Until We Are Free

by Shirin Ebadi

  We gave up discussing the report and talked about how our various neighborhoods had come alive in anticipation of the vote. “In my apartment block, there were young people up until three in the morning shouting, ‘Ahmadi, bye-bye! Ahmadi, bye-bye!’ ” said Narges Mohammadi.

  Others in the group recounted similar stories from across the city. One of the lawyers said that a group of young people had stopped her on a street corner and invited her to join a political discussion about how to end Iran’s international isolation. Another said she’d been struck by how respectful everyone was during these heated discussions, in bakeries, in traffic, at newspaper kiosks. After discussing all that we had seen around the city, we felt that the momentum was clearly against Ahmadinejad and there was little chance that he would be reelected. Virtually everywhere in Tehran, from the working-class districts at the city’s outskirts to the middle-class areas of the center and the north, Iranians were visibly shifting toward the progressive candidates. We had worked for so long now without any prospect of change, and this new, delicate hope made our efforts seem more urgent than ever.

  Suddenly Narges clapped her hands and yelled, “Why are we wasting time? This report is supposed be published in a week!”

  Everyone went quiet, and we bent our heads down, sipped tea, and began to work. It took us a couple of hours to finish, and we agreed to meet again the next week, upon my return from a short trip to Majorca, where I was heading that evening to deliver a speech on freedom of expression. My colleagues said goodbye and headed off into the night. I washed the teacups, tidied the office, and went home upstairs.

  Javad was sitting on the couch watching television, waiting for me. “What took you so long? I was hoping you’d get back a bit earlier before you have to leave again.”

  He was right. Since our younger daughter, Nargess, had moved abroad two years earlier for graduate study, I’d been working longer hours, and his complaints, though rare, were fair. I sank down beside him on the couch and leaned lightly against his shoulder. “I’m sorry—we got caught up talking about the election. But this is my last trip before the summer, and then we’ll have three months to ourselves. With Nargess, too.” This summer, our daughter would be coming home from The Hague, where she was apprenticing after having finished her master’s in Canada, and I was looking forward to the break. We would go to our orchard cottage in the countryside just beyond Tehran, invite our relatives to visit, and eat our lunches outside, in the sun.

  I started washing some lettuce for a salad, then set the table for dinner. We were eating when my cousin from Germany phoned to say he would be arriving in Tehran in a couple of days. I invited him to spend time with us at the orchard. I thought about asking my brother and sister as well, and the idea of this family gathering cheered me up as I packed my bags for the airport. I was shoving some clothes into my carry-on bag when Javad brought me a cup of tea. “Just stop for a minute and relax before you leave.”

  At that moment I loved my husband as much as anytime in our nearly thirty-four-year marriage. He was perpetually worried about my health, chiding me to eat less rice and to get more exercise. He paid attention out of concern, but he never nagged, like a true partner. He had been this way from the very beginning: in the early years of my judgeship, he never expected me to entertain or make my own jam, like a good Iranian housewife, and in the following years, he took care of the girls when I had to travel abroad for work.

  The doorbell rang. It was the driver who would be taking me to the airport for the overnight flight. I picked up my bag and scanned the room, in case I was forgetting something. By the front door Javad stood waiting for me, as he always did, holding my mother’s Koran. He smiled gently and held it high, so that I could pass under it, as is Iranian custom, so that it would protect and safeguard me during my trip. I passed under the holy book three times, bent my head down to kiss its cover, and then turned to hug Javad.

  “Come back quickly,” he said, squeezing my arm. I walked downstairs to the waiting taxi, still feeling the warmth of his hand on my back. Little did I know that I would never see my home, or my country, again.

  It was really only my body that arrived in Majorca; my head was back in Tehran. The moment I entered my hotel room, I switched on my computer. The news sites were reporting a massive turnout at polling stations. Only significant turnout could defeat Ahmadinejad and his fundamentalist allies.

  The next day I was sitting in a café on a cobblestoned alley in the old town of Palma with my Persian-Spanish interpreter, Rima, and some other organizers. Rima checked her phone and then shouted happily, “Mousavi has won!” But in the time it took to explain to those with us what had happened, and accept their congratulations, another email arrived.

  Rima read from it dully: “Ahmadinejad has won in the first round, with a sweep of twenty-four million votes.”

  I looked quickly at my watch, carefully calculating the time difference. How was it that the votes had been counted so quickly? And twenty-four million, such an enormous margin? Where had his supporters been during those final days? What of the votes of all the young people who had thronged the city? I felt a leadenness come over me, as the implication of this—that the center would be closed for at least another four years—sank in. I apologized to the group in the café and returned to my laptop at the hotel, where I spent the next several hours. Karroubi and Mousavi were objecting to the vote, alleging fraud. The results had Karroubi at only 300,000 votes, a number he charged was less than the total number in his political party and campaign headquarters. Mousavi leveled his own objections. There was talk of tampered boxes, of the unseemly haste in which the vote had been announced, the astonishing returns that showed that each reformist candidate had failed to carry even his own hometown—unthinkable. Words like “stolen” were now being used, and shocked crowds were gathering. I spent the whole evening on the phone, talking to relatives, to colleagues.

  The next day, when I woke up, I learned that the supreme leader had sent a message of congratulations to Ahmadinejad; this sealed everything. It meant that the objections of the moderates would be ignored. Crowds gathered outside the Interior Ministry to again protest the result; officials came out and told them they would investigate. But it was clear that as far as the regime was concerned, the vote was finished; now Iranians would just have to accept the result.

  But this time they refused. On the night of June 13, around midnight, the authorities began arresting people, among them the most distinguished politicians of the land. They even arrested Dr. Ebrahim Yazdi, the leader of the Freedom Movement, who was seventy-eight years old and in the hospital, attached to IVs for cancer treatment. They wheeled him away in his hospital bed and took him to prison.

  That same night, close to three o’clock, a band of Ahmadinejad’s supporters, accompanied by the police, attacked a University of Tehran student dormitory. They shot five students dead and left at least one hundred wounded.

  On June 15, millions of Iranians flooded the streets of Tehran in the biggest demonstration since the 1979 Islamic Revolution. They marched peacefully and largely in silence, holding up placards that read, “Where is my vote?” and “Our silence is loud with what we cannot say.” They carried a green banner hundreds of yards long, a sign of their support for Mousavi, who himself came out to greet the crowds. He promised to do something, to safeguard their votes. The immense crowds around the city were peaceful, but in two incidents authorities fired on protesters. At an arms depot, they shot at least two young people. When the injured were taken to the hospital, the authorities showed up and carted them off to prison. The Ministry of Culture and Islamic Guidance ordered all foreign journalists to leave Iran; the authorities arrested a number of Iranian journalists and sent messages to others, saying that snipers were waiting to open fire on them, should they leave their homes.

  My hotel room in Majorca, with its brightly patterned blue bedspread and lemon walls, felt like a cage. A few of my colleagues, I learned, had been
arrested; others had received threats and had gone into hiding. At some point, the state had slowed down the Internet connection. With fewer and fewer emails coming through, I relied on the phone.

  “This is a coup. Don’t come back to Tehran right now,” said one colleague I managed to reach. “Wait at least a month.”

  Both Javad and my brother, whom I was talking to regularly, were against my returning.

  “They’ll arrest you at the airport,” Javad said. “It’s mayhem here. It’s too dangerous.”

  I wasn’t really frightened of going to prison. I knew that it would be politically too costly for the state to keep a Nobel laureate imprisoned for too long and I’d be released after a spell. But the intelligence agents were far too clever for that. They would arrange, as they had done in the past, for a mob to attack my house, and I would be killed in the melee.

  I sat on the bed, looking out at the sea, a pale blue-gray in the twilight, and thought of a case file I had studied all those years ago. Back in 1999, when I was representing the family of a dissident couple who had been murdered by rogue intelligence agents, I had come across the death squad’s assassination list in the state’s files. The couple whose family I represented had been stabbed to death in their home in November 1998; in the three weeks following their death, three dissident writers turned up dead in the outskirts of Tehran, all apparently strangled. Many felt there had to be a connection between these murders, but no one imagined it would be something as coldly systematic as a simple hit list, drawn up by state agents. Most of the writers and intellectuals who appeared on the list had already been killed, but a few names remained. Mine was one of them. The Ministry of Intelligence had formally approved my killing. The authorities had not been able to carry it out then, because the reformists began revealing the state’s involvement with the death squads. But what about now, when the state was more shaken than at any moment in its history?

  All these thoughts filled my head, many of them inconclusive and contradictory. On the one hand, I thought, if the Islamic Republic is praying for my death, why should I help it along? But on the other hand, I wanted to be in Iran, among my family and colleagues. I wanted to share their fate and destiny. I packed my bag as if in a trance, unsure where it would end up.

  I boarded the plane hesitantly, flying to Madrid, then to Amsterdam. There I had a three-hour layover, which I spent roaming the halls of the terminal, still unsure what to do. I stood by the departure gate, staring at the word “Tehran” on the board. And I looked with envy at all those who would fly without fear of the other side. For a while I joined the line, and then, at the last moment, I pulled back. Perhaps that was the most fateful decision of my life. I often wonder what might have gone differently, had I stepped onto that flight. I might have ended up under house arrest, like the Green Movement opposition leaders. Or perhaps I could have lent my voice to the struggle, and somehow ensured that the world kept watching.

  I walked out of the departures hall and called my daughter Nargess.

  “Nargess jan, I’m coming over,” I said. And then I found a train and went to my daughter.

  Those early days of the demonstrations kept the world transfixed, and the images and scenes of a Middle Eastern nation rising up for freedom dominated the international news. I imagined that the protests would force Supreme Leader Khamenei to back down, to admit fraud and hold new elections. Mousavi had even agreed not to run personally, simply to open a way for Ahmadinejad to step down. But as Nargess and I watched from her flat by the river, it was clear that not only was the regime unprepared to back down, but that it intended to crush the protests.

  In those tense days of late June, the state sent its full armory of police officers, security agents, and paramilitaries into the streets. They beat matrons who had been protesting peacefully; they opened fire on the unarmed crowds, composed of the young and the old, the working class and the middle class. On one street a militiaman shot a young woman called Neda Agha-Soltan, whose body crumpled in the road. People in the street managed to detain the militiaman who killed her. They took his ID card off him, to keep as evidence that he worked for the state. A passerby filmed the whole incident and posted it online; the killing of Neda went viral, and her frozen face became iconic of the brutality of that time.

  By this point, everyone knew that those who were injured and went to the hospital were often arrested by the police in the emergency room. And so the injured went home, waiting to be called on and treated by doctors they knew.

  Throughout, the protesting people of Iran did not resort to retaliatory violence. They knew that the slightest hint of violence toward the state would lead the regime to respond furiously, going on a killing and execution spree, as it had done in the early days of the revolution when it had been challenged by people.

  And so they stayed stubbornly in the streets, chanting, “We don’t want an Islamic state!” and “Death to the dictator!”

  As tensions mounted and the depth of the challenge posed to the regime became more evident, many Iranians began to complain that the United States was not doing enough to support the protesters. “Why doesn’t Obama say something?” people asked; they felt his response had been tepid and disappointing. Some imagined that forceful words might make a difference on the ground; some seemed to think they would carry symbolic value that would have its own importance. But I thought President Obama’s cautiously worded statements were precisely the right approach. What could he have done, in the end? Was he going to send ground troops to defend the protesters? Of course not. Was he going to make weekly statements condemning the supreme leader and championing the opposition? This would have been a destructive course to take. It would have emboldened the establishment figures and led them to call the opposition American stooges, and it would have risked creating a rift between the opposition leaders and the Iranian people. The president’s subtle yet pointed remarks, I felt, reflected a sophisticated understanding of the internal dynamic inside Iran. In the end, those who were crushing the protesters weren’t able to exploit America’s response to intensify their crackdown.

  —

  I spoke regularly to the world media throughout this tumult. I kept in close touch with friends and colleagues in Tehran, and in endless interviews and appearances I relayed what was happening. Soon the authorities began regularly summoning two of my colleagues for interrogations. Through them, the government sent a message to me: “Tell Ebadi that if she stays neutral about this, we’ll leave her alone. After things settle down, we’ll even let her open the center back up. But the condition is that she stay silent.”

  I sent this message back: “I haven’t supported any particular politician in this fight. What I support is the people, and their rights as citizens. Of course I cannot stay silent in the face of these ongoing killings and brutality. The center has value as a sanctuary. If I am to be silent and not defend my people, why would I need an office?”

  The security officials’ proposition had conveyed an important point: they didn’t want me to speak up about the abuses that were going on. They found this threatening and wanted my silence. Why should I fulfill their wish? Especially since every day, more horrifying news came out of Iran.

  —

  Many of the arrested protesters were taken to a makeshift detention center called Kahrizak, which in the Iranian imagination is now a name that haunts, like Abu Ghraib. It was a large prefabricated warehouse divided into many small rooms, and the authorities packed prisoners into these spaces, often denying them access to a toilet. Torture, here, was systematic and brutal. The guards sodomized male prisoners with bottles and batons and raped the women. Several detainees died under these circumstances, including the son of a high-ranking official who happened to be an Ahmadinejad supporter. It was when this boy was killed that the political establishment started to pay attention. When the victims had been only gheir-khodi, outsiders with no affiliation to the state, the regime had been unmoved.

  By the end of Ju
ly 2009, Iranians finally retreated from the streets. As the reports emerged of the rapes and abuse at Kahrizak, people came to understand exactly the price they would pay for challenging the regime. The majority decided that they were not willing to give their lives or have them broken, but their grievances festered. Each evening across the city, people started taking to the rooftops of their buildings and crying “Allaho akbar” into the night. To shout “God is great” from your rooftop in an Islamic country should not, the thinking went, be a punishable offense; but in this collective action, in hearing the echoes reverberate across the streets and throughout neighborhoods, people signaled to one another, and to the state, that they had not forgotten. The slogan “Death to the dictator” was etched in their hearts.

  Ahmadinejad, intoxicated with his victory, called his opponents khas o khashak, nothing but “dust and dirt.” In the short term, he could easily claim success; as president, he’d crushed the widest and most significant popular uprising Iran had witnessed since the Islamic Revolution. Khamenei declared his unstinting support for Ahmadinejad, and the Revolutionary Guards, who had handled the repression and bolstered the system, acquired even more power than before. The president appointed a number of guardsmen to cabinet positions, and the Revolutionary Guards’ economic clout, already considerable, expanded even further. But the moral victory belonged to the protesters, and mainstream public sentiment shifted palpably from indifference toward the regime to real revulsion. The foremost classical musician of Iran, Mohammad Reza Shajarian, sided openly with the “dust and dirt” and asked state television to stop airing his music; a musician of the younger generation wrote a song called “Khas o Khashak” that quickly went viral.

  By that point, I was speaking to Javad every night on the phone. I either called when I knew he would be home from work or he called Nargess’s flat himself. One night he told me that a court summons had arrived for me.