Until We Are Free

by Shirin Ebadi

  “These are government officials! Why did you lie to me?”

  “In my view, they’re thieves. And I’ll only allow them to take away files if you, as the police station commander, formally testify in the official procès-verbal of the event that they removed material from my office against my objections and protest.”

  He agreed. We compiled a procès-verbal, and the intelligence officers carried away two large cardboard boxes full of any documents that had drawn their attention. They also took my computer’s hard drive. Of course, the tax audit was just an excuse. What they were looking for, what they were hoping to find amid all those papers documenting the abuse of critics of the regime, was some piece of paper that might prove I was a spy. That I had links with foreigners, and that some faraway government was funding my work; that every month, the American government deposited a check into some imaginary bank account, as payment for my defense of Iranian political prisoners.

  For an entire month, I protested, giving interviews to every reporter I knew, making noise about the confiscation of my files. After that time, they sent a two-line letter saying that I could have them back.

  —

  The intimidation, the endless monitoring, the new ways the regime found to trip up my work and frighten me—they never ceased. It had been like this, to some extent, from the beginning, when I resumed work after the revolution. But it was impossible not to admit that it was getting increasingly intense. I noticed Javad becoming more cautious, always checking twice or three times in the evenings that our front door was double-locked. Was there more gray in his hair, or was I imagining that? Did he seem lost in thought more often as of late, tapping his pencil loudly against the newspaper in the evenings? Perhaps I should have talked to him about it, and asked how he was coping with the added anxiety. But while I felt the state circling ever closer, it was a reality I most often chose not to think about, in order to simply cope with the passing days.

  After the center’s secretary, Jinoos, went to prison, I hired another young woman, Hedieh. She was studying for her master’s in sociology, and her English was strong. Three afternoons a week, she stopped by the office for a few hours and handled the various calls and emails that came for me from abroad. About a week after she started work, she called and told me that intelligence officials had stopped her outside the university and warned her not to work for me. She was a women’s rights activist, not the sort of person quick to wilt at an encounter with security officials, and she had told them to leave her alone. They had cornered her on a street lined with bookshops and plane trees, not far from campus.

  “I’m not doing anything illegal. And I need the money,” she told them. They warned her that if she didn’t quit, they would have her expelled from the university. When she related this to me, both of us concluded that they were bluffing.

  But when she arrived that afternoon, I was surprised to see her walk in. It was not one of the days she worked. Her eyes were puffy from crying, and her nose was red. The dean of her faculty had summoned her to his office and said that she would not be permitted to defend her thesis if she continued to work for me.

  “He said, ‘Are jobs so scarce these days that you have to work for Ebadi?’ ”

  I patted her hand and rose to pour some tea.

  “My parents think I should quit. They say the university’s expelled many students for less serious reasons. But it’s so unfair. I’m happy here; I’m learning new things.”

  “You need to listen to your parents,” I said gently. “As a student, you’re vulnerable. But once you graduate, the agents won’t have anything so easy to hang over you. You’ll always be welcome to work here.”

  She looked at me gratefully and then, with some embarrassment, collected her things.

  As she opened the door, her eyes welled up again. I squeezed her arm. “It’s fine, azizam. There will be many chances to work together.”

  She was not the first, and neither would she be the last. In the past few months, she was the third secretary the security apparatus had bullied into quitting. Each time the routine was the same: some chance encounter on the street, general threats, then very specific ones. Always they found the most vulnerable aspect of the young woman’s life and shoved their fingers into it. With the master’s student, it was expulsion. With the next secretary, a law graduate who was preparing to sit for the bar exam, they threatened to deny her license to practice law. She was feisty about it, assuring me, “They won’t be able to pressure me!” But she also soon came by in tears, after receiving a letter from the Bar Association stating that her license had been blocked by the intelligence ministry. And to her I said the same thing I said to all of them:

  “You should go. You need to think about your immediate future. Whenever you want, you can have your job back.”

  She, too, smiled gratefully and hugged me, her hair smelling of smog and fruity shampoo.

  I fully sympathized with these young women, and I was determined to keep them out of harm’s way. For my own purposes, however, I was beginning to feel quite frustrated. My knowledge of English and computers was not really adequate, and I needed someone to help me. But who could withstand the pressures of the intelligence and security officials? What use would it be to find someone new only to have her forced to resign after a month or two? How could I navigate a way out of this cycle? They wanted to paralyze me.

  The Nobel Women’s Initiative ended up saving me. I and the other female laureates who had banded together to found the group had become very close and kept in touch, sharing both progress and challenges we faced in our various countries. Jody Williams, who won the Nobel Peace Prize for her work on land mines, was the first to suggest that I should work with a secretary who didn’t live in Iran at all. The group hired a young woman based in Washington, D.C., as my secretary, and the plan was for us to talk on the phone twice a day, so we could update each other on the work I needed.

  It was a sound idea, but costly. I practiced pro bono law, and compared to the going rate in Iran, the salary of a secretary in the States was considerable. The NWI women graciously offered to cover the costs. And so began the long months where I would plan my days around walking to a public phone—I didn’t want to call her on a landline or my mobile, which the authorities would be tapping—to ring Washington, D.C., eight and a half hours behind. To make things even more complicated, my secretary had a baby and didn’t want the phone’s bell to wake her up, so I had to plan my calls around both the time difference and the baby’s naps. But I was willing to do it. I wanted to show the intelligence officials my strength, and to what lengths I was willing to go. I would get up at five in the morning and walk to a pay phone. They needed to understand that I would never give up.

  —

  I woke up to my phone ringing. I thought I was dreaming, that it was Negar, my daughter in America, calling. Then I opened one eye and saw my mobile on the nightstand flashing. I grabbed the device and pulled it to my ear.

  “Yes?”

  I heard heavy breathing. “You stupid bitch, be careful. We’re running out of patience with you.”

  I hung up and turned off the phone. They were furious. Every time they set a trap, I stepped out of it. I knew this explained the phone call. But as I stared at Javad’s form beside me, his chest rising lightly, I felt my own chest constrict. Look how close they can get to us, I thought. Even here, while we are sleeping in our beds.

  —

  Perhaps I should have seen it coming, should have acknowledged to myself how the state’s animosity toward me was mounting steadily. But at the time, I was deeply shocked by what happened next. At two P.M. one day in January 2009, a mob of men with beards, carrying posters and walkie-talkies, arrived on the street outside my office. I was bent over a file cabinet when I first heard the shouts. When I heard my name, I froze.

  “Death to the American mercenary! Down with the enemies of the Islamic Republic! Death to the traitor Ebadi!”

  There were so many
voices, it sounded like a whole demonstration. I was too nervous to go to the window, so I locked the office door and fled to my home, upstairs. Javad was there, already by the window himself.

  “They’re carrying banners,” he said grimly. “And there are more coming.”

  I sank down onto the sofa, gripping my mobile phone. The shouts kept swelling and rising. I ran into the kitchen, where a smaller window, covered by a thin lace curtain, looked out onto the street. There was something like a hundred men out there, a mix of ages. They wore dark colors and angry expressions, and one held a large pipe. Others had batons.

  “I’m going to go close the inside door,” said Javad, walking swiftly out of the apartment. Our building had a large metal internal door that could be shut from the inside. Rarely used, today it might save us.

  Left alone, I thought of Javad down there, separated from the mob by a metal door, and jumped up. I had to do something. With trembling hands, I dialed the local police station.

  “There are men outside shouting, attacking my building. I think they’re here to kill me.” The words spilled out of me, verbalizing the thought I hadn’t allowed myself to think.

  The officer began telling me that he would send a car over, but I couldn’t hear what he said after that, because of the sounds of metal being hammered and glass shattering. Javad was back, and he said they had started hurling stones. We stood there together, side by side in our kitchen, watching below. Two men were using a metal bar to pry the sign for my law office off the building. Others had taken out cans of spray paint and were busy spraying—I could only imagine obscenities—across the walls of the building. The others threw more stones and shouted that I must die, that I had betrayed the country.

  I saw a woman who was holding a child’s hand start turning down the slope to our road, see the commotion, and turn back. A moment later a police car appeared, slowing as it approached the scene.

  “Finally they’ve come,” Javad said, pivoting to run back downstairs.

  “Wait—where are you going?”

  “The police are here now; I’m going to talk to them.”

  I watched from my spot at the window as Javad approached the two policemen, waving at the building. I was scared for him, my hands shaking as I pulled the curtain back even farther, and I thought for a second that I should follow him. I could see him growing more distraught. The policemen stood calmly, doing nothing to intervene.

  Within a few minutes, Javad came back, furious. “Do you know what they said to me? They said, ‘They’ll just chant some slogans for a while and disperse themselves.’ What about the damage? The hacked-off sign? The spray paint? I told them, ‘This is terribly offensive, an attack.’ They just smiled at me.”

  I suddenly realized that my colleagues’ homes might also be targeted, and I quickly phoned two or three of the most prominent and warned them. I saw some of the neighbors start coming out of their buildings. One of them, an older man from two doors up, was holding a video camera and had started filming the assailants. It was so brave and unexpected that my throat caught. Within moments, one of the policemen—of the pair who had done nothing to prevent the attackers—went over and confiscated his camera.

  The mob stayed on for another thirty minutes, their chants slowly deflating. Eventually they began walking off. They were members of one of the state’s hard-line volunteer militias. Culled from the poorest strata of society, they were religious enough to be radicalized further in a militia’s fold. These were the men the state dispatched when it wanted to brutalize dissidents, attack European embassies, raid feminist demonstrations, or otherwise bully Iranians yet keep itself distanced from that repression. By sending in the voluntary militias, the state maintained some measure of plausible deniability, and it often called the militiamen “students.” Because of this setup, the militiamen who attacked our building were permitted by the police to wreak their havoc; this was why the police confiscated our neighbor’s camera but not the thugs’ cans of spray paint.

  That evening, Javad and I stayed in, hovering around each other. I cooked chicken with barberries, in saffron and orange sauce, and we ate in silence, the sense of security we had always felt at home now gone. The ringing of my cellphone punctured much of our quiet evening. News about the attack had swiftly reached reporters, a number of whom showed up immediately, snapping photos of the damage, ringing our bell for a few quotes. What everyone who came down marveled at, apart from the extent of the damage itself, were the comic misspellings in the graffiti. The attackers had written “America crone” on the wall and had misspelled the Persian for “crone,” ajooz. The irony here was that the state claimed that “students” had been responsible for the attack.

  The news reports began reverberating internationally, enough so that two weeks later, the police officers who had merely observed the attack came to my office.

  “Can you please get your building repainted?” one officer asked. “Every reporter coming to Iran now stops and photographs it. These reports are actually very damaging to your reputation, because these slogans on the walls make the foreign journalists think the Iranian people don’t like you.”

  I laughed openly. “Whoever sprayed those slogans on my building can come back and clean them off themselves. I’m not doing a thing.”

  “But, Khanoum Ebadi, your reputation?”

  “Don’t worry about my reputation. The people understand very well who provoked and backed the attackers.”

  The defaced building walls remained as they were, the angry slogans bright red and glaring, for about three months. Then, one day, a few municipal workers came along with buckets of paint and began covering them up.

  I was standing in the Tajrish bazaar purchasing vinegar when my mobile rang, flashing the number of a colleague from the Defenders of Human Rights Center.

  “Omid Mirsayafi is dead,” she told me. “They delivered the body to the family two hours ago, and they’re saying it’s a suicide.”

  The previous spring, the authorities had gone after Omidreza Mirsayafi, a young blogger from a working-class family who, like so many Iranians, was finding it harder and harder to get by. He had written an open letter to Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei on his blog, describing himself as a young Shia Muslim in need of help getting either a job or a loan, so that he could set up his own business. Would the supreme leader help him, he asked, just as Khamenei had helped the Lebanese?

  Mirsayafi was referring to the outpouring of support Iran had extended to Lebanon in the wake of the Lebanese militant group Hezbollah’s 2006 war with Israel. As Hezbollah’s main supporter, Tehran sent hundreds of millions of dollars in aid and helped rebuild hospitals and homes in Beirut bombed during the war, bringing salaries and jobs to thousands of Lebanese. Like many young Iranians facing 30 percent unemployment, Mirsayafi had chafed at his government’s priorities. The tone of the letter was polite, but it still provoked the anger of security officials, who filed a complaint against Mirsayafi to the judiciary, which then tried him and sentenced him to two and a half years in prison.

  The judge ignored the fact that other than his letter of protest, he mainly wrote about Persian classical music, new songs he liked. He was sentimental and posted pictures of roses and poets until his imprisonment in the spring of 2008. Now he was dead.

  “Meet me at the office in an hour. We’ll go to the family,” I said, handing the vinegar to the shop owner. I rushed back home, growing antsy as the taxi inched through the traffic, heavy because of Norouz, or the New Year, celebrated at the spring equinox. As I waited for my colleagues to arrive, I read through a selection of Omid’s blog posts that we had saved on the office computer. Now that he was dead, his writing seemed eerily prescient.

  In one post two years before he had written, “I have never been a person who would stoop to self-censoring and will never be. I’d rather not write at all if I have to stop being frank and honest in my words.”

  In another post he wrote about an experience that he called
his second “birth,” when something inside him compelled him to stop being a “passive bystander” in the face of committed wrongs. He described walking through a park in central Tehran on a day when young people were demonstrating in the streets.

  I was standing around one of the gates near a young married couple. A seventeen- or eighteen-year-old boy, clearly a religious extremist, approached us.

  “Beat it! Disperse!” he spat.

  We didn’t pay any attention. The boy raced toward the young couple, addressing the young man: “Didn’t you hear me, husband-of-a-whore? Didn’t I just tell you to get the fuck out of here?”

  The young man was too shocked to give even the smallest hint of a reaction. Obviously he could not simply ignore the insult—yet if he did anything he was sure to get arrested. Having witnessed the scene up close, and without any second thought, I ran at the Basij [militia] boy and shoved him aside.

  Omid went on to recount the other paramilitaries descending upon him with batons, beating him to the ground and dragging him into a police van. He spent twenty days in prison for that, and writes that he came out a “different Omidreza.” He said, “I learned that you create yourself.”

  I was immersed in his thoughts, so gentle and yet so uncompromising, when my colleagues arrived. It took us over an hour to reach the family’s neighborhood, which was across the city, tucked deep into the faded, sooty districts of Tehran’s south. We finally found the house on a small side street lined with decaying tenement buildings. Omidreza’s father opened the door. He was an older man, with gray stubble, dressed in modest, loose trousers and faded shoes. Their house was tiny, two stories, with each floor a single, small room. The male relatives were seated on the floor, on a worn carpet, looking down and trying not to cry. They greeted me and my colleagues. Three women of the family sat outside the doorway in the corridor, listening. The whole time I was there, I could hear the sound of their weeping.