by Shirin Ebadi
“Kick all of these people out of your office. Don’t let them back in again. Understood?”
“How can you say that? These are some of the most distinguished, prominent people in our society. I would never do that.”
He made an exaggerated pfft sound. “These people you respect so much, they’re simply nobodies. If you kick them out, they’ll just melt and disappear like a snowball in the sun. They only feel strong because they’re crowding under your umbrella.”
In my head, I imagined saying, And then you’ll be happy? Then you’ll leave me alone and let me do my work and stop monitoring and harassing me?
But instead I took a curt tone: “Look, the center’s office isn’t mine. I’ve transferred ownership to the center as an endowment, and the board decides who should enter, not me.”
“Do you have that endowment document handy?” he said, smiling with fake pleasantness.
“When you pray at dawn each day and when you fast during Ramazan, do you get a receipt? Do you have documents that prove you fasted?” I was now raising my voice. “I’ve given that office to the center because in my belief system, human rights work is an act of worship.”
At this he got up suddenly to leave. As he opened the door, he turned to face me. “Inshallah, we’ll see you again soon.”
—
The next day, I met with my colleagues at the center and told them about the meeting. They all agreed that I was protected by my international position as a Nobel laureate, that intelligence agents wouldn’t dare take action against me, and that we should ignore their threats. So we continued with our work as before, taking on cases and spending long hours over coffee in the afternoon at our office, strategizing and planning for the future.
I made a point of finding out more about Mahmudi, the man who saw himself as my nemesis. I knew that this wasn’t his real name. I often thought of him, mulling over his single-minded purpose in bringing me down. Though he seemed to be the lead interrogator and agent handling the files of the country’s most prominent dissident lawyers and activists, he was obsessed with me. I had never, in all my years defending people the state persecuted, come across another instance where one intelligence agent had dedicated his career to the ruining of a single individual. Mahmudi interrogated so many of my colleagues over the years, most often about me, probing them about what “Shirin” was up to, that I had gathered a picture of him in my mind. He wanted to know the most minute details of my life and behavior. He always referred to me as “Shirin” in his interrogations, to make me smaller, not worthy of being called khanoum or even by just my last name. He did it, I believe, to make it seem like he was intimate with me, that he was powerful and I was small.
He worked in the security branch of the Ministry of Intelligence, charged with the “security file,” which concerned people like me: activists, critics, people seen as enemies. With his medium build and light brown hair, I took him for a fair Iranian of Azeri or Turkish background. He had been a militiaman since his youth, and those colleagues who could identify a regional accent down to the town said he was from Orumiyeh, in the Western Azerbaijan Province of Iran. It offended him to be called an interrogator; he thought this was too lowly a description for the work he did. He called himself a “case specialist” or, sometimes, an “intelligence officer.” During interrogations he had a habit of mimicking people. “ ‘I want a lawyer,’ ” he’d say, inflecting his voice with his victim’s cadence and manner of speech. “ ‘I want to call my family’ ”…“ ‘I’m just asking for my rights.’ ” He was married and had a daughter. I knew this because he paused one interrogation to take a call, speaking kindly to a little girl, promising to bring her something when he got home.
His obsession with me never abated. “You don’t know how his eyes glitter with hate when he says your name,” one of my colleagues related after undergoing several interrogations Mahmudi had dedicated to discovering details about me.
“Something about you enrages him personally,” she went on. “It’s as though you have something he wants badly. Social standing? Prestige? He’s furious that you are who you are.” Mahmudi was determined to bring me down, but at first, he started with small acts of sabotage.
—
On December 10, 2008, my organization had planned a celebration for the sixtieth anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the charter the U.N. General Assembly passed in 1948 in the wake of World War II, designed to enshrine the basic rights of individuals everywhere. About one hundred people were invited, and we had rented a tent, chairs, and heaters to make use of the office’s large, tree-shaded terrace, to accommodate everyone. As we did each year, we would also present an award to a prominent Iranian activist who had worked for democracy and freedom of expression. That year, the award was going to Ezzatollah Sahabi, one of Iran’s longest-serving activists, an advocate of political and citizens’ rights, who was turning seventy-eight.
Our office secretary, a young Baha’i woman named Jinoos, arrived early to decorate the premises, setting up chairs and arranging flowers along with a few other colleagues. When I arrived at the center, I noticed dark Peugeots double-parked at the entrance. The front door to the building was wide open. I climbed the stairs quickly and found the door to the office also ajar. As I walked in, Jinoos said loudly, “Khanoum Ebadi has arrived.”
Narges Mohammadi, one of my closest colleagues, a human rights activist in her late thirties whose journalist husband had spent much of the past decade in prison, came toward me. “Shirin, they’ve come to shut us down. They want us to leave now, so they can seal the entrance.”
“What’s happening? We’re not doing anything wrong here!”
Two security agents dressed in dark suits stepped in from the corridor. “Regrettably, by order of the revolutionary court, we must close down this office immediately.”
“Do you have a warrant from the prosecutor? Did you even have a warrant to enter the premises?”
“The door was open, and we just walked in. We have no warrant, but the prosecutor gave us verbal orders.”
“I’m not accepting that.” I moved to stand before the doors to the terrace.
The taller agent, who had an angry rash under his stubble, put a hand on his hip, where I knew he was concealing a weapon.
“We don’t want any trouble, and we don’t want to arrest anyone. But please be absolutely certain that this ceremony will not be going ahead, under any conditions. We have to seal the office, and this is on highest orders.”
I knew he wasn’t lying. In the Islamic Republic of Iran, the orders of the Ministry of Intelligence and the security apparatus always outweighed the law. I had dealt with many cases where people resisted arrest or challenged agents, demanding to see a warrant. Nearly always they were badly beaten and dragged away, or their office or home was ransacked. The officer standing in front of me with his hand on his gun was capable of doing anything he wanted. He would never be reprimanded, and he and I both knew it.
A third agent emerged from the back of the office holding a video camera and started panning the room with his lens. He videotaped the papers on the desks, the photos on the walls, the fern in the corner, and then turned his lens to all of our faces.
“Are you a film director? Just do your job and get out of here,” I said.
Jinoos pulled a camera we kept for witness testimony out of a desk drawer. Her eyes welled with angry tears, and she wiped them with her sleeve as she switched the device on and swiveled to face the agent with the camera.
“Then I’m going to film you!” she said.
The agent looked dumbfounded and turned to the lead officer, who had his back to the room, busy speaking into a mobile phone, and hadn’t noticed this exchange.
“Turn off that camera now!” the cameraman screamed, moving toward her.
“If filming is so bad, why are you doing it?” she said, pivoting to film all the agents in the room; there were now roughly a half dozen of them.
“Handcuff her!” the cameraman shouted, motioning to the other officers.
Whatever happened that afternoon, I didn’t want Jinoos to get arrested. If she ended up at the police station, they would discover that she was a Baha’i, and she could end up spending years in prison.
“Jinoos, please stop,” I said, putting my hand on her back. An agent stepped forward to take the camera, and she passed it to him. Her hands were trembling.
During this exchange, some of the guests had started trickling in. They looked around nervously, and one of them told us that a row of security officers were now standing outside the building, trying to prevent people from entering. We could hear shouting from outside, a man yelling, “It’s over, we’ve put an end to it. Stand back!”
I rushed to the window and saw a swirl of bodies, women that I recognized as guests trying to move toward the doors. As the officers shoved them back, one woman, a director, stumbled backward and fell into the street. A man was waving his arms and objecting. An officer grabbed his arms, and another handcuffed them and pushed him into a waiting police car. The street was now entirely blocked with security cars.
The lead officer inside cleared his throat loudly. “Are you going to leave? We’ve asked you politely, but if you don’t start to move, we’ll throw you out.” A few more officers entered the room, flanking the angry one who seemed to be in charge.
I fumbled in my purse for my mobile phone, to call the local police station.
When the commander answered, I said, “I need your help,” feeling short of breath. “There are some men at my office, and they don’t even have a warrant. They’re trying to kick my colleagues and me out of our private property.”
The officers were listening to my call, clearly furious. I pressed the phone to my ear, so that no one could overhear the station commander telling me that it was no use, asking me not to resist. “We will not help,” he said. “This comes straight from the Ministry of Intelligence.”
I looked at the officers, growing restless and impatient, striding about the office and shoving papers around desks. When I saw how white Jinoos’s face was, I realized that putting up a fight would place her, the other young colleagues, and some of our guests in the most danger. They likely would not dare to arrest me. But what about everyone else? I waved Jinoos, Narges, and the others over to me.
“I know it’s hard, but we have to go. There isn’t any choice,” I said, keeping my voice low. We walked around the office shutting off the computers, then stepped outside to turn off the heat lamps on the terrace. The pastries and cakes on the platters, the drinks, the decorations—we left it all there and filed out of the office, with the agents locking the door behind us. The guests outside had already been dispersed. It was approaching dusk, the shadows fading on the police cars that still lined the street. I wondered briefly whether anyone would show up tomorrow and find the doors bolted, or whether news would spread quickly among the city’s activist and human rights community.
Because NGOs in Iran scarcely ever accepted foreign donations or funding—this would immediately compromise them in the eyes of the regime and lead to their closure—most functioned out of people’s living rooms. The Defenders of Human Rights Center had been the only NGO with a big office, and it had become the gathering spot for numerous activists and organizers who worked on women’s rights, the environment, and a number of other causes. It was a safe, social space where those building their society came together to debate and share news, often sitting under the trees on the spacious terrace, smoking and talking. Many called that terrace the “human rights canteen.” So the shutting of the center meant more than simply closing down the physical space of a handful of human rights lawyers; it effectively closed down the main intellectual and social hub for those in Tehran working on civic activism. And perhaps that had been partly the objective. This thought made my limbs heavy with discouragement, and I looked up at the center’s darkened windows, which reflected the neon sign of the bank on the ground floor.
I have always worked to build things in my country, to find ways to convey what human rights mean, to persuade people that they matter. It is simply in my character to do this, and I nearly always press on when things go wrong. But that evening, standing in the street before the officially bolted and sealed door of Iran’s only human rights center, I allowed myself to think for a moment how hard it was.
—
Despite my efforts to keep Jinoos safe that evening, a week later the authorities discovered that she was a Baha’i and arrested her at her home. The authorities detained her for about a year, and sometime after her release, they imprisoned her father, for no reason other than his faith.
We also had smaller worries to contend with. All the equipment we had brought in for the ceremony—the tent, the large outdoor heat lamps, the chairs—were still on the office’s premises, and we would have to pay a daily fee for their rental. I tried to contact various authorities to unseal the doors, just so we could return the equipment. After giving me the runaround for two months, they finally let us in for an hour, long enough to remove everything. The authorities never made the case against the center public, never sent it to court, and never gave me access to the file, so I could see what wrongdoing had been alleged against us. The investigator said the evidence was classified and that it would only be divulged to the court, which, of course, was never consulted on the matter.
Not long after the authorities permitted us that one hour of access, I ran into the building’s manager on the street. It was a blustery afternoon, the wind whipping the trash along the gutters, steam rising up from the pyramid of fava beans a street vendor was cooking next to the kiosk where I had stopped to buy a newspaper.
“Khanoum Ebadi, now that I see you, there’s something I wanted to mention,” the building manager said. “One night after they closed your office—it was around eight P.M., when I was going home to my apartment—I noticed two men opening the door to your office.
“I recognized them because they were the same men who had rented the apartment next door to you last year. They were hardly ever there, but I recognized them. I told them that the office had been sealed by government officials, that it wasn’t their flat in the first place, and demanded to know why they were breaking the seal. They showed me government ID cards and said they were intelligence agents and had the right to enter. They told me not to mention to anyone that I had seen them. But I thought you should know.”
“Thank you for telling me,” I said slowly. We had always had a good relationship. He was a kind man, and now I appreciated his integrity all the more.
“I better be off,” he said, waving goodbye as he headed quickly into the bustle of people doing their after-work shopping. I watched him disappear down the street, rooted to the spot, absorbing what he had said. It meant that for at least the last eight months, since that neighboring apartment had been leased, the Ministry of Intelligence had been operating right next door to us. They had likely installed listening devices, capturing hundreds of our private conversations, taking down the most intimate details of our meetings with clients. Realizing that just on the other side of the wall, all these months, had been a Ministry of Intelligence listening post made me angrier than I could have imagined. Not because they were eavesdropping, for I expected that. But because they had been right up against us, hearing and knowing exactly what we did. They knew that we were doing human rights work and not plotting the regime’s overthrow. And they had still shut us down anyway.
With the center formally shut down, or at least physically shut down, the authorities imagined they were putting a stop to our work. But we almost immediately began working out of my personal law office. It was not a terribly big space: two rooms and a central reception area. But we fit in more desks and carried on.
One afternoon, as we were seated around the wooden conference table discussing our cases, someone buzzed at the door. Two sour-faced men, probably in their late forties, in bag
gy navy trousers, stood outside.
“We’re here from the tax office. We need to inspect the premises,” one of them announced.
“Is this really necessary? Since when do tax officials come inspect people’s offices?”
The so-called tax men presented a letter that stipulated their permission to inspect my office.
“Very well, go ahead,” I sighed. But they had what was effectively a warrant. They searched every nook of my office, to the contained dismay and amusement of my colleagues, and then left. I wrote to the minister of finance to complain but heard nothing back.
A week later, the two men—now clearly intelligence agents posing as tax officials—came back. This time, as they stood in the doorway they told me that they had a letter from the finance minister authorizing them to confiscate various documents for a thorough audit.
“I’m not letting you take away my files,” I said. “These are confidential legal documents, and they have nothing to do with tax or accounting. People trust me, they come to see me as a lawyer, and they share very personal information. I can’t let you have access to that.”
“Sorry, but we have a warrant from the court, too,” the tall one said, pulling out another piece of paper.
“I’m sorry,” I said firmly. “I have responsibilities to my clients.”
“Well, we can do whatever we want. You have no authority over us.” And they proceeded to push their way inside.
Once again, I rang the police station. “There are thieves in my office,” I said. “They’re threatening me and trying to take my files. Please come immediately!”
Within minutes the siren wailed down the street, and two officers, including the station commander, came bounding up to the door. When the commander saw and spoke to the two “tax” officials, he was angry.