by Shirin Ebadi
They were all working-class men, and they spoke timidly to us, the lawyers who had traveled down from the north to pay condolences for their boy. One of the men, who may have been Omidreza’s uncle, felt more comfortable speaking and led the conversation.
“He was the calmest boy. Always reflective, always asking questions. We know he didn’t kill himself. He would never do such a thing. We know they tortured him, and we want to complain.”
“Has there been an autopsy?” I asked.
They all looked at me blankly, then shook their heads.
“But why not? Why didn’t you have one done?” I realized from their blank faces that they didn’t know what an autopsy was. “If the forensic doctor had examined him, there would have been evidence of the torture.”
“The ones who washed his body before burial, they saw all the bruises. They saw blood around his ear and head. They can be witnesses,” the father said. His hands, brown and rough and lined, were folded limply in his lap.
I explained that such testimony wouldn’t hold in court, that sometimes bruising can come after death, depending on how the corpse is handled, and that only a formal autopsy could prove torture. But an autopsy would have required the permission of a judge, which would certainly not have been granted; and even in many cases, I explained, where we had had forensic evidence of torture, we had been unable to secure a conviction. I didn’t want this devastated family to go through any more than they already had, to pursue a legal battle that would produce only more heartbreak and anger. I tried to soothe them in terms they could understand, explaining why legally we had so little recourse. Fortunately, they were religious and could perhaps reconcile what had happened to Omidreza through their faith.
“In another world, justice will be served. When justice is not available to us in this world, there is nothing for us to do but seek refuge in a higher power,” I said.
The family thanked us and rose to see us to the door. As I passed the corridor, Omid’s mother pressed my hand; her eyes looked hollowed out, her skin as pale as her white chador.
Is there anything more unnatural in this world than losing a child? And then to trust that justice must be forfeited to God? This was always the most painful part of my work: the searching eyes of the mothers and fathers whose children had been killed or were imprisoned, seeing in me some potential help. But the reality is that the fate of their sons and daughters rests largely on the political conditions of Iran, not on my abilities as a lawyer. When there was nothing I could do, I resorted to words and tea. My colleagues called my approach “tea therapy,” because when these families came to my office, I usually brewed a pot of tea. And as we sat together drinking, I tried to talk about different things. I recounted the problems other families in similar situations were facing. Just so they would know they were not alone, that others were in a similar place, suffering alongside them. Sometimes this eased their despair by a shade. When they left my office, they often seemed calmer. When I couldn’t reduce the burden of a family through my work, I could at least try to soothe their pain.
—
One afternoon I was in my office working quickly, trying to clear the files off my desk so that I wouldn’t have to take them upstairs with me in the evening. My daughter Nargess, now living in Canada while studying for a master’s degree in law, was returning to Tehran that evening to visit with us and finish up some loose ends with her law apprenticeship. I had put some lamb out in the kitchen and had left the rice to soak. Because I was rushing to get upstairs, I had been drinking more tea than usual all day, and when I felt my pulse racing a bit, I chalked it up to too many cups.
Javad was not yet back, and I was alone when I went upstairs. I moved about the kitchen, listening to the radio while chopping herbs, mixing yogurt, setting out pickles—arranging all the numerous elements required of a proper Persian dinner. Javad rang to say he was downstairs, and I grabbed my manteau and head scarf to head to the airport.
I tried to chat naturally as we drove and went inside, but once I saw Nargess’s face as she emerged from the arrivals hall, I knew something was wrong.
“Maman, they’ve taken my passport away,” she said.
“Who took it? What did they say?”
“A security officer. At passport control they asked me to wait, and then a security officer came and took it away. He didn’t explain why, and when I demanded to know, he said I would receive a letter calling me to the intelligence ministry for investigation. He said they would explain the allegations against me there.”
“We’ll talk about it in the car,” I said, putting my arm around her.
Noticing how grave her father and I looked, she stopped in the parking lot.
“I’m actually fine, you know. I told them maybe they were doing me a favor. Maybe I won’t have to start my PhD in the fall after all.”
I was struck by this. When had she become so unflappable, able to be breezy under interrogation with an intelligence agent who had just confiscated her passport? We sometimes do not know our own children until life throws some unimaginable obstacle in their path and they respond with a courage we would never have had the opportunity to see otherwise.
The empty expanse of desert stretched before us on the Tehran-Qom highway, only the billboards lit up as we sped back toward the city. I tried to match Nargess’s high spirits, but when we arrived home, I sent her off to take a shower and stood in the kitchen, thinking.
I felt as though it had started. As I stared at the old wooden clock on the wall, which I had bought on Jordan Street not long after our marriage, I couldn’t say what, exactly; I couldn’t follow the thought out to its logical progression. But it was clear enough. The state had finally started going after my family. It wasn’t just content with me anymore. I had witnessed this over the years with many of my clients, dissidents and activists whose relatives suffered state intimidation, were hassled and threatened and sometimes blackmailed or imprisoned, all “collateral damage” in the quest to get the original target—the dissident or activist or journalist in question—to drop their activities. It was the dirtiest of the methods the security agencies used, exploiting these families and their emotional ties. In one typical tactic, the spymasters would simply arrest the loved one of a political prisoner who was resisting the state’s demands to make a false confession and incriminate himself. They would then tell the prisoner that his sister or wife had been arrested, and that unless he confessed, they would be forced to torture her. It was all designed to identify that weak point, the point they could press on to exert their pressure.
But I wasn’t an activist or an opposition figure. I was just a lawyer, by dint of having my career as a judge suspended—a lawyer working to make the laws of the country more fair, trying to promote lawfulness. To me this was as clear as the light of day, but for the authorities, growing more merciless by that same light, it seemed to make no difference. I called Nargess and Javad to dinner in the kitchen.
“It’s a test,” I said as we sat down around the table. “It’s a test to see if I’ll cave, if they can use Nargess to get to me. If we react, they will try to use her forever. But if I stand firm and don’t respond, they’ll realize they’ll need another tactic.”
Javad frowned at this. “So what do you suggest—that we do nothing?”
“Well, what can we do anyway? We can only show that we aren’t shaken, that we know she hasn’t done anything wrong, and that we’ll proceed with our lives as usual. It’s a game, Javad, to see who’ll blink first.”
He said nothing to this, moving the food around on his plate listlessly. He would clearly rather not be having the blinking contest at all. But Nargess’s eyes glittered.
“I’ll be fine, maman,” she said. “I have no problem going to see them. I really haven’t done anything wrong.”
—
In the days that followed, I sometimes overheard her on the phone with her friends, still laughing off her situation.
“It’s actually
great to be stuck in Iran—I guess I’ll have to spend the whole time at the Caspian, by the beach,” she would say. Another time, what she said made me stifle a smile: “It’s no bother at all. Finally, I’m becoming important!”
As a precaution, Javad insisted that we install a burglar alarm in our house. He chose a system that would automatically alert the local police station in case of a break-in. I found this ridiculous, because if we ever faced attack it would be the authorities themselves who would be responsible. But I saw that installing the alarm made Javad feel more secure, and I went along with it.
Several days passed, and the authorities summoned Nargess for questioning on the very day I was due to travel abroad for a seminar. My phones were tapped, my emails were read—all of this I knew. So it was evident that intelligence agents had timed their little game purposefully. Would I leave the country, knowing that my daughter was sitting in a government office with the officials of a ministry that just years prior had plotted my assassination? Would I board that plane and turn my back on my daughter, aware that so often when intelligence agents summon someone for “investigation,” it is an occasion to arrest them? Would I blink?
“Nargess is a grown woman now; she’s perfectly capable of defending herself. And I agreed to this conference ages ago—I really can’t cancel at the last minute. If I were to drop my work every moment my children needed me, would I ever get anything done? Her father is here; they’ll be fine.” I said such things into the phone at every opportunity, several times a day, until the day of my departure and Nargess’s interrogation. It felt strange to have scripted this conversation, to be saying these things into my home and office telephones while imagining the intelligence agents sitting across town, in some fluorescent-lit room, taking notes. Notes that would later go to higher security officials, who would be monitoring my reaction. Perhaps another mother, a mother whose work did not involve knowing and responding to the tactics of a highly trained security apparatus, would have thought me merciless.
But I understood that if I postponed my trip by even a single day, in order to ensure that Nargess came home safely and that her passport would be returned, they would spot my weakness. That would be the real danger. They would know then that they could use Nargess against me, and it was that I feared more than anything. If they concluded that she was my weakness, there would be no telling what they might do to her next, or to me. And so while it was one of the hardest things I have ever had to do in my life, I said goodbye to Nargess and Javad that morning in the living room, kissed them both, and then drove to the airport to board my flight.
When I landed in the United States, I immediately called home. Javad told me that when Nargess turned up for the appointment, the officials simply handed her passport back, without any investigation or questioning at all. So I had been right. I thanked God that if nothing else, all of my years of being watched by the security agencies, and defending clients permanently in their nets, had taught me enough about how they worked. To this very day, no one has explained to us why Nargess’s passport was withheld after that trip, or what was being investigated. Nor has anyone explained why her passport was returned.
In the early spring of 2009, Iran began gearing up for the June presidential election. Ahmadinejad’s popularity had sunk abysmally; Iranians widely reviled him for ruining the economy and for the repressiveness of his rule: the stepped-up censorship, the morality police, the conservative Islamic agenda that seemed to slowly, with each passing month, find a new quarter of Iranian public life in which to assert itself. Because Ahmadinejad’s tenure had proved so disastrous for such a wide swath of Iranians, the upcoming election was emboldening people to express their frustration in ways they might not have dared months prior. The students at Sharif University of Technology, in Tehran, disrupted the president when he spoke on their campus, chanting, “Liar! Liar!” This was repeated at several of his public addresses.
The two key challengers to Ahmadinejad were Mir Hossein Mousavi, a former prime minister who had a reputation as a clean politician, and Mehdi Karroubi, a progressive cleric and former speaker of parliament. Both were determined to avoid competing directly with each other to prevent another Ahmadinejad term at any cost. Motivated, savvy young people manned their campaign headquarters. Former president Mohammad Khatami, the reformist who spent eight years moderating Iran before Ahmadinejad turned up, hung a green scarf around Mousavi’s neck in a ceremony. It was a symbolic show of support from the still widely respected cleric, and green, the color of Islam, became the color of Mousavi’s campaign.
In the weeks that followed, the streets of Tehran were full of green balloons and ribbons, with green flags flying from lampposts. The city was suddenly transformed from the sluggish, smog-choked capital of bitterness, people complaining about the rising cost of milk and meat, into an alert, excited citizenry discussing foreign and economic policy. Young people, especially, were so excited that they had taken to spending whole evenings and much of the night in the streets.
On the eve of the election I was in a taxi stopped at the intersection of Vali Asr Street and Vanak Square, in north-central Tehran. This was one of the busiest stretches of the long boulevard that slopes down from the Alborz Mountains to the south of the city, lined all the way with plane trees. Commissioned by an Iranian shah to rival the Champs-Élysées, Vali Asr was the stretch of Tehran where the children of the elite raced their Ferraris, where porticoed boutiques sold velvet curtains from Milan that cost more than a construction laborer made in a lifetime, where prostitutes loitered at rush hour, where taxi drivers and young men with long hair and grunge-rock T-shirts lined up to buy hot stew from curbside stands. The aspirations of Tehran’s eight million citizens seemed to pulse here.
An accordion bus had stalled in front of my taxi, and the street was loud with the mad honking of traffic. But instead of the usual children selling matches and threaded orange blossoms, young people in bright green headbands were winding their way around the stationary cars. They were leaning into windows to pass out flyers and campaign posters bearing the photo and green banner of their candidate in the next day’s presidential election.
A few approached my taxi, and as they came closer, they recognized me.
“It’s Mrs. Ebadi!” cried a young man with heavy glasses and a green scarf. “Who are you going to vote for?”
Although the taxi window was closed, he was shouting so loudly that I could hear him clearly over the car engines and the radio. I lowered the window to reply, but a young woman waved a green balloon and answered for me:
“Of course she’s going to vote for Mir Hossein!”
I extended my hand and took the campaign leaflets and flyers. “I’m voting for freedom,” I said.
By now a small crowd had gathered around my taxi, everyone talking and laughing together. They had all heard me, and they interpreted my response as support for their candidate.
“That means she’s going to vote for Mousavi,” said the young man with the scarf. “Mousavi is the one who—”
“No, didn’t you hear her? Freedom is with Karroubi,” another interrupted, holding his posters aloft.
I laughed at their back-and-forth and was about to say something when the taxi started to move. I turned to wave as they stepped back onto the sidewalk, their arms filled with leaflets. It had been a long time since I had seen young people in Tehran animated in this way, talking politics freely on the street as though they felt themselves to be citizens of a country that gave them the right.
It took me another half hour to get home. I unlocked the door to my law office and hurried to make tea ahead of my colleagues’ arrival. I wondered, with the election taking place in the morning, whether the authorities would pay much attention to the report my colleagues and I would be releasing later in the week. I printed out and stapled copies of the draft report and our meeting agenda, keeping an eye on the clock. In the past, I’d had an assistant to help me with such tasks, but the authorities had re
cently arrested the last young woman who’d worked for me. Now I mostly managed on my own, aware of the risks anyone who worked with me had to take. I stopped for a moment to catch my breath, and remembered to take out my mobile phone and remove the battery. I did not want the authorities to spy on our meeting.
It was dark by the time my four colleagues from the Defenders of Human Rights Center arrived. Since the authorities closed our office in December 2008, we were still holding our weekly meetings at my law office. Our caseload defending arrested activists and journalists had doubled in the past year, as the state intensified its crackdown on its critics. Despite the arrests of a number of my colleagues and increasing harassment, we were persisting with our work, and all of us hoped that this election would bring a president into office who would tolerate our activities.
That evening we were meant to be working on a report about underage executions, one of the gravest flaws in the country’s justice system. Though the report was important, everyone was caught up in the excitement of the election. Around the conference table, none of us could concentrate; we just wanted to discuss the presidential election.
The outcome mattered dearly to all of us. If Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was elected for a second term, the country would slide even more deeply into repression. Ahmadinejad would certainly not allow the center’s office to reopen, and there would be more censorship, more arrests of activists, a more suffocating political climate than what we were already struggling to cope with. But if one of his opponents, either Mir Hossein Mousavi, the candidate of the young people who had stopped my taxi, or Mehdi Karroubi, the moderate cleric, won, there would be a decent chance of the atmosphere becoming more relaxed. Newspapers could again offer a platform for debate, and all the marginalized reformists who had been pushed out of public life could edge their way back into politics. I was not anticipating a freewheeling democracy, just a return to the competitive politics and lively press that had predated Ahmadinejad. Most important, I hoped we could resume our human rights work more freely.