. It is hard to think like this now, but everyone thought this was a great new start for our country, we had thrown out the Shah, and then we had this chance, to fight, to show the world, to show Saddam about the new Iran.’
‘But there was no real winner, am I right? It was a ceasefire?’
In 1988 Khomeini had likened the signing of the UN-mediated truce to ‘drinking a cup of poison’, so it was hardly a triumphant victory, but I didn’t mention his famous quote, not wanting to rain on Mr Yazdani’s patriotic parade.
‘Yes, this is true, but what is important is that we fought back and we defended Iran. Saddam had the backing of America, but we had nothing. The war brought the country together.’
‘So when you signed up, you were part of the Basij?’
‘Yes, all the volunteers were basiji. Hundreds of thousands of us. We had a uniform, a gun, grenades. Some had RPGs.’
‘But the Basij is different now,’ Sara added quickly. ‘Then they were only to fight the war. Now it is terrible, how they treat people, the things they can do …’
She drifted off, shaking her head, her feelings written all over her face, reflecting the general impression I had got from everyone I had spoken to in Iran about this subject, this mixture of anger and revulsion at any mention of the Basij.
‘They tried to make Mehdi join. I begged him not to. They came to his university; they have a special branch for students, to keep watch on the other students, and if they are making trouble against the regime, to report them to the university.’
‘Did he want to join?’
‘No, thankfully, no. But they gave him a lot of pressure. And it is easy to see why some boys want to, especially if they come from poor families. They will be given food at the mosque, they are looked after, given uniforms, sometimes weapons. This is very attractive for a young village boy with nothing. As a basiji you will be taken care of in all ways, a place at university, maybe a government job after studying. Many things like this, so these families encourage their sons to join.’
‘It is not only about these things,’ said Mr Yazdani. ‘It is the power. Suddenly you have power, the power to stop people in the street because of their clothes, their hair, young people like them, old people, women. It has gone too far, it was not like this when the Basij was created. We were supposed to fight for the Islamic Republic, against Saddam.’
Khomeini’s original vision for the Basij, had been to create a ‘twenty-million man army’, a volunteer militia force, the Organisation for the Mobilisation of the Oppressed, made up of almost half the population, reporting to the Revolutionary Guards and loyal to the Supreme Leader. Originally created to quash uprisings among the Kurds and other tribes, within a year of the Islamic Revolution, Iran was at war and the ranks of basiji swelled as their duties extended to the battlefield, although it never got anywhere close to Khomeini’s fantasy of 20 million. Women were originally encouraged to join, but with the war underway, the force was largely made up of young men and boys, mostly poor, rural and illiterate, seduced by the romantic notion of seeing some action or martyrdom, or both. Mr Yazdani obviously despaired at what the Basij had become over the intervening decades – essentially a thuggish, home-grown militia of ignorant bullies.
‘So what happened? What changed?’ I asked him.
‘It was always different, depending on who was president, but it became very bad when Ahmadinejad was in power.’
‘Yes, now they are everywhere,’ said Sara. ‘Harassing people in the street for everything! This is when they tried to make Mehdi join. Our neighbour’s son was threatened by a basiji in Tehran for having gel in his hair – he had a spiked haircut, they said it was too western. This kind of thing suddenly happened more and more, they would ride around on motorcycles, stopping cars to find out what music was playing, or if they saw a man and woman together who they thought were not married. They would smell people’s breath to see if they had been drinking alcohol, even elderly people.’
‘So do you think the Basij will be scaled back now, under Rouhani?’ I asked.
‘Maybe, yes, I hope. I think the feeling is changing now. Because of the protests in Tehran in 2009, after the election. The Basij were shooting into the crowd, beating people in the street, young boys just like them, and girls too, beating them with iron bars and sticks. After this, even some ayatollahs spoke out against them. It was too much to see this. People were killed, young people, sons and daughters. You know about Neda Agha-Soltan?’
I nodded, recalling the chilling video footage that had shocked the world – the death of Neda Agha-Soltan, a young music student shot in the chest from a rooftop by a basiji at the Tehran protests of June 2009. Fellow protestors had captured her death on their cameras, her last breaths and blood pouring out of her mouth as she lay in the street, in broad daylight. I thought about Aheng, the young sparky schoolgirl I had met on the road to Tehran who had protested that day with her parents, joining the thousands marching down Azadi Street. It could so easily have been her, killed by some boy of her own age, cocky, brainwashed and trigger-happy. Instead it had been Neda. She was not the only one, but it was Neda who became the international face of the protests, the martyr of the Green Revolution and, as is the way with twenty-first-century revolutions, a hashtag, #Neda, that had swept across the internet.
Mr Yazdani was tiring now and made his excuses as he rose slowly from his chair.
‘He likes to go to sleep early,’ said Sara, an affectionate smile across her face, patting her husband’s arm as he limped off to bed. ‘But he is much older than me,’ she added, her smile turning to a cheeky grin. He smiled back and kissed her on the head.
I watched him go, scooping up a sleepy Amir on his way, and wondered how he remained so gentle and kind after the horrors he had witnessed in the war, the death of his brother and his own injuries that clearly still caused him pain. There had been no need for him to look after me today; he could have seen it as an opportunity to squeeze a hefty ‘tourist tax’ from me f
or his taxi services. He hadn’t needed to stop to help his friend with the broken-down car, or make his quiet pledge to check on his lonely neighbour. It wasn’t the first time I had marvelled at the remarkable humanity among the people of this country. Was it against all odds, or a result of their situation? The question remained a mystery.
17
Persepolis: Empire and Excess
AS I LEFT Yazd, I was aware that I was embarking on the final leg of my Iranian adventure. Shiraz, the city that had been calling me for so many months and thousands of miles, was finally in sight, no longer a mysterious faraway place but an achievable goal, just 300 miles away now. I allowed myself the thought that I really was going to make it.
Wanting to make the most of every precious day of my visa, and reluctant to retrace any of my route back north to the Turkish border, I had planned to end my journey in Shiraz with just enough time to ship my bike home from there. My final plans were still undecided, and I mulled them over as I studied my route to Shiraz, plotting a purposely meandering course for my final days on the road. I settled on a network of back-country roads that took me over a vast dry lake bed, its salt crystals sparkling in the sun, before crossing a flat, rocky plateau with the remains of ancient forts and abandoned wells dotted along the roadside.
A remote but well-travelled dirt track delivered me over one more mountain range into a lush river valley. This source of water and greenery was obviously so rare and revered that it warranted its very own brown tourist signs, the first and only time I had seen them in Iran. Behesht-e Gomshodeh – The Lost Paradise, they promised. I followed these signs for miles, with no idea what such an enigmatically titled place could be but intrigued by the notion. My mind ran wild with its own version of such a fantasy, and I wondered when this mysterious tourist attraction would appear. I even wondered if it was some kind of theme park; I imagined crystal grottos, palm trees, scented tropical flowers and warm turquoise lakes. It was only when the signs ran out that I had a Lost Paradise? You’re standing in it moment and admonished myself for feeling slightly disappointed. Beautiful as it was, it was essentially no more than a particularly verdant valley that had been bestowed, in typical overly dramatic Iranian style, with a flowery title. But once I’d recalibrated my expectations, I came to value the Lost Paradise as much as the Iranian tourist board obviously did. Its empty roads, shady rest stops and cool, crystalline rivers were a welcome relief after so many miles in the harsh, baking climes of the Dasht-e Lūt and so long running the gauntlet on Iran’s violent highways.