Until We Are Free

by Shirin Ebadi

  On a cloudy afternoon in February 2004, a middle-aged man came to my personal law office, on the ground floor of my apartment building, and identified himself as a government official. He was accompanied by a man he introduced as an American colleague, a professor from Stanford University. I offered both of them a cup of tea and some raisin cookies, and the official explained to me in detail how the government was deeply committed to tackling the land mine crisis; however, he noted, serious obstacles had emerged around the procurement of advanced mine-removal equipment. The most technologically effective demining tools, he said, qualified as “dual-use” goods, meaning that Iran could also use them for military purposes, and therefore international sanctions made it impossible for the state to import such devices. He insisted that this challenge was at the core of the government’s difficulties in removing mines.

  I listened patiently, leaning into the beige floral upholstery of the armchair, wondering where the conversation would lead. The man stated that he had long-standing expertise in demining and that he had personally designed a device that would work effectively to detect mines on the desert terrain of Iran’s western provinces.

  “The trouble is, I need to purchase one of the key components abroad, but none of the manufacturers are prepared to sell to me,” he said. “They don’t trust the government with such a part.”

  The American, the official explained, was going to assist in the production of the mine-detection equipment. But he did not speak Persian, and he sat impassively listening to our conversation.

  “If you, Khanoum Ebadi, would be able to place the order for this component, I would certainly cover all the costs,” the official said.

  “What exactly is the problem with this component?” I asked.

  “Well, it can be used for making centrifuges.”

  At that time, Iran’s nuclear program and all its associated technical complications were not matters of daily debate in the media, so the term “centrifuge” didn’t immediately connote anything for me.

  “Centrifuges can have a military use, and these American sanctions end up making it impossible for us to procure things we need. If we had this part, Iran would be able to manufacture its own very effective mine-detection machines. Imagine how quickly we could then remove mines.”

  The American shifted his long legs. He said nothing to signal that he understood what was being said about his country’s role in our country’s demining problems.

  “Could you write the name of this component down for me,” I asked, handing the official a piece of paper. I promised that I would talk to some friends who might be able to help, and I said I would do whatever I could in the service of my country.

  The two men thanked me and headed out to a waiting taxi. I sat alone in my office holding the scrap of paper, listening to the faint sound of the radio coming from the apartment above. There was an uneasiness in the pit of my stomach. I had started the land mine NGO in order to do something so that children would stop getting blown up while playing in the fields. My feelings about this cause were fierce, because these were such senseless deaths and injuries, entirely preventable if the government would only enact better policies. Now it seemed like I was in a position to take a tangible action. But there was something peculiar about the two men, the silent, tall American from Stanford and the official who so desperately needed this part.

  A week later, when I was in Paris attending a seminar, I spoke to my old friend Dr. Karim Lahidji, who would later become the chairman of the International Federation for Human Rights, about the men and their request. He advised me not to get involved in such dealings and, instead, to focus on helping those injured by land mines. Because I had no technical expertise in such matters, it seemed like sensible advice. Besides, I had no idea where I would even begin the search to buy—in bulk, at that—some obscure part that could fit into a centrifuge.

  When I returned to Tehran, the official rang to ask for another meeting. I explained that it was simply too complicated for me to find a seller of the part he needed. He never contacted me again. Why an American had been involved, and who he was, I will never know. Perhaps I should have been savvier at the time; but it was only a few years later, when the nuclear dispute truly turned into international news and it became commonplace to read about the West’s concern with Iran’s nuclear centrifuges, that it occurred to me that the strange men might have been intelligence agents. They had sought to exploit my international stature to carry out a shady transaction, buying banned parts from the West that they were unable to procure themselves. Had they intended to entrap me, or did they simply hope to use me to acquire a part that was proving hard to secure? Although I like to think that the surveillance and harassment I’ve endured over the years has made me watchful, always on the lookout for odd coincidences and interactions that reveal the hand of Iranian intelligence trying to get close to me, the land mine venture took me by surprise. It showed me that no matter how alert I kept myself, the Islamic Republic would scheme and machinate in ways that I could never anticipate. And it was only going to get worse.

  —

  Although my land mine initiative cast me in the government’s path, it also yielded an extraordinary opportunity. When Nobel Peace laureate Jody Williams, who won the prize in 1997 for her work on land mines, noticed that I was also working on this cause, she invited me to the 2004 conference of the International Campaign to Ban Landmines, held in Nairobi. I gave a speech about land mines and briefed the conference participants about the situation in Iran. Another speaker was Wangari Maathai, a Kenyan who won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2004, the year after me, for her activities in the field of environment protection, including her campaign against the destruction of trees in Africa.

  So, purely by coincidence, we three women Nobel Peace laureates found ourselves in the same place at the same time. I suggested to Jody and Wangari that we join together and start an institute that would harness our activities and work as women peace laureates to improve women’s conditions across the world. They were both enthusiastic, and the three of us appeared before journalists holding each other’s hands high up in the air. Apart from Aung San Suu Kyi, who at the time was under house arrest, all the other living women laureates were on board with the proposal, and we formally launched the Nobel Women’s Initiative in 2006. It was a community of women I felt honored to be a part of and that would prove, in the future, an indispensible help to my work in Iran.

  —

  One afternoon in the spring of 2005, I drove to Evin Prison to visit some of my clients. Evin sits close to the base of the Alborz Mountains, and it was one of those clear days when the mountains towered over the city, a hulk of pristine white snow above the brown, slushy streets. As the car turned down the street toward the prison, past low-slung, cement apartment buildings and the white honeycombed block that was the old Hilton Hotel, I pushed my own faded memories of Evin out of my mind. The prison is where I spent three weeks in detention in 2000, after a court charged me with spreading evidence of the state’s complicity in an attack on students the previous year. That day I remembered how after my release, my childhood stutter, overcome only in my teenage years with great effort and the help of a psychologist, had returned. I saw a therapist for some weeks and did some exercises, and I managed to overcome it again, but the jolt of having that old affliction resurface never left me.

  Walking toward the prison doors, I tried to focus on the clients I was going to visit. Most of them no longer had outstanding legal cases, but like most other human rights lawyers, I still stopped in once or twice a month to keep their spirits up, to see how they were doing and to occasionally pass them messages from friends or relatives. My persistence in meeting these prisoners seemed to irritate the state. Just two weeks prior, I had received a summons to appear before a revolutionary court. The letter itself did not specify what, if any, charges the court was considering against me. This contravened the country’s penal code, and I chose to defy the order. Not much
happened after that; a judiciary spokesman told reporters that the revolutionary court had sent the summons in error, and that a public court would deal with the matter. I never heard about it again.

  That day as I sat in Evin’s waiting room, I saw a small, wiry man with fierce eyes lurking about the corridor. It was Akbar Ganji, a prominent reformist journalist who had been imprisoned for his investigative articles that uncovered state complicity in a string of assassinations. Like many reformists, he had come from within the very belly of the system, a former Revolutionary Guardsman who had somehow been transformed into the Islamic Republic’s Bob Woodward, responsible for the investigative journalism that shook the state’s very foundations. In 2000 the authorities arrested him for allegedly violating press laws and undermining national security and sentenced him to ten years in prison. Now, forgotten inside Evin, he seemed to be expecting no one. I had noticed him once or twice before in the waiting room, similarly unoccupied.

  “You’ve been sitting in prison for four and a half years—how come there’s never anyone here to talk to you? Where’s your lawyer?” I asked.

  “My lawyer didn’t even say hello to me last time I saw him.”

  “Do you want us to take over your case? We could always try for another appeal.”

  His eyes lit up, and he moved forward.

  I opened my briefcase and wrote out a power-of-attorney document on the spot. Ganji signed it, and we took on his case.

  I saw him three or four times after becoming his lawyer. One afternoon, when I visited to bring him a book, he told me he was planning to go on hunger strike. After he announced that, the prison authorities wouldn’t let me see him anymore.

  Ganji’s strike started to draw international attention, and Saeed Mortazavi, Tehran’s prosecutor general at the time, was furious. Perhaps more than any other official in living memory, Mortazavi is associated in the minds of the public with abuse and a sadistic passion for punishing dissidents and critics. He is widely believed to have presided over the 2003 prison assault on Iranian-Canadian photojournalist Zahra Kazemi, who later died of her injuries. Most journalists and politicians who passed through his courts in those years have stories of the cruel, insane, and often idiotic things he said to them in court. I think it would be fair to say that he did not particularly appreciate me as a lawyer.

  A couple of days into the hunger strike, Mortazavi publicly told reporters that hunger strikes were illegal under Iranian law and that as a result, the authorities were denying Ganji visitations and phone calls as punishment. This was ridiculously untrue. The next time a journalist called me to ask about the case, I raised the issue of Bobby Sands Street. In 1981, the new Islamic authorities had renamed Churchill Boulevard, which ran along the British embassy, Bobby Sands Street, in honor of the IRA hunger striker, whom the revolutionaries celebrated as a “freedom fighter.”

  “Why have the authorities named one of the most important streets of Tehran after Bobby Sands?” I asked. “How come outside the country a hunger strike is heroic and brave, but it is forbidden inside Iran?”

  At this, Judge Mortazavi grew livid. He filed a complaint against me, accusing me of spreading lies, and ordered a restriction on my movements, forbidding me to leave Tehran.

  And then he shifted his line, arguing that Ganji was not on a hunger strike at all. The talk of a hunger strike was just my invention, he claimed, and Ganji was sitting in prison fit and content.

  I challenged this: “Then prove it. Let me visit him and confirm.”

  The authorities didn’t let me visit Ganji. But a sympathetic prison official took a photo of his emaciated frame lying in a prison hospital bed, and the image went viral. In the photo Ganji lies with his head on a lilac pillow, his arms spindly like a small boy’s, his skin patchy and sallow. I did all I could, as was so often the case when legally I had no recourse; I gave interviews and led a media campaign, trying to conjure international outrage. When Ganji’s wife finally saw him, she told me he looked like a dead man who sometimes moved.

  What Ganji’s emaciated, broken frame symbolized on that hospital bed was more than one man’s willingness to give his life for change. To me, it signified a wider desperation that millions of Iranians felt with the system. Eight years of a reformist presidency, the tenure of Mohammad Khatami, had ended in this. At the most fervent moments in that reformist period, when people had believed that the system could change peacefully from within, Ganji had been at the forefront of the effort. There is a photo of him standing on a pedestrian bridge above the Seventh of Tir Square, near the headquarters of the newspaper from which he had launched his investigations. He smiles broadly, with the traffic streaming beneath him, an impish gleam in his eyes. But now, in 2005, Ganji was a shell. The newspaper was closed, I was not even permitted to visit him, and Khatami’s term was over. Many people I spoke to wondered why they should even vote in the upcoming presidential election, when it seemed as though nothing would change.

  On the eve of the 2005 presidential election, I was calmly cleaning parsley and cilantro in a sink full of water so I could cook one of the favorite dishes of my younger daughter, Nargess, for dinner. My mobile kept ringing. Four times already I had dried my hands to answer it, but this time I let it go. Journalists were calling me from around the world to ask who I would be voting for the next day and who I thought would win.

  “I’m not voting for any candidate,” I repeated each time. They would then ask if I was boycotting—journalists were ever eager to attach a quick label to one’s motivations—and I would try to simply explain my position. Neither of the two main moderate candidates—Mehdi Karroubi, the former speaker of the parliament, and Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, the former president—inspired my confidence. I did not believe that their leadership would start Iran down the path I felt it needed to take. Lawfulness, reform, respect for citizens’ rights—these were enormous structural problems that required a visionary, not regime loyalists who might be pragmatic but would not fundamentally challenge what was wrong with the system. With one eye on the stove throughout these conversations, I also brought up the problems with the electoral process itself.

  At the time, Iran was unique in the region for having competitive elections. Throughout most of the Middle East, dictators either didn’t hold elections at all or held farcical events, ignored by their people, in which they won 99.9 percent of the vote. In Iran, there is enough political rivalry, and enough of a constitutional mandate for an electoral process, that elections draw a reasonable turnout, and rarely since the 1979 revolution has the result been wholly or even partially known beforehand. Iran’s elections have largely been clean, if only because the process of vetting candidates is itself dirty: high clerical authorities vet candidates and permit only those figures they consider acceptable to make it onto the ballot. As a result, there is real rivalry between some figures, but it is not a truly democratic process by any stretch. I told the journalists calling that night that I did not consider this a fair enough process and could not see myself participating.

  When the phone began ringing again, I looked at it with some frustration, but then I noticed that the caller was Nargess. She was on her way home from Bagh-e Gilas, a café in northern Tehran that she and her friends frequented. Nargess was still living at home; though she had been admitted to McGill University in Canada to study international law, I had persuaded her to first sit for the bar exam in Tehran, then move abroad. In order to become a fully licensed lawyer in Iran, you must first pass the bar, then complete an apprenticeship, so she had a gap year before starting in Canada. In my dreams, she would finish her PhD and return to Iran to work alongside me to defend human rights cases. But I knew that, like her sister, she had other visions for her life.

  Some young people are better able to tolerate the duplicity and compromises that living in Iran demands of them. But Nargess had always found the state’s social restrictions and the bullying atmosphere difficult. She was an exuberant young woman, talkative and quick
to joke and laugh. She hated when I told her not to laugh so loudly in public—I didn’t want her to attract the attention of the morality police, but she still felt indignant at being scolded for such a natural behavior. She had a profound sense of justice and chafed at unfair restrictions. One of her favorite pastimes with her girlfriends was to go to a local coffee shop for milk shakes. The owners, under orders from the municipality, permitted customers to linger for only one hour, before turning them out. Her girlfriends were often happy to simply move on to another café, but Nargess had never made peace with such restrictions. She saw them for what they were: an unfair policy designed to interfere with young people’s lives. She was always the one to demand why, the one to push back. She had been like this from the beginning, even as a child. During Ramazan, when the state forbade eating in public, she would always complain at having to hide her head in my handbag to take a bite from a sandwich.

  “There’s so much traffic,” she said, and I could hear cars honking in the background. “I’ll be later than I thought.” And then the call dropped before I could reply, as it so often did in Tehran. Nargess was not planning to vote, and neither were others in our family. On these kinds of matters we were mostly in agreement.

  Finally Nargess arrived, followed shortly after by Javad, and we had one of those family dinners that at the time seemed ordinary: the three of us sitting around the kitchen table, the light glowing softly against the linoleum pattern of the floor, the sheen of the navy cotton cloth beneath our plates. We talked about Negar, who was about to move to Georgia, and Nargess’s own plans to study law. We helped ourselves to pickled vegetables from the cobalt-blue ceramic bowl we had bought in Kashan, on a summer trip when the girls were small. These details linger in my mind when I look back now, a reminder of the sheer beauty of the present, which we so rarely appreciate.