by Shirin Ebadi
So I kept on. Wherever I went, meeting with various officials, with Desmond Tutu, at the United Nations, I brought up this issue, of Iranians’ right to free access to information and the astonishing case of the European firm that had effectively capitulated to the Iranian government. Eventually, public sentiment around Eutelsat’s actions gained traction, and the firm reinstated BBC Persian and VOA Persian on Hot Bird, effectively plugging Iran back in.
The Islamic Republic learned a lesson. It learned that global public opinion could be mobilized and mounted to apply pressure to its behaviors on the world stage. It learned that it couldn’t freely target global satellites hovering in the sky to enact its censorship. And I suppose it learned, dangerously enough for me, that I could effectively work for and demand accountability for Iranians’ rights even from exile.
But, of course, the Islamic Republic, even when chastened, finds new ways to renew its purpose, cutting its citizens off from outside information. When it realized it could not hold up an iron curtain, shielding Iran from satellite signals, it installed mobile stations throughout the country’s cities that did the same thing, only at the ground level. Instead of targeting the satellite waves as they bore down from the sky, these stations intercepted the waves just above Iranians’ houses.
Iranians’ concerns about the health impact of this interference over the city grew by the day. Newspapers published anxious pieces, and senior officials, including a vice president and the director of the Department of the Environment, spoke publicly about the medical risks of terrestrial jamming. This soon became a key issue of public debate and concern, the fact that the state was jeopardizing Iranians’ health in order to censor what they could watch on television. This, too, proved that my work outside the country could still have a great impact on the government and what people inside the country were thinking and talking about.
—
In the months that had passed since Javad’s ordeal, we had stayed in regular touch but had studiously avoided talking about our future. It seemed almost beside the point to discuss our marriage when we were physically separated, and my main concern throughout this period was to ensure that we were all as safe as possible. I knew that the Iranian authorities and Mahmudi were pressuring Javad intensely to disclose information about our life, and I worried that they would use whatever they might somehow glean against us. So while many of our conversations revolved around security, by February 2010, Javad wanted desperately to see me and the girls.
I didn’t know what would become of our family, fragmented in this way, living apart by force, and I didn’t know what would become of my marriage. To begin to think about this, we had to at least talk with each other face-to-face. But Javad’s passport was still with Mahmudi. He went to see the authorities to ask for it back, along with our property deeds and birth certificates. They put him off for a month, and then, one afternoon, Javad called me in high spirits.
“I’m ready to book my flights,” he said, sounding more like himself than he had in months.
“Did they give everything back?” I asked, suspicious.
“They still have the deeds, but at least I have my passport. I can fly as soon as we make plans.”
The hard-line press, as though somehow privy to our family discussions, started running tabloid-style pieces about us. We were written about as “Shirin” and “Javad”—a debasing familiarity unheard of in Iranian newspapers. They wrote that I was refusing to allow Javad to come to Britain (as though this was in my power!) and that we were feuding. The sources for this drivel were anonymous, but the reports were attributed to Javad’s family.
I ignored it all and focused on putting the dark days of the past year behind us. We planned for Javad to come to London, and then we would spend time with Negar. Javad wanted to meet with some old school friends in the States and Canada, to consult with them about finding working outside Iran.
He bought his Iran Air ticket for the following Wednesday. Even after everything, he still insisted on flying Iran Air, which he called “our” airline, by which he meant Iran’s. I said nothing, but I was quietly pleased that so much of him hadn’t changed, despite his ordeal—he was still quietly and proudly nationalistic, determined to fly the national carrier even when most Iranians who could afford it now traveled only on European airlines.
Two days before his flight, quite late at night in Tehran, he called me.
“I’m worried about going through passport control. What if they arrest me after I’ve gone through? The records will show that I’ve left the country, but I’ll be nowhere. I’ll have disappeared. Or what if they take my passport away at the airport?”
I could imagine him sitting on our plaid couch, a cup of tea growing cold beside him, the day’s newspapers scattered on the table. In a marriage, there is so much physical closeness one takes for granted until it is gone: a hand rested on a shoulder, leaning over to reach for glasses on a side table. Now we had only these phone calls.
“There’s one thing you can do. It won’t solve everything, but you should do it.”
I explained that he could go to the passport office and check whether his name was on the list of those individuals barred from leaving the country. There was a second list as well, held by the security forces at the airport, and this list snared those who made it past the first passport check. Javad wouldn’t be able to find out about the second list, but he could at least check if he was on the first. Through interrogations and various channels, many politicians and civic and human rights activists had learned that they were on the second list; thus they stayed away from the airports, because to attempt to travel would lead to the confiscation of their passport and a trip to Evin Prison. Mohammad Khatami, the former president, was on that list, as was Simin Behbahani, a friend of mine and the nation’s foremost poet, known as the “lioness of Iran.”
“I’ll try it,” he said glumly.
I put the phone down and paced the small flat until Nargess came home, her arms full of groceries.
“I’m cooking for Dad,” she said, pulling out a carton of strawberries and the white cheese he liked. Nargess was enthusiastic about cooking, and since moving to London, she had devoted a great deal of effort to learning how to prepare Iranian desserts and stews. Her cooking had become impressive, and she was eager to share her new skills with her father. I smiled and changed the subject, helping her put everything away.
The next morning, Javad went to the passport office. He handed his passport to a young policeman and asked for it to be checked against the foreign travel ban list. The young man disappeared, but within seconds he returned, a frown on his face.
“We don’t deal with forged passports here.” He tossed the passport across the counter toward Javad.
“Forged! This is my own passport. I’ve traveled on it many times.”
“Well, if you travel on this, you’re going to get arrested.”
Javad stood there in shock. The policeman picked up a magnifying glass and flipped the passport open.
“See?” He hovered the lens over the main page and showed Javad how his surname had been erased and rewritten. The same thing had been done with his British visa.
Javad leaned his head into his hands. “What am I supposed to do now?”
“Apply for a new one. But until then, don’t use this one.”
Javad called me that night to fill me in. He seemed bewildered by what was happening.
“Don’t you see, Javad?” I said. “They tampered with your passport while you were in prison. They were probably hoping you’d travel on it without noticing; they would let you through the airport there, and then at Heathrow you’d have been arrested for traveling on a forged passport.”
He didn’t say anything, so I continued:
“That would have been ideal for them. They let you get arrested by the British border police. Then they haven’t done anything to you themselves, but both of us look terrible when the news gets out that you were arrested in Lon
don for traveling into the U.K. on forged documents.”
“I don’t think you’re right,” Javad said. “You’re being too cynical. If that was their plan, why would the policeman at the passport office have told me himself that it was forged?”
“Because that policeman isn’t an intelligence agent. He had no idea what they were up to; he just looked at a passport you handed him. And Mahmudi probably didn’t think you’d go to the passport office, so it didn’t occur to him to keep the passport police in the loop.”
“Maybe you’re right. Though I don’t know—it sounds so far-fetched.” Javad sounded tired and hesitant, but he agreed to cancel his trip.
A few days later, he went to see Mahmudi and demanded to know why his passport had been returned to him doctored. Mahmudi put his feet up on the table and peered at Javad, not in the least chagrined.
“What, did you think we were just going to do nothing? While Ebadi travels around the world criticizing President Ahmadinejad, who has the blessing of our beloved leader? Should we just sit here idly and let it go? You got lucky this time. But who knows what’ll happen next time. Tell your wife to cut it out; tell her to sit down and just be quiet. Tell her to come back to Iran, to return to her home and her normal life. Because if she keeps it up…”
At least that made it clear to Javad that the forgery had been Mahmudi’s handiwork. So Javad applied for a new passport on the grounds that he had lost his old one. But when the new application went into the security system to be vetted—as is standard procedure in Iran—the Ministry of Intelligence sent word that because of security concerns, Javad Tavassolian was not permitted to leave the country.
This time, Javad channeled his fury through his pen. He wrote a scathing letter to the intelligence ministry, formally objecting to the ban on his travel. He asked, “Can you please explain to me what damage I, a seventy-year-old engineer who has spent my entire lifetime building my country, can pose to national security through a short trip to visit my family?”
A week later, Mahmudi summoned him. By now, the trek from our neighborhood to Mahmudi’s office was becoming a regular journey for Javad. From behind his desk, Mahmudi waved the letter in the air, then read a passage aloud in a mock whining voice. Javad put his head in his hands and stared at the cracks in the faded linoleum.
“So now you complain against me? You don’t seem to get it, do you, Mr. Tavassolian. I will only leave you alone once your wife becomes quiet. Do you think I’m dense? You think I don’t know why you want to go abroad? You’ll land and start giving interviews about why you publicly renounced your wife. She thinks she’s smart, but I’m smarter.”
“I would never give an interview. I just want to see my family, my wife and my daughters.”
“Forget about it,” Mahmudi snapped. “What I said stands. No foreign travel.”
Javad rose and walked out of the room, saying goodbye only to preempt Mahmudi’s rage at not being taken leave from properly. The drive home took him longer than usual; the streets were clogged with traffic, hulking cement mixers heading toward their construction projects, reminding Javad of the building projects he used to oversee, the status and respect he’d once enjoyed as a senior engineer of the teeming capital. He had lost his career too early because of me, had lost the stability of his marriage, had lost the right to see his daughters when he wanted to, or perhaps even at all.
And he knew now that the problem with Mahmudi was not going away. From that day on, Mahmudi summoned Javad twice a month for interrogation, each time posing the same questions, again and again: Where does she go? Who does she see? What did she tell you on the phone last night? We know you talked to her. And always, always: Where does she get her money?
As I traversed the capitals of Europe, working to ensure that Iranians inside the country had access to unbiased news, the siege against me continued in Tehran. One day, Javad told me that a letter had arrived from the state tax organization. It declared that the monetary award that had accompanied my Nobel Peace Prize ($1,200,000, received in 2004) was actually taxable, and that I was therefore now years in arrears and also owed years’ worth of late penalties. I sighed deeply when Javad read me the letter, because I saw the direction in which this was headed. I had settled my taxes each year, and I had received my annual license to practice law on that basis. Iranian law exempts income from awards and prizes from taxation, so there was no basis to tax the Nobel money.
A friend and colleague of mine at the Defenders of Human Rights Center, Nasrin Sotoudeh, took up the case on my behalf and went to file an objection. One visit to the tax office was enough to make clear who had concocted the charges; the tax officials told her that the herasat, or safeguarding, section was very sensitive about the case. Herasat is the term for the section of each ministry or organization across the government through which the Ministry of Intelligence exercises its influence. In other words, this case had been put together against me through orders from the intelligence ministry.
A few days after Nasrin’s meeting with the tax officials, Mahmudi turned up at her office. “I don’t want you defending Ebadi on this,” he said.
“Prizes aren’t taxable—that’s just a fact,” she said.
They sparred, and she refused to back down, promising to take the case to the Board of Settlement of Tax Disputes. Nasrin discovered a litany of problems and discrepancies in the case against me. They had backdated a tax warning to 2004 but had sloppily included the address from my building that had come into existence only after 2008, when the street had been renumbered.
When the case reached the Board of Settlement of Tax Disputes, the tax officials argued that the Nobel Prize is a “political” award and, as such, is taxable. Nasrin put up a detailed defense; she had also secured a letter from the Norwegian Nobel committee that confirmed that the prize is a social and scientific one, made for contributions to human rights. That should have settled the matter, but the board had decided—or been instructed in advance—that I was guilty.
Five months later, Nasrin went to prison. For agreeing to defend me, and for her other human rights work, she was sentenced to six years in prison. Though I tried to raise her case with the media and mention her during my talks and meetings, her arrest attracted only modest attention in the West. I wished that the international media paid more attention to how Iranians in the younger generation were being systematically bullied by the state into abandoning their work. The climate in which I had built up my practice and established myself no longer existed, and by meting out such a harsh sentence to Nasrin, the state was trying to intimidate the few remaining human rights lawyers who had not already gone abroad.
The court also barred Nasrin from practicing law or leaving the country for twenty years and found her guilty of “acting against national security” and of “propaganda against the regime.” Apart from her recent work defending my seized assets, the main focus of Nasrin’s work had been to defend Iran’s most vulnerable citizens, prisoners of conscience and minors facing the death penalty.
I had known Nasrin for almost twenty years, since before she had even finished her law degree. We worked closely together for years, but my most vivid memory of her was from an evening in 2007, when she was eight months pregnant with her second child. A number of activists were meeting at someone’s home, discussing the women’s movement, when a sharp knock came at the door. Uniformed police stormed in and began arresting the women present. One of the officers told Nasrin that they would not detain her and instructed her to go home. “I’m not going anywhere,” she said to them. “My friends who you’re taking away are my clients, and they’re going to need me.” She spent that night in a cold cell at the police station with her friends, who became instant clients, and defended them the next morning in court. She managed to secure their release that very day.
After 2009, Nasrin took on bolder cases. She represented Arash Rahmanipour, a young man who was arrested and later hanged for his alleged involvement in the Green Movement
uprising. Nasrin discovered and made known that Rahmanipour had confessed only after Iranian authorities threatened his family.
Word reached me after her arrest that officials had promised to release her swiftly if she confessed to her alleged crimes and spoke out against me and other colleagues. If she did all this, they said, she would be reunited with her family.
After hearing this, I lay awake at night in my London apartment, staring at the shadows in the room, thinking about Nasrin. I thought about her children and how small they were, and about what I might have done myself, in her position.
In the end, she refused to capitulate, even though one of the intelligence agents told her, “I’ll make sure that you stay in prison for over ten years, and that by the time you’re released your three-year-old son will have grown into a man taller than you.”
They refused to allow her to visit with her children and began summoning her husband for interrogation, threatening him with prosecution as well. But Nasrin stood firm. Some part of me had known she would. She is a slight woman, with deep brown eyes and bangs that slip over her face from under her head scarf. But she stood firm, and I worried for her, because she was inside the country, firmly within their grasp.
—
All of the lawyers who had been my colleagues at the center, my close friends and allies in our work, were now either in prison or in hiding. The state viewed them as guilty in their own right, for their own human rights work and the defense of their clients, but their ultimate guilt came from their association with me. Unable to snare me, the authorities had systematically tracked down and sentenced virtually every significant colleague I had worked with over the past decade. With Nasrin in prison, there was no one to defend my tax case. Other lawyers were frightened, certain that representing me would land them, too, in prison. Javad reached out to a few lawyers he knew personally, but each refused. I finally told him it was no use. No one was prepared to represent me, and even if we were to find someone, the court would not listen, anyway. My conviction would be reaffirmed at every stage.