by Shirin Ebadi
“They sent him to either kill you or talk with you. The first is unlikely, as they wouldn’t have bothered to rent an office first,” said a friend drily. “But they are still scared of you, to be watching this closely.”
Sometimes I look at his card, which remains in my drawer. The international agents of the Islamic Republic all have multiple identities and passports. Even the most notorious officials, the hanging judges associated with the worst human rights abuses and the officials close to the nuclear program who are on the European Union’s list of sanctioned officials prohibited from traveling to the West, have alternative passports. These authentic documents are produced by the state but show different identities, enabling these men to travel despite sanctions. Names don’t matter. They use their third and fourth passports and fly to London or Paris, laughing at all of us.
Months have passed and the office sits empty, the lights off and the little glass window that looks out onto the corridor blocked from the inside with a piece of cardboard. I think about the listening equipment that must be inside and wonder whether it has gathered dust.
—
Most evenings when I am in London, I stand outside on my small balcony and look out across the Thames at the city spread before me. I am accustomed to gazing at mountains, and the outline of the Alborz is still etched in my mind, but I try to remind myself that I am not the first Iranian who has lost her country because of speaking truth to power. Since Persian poets first began committing verse to paper, we have been able to trace our country’s long struggle for justice through literature, and perhaps this is why Iranians take such solace in satire. One evening in London, the great Iranian satirist Hadi Khorsandi staged a play, in Persian, called The Trial of Shirin Ebadi’s Sister. Although it was bittersweet to watch, sitting there in the darkened theater, I thanked God that I was alive to see the worst days of my life turned to art.
Khorsandi himself played the clerical judge; he sat behind a desk wearing flip-flops under his robes, which he rearranged importantly. His mobile rang with the news that the police were bringing Shirin Ebadi’s sister into his court for trial.
A woman walked onto the stage, and the judge immediately flayed her with questions, many utterly stupid. Every time she tried to interject, he shouted at her, “Be quiet, or I’ll execute you!” Though it was an interrogation, the judge posed and answered his own questions, as the woman grew more agitated.
“So, have you ever been to Shirin Ebadi’s house? What was she doing? Was she making koofteh [meatballs]? I bet she had one hand in the koofteh and was speaking to the CIA with the other!”
“Hajj Agha, you can’t make koofteh with one hand.”
“Silence! I’ll execute you!”
After more such questioning, the muezzin’s call to pray sounded. The judge excused himself.
“Let me go have lunch and pray; then we’ll execute you after.”
After he exited the stage, the woman faced the audience and answered her own mobile phone. “This idiot thinks I’m Shirin Ebadi’s sister and won’t leave me alone! They told me that he wasn’t feeling well and asked me to come down, but he won’t let me get a word in to explain.”
At this point, the audience realizes that she is a nurse employed by the judiciary.
When the judge returns to the courtroom, she bursts out before he has a chance to speak: “Please, just listen for one second. I’m here to take your blood pressure!”
And the story ends like this, a satire of justice in the Iranian court system. Khorsandi said he was inspired by something I said in the wake of my sister’s arrest: “When they do this to a sister of a Nobel laureate, imagine what they do to a nameless student or a journalist without a reputation.”
The play, I hope and pray, will only be a footnote in my story. I still believe that one day I will live again in the same city as my sister and brother, and wake up to the birds and the honking and the shouts of the metal scrap vendor that tell me I am in Tehran. The orchard remains in the care of my friends; by now the trees must be a foot taller, and I imagine that one day I will again taste their fruit and sit under their shade, recalling the days when Javad and I planted them with such care. I have lost more than I ever thought possible, but I nevertheless thank God that even from exile I can still work to build my country. It is for the sake of Iran and its people, its potential and its greatness, that I have taken each and every step along this journey. And I know that one day Iranians will find their own path to the freedom and justice they deserve.
My dear friend the great poet Simin Behbahani died in Tehran while I was in London. I could not attend her funeral to say goodbye, but I thought of our long walks together in the Alborz foothills. I remembered our talks about the fragility of life and everything that bound us to Iran. Has ever a country been so loved? As I go about my second life, her verses often echo in my mind.
My country, I shall build you again,
even if with bricks of my life.
I shall erect pillars beneath your roof,
even if with my own bones.
I shall again smell those flowers
favored by your young,
I shall again cleanse you of blood
with the flood of my tears.
In the summer of 2015, just as I was finishing this memoir, after two years of intensive negotiations and many more of open conflict, Iran signed a historic nuclear agreement with the West. For once in the long, fraught history of Iran-U.S. relations, both countries were led by moderates keen to move beyond the legacy of mistrust and to accommodate each other’s concerns. President Barack Obama sought to assure Americans that the accord he was striking with Iran would put in place limits on Iran’s nuclear program that for years had eluded the international community: a cap on uranium enrichment and the number of operable centrifuges, as well as an inspections regime that would ensure transparency and assure the West that Iran could not seek a breakout capability for a nuclear weapon. President Hassan Rouhani, for his part, succeeded in fulfilling the mandate on which he was elected by the Iranian people: negotiating an end to the sanctions that were strangling Iran’s economy while maintaining the essentials of a peaceful nuclear program, to which Iran was entitled under the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty.
For ordinary Iranians inside the country, who have lived for the past decade under the threat of a potential American or Israeli military attack, and who have suffered the devastating impact of sanctions, the deal is cause for great hope. Iran’s currency, the rial, has steadily dropped in value in recent years, as the country lost its ability to trade with the world and export its oil. More than anything, Iranians want their economy to improve and their nation to emerge from political isolation. They want their government to spend whatever funds it does gain access to on Iranians inside the country, rather than on weapons for Hezbollah in Lebanon or Bashar al-Assad’s troops in Syria.
Within days after the negotiators sealed the deal, Britain reopened its embassy in Tehran, and European and American companies rushed to Tehran to ready themselves for the economic boom that is expected once banking sanctions are lifted. As history has proven, countries that interact with the world, forge commercial ties, and can elicit foreign investment develop stakes in being integrated with the global community. Having such stakes can, with time, potentially change the behavior of Iran’s government. President Rouhani, Foreign Minister Javad Zarif, and the other moderates who support the nuclear deal believe it is the only way to advance the country’s national interest. Their interpretation of national interest is centered on economic growth and a stable relationship with the region and the world. But there are hard-liners in Iran who cling to the ideal of uranium enrichment at any cost; their vision of national interest is interlaced with ideology. It remains to be seen whose vision will prevail, and whether this deal, which many deem so historic, will fundamentally alter the Islamic Republic’s troubled trajectory in the world.
As I write this, the nuclear deal has passed throu
gh both the U.S. Congress and Iran’s parliament, and what is essentially an arms control treaty will soon be ratified. But the real problem still remains. Iran continues to interfere in the neighboring countries of the Middle East. Iran, as the only country with an overwhelming Shia majority, seeks to assert itself as the leading Shia power in the world, to cultivate Shias in other countries, and to encourage them to rise up against their rulers. This ambition underpins Iran’s involvement in Lebanon, Iraq, and more recently Yemen. Naturally, Iran’s behavior has deeply alarmed Saudi Arabia, which sees itself as the Sunni opposing pole in the region, and the two countries’ rivalry is today destabilizing the region in ways that will doubtlessly continue, despite the signing of the nuclear accord.
Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, has declared several times since the agreement was signed that the Islamic Republic still does not trust the United States, and that America remains the enemy. For Iran’s clerics, America’s enmity has been the bedrock upon which the revolution was built; they invoke America’s nefarious intentions each time they wish to suppress the country’s native opposition, claiming dissidents are working at Washington’s behest. It is hard to imagine an Islamic Republic that is at peace with the United States, for a revolution not perpetually at war with its enemies becomes duty bound to be accountable to its citizens. This is something to which Iran’s rulers have shown themselves to be averse.
At a moment when so many Iranians are celebrating the end to their country’s worst period in recent memory, I do not wish to appear the sour cynic. But those of us with long experience of this government know it too intimately to imagine that everything brutal and illiberal about the Islamic Republic will transform overnight. It is too early to judge what the nuclear deal will mean for Iran, the Middle East, and, indeed, the world. Like all my countrypeople, I will watch and wait eagerly, hoping for a path that opens up, ultimately, onto freedom.
My aim in writing this book is to bear witness to what the people of Iran have endured in the past decade. By reading it, you will see how a police state can affect people’s lives and throw families into disarray. What you can take away from my personal story is this: if a government can behave in this way with a Nobel Peace laureate who has access to the platform of world media, and who is herself a lawyer with intimate knowledge of the country’s legal system, you can imagine what it does to ordinary Iranians, who have no such means or expertise at their disposal. I am compelled to share my story on behalf of the many faceless Iranians, political prisoners and prisoners of conscience, who sit today in the prisons of Iran, an Iran that has become one of the world’s largest prisons for journalists, lawyers, women’s rights activists, and students, who instead of studying are languishing in cellblocks, yet another generation whose talent and dreams are squandered. But the hardship imposed by the Iranian police state has not caused the people of Iran to lose their hope for change or their willingness to reach for it.
There are many people to whom I owe my thanks, both now and over the years.
I’m grateful to my longtime friend Abdolkarim Lahiji, from whom I’ve learned so many things. My daughters, Negar and Nargess, who were my champions throughout the difficult period following 2009 and who have always warmed my heart. My former husband, Javad, for enduring more than thirty-seven years of hardship as a result of my work. I thank him, truly, for his forbearance, and wish him happiness in the new life he has started.
My brother, Jafar, and my sister, Nooshin, for their continued support; I am truly sorry that because of my work they have had to endure so many interrogations at the hands of security officials.
My wonderful colleagues Abdolfatah Soltani and Mohammad Seifzadeh, and Narges Mohammadi, who all worked so closely with me to found the Defenders of Human Rights Center and who, for this reason, sit in prison today. It is only with their help, and the efforts of so many other colleagues, that we were able to make such strides in human rights in Iran in such a relatively short span of time. Thanks as well to all the rest of my colleagues at the center, whose hard work and efforts have helped ease the difficulties of exile. I hope that one day we can gather together in a democratic, secular Iran and work to defend the human rights of those who are victimized.
The Nobel women laureates with whom I formed the Nobel Women’s Initiative, and the group’s staff, all of whom have been a steadfast source of support.
Azadeh Moaveni, without whose efforts, day and night, I would not have had the opportunity to publish this book. David Ebershoff, for his dedication in reading these pages with such acuity and for his invaluable advice. Karolina Sutton, for putting her long-standing experience at my disposal and for helping me clear the various obstacles that stood in the way.
BY SHIRIN EBADI
Until We Are Free
The Golden Cage
Iran Awakening
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
DR. SHIRIN EBADI was one of Iran’s first female judges and served as the first female chief magistrate of one of the country’s highest courts until the 1979 Islamic Revolution stripped her of her judgeship. In the 1990s Ebadi returned to the law as a defender of women’s and children’s rights, founding a human rights center that spearheaded legal reform and public debate around the Islamic Republic’s discriminatory laws. She has defended many of the country’s most prominent prisoners of conscience and spent nearly a month in prison in 1999 for her activities. For many years she was at the center of Iran’s grassroots women’s movement. In 2003 she was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for her work. Since the election uprising of June 2009 she has lived in exile.
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