Until We Are Free

by Shirin Ebadi

  “This lecture is being held with the official permission of the university. You have no right to disrupt it,” she said. “All of you must leave immediately.”

  One of the mob women sprang forward and reached for Rahnavard’s chador. “You don’t even deserve to have this chador on your head,” she said, pulling violently at the fabric, which was pinned to Rahnavard’s manteau beneath.

  The rest of her accomplices surged forward. The small band of students who had formed a circle around me started moving toward the back of the lecture hall. “Khanoum Ebadi,” they urged, “we have got to get you out of here—follow us.” They herded the chancellor and me out a back door and down a long corridor. The students led us into a small classroom and closed the door and barricaded it with chairs and tables. Soon we heard shouts and running, cries of “They’re here, they’re hiding in this room!” and then fists pounding against the door, trying to push it open. Rahnavard called the security services on her mobile phone.

  “They’ve forced me to do something I never wanted to see happen. I don’t believe that police should set foot on university grounds, but there’s no other choice,” she said to me.

  The police arrived and forcibly escorted the mob of women away. We agreed that canceling the lecture seemed the safest course, and I thanked the chancellor and her colleagues for the invitation and their quick wits as we’d faced attack. We shook hands warmly, and then two officers who had stayed behind walked me safely off university grounds. Nothing ever came of the incident, the authorities made no arrests, and we never found out exactly who had dispatched the women to disrupt my lecture that day. Rahnavard threatened to resign if the authorities didn’t find and prosecute those responsible. But they never did, and after Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s election, she eventually stepped down herself or was fired—it was never clear. Though discussing women’s rights in Iran had always been fraught with difficulty, what happened there that day seemed the beginning of an altogether new kind of harassment and intimidation.

  Although the Nobel Prize irritated the Iranian government, the money that accompanied it helped my work considerably. I purchased an apartment that would serve as the headquarters for the Defenders of Human Rights Center, the organization I had founded to bring numerous lawyers inside the country together to defend political prisoners and to promote the legal and human rights of Iranian citizens. The center was the most effective force challenging the Iranian government’s political repression; it also functioned as a legal aid network for dissidents and victims of state repression. The Nobel money meant we could pursue more ambitious plans and programs than ever before.

  I also deposited some of the money in a high-interest bank account in Iran and distributed the interest income among the families of political prisoners who were living with one breadwinner in prison and badly needed help. I put a small amount, as well, in a bank account in France to help support my daughters’ studies. Since the Islamic authorities had stripped me of my judgeship in 1980, I had not been able to earn income and save money for their education, and the legal work I began to undertake in the 1990s, defending children’s and women’s rights, was almost entirely pro bono.

  We weren’t simply providing this pro bono defense because as lawyers we felt it was the right thing to do. We also had a higher goal: we wanted to help give people the courage to express their opinions. We wanted to assure them that if they were arrested because of their pro-democracy activities or for speaking their minds about citizens’ rights or some other sensitive issue, they would know they’d have access to a group of lawyers who would defend them without asking for a fee and would help look after their families. We had a team of psychiatrists and medical doctors, for example, that offered free treatment to our clients’ relatives.

  The reports we compiled every three months were the other key effort in our work. We dedicated a great deal of time and care to them and included only abuses that were documented and verified, such as cases of arbitrary detention and harassment of activists. They were the first reports of this kind to be published inside Iran by an Iranian organization, and they soon became a staple resource for the United Nations and other international human rights groups, prompting the authorities to scrutinize the center’s activities even more aggressively. We held training courses for those whose background or activities made them particularly vulnerable to arrest—student activists, religious and ethnic minorities, and journalists. We taught them about their rights should they be detained, and how to navigate the judicial process in order to secure furloughs and, sometimes, early release.

  We had started the center with no expectation of ever really making a living, and we had struggled to put even a basic infrastructure in place: an office, some desks, phones that worked, a place people could come to bring their broken lives. Now, with the Nobel Prize money, the center’s lawyers finally had a place to gather and work.

  —

  The same year I won the Nobel, a little-known figure was appointed mayor of Tehran. Most Iranians and, indeed, most Tehranis had not previously heard of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the civil engineer from working-class south Tehran. The municipal elections had drawn perhaps the poorest turnout in the city’s history. Only 12 percent of the city’s inhabitants voted, nearly all of them from the traditional, radical minority in society loyal to the Islamic regime. Most Iranians, disappointed by President Mohammad Khatami’s failure to push forward his reforms, sat out the election. With the moderate majority absent, the conservatives easily swept the election, and the city council, composed of traditionalists and hard-liners, chose Ahmadinejad to run Tehran.

  What happened next astonished everyone, especially people like me, Muslim Iranians who were quietly faithful in their personal lives but felt that religion should be a private matter, not used for extravagant political gestures. Ahmadinejad declared that the martyrs of the Iran-Iraq War deserved greater public commemoration, and he ordered that newly found remains of the war dead would be buried in seventy-two of the capital’s parks and squares. The Tehran where I had spent my youth as a college student, including the parks where my husband and I had walked hand in hand during our courtship and where I had taken my girls to play when they were small, was going to be transformed into a haphazard cemetery.

  Young Iranians, especially, were indignant. The city’s green parks provided the few spaces where friends and couples could go to spend their free time, and given the state’s strict social codes—the ban on Western films and music, the filtering of the Internet, and frequent raids on coffee shops—the parks were particularly precious. But Ahmadinejad was determined. He sent flag-draped coffins bearing veterans’ remains even into Tehran’s universities, and clashes erupted between furious students and the police and municipal undertakers. The biggest confrontation took place at the elite Sharif University of Technology, a feeder school for Stanford University and other top institutions in the West. Iranian universities, like universities in much of the world, are hotbeds of political activism. The students knew that the burials were intended to send a pointed message to them: that freedom of thought, education, and the physical space of the university itself belonged to the revolution and its martyrs.

  Slowly Tehran became the canvas on which Ahmadinejad expressed his radical vision for the state. One afternoon, while driving, I looked up to see an enormous mural on the side of a building. It was a female Palestinian suicide bomber clutching a rifle in one hand and her little son in the other. This, it seemed, was the state’s only vision of gender equality. Ahmadinejad instituted separate elevators for men and women in government buildings, and he fired swaths of municipal workers who were not religious or devoted enough to his ideology.

  Tehran had long ago started to transform, beginning with the 1979 revolution itself. But the extraordinary way in which Ahmadinejad was taking charge of the city, remaking it to fit his extremist view of the world, filled me with sadness. I recalled the cosmopolitan Tehran of the 1970s in which Javad and I had cour
ted. The elegant restaurants and manicured gardens may have reflected class inequality, but they also symbolized the aspirations of most of the city’s inhabitants to lead comfortable, urbanized lives. Javad, too, was deeply troubled by the remaking of Tehran. He worked as a senior engineer on many of the capital’s leading development projects, and his life’s ambition had been to build a modern city with gleaming hospitals and telecommunications towers.

  Javad and I first met in 1974, when I was twenty-seven, at the home of family friends. A few weeks later, he walked into my Tehran courtroom wearing a white suit and pretended to need my opinion on an obscure legal question. He was an electrical engineer whose work didn’t involve fine points of civil law, but he was keen for us to get to know each other.

  I appreciated his initiative. Back in those days, many parents insisted on picking out their children’s partners, but my parents were open-minded and were happy for me to make my own decisions. As Javad and I spent evenings together in the restaurants of Tehran in those early days of courtship, it became clear that he was at ease with my independence and appreciated my blunt, willful character. This mattered deeply to me, because many Iranian men were not so receptive to a woman with a demanding career. In the 1970s, many Iranian women from upper-middle-class, educated families pursued careers, but traditional attitudes about women’s duty to home life had scarcely budged. Javad, though, seemed to find it the most natural thing in the world that I was a judge. He appreciated my independence, and I was attracted to his self-confidence. We were married on a spring day, with the head prosecutor of the judiciary as one of our witnesses. I carried a bouquet of white roses.

  Since then, despite all the tumult we’d experienced, our marriage had been solid. When I stopped practicing law, Javad was supportive, just as he was in the early 1990s, when I began to take on human rights cases. We had our two daughters to raise and our cottage, with its small orchard, as a refuge; we had our parents and siblings. And though our interests differed—Javad was athletic and enjoyed playing classical Persian instruments, while I worked long hours and went hiking with poet friends—even once our daughters were grown, our marriage had a solidarity that we both treasured, an accumulated store of shared understandings and private jokes and mutual concerns.

  The authorities had monitored me closely since the 1990s, when my legal defense of women and children started getting national attention. Once when we were having trouble with our office phone lines, an electrician took the cover off the phone socket in the wall and found two listening devices, bugs as small as watch batteries, attached to the wires. He removed them with pliers and held them up in the air, a look of disbelief on his face.

  “Do you want me to go through all the sockets in the office, khanoum?” he asked.

  “No, it’s fine. Let them listen.”

  I didn’t mind them eavesdropping on my work conversations. I had nothing to hide. Even before seeing the bugs for myself, I had long known that my phones were tapped. During the three weeks I spent in prison in 2000, my interrogators openly referred to private matters—relationships with friends and minute details of discord among colleagues—they could have gleaned only through spying. After the Nobel, though, the surveillance intensified. The state said it feared for my security and assigned me two full-time bodyguards; they were ostensibly there to protect me, but I knew their real purpose was to monitor my work, to report back on every person I met and spoke with. If Javad and I went out to dinner, they came too, sitting at a nearby table.

  The scrutiny compelled us to stay at home more. We made salads together in the evenings and sat around our Formica kitchen table, talking about Javad’s latest engineering project—Milad Hospital, to be the largest in the capital—and my latest cases. Now when I came home in the evenings, I would first take off my head scarf, then pull the battery out of my mobile phone. Mobile phones, even when switched off, could be used as listening devices. Like many Iranian families, we shared a building with relatives, and when I visited my mother in her apartment one floor beneath ours, as I did most evenings after dinner, I wondered if they had also bugged her rooms, monitoring the movements and opinions of a seventy-year-old woman.

  It left me especially uneasy to know that someone was always listening in on my conversations with my children. My older daughter, Negar, was studying for a master’s degree at McGill University in Canada, and I spoke to her on the phone every day. One night, not long after I had received the Nobel, the phone rang at around three o’clock in the morning. I grasped for it on my nightstand, knocking over the alarm clock and waking Javad. My heart thudded as I hit the button to answer, wondering what had happened. I always worried about them in the back of my mind, my husband and my daughters, because I was aware that the regime would never hesitate to use them against me. I had known this since that day in 1999 when I was going through the government files for a case I was preparing on behalf of the family of two murdered dissidents and I saw my name on the list of targets for state assassination. It was perhaps the single most terrifying moment of my life, but I thanked God many times afterward for the chance to have seen that list. It showed me the ruthlessness I was up against and primed me for how strong and guarded I would, in turn, need to be.

  “What’s wrong?” I asked, without saying hello.

  “Nothing! I mean, I’m sorry for calling so late. But Behnud asked me to marry him tonight. I wanted you to be the first to know.”

  I sank back against my pillow and breathed deeply, waving my free hand to indicate to Javad that it was nothing. Behnud was a young Iranian I had met once in Canada while visiting Negar. I knew they liked each other, but he had moved to the United States to pursue a PhD at Georgia Tech.

  “But Behnud is in Georgia,” I said.

  As with all determined young people in love, Negar had already charted the path ahead. She had contacted the university and learned that there was a good chance that she could receive funding to do graduate work there as well. I tried to sound encouraging and pleased for her, but her plan worried me. What if she didn’t get admitted? What if she didn’t receive scholarship funding? Would she have to walk away from love or quit her studies and move to Georgia, in the hopes of eventually getting into a nearby university? After we said goodbye, I switched the light off and sank back under the covers, leaving the resolution of the issue to God. Fortunately, not long after, news came that Negar had been admitted to Georgia Tech, and she would soon head to Georgia, where she and Behnud would start their life together.

  There was only one small complication. They needed to get married fast, as Negar would be entering the United States on a student visa, and at the time, the U.S. government offered Iranian students only single-entry visas. This meant that the thousands of young Iranians who moved to the United States each year to attend university or do graduate study were effectively marooned there, unable to visit their families in Iran for however long it took them to finish their education. All the years of enmity between Iran and the United States hadn’t cooled the eagerness of young Iranians to study in America, but it imposed terrible hardships on those who did. As always with politics, it was ordinary people who suffered most when their governments quarreled. For Negar and Behnud, getting married in the United States was not an option either, as there was no prospect of Behnud’s parents and relatives receiving American visas to travel for the wedding.

  Early that summer, Negar flew back to Tehran. We held her wedding in a large orchard on the outskirts of Tehran, for this was the only place we could have a mixed wedding party. Most of the city’s middle-class couples either got married at home or rented out one of these private wedding orchards, which were specially set up with gazebos and catering facilities for receptions. By law, the city’s hotels and restaurants were not permitted to allow men and women to mix together, even for a wedding party, and the authorities often raided receptions and parties in private homes in Tehran, fining and arresting guests or demanding bribes.

  The night o
f the wedding, I lingered at the edge of the festivities for a moment to watch my daughter. Javad soon joined me, a gentle smile on his face. We stood there together in the warm night, the buzzing of the crickets audible during a pause in the music of the dance floor, and a thought passed unsaid between us: It all turned out all right.

  I gave my gratitude to God, and prayed that he would continue to protect us from those who wished us harm.

  In most Iranian cities there is at least one artificial limb shop, for the country has the second highest number of land mines in the world studded into its soil. An estimated sixteen million mines are left over from the war with Iraq, waiting to explode beneath an unsuspecting farmer or child. The government has not done nearly enough to address the land mine problem, and to cover up this neglect it also censors news coverage of land mine deaths and mutilations. As a result, most Iranians who live outside the worst-afflicted regions have little idea that their country harbors such dangers.

  This is why I established the Mine Clearing Collaboration Association, the first such NGO in Iran. My primary aim was to make land mines a daily topic; in my experience, when a fringe problem becomes a national problem that people are aware of and discuss in daily conversations, solutions emerge, and pressure also mounts on the government to take some action. The state could pursue mine removal more seriously, and it could also join the Ottawa Convention, which demands that states halt the production and deployment of land mines. Another aim of the organization was to provide financial help to the injured and wounded, as many of the hardest-hit areas are also quite poor, and the cost of the prosthetics themselves, along with the loss of the ability to work, can be devastating for families. Gradually the Iranian public became more exposed to the issue. The problem in the ground had become a problem on people’s minds, and I was hopeful that the government would start dealing more proactively with mine removal.