Until We Are Free
Page 4
It was a testament to how little Mahmoud Ahmadinejad featured in the national political debate that we didn’t speak about him that night at dinner. His name didn’t come up, as no one thought he stood a chance. It was only later that people started paying attention to what Ahmadinejad had been up to that week.
We went to bed that night having heard that Mehdi Karroubi was ahead, and woke up to learn that because no one had received 50 percent of the vote, the election would be determined in a second round. The two finalists were Rafsanjani and, unbelievably, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. We stood in our pajamas absorbing this astonishing news. I boiled water and absently stirred Nescafé into a cup of hot milk. Until that moment, Ahmadinejad’s campaign, which had attracted modest attention only in the final few days, had seemed mostly a gimmick. He had started appearing in small towns across Iran wearing a faded windbreaker and complaining that the rich political elite were exploiting the downtrodden poor. “I’ll bring the country’s oil wealth to the people’s dinner tables,” he had promised, portraying himself, despite the enormous influence he enjoyed as mayor of Tehran, as one of the people, a modest figure in an old jacket.
“Maybe people in small towns and villages voted for him?” I suggested to Javad as we sat down to breakfast. Urban intellectuals and reformists weren’t exactly well attuned to rural and small-town Iran. But since the country was 70 percent urbanized, it was not as though the rural areas could have dominated a national election.
Although the necessity for a runoff was worrisome, no one imagined that the second round would produce anything but a Rafsanjani victory. When Ahmadinejad won a few days later, we were shocked. Rafsanjani declared that the election had been tampered with, and he said that because he knew that no one—by this he meant the supreme leader—would pay attention to his grievances, he would complain only to God.
Some months later, the reformist faction in the parliament published findings that showed how Ahmadinejad had spent vast sums of public money from the Tehran municipality on his election campaign. It wasn’t clear yet what implications Ahmadinejad’s win would have for Iran, but he was religiously conservative and politically hard-line, the kind of Iranian politician who was suspicious of the West to the point of paranoia. He was also obsessed with making daily life more religious, against the wishes of the majority of Iranians. It seemed most likely that for us, the lawyers at the Defenders of Human Rights Center, and our work, his presidency would not augur well.
—
Not long after the election, my older daughter, Negar, arrived for her last visit before starting her studies in Georgia. Her arrival always involved an intense schedule of socializing, as all the relatives wanted to see her and she also wanted to see her friends from high school; the result was typically two weeks packed with family lunches and dinner parties. One night the girls and I had dinner at a cousin’s house and took a taxi home after midnight. As we got out, two young men stepped out of the shadows of a nearby building.
“Mrs. Ebadi?” one of them said. Their hair was slicked back with gel, and one wore a baggy plaid blazer, under which something seemed to be bulging.
“Yes, and yourself?” I replied curtly. I was aware of my two daughters behind me, their party dresses covered only by light overcoats.
“We’ve come to see you about a legal matter,” said the one in the blazer, moving too close. “Can we impose on your time?”
“Legal matters are handled during the day, by appointment. You can call my office tomorrow.”
“But we’ve come a long way,” the other young man called out, taking a few steps forward.
At that precise moment, the doors of a nearby restaurant flung open and people began pouring out into the street. They were dressed up and clearly coming from a wedding reception, and within minutes there were nearly a hundred people outside, talking and looking for taxis and cars. The two men who had approached us looked startled, and edged aside.
“Good night to you,” I said, without even turning back. The three of us turned together and began walking away.
Once we were inside the house, the girls hung up their coats and head scarves and were soon back to laughing and chatting and dissecting the party, as though nothing had happened. I watched them unbuckle their sandal straps, their nails painted in shades that matched their dresses. But my spirits had dived. I didn’t believe for a moment that those two men had wanted to discuss a case with me. I had spent years fielding visits from distressed family members of people who needed legal help; they were quick to launch into their stories and unfailingly polite. These men had seemed sanguine and pushy. And they had been waiting at the top of my street after midnight on a weekend when both of my daughters happened to be with me. They had come, I was convinced, to try to hurt me in some way. I moved silently into my bedroom, more angry than scared. I remembered what one of the interrogators had said to me when I was imprisoned in Evin. It had only been three weeks in solitary confinement, but the girls had been younger then, and I had been desperate to get out.
“Don’t you miss your daughters?” he had asked, looking at me with contempt, as though I had done something terrible to land myself in a prison, not only a criminal but a neglectful mother.
I didn’t fall asleep that night until very late, and twice I tiptoed down the hall to peer into the room where the girls slept.
—
Iran’s Interior Ministry is located in a looming brown 1970s-style building on Fatemi Street, named for Hossein Fatemi, the politician who in the early 1950s helped Prime Minister Mohammad Mossadegh nationalize Iranian oil and gas. This bold initiative made Mossadegh a national hero, and the 1953 CIA-orchestrated coup that toppled his government was a devastating moment for my generation of Iranians. We lost our much-beloved, democratically elected leader, we lost our sense of inviolability and independence, and we lost our nationalist aspirations. In their place, we gained the conviction that the United States wished Iran harm. After the coup, the shah’s men arrested Fatemi and executed him by firing squad. In the wake of the 1979 revolution, most of the city’s streets had been renamed after Shia saints, Islamic revolutionaries, or, later, war martyrs, but Fatemi had remained Fatemi. My family, like many in Iran, had been closely affected by the coup and its legacy. My father had been an ardent supporter of Mossadegh’s, and after 1953 he lost his senior position in the Ministry of Agriculture, returning only years later to a succession of low-level jobs. I had often thought of him when I lost my judgeship, and of how Iran’s history might have unfolded differently had Mossadegh not been tripped by the United States just as he sought to move the country down the path of true independence.
I walked up the steps to the ministry, watching the warm breeze of the early Tehran summer make the Islamic Republic flag flutter. I was there to visit Abdolvahed Moussavi Lari, the outgoing interior minister, to discuss why the Defenders of Human Rights Center had not yet received its official permit. We had founded the center in 2001, and legally the constitution did not oblige us to request a state license for our activities. But as with much of everything that went on in Iran, the authorities applied and invoked the law selectively, molding it to fit their political aims and, often, to quiet their opponents. I was not an opponent of the state—I was a human rights defender, and I based my criticisms of the state on legal grounds. But authoritarian governments are not fond of shades of gray; they cannot tolerate any criticism at all, and so I knew that at some stage, the authorities might quibble with the center’s status.
We had applied for a formal permit soon after our founding and had begun our activities while we waited. Four years had passed, and still no permit; I knew that an order had been given at the Interior Ministry to grant one, but the actual certificate had never materialized. When I had chased this two years prior, an official had told me, “You’re carrying on with your work, no one is bothering you. Why do you need a piece of paper?” Perhaps I was being stubborn, but years of dealing with the Islamic Republic had taught me that
legal vagueness meant legal vulnerability. I wanted that piece of paper. I pressed, and the official promised to give us our license the following week. But that week became two years, and now, in June 2005, we still had no certificate. With Ahmadinejad set to take office, this last week of Khatami’s presidency seemed like a smart time to make a final push.
As I announced myself to Lari’s staff, I noticed a striking absence of women. Everywhere there were young and old men answering phones, seated behind computers, but not a single woman among them. In Tehran, this was rare enough to be conspicuous. Though women rarely ascended to senior or managerial positions in ministries, they were usually well represented among the lower-level staff. Apart from this, Lari’s office was like that of any other minister: spacious but spare, with a small sitting area in one corner of the room.
I sat down opposite the minister, who was a cleric and wore a black turban, the designation for those who are descendants of the prophet Muhammad. There was a calendar on his desk with a panoramic photo of the turquoise mosque in Isfahan, and a heavy glass paperweight.
“Why don’t you give us our license?” I asked bluntly. “If you happen to get sent to prison over some political disagreement in the future, who’s going to defend you? You should keep the center working for such a rainy day!”
He smiled at this but shook his head confidently. “Such a day will never come,” he said. But he told me that we could have our license. I sat there listening to him direct his assistant to follow up on this; then he told me, “You’ll be contacted very soon.”
I had heard those words too many times to imagine that they meant anything. And, of course, after I left his office, nothing happened. Perhaps the reformists were not overly fond of us; we had recorded their offenses and legal breaches in many of our reports. But despite our presence as a sort of permanent spike in their side, they tolerated us. They tolerated me and my colleagues, and in their time, our work was still a part of Iran.
I went home straight after the meeting, as I was expecting a visitor that evening. Ahmed Chalabi, the Iraqi politician who had helped persuade the United States to topple Saddam Hussein, had asked to meet with me. Chalabi was close to the Iranian government as well, and I found it strange that there had been no mention of his arrival in the Iranian media. When the hour of our appointment came and went, my phone rang. It was Chalabi; speaking in reasonably good Persian, he apologized for not being able to come in person. He had wanted to meet with me, he explained, to ask whether I would consider serving as a judge in Saddam Hussein’s trial. The U.S. military had captured Saddam at the end of 2003, and he had remained in detention since then, awaiting trial for the various atrocities he committed during his long years running Iraq, from using chemical weapons against Iraqi Kurds to crushing the Shia villages in Iraq’s south.
“You can’t try him in Iraq,” I said. “He needs to be tried in an international criminal court, a proper tribunal.”
“But a tribunal won’t hand down a death sentence,” he said.
“Well, if you’re determined to execute him in advance of a trial, I can’t be a part of that.”
Our conversation ended there. It would have been powerful and politically deeply symbolic to have had an Iranian woman judge, a Shia, presiding over the fate of Saddam Hussein. But I could not participate in a kangaroo court, when it was precisely that sort of abrogation of justice I had spent my life in Iran challenging. I saw no mention in the Iranian papers in the following days that Chalabi had visited Tehran, and I thought it remarkable that the United States had relied so heavily on a man who had such intimate ties with the Iranian government. A man who passed through Tehran without a trace, and spoke Persian well enough to negotiate on his own.
In September 2005, not many weeks into his presidency, Ahmadinejad walked up to the podium at the United Nations General Assembly and declared that Iran had the right to nuclear power and would defy America’s “nuclear apartheid.” He ended his address with a prayer, predicting that the last imam of Shia Islam would soon emerge. Watching this from my living room in Tehran, I felt a sense of dread. His disingenuous smirk, his look of almost pleased indifference as world leaders regarded him with distaste and dismay—I saw that this man relished confrontation, and that his political ideology registered this defiance as a great success. I recall that moment with particular clarity even now, because that was when the anxiety I would constantly hold in my body first set in, the growing awareness that things looked poised to go badly, perhaps even disastrously wrong.
The reformists had tolerated my work as a human rights defender, and during their tenure Iran had been on relatively stable terms with the world. Not good terms, but stable ones. The West had serious grievances with Iran’s behavior in the region and was troubled by the country’s nuclear program. But Iran, until Ahmadinejad, had not actively been looking for a fight. Though he had promised to improve the country’s economy and bring better living conditions to the working poor, both in the cities and in rural areas, the new president now seemed mostly interested in throwing Iran onto a collision course with the West.
As Iran stumbled into this uncertain new era, one consolation was that my daughter Nargess was still living at home. My elderly mother had died in late 2004, as well as my beloved older sister, Mina, who had been ill with cancer. Having Nargess around after these losses was a great salve. She would often spread her law books out on the table in the evenings, and we would work together side by side, one of us occasionally rising to pour more tea or bring out a bowl of dried mulberries. On some evenings, Javad practiced his tar, a traditional Iranian string instrument, in the other corner of the living room; on other nights he would return from a singing class and find us with our heads bent over our work. “How diligent mother and daughter both are,” he would often say fondly, dropping a kiss on Nargess’s head. Our marriage was more companionable now that the girls were young adults.
Nargess was now interning at the Iranian Bar Association. When she had studied law at Shahid Beheshti University, a top law school, I had looked over her assignments and coursework with curiosity, to see how law was being taught under the Islamic Republic. When I had been a law student, in the 1960s, we had carefully studied key principles of Islamic sharia, despite the fact that the shah had instituted a secular criminal and civil code. After the revolution, one would have expected the universities to expand and enhance their teaching of sharia, since the new regime had replaced the shah’s secular legal system with Islamic law. But Nargess was learning less than half of what I had learned about sharia principles in my own student days. Why was this the case? Essentially because the crafters of the Islamic Republic’s education system did not want to teach students the subtleties of sharia law, philosophy, and tradition. Well-trained and erudite students would be equipped to argue for fresher and more modern angles and approaches to Islamic laws. But the Islamic Republic wanted dim Muslims who were not literate in Islamic legal debates, for Muslims who knew their religion could be potential enemies of the regime. This is why a fundamentalist cleric once said in his address to the country’s parliament, “We need jurists who are committed to the Islamic Republic and should not be educating and delivering to society people like Shirin Ebadi.”
To the likely dismay of that cleric, the volume of my work was growing all the time. I was constantly giving interviews, meeting new clients, and generally functioning more than ever as a repository for those seeking justice. Most often people would come to me after they had lost hope of securing a fair outcome through the courts, and I found myself repeating the same phrases to nearly everyone who passed through my door: “The courts in our country are no longer independent, so you shouldn’t be too hopeful. I can’t perform miracles, but I will make use of all the channels and loudspeakers at my disposal to convey your voice to the rest of the world.”
In the evenings, Nargess and I would often interrupt our work to watch the news, both the state broadcaster’s newscast and the BBC Persian se
rvice, to learn what was transpiring around the world. The state news often carried images of Ahmadinejad’s trips around the country. Inevitably the camera would follow him as he shook the hands of grizzled old farmers in some drought-stricken part of Iran, the cracked, yellow dirt forming a landscape of utter devastation that Ahmadinejad, now portrayed as a national hero, was promising to rescue. During his visits, Ahmadinejad would give speeches to a rural crowd overcome with admiration, he would wave their letters of complaint before the camera, promising state accountability, and he would then walk through the crowd passing around envelopes of cash, each holding 100,000 tomans (the equivalent, then, of about $50).
This infusion of cash into the economy was dangerously inflationary. The country’s economists were appalled. They published letters in national newspapers warning of impending economic crisis; even the head of the Central Bank of Iran warned that Ahmadinejad’s policies would cause rampant inflation. But their complaints resonated nowhere, and ordinary, impoverished Iranians, understandably, viewed Ahmadinejad, with his impassioned rural speeches and fat envelopes of cash, as some sort of savior. The envelopes, much like a drug habit, offered a balm to hardship in the short term, but they created a far greater problem for the country’s treasury down the line.
During the first two years of his initial four-year term as president, Ahmadinejad enjoyed great freedom—he had the unconditional support of the supreme leader, whom the Iranian constitution vests with absolute power, and the backing of the country’s hard-line establishment. When the clerics had taken over Iran in 1979 and devised a legal system that vested them with absolute power, the running of the economy had ranked low among their priorities. The Ayatollah Khomeini famously said, “This revolution was not about the price of watermelons,” and his successor, Ayatollah Khamenei, seemed similarly unfazed by Ahmadinejad’s economic shenanigans.