by Shirin Ebadi
The box contained virtually everything of importance that we had accumulated during our thirty-four-year marriage. It had deeds and documents, the gold coins my daughter Negar had received at her wedding, some family jewelry.
“We unlocked the safe-deposit box and returned the Nobel medal,” Mahmudi said, laughing. “Now we have it on film and will send it to any international figure who opens his mouth to object. So your wife can stop spreading lies about this government, pretending we’ve taken away her prize.”
Javad was furious. “This safe-deposit box is in my name. Mine. And it holds my assets, which haven’t been confiscated. How do my family documents, or my marriage certificate, have anything to do with state security?”
“I’m the one who makes that call.”
Mahmudi and his crew turned and walked out, taking the second key with them. Javad felt faint; his blood pressure had dropped. The bank manager led him to his office, where he offered Javad some sugar water.
As they sat in the office together, the bank manager chided him.
“Why are you still here? Don’t you see there’s no law, just bullying everywhere? You should leave. Forget everything in the safe. Just go!”
“It’s not actually my choice. My passport has been confiscated, and I’m banned from leaving. I’m stuck because I married a woman who believes in human rights and isn’t prepared to back down. And in the eyes of those intelligence agents, there’s no greater sin. There’s nothing for me to do. Neither she nor they are willing to compromise.”
When Javad recounted all of this to me, he sounded truly tired and fed up. His daily life now consisted of doing small renovations on our apartment and at the orchard house, hiking and swimming with friends, and having dinner with his sisters. We never spoke of my returning to Tehran, as even despite the Nobel Prize, it was almost certain I would be immediately arrested. But not discussing any prospect of return also felt like a passive acknowledgment that we would probably never be together again.
For Javad, the hounding and the harassment were just building, it seemed, after his terrible ordeal, instead of letting up. He had even tried to take some steps himself, going to see a relative who had formerly been deputy speaker of the parliament, to lodge a complaint against Mahmudi and all he had done. But nothing this relative did had any traction at all. In the Islamic Republic, everything could be forgiven in the name of safeguarding “security.” Of course, “security” had now become a hollow word, just a euphemism for the system’s absolute political power and its crushing of all criticism.
—
At eleven-thirty on a cold night that December, just a few days after Christmas, Mahmudi and his agents rapped at the door of my sister Nooshin’s house in Tehran. She and her husband had just brushed their teeth and were getting ready for bed.
“We’ve come to ask Khanoum Ebadi a few questions,” one of them said.
“Do you have a warrant?” her husband asked. The late hour made him even more nervous.
They presented a sheet of paper signed by the Tehran chief prosecutor, authorizing them to interrogate whomever they needed to, to search wherever was necessary, and to make arrests as appropriate.
“But the warrant doesn’t mention anyone’s name,” Nooshin said, alarmed.
“Exactly—that means we can arrest anyone, including you,” Mahmudi said, grinning.
His men started going through the house, pulling open the cutlery drawer in the kitchen, rifling through the pantry. The laptops they found went straight into their duffel bags. And then Mahmudi told Nooshin that she needed to come with him to the “ministry” for interrogation.
“It’ll only take a couple hours,” he said. “You can come home after. We’ll just go through the laptops while we’re talking, and if we need you again, we’ll summon you.”
My sister Nooshin is a dentist with two sons. Between her practice, some research work, and taking care of her family, she really doesn’t have time to be doing anything politically subversive. And that night, as the clock edged past midnight, she was scared to go with those men. What legitimate government building would be open at that hour? But in the end, she went, because she knew that resisting would be useless; they would just force her anyway. She pulled on her manteau and head scarf, grabbed her handbag.
“Wait—I’m not letting you go alone,” said her husband.
“You can come along, but you can’t ride with us. It’s illegal. You can follow in your own car,” said Mahmudi.
But the moment the car carrying Nooshin set off, another car driven by Mahmudi’s men blocked her husband’s car. He roamed the city until nearly dawn, going from one police station to the next, rousing the on-duty clerk at the Tehran magistrate’s court, but found no trace of the intelligence agents or his wife.
When I heard what had happened, my anger surged, and I charged out of the apartment in London to go for a walk. I couldn’t sit still, knowing they had arrested the only sister I had left, the person I loved most dearly in the world after my husband and children; it tormented me to know that she was sitting in a cell in Evin Prison because of me. I walked for a very long time, until my feet ached and I was out of breath. He was going after me again, Mahmudi. He was going after her only to get to me, just as he had done with Javad.
They kept her for twenty-one days. I made extra dua every single day of her detention, whispering at the end, “Please, God, let them release my sister.” Mahmudi didn’t beat her, but his agents verbally abused her for hours on end during interrogation. They insulted her, they insulted me, they called me a lackey for America and berated me for my treason.
“Tell us everything you know about her,” they said. “How can she afford to live abroad? Where does she get her money from? Why did she win the Nobel Prize? Who is she in contact with regularly?”
And each time, Nooshin said, “She’s my sister; I’m not her colleague. I don’t know the kinds of things you want from me.”
After two weeks, she started having heart palpitations and chest pains. She was permitted no visits with her husband, with her sons. It was strict solitary confinement for Nooshin, as it had been for me. The prison doctor gave her some medications, but her condition only worsened. In the end, fearing that she might die on them, creating an even greater headache, they let her go.
While she was in prison, I worked feverishly. With every report and press release and interview, I was communicating with Mahmudi: You can’t touch me. Nothing you do will affect me and what I do.
When she was released, I called her and said, “Nooshie, if I take one step back, they’ll think they’ve found my weak point. It’ll just get worse for you. I know it’s so hard, but we have to hold them back. If they see it has no effect on me, they’ll eventually stop. But if they think they can use you against me, they’ll do it forever.”
She said she understood. I could tell from the tone of her voice that she did. When I heard myself saying such things, I recognized how stark and stubborn it sounded. But I was familiar with Mahmudi’s mind, his tactics; I had come to know them inside out. When you are up against such people long enough, you come to think the way they do. After I had seen what they did to Javad, I’d finally understood them properly. They would grab anyone I loved and drag them to the edge of the most treacherous cliff. They would dangle them there, baiting me. And when I wouldn’t be drawn in, they would eventually loosen their hold and let go. It is a painful calculation, but it is better to be dragged and let go than kept dangling at the edge forever. Had I budged even a bit, I have no doubt that’s what they would have done with Nooshin and Javad, and perhaps other family members as well. I had seen it happen with others. The intelligence apparatus of a state like the Islamic Republic knows no gray area. You’re either corruptible and scared or you’re not.
“We want you to report back on every conversation you have with your sister,” Mahmudi’s boss told Nooshin before he released her. “Do you get it?”
“But we just talk about fami
ly—we never discuss her work. How useful is family news for you?”
“We’ll see about that. We’ll pay close attention and see how honest you are. Because, you know, we know everything about Shirin. Don’t think that we have to listen to her phone.” He laughed at that. “Tapping phones is passé; we’re way beyond that. We have someone sitting right next to her to report back.”
It was another message, intended to make me suspicious of everyone I worked with, to plant in my mind a tiny seed of doubt.
“You’ll probably talk to her tonight,” he went on. “Tell her that it’s not too late—”
Nooshin cut him off angrily: “I’ve said it a thousand times: Shirin doesn’t listen to anyone! Stop sending messages through me—it’s useless.”
For the next two years they kept her in limbo, not setting a trial date but preventing her from traveling abroad and calling her back in for more questioning. Finally, after two years, her case went to trial. Mahmudi had told her that once the court was convened, she would probably get six months in prison.
The day of her trial, Nooshin walked into the court building with her lawyer, her stomach gurgling with nerves. At the entrance, she spotted one of her dental students and was gladdened to see a familiar face.
“But what are you doing here? Do you have a court case, too?” Nooshin asked, with some concern.
“God forbid I’d have a court case!” the girl laughed. “I was visiting my father—he’s a judge at the revolutionary court. I’m heading to class now.”
Nooshin’s lawyer interrupted to ask what branch the girl’s father presided over, and it turned out to be the same as the one handling Nooshin’s case. They quickly briefed her about Nooshin’s situation and asked her to put in a good word through her father. The young student, who knew she needed a passing mark from Nooshin at the end of the academic year, said she’d happily oblige.
Nooshin walked out of the court that day acquitted, exonerated from “conspiracy against national security through cooperation with Shirin Ebadi” and removed from the list of those barred from leaving the country. Despite the two-year-long machinations of one of the country’s top spymasters, my sister evaded a prison term because she happened to teach dentistry and ran into one of her students in the courthouse lobby.
Colleagues in Tehran told me that Mahmudi was asking about my address in London; my nemesis wanted to know how I could afford to live in such an expensive city. How obsessed they were with money, I thought one gray afternoon in early 2010 as I boarded a bus headed toward Hyde Park. The bus rolled past the ornate stone buildings of Park Lane, the sky low and heavy with gray clouds. I believed they knew that I had no great sums of money hidden anywhere, that I did not receive sizable monthly transfers into my bank account from some shadowy foreign power. I rode the bus most of the time, like any other Londoner who had to be conscious of her spending. I knew the bus system so well that I often gave directions to confused tourists who asked for help.
My meeting that morning was at the Dorchester Hotel, and it took me several minutes of walking around that end of Hyde Park before I found the place. It had yellow-and-white-striped awnings, and luxury cars lined the driveway, many of them with Persian Gulf license plates. A Bentley stopped near the glass doors, spilling out Arab women in full-length black abayas and a Filipino servant trailing behind holding shopping bags. The hotel had been suggested as a meeting place by an emissary of the French telecommunications company Eutelsat.
Eutelsat and I had been engaged in fraught discussions for some months. My involvement with the firm stemmed from my efforts to continue to pressure the Iranian government on human rights from the outside. In the aftermath of the 2009 uprising, Iranians had begun turning to satellite TV networks for their news, more so than ever before. State television and radio had carried little coverage of the nationwide protest movement, and what it did broadcast was highly partisan and distorted. Iranians’ anger grew such that they began chanting against the state broadcaster on the streets during protests. Iranians had always watched networks like BBC Persian or Voice of America’s Persian service, but the viewership figures for both networks had jumped, angering the Iranian regime and prompting it to scramble the networks’ satellite signals more aggressively than in the past. The satellite that broadcast these two networks was Hot Bird, and virtually all of the estimated 70 percent of Iranians (by the regime’s own figures) who had satellite TV at home connected to this particular satellite, which was owned and operated by Eutelsat.
As the Iranian authorities stepped up their scrambling efforts, not only did they knock BBC Persian and VOA Persian off the air, but they also interfered with the signals of neighboring networks that also broadcast on Hot Bird. These were other networks, other channels in other languages that had nothing to do with Iran, and the heads of those networks eventually complained to Eutelsat about the interference with their broadcasts. Eutelsat investigated, then sent a couple of letters requesting that Iran stop scrambling the Hot Bird satellite—which, of course, Iran ignored. The Iranian government, for its part, was also a paying client of Eutelsat, because a number of Iranian state networks were also broadcast on Hot Bird; thus Iran, as a customer of Eutelsat, was well placed to ignore its warnings.
Eutelsat ended up taking the easy way out. It took VOA Persian and BBC Persian off Hot Bird and installed them both on a peripheral satellite. This way, it protected the signals of its other customers and avoided a confrontation with the Iranian government. But for Iranians, this was a disaster, because now the state could jam this other satellite without anyone else complaining. Imagine one of the very last closed societies on earth (apart from North Korea and China, where people’s access to outside news and information is heavily restricted) suddenly losing its main connection to the world overnight. The calls started coming from Tehran immediately. One colleague rang me at one in the morning, Tehran time.
“Why are you calling me at this hour?” I asked, surprised.
“Because I usually stay up late watching the news, and now I have nothing to watch,” she said. “Instead of punishing the government, they’ve punished us.”
It was true. By knocking the Persian news networks off Hot Bird, Eutelsat—a French company operating in the European Union, which avowed such commitment to universal human rights—was essentially creating the perfect state of affairs for the authoritarian government of Iran. So I pursued the path I’ve come to call “name and shame”; I started talking to the media about how unethical Eutelsat’s actions had been, and how regretful it was that nearly fifty million Iranians had lost access to objective, freer news.
The man I was meeting at the Dorchester, from Eutelsat, had apparently come to offer me an explanation. As we sat in the restaurant, which was gleaming with brass and padded with Persian carpets, and drank tea from delicate filigreed cups, it occurred to me that a company run by employees accustomed to such places might prize profit margins above all else. But I waited to hear him out.
Our meeting, however, was short and not especially productive. The Eutelsat representative told me that his firm had leased Hot Bird to another firm and that this firm had been the one that had complained about the interference issues. It sounded like an attempt to justify what was becoming an increasingly noticed and unpopular decision.
“The final responsibility rests with you,” I said.
I left the meeting that day feeling frustrated. As I walked through the Dorchester’s lobby, lined with palms and urns of roses and scented warm and sweet as a patisserie, I could not decide where to go next. For a moment, I hesitated at the curb. A gunned motorcycle raced up behind me, and I jumped back from the street in fright. For years, in Tehran, my ears had been primed for the sound of a motorbike; the state’s favorite mode of killing critics and dissidents was sending an assassin on a bike. A shot or a plunged knife, the roar of the engine, and the target would be instantly slain, with witnesses often not even realizing what had happened. I inhaled deeply and told myse
lf, Shirin, you’re not in Iran anymore.
I was careful of my security in London. Nargess and I had moved into an apartment building with a concierge and multiple gates, a place where one simply could not get through without codes and some level of permission. I had never felt especially endangered otherwise, but habits stay in our bodies, as phantom memories in our muscles. Although my pulse still pounded, I smiled at the idea that part of me thought it was back in Iran.
Needing to go across town to an Iranian supermarket for some groceries, I decided to walk part of the way, to clear my head. I returned to London frequently enough that I was starting to feel at home in the city—not properly at home, because I still traveled frequently and spent half my time in the States, but at home in terms of growing familiarity. I knew the patterns of the waning winter light, and I appreciated the friendliness of Londoners, so many of whom were themselves foreigners from some far-off place.
It occurred to me as I was walking through the park that I could go see Bernard Kouchner, the French foreign minister, who had also helped found Doctors Without Borders. I had met him several times, and he had been very friendly. He had always referred to me as a colleague—his organization had also won the Nobel Peace Prize—and I felt he might understand the gravity of the situation with Eutelsat. And, since the French government was a major shareholder in the company, he might be in a position to exert some influence.
The following week, Kouchner invited me to meet him in Paris. We sat together in the vaulted interior of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs building, and he listened patiently. “The Iranian government needs to be pressured not to scramble satellite signals,” I said. “They should be punished, not the BBC.”
Kouchner was sympathetic, and he raised the issue at the level of the European Union, which soon released a statement condemning Iran’s scrambling efforts. But that was not the result I wanted. I didn’t want an E.U. statement; I wanted the Islamic Republic penalized.