A State of Fear (11 page)

I
n the still of an autumn night in 1983, the quiet was shattered as about 50 guards attacked the cell blocks, concentrating on the intransigents’ cells. They targeted anyone who looked un-Islamic or unrepentant in any way – which they took to mean anyone with glasses or a moustache.

It was a regular raid. They marched down the corridor, two or three of them staying by the doorway of each cell. As the ‘wild bunch’ reached the last cell, they turned and began their most savage attack, pulling prisoners from their sleep and dragging them into the corridor. They were beaten until they could no longer stand. The contents of the cell were turned upside down again. Then they would move to the next cell and repeat the process. All the while the Tavabs looked on and sometimes joined in the beatings.

The governor always made sure that he was at the heart of these raids. Here he was in his element. He loved this carnage. Running around, in and out of the cells, he would be drenched in his own sweat, panting heavily as he heaved his bulbous frame
from one cell to the next. Anyone unfortunate enough to catch his eye received a beating.

That night I saw him slapping and chopping at Mohammed Abrandi, a prisoner in his 70s we called
Amou
– uncle. Amou was an oil worker who had criticised the Tavabs in the block. Then, with one wild movement of his arm, the governor lost his balance and his colossal bulk came crashing down. He landed heavily on his right arm, which promptly broke and he screamed in agony. It took five of the guards to haul the howling governor to his feet. As they left, they shouted ‘God is great, long live Khomeini! Down with communism!’

Far from being a cause for amusement for us, we knew that Haji’s misfortune would spur on the other guards. The blameless Amou was quickly surrounded by guards. As he looked up at them encircling him, they started beating him on all sides with fists, feet, clubs and lengths of cable. He was pushed from one guard to the next, in a savage game of pass the parcel until he lost consciousness. Then the guards meted out the same treatment to others in the cell.

Amou had been singled out for rough treatment. When he arrived in the block, the guards put him low down the danger list, in cell 5 close to the control room. They thought he was just an old, sick and illiterate worker. One day Amou offered some of his food to a young cellmate who he thought looked as though he needed it more than he did. The Tavab overseer in their cell, who was only about 16, grabbed the food from the young man and threw it into the plastic bag in the room that served as a rubbish bin and shouted to Amou that he would report this ‘communist behaviour’. Amou had been simmering with anger ever since he had been put in that cell. The Tavabs incensed him. Now this anger exploded.

Amou would have been naturally tall, over two metres, with long, gangling arms and legs and big hands and feet. Now, though, he was bent almost double. But he drew himself up to 
his full height and slapped the Tavab across the face, a stinging blow that knocked the brat to the floor. This won Amou a beating by five other Tavabs and an immediate move to cell 24 – promotion to intransigents and elevation to hero status in the eyes of the prisoners.

The night of the mass beating in our block, between one and five prisoners in each intransigent cell were punched, kicked and stamped unconscious by the guards, and then dragged out of the block by the Tavabs. This happened throughout the prison that night and those that followed. This was the start of what was called ‘doomsday’ and included attacks on the women’s blocks. Those prisoners taken away were moved to another complex in the prison. They were put in front of a wall, given pencil and paper, and asked specific questions about their attitude to the Islamic regime, the war with Iraq, Israel, the US and the Soviet Union. They were asked questions about the different prisons that they had been at, and how they had acted in them. Pressure was put on them to identify other prisoners who had shown opposition of any form within the prisons. They were asked similar questions about others in their cells. The last question was, would they become a Tavab? If the answer was ‘Yes’, they were expected to prove it, by giving all the information withheld so far – details about their political activity before their arrest, about their family and friends, and information gathered within the prison. In particular they were pressed for information about the activities and identities of the intransigents within their cell and block.

Those who managed to pass this test, some giving evidence they knew to be out of date, could get back into the regular blocks. Some found themselves back at Evin’s 209 with lengthier sentences and beginning a new round of interrogation and torture. Those who refused to co-operate, or had nothing further to tell, made up the doomsday block. This regime, which had developed in an ad-hoc manner, involved the prisoner in
solitary: blindfolded, standing facing the wall, forced to listen to a constant barrage of sermons, speeches and Koran readings broadcast around the clock. These were interspersed with replays of interviews with oppositional leaders who had capitulated to the Islamic regime. Khomeini was heard crying in front of adolescents about to be sent to the front in the war against Iraq, ‘I wish I was a Pasdar. You are God’s chosen. Dead or alive, you will go to heaven. I am the loser, because I have not been chosen to share your glory’.

There would be live broadcasts from the trenches the night before an attack as the young Pasdars psyched themselves up to go over the top. They were used as human mine detectors, one detected mine equalling one boy blown to bits.

At its inception, doomsday inmates were forced to stand for days on end, deprived of sleep, and kicked back onto their feet when they collapsed from exhaustion. They had three breaks a day to eat and to go to the lavatory. Further punishment was equally arbitrarily imposed. The prisoner would be forced to sit cross-legged on the floor, blindfolded and facing the wall, presumably because the Tavabs had grown tired of kicking them to their feet. This lasted for a couple of days. The last stage was the separation of prisoners from each other with plywood partitions.

Doomsday’s laws evolved from day to day as the governor, the guards and Tavabs patrolled doomsday. No one knew what was forbidden and what was not. The residents of doomsday would discover a rule when he or she had broken it and earned a beating – this rule, though, might have changed entirely by the next morning. Moving your hands got you beaten. Stretching your legs got you beaten. So did turning your head, or adjusting your blindfold. Whatever you do, do nothing was the message.

The guards seemed equally at sea. What appeared to be a carefully thought-out strategy to disorientate, confuse and distress the prisoners in fact was the opposite – random,
ill-conceived
and inconsistent… but hell, nevertheless. At 11pm, all
doomsday’s prisoners were ordered to lie down. At 6am they were ordered to sit back in position; facing the wall, legs crossed. Bodhiramma, the Buddhist saint, squatted for years facing a cave wall. That was his choice: the prisoners in doomsday had no such luxury. Days rolled into weeks, and so into months. Some inmates capitulated. They would cry out, ‘Bring in the papers. I’ll write anything you want’. They were filmed and used in the performances that the governor staged, where they confessed to things they had never done. Often, they would sit on the stage, sobbing or laughing uncontrollably. Others crumbled physically and mentally through trying to hold out. Of those who returned, some had lost their voices. Some could no longer concentrate and lost their memory. Many developed twitches. Suicide was not uncommon.

One man who spent ten months in doomsday would wander back and forth in a straight line, talking to himself, totally oblivious to his surroundings. During his time in doomsday, he had learnt to trust no one, to associate with no one, indeed to forget himself. Four years after his experience in doomsday, he too killed himself. Years after others were released, some still chose to end their lives as a result of what had happened to them. It was from the scattered testimonies of these human husks that we discovered what was happening in the governor’s latest creation.

M
ojtaba was born in a village called Khomein in central Iran sometime in the late 1940s, not far from where Khomeini himself came from. Mojtabah’s father was the village shopkeeper. This was a stable and respectable background, where the remnants of Iran’s feudal past still clung on tightly. Religion and the patriarchal family dominated. As a young man, with the encouragement of his proud parents, Mojtabah entered a small seminary in the locality from which he graduated to Iran’s religious capital, Qom. Here he was given financial support and a roof over his head in order to continue his religious studies, under the guidance of some of Khomeini’s closest associates.

He was a pupil of Gilani, who would become the most senior judge of the Islamic revolutionary courts, responsible for the execution of tens of thousands. After the establishment of the Islamic regime, Khomeini handpicked Gilani as one of the founding members of the Council of Keepers – a religious body that oversaw all legislative matters dealt with by the
Majlis. Without their explicit approval, no law could be enacted. At the time of writing, he was still the most prominent member of this body.

As opposition to the Shah gained strength in the late 1970s, Mojtabah, along with many of his young contemporaries in the clergy, organised a group to distribute Islamic propaganda material, including reprints of Khomeini’s speeches and writings from exile in Najaf, the religious city in Iraq. They would circulate pamphlets among the pilgrims who flocked to the holy city of Qom. This political activity led him to visit Tehran regularly, opening him up to secular contacts. He wanted to get into the student milieu, to widen both his knowledge and his political activities. Once he was picked up by the Shah’s secret police and received a beating within the holy Fatima al-Masumeh shrine itself! He was so sore after this that he could not journey anywhere for several weeks to spread his message of freedom.

By 1977 Mojtabah had established a foothold in the most vibrant areas of opposition– among students, in the universities in Tehran – the centre of political opposition to the Shah’s regime – and in the seminaries of Qom – the centre of religious opposition. He sought out prominent student activists and tried to convince them to make a stand of religious opposition. He had some success in this, but as the movement deepened and expanded, so did his own reading and experience. The rising power and confidence of the workers’ movement, and its political expression in the Marxist left, set new questions that neither the Koran nor Khomeini could answer in the opinion of this inquisitive and socially conscious priest.

Each summer, the seminaries in Qom would close for three or four months. The religious leaders there would assign him to travel to remote villages to preach to the peasants. In addition to daily prayer sessions, there would be weekly sermons during which Mojtabah would subtly criticise the
rule of the Shah and present the teachings of Islam and Khomeini as the only salvation.

In February 1979, Khomeini made his famous journey by Air France jet from Paris, arriving at Tehran airport to be greeted by eight million people. Emerging from the luxury of his ‘Ayatollah Class’ cabin, he and his entourage were driven towards the city centre, where millions thronged the streets hoping for a glimpse of him. So dense were the crowds that he had to be taken by helicopter the last few kilometres to Tehran’s newest and largest graveyard.

Amid the headstones, Khomeini denounced the Shah for creating the most thriving industry in Iran. The bitter irony that history so often repeats was later to see this same graveyard extended a hundred fold, stretching out into the desert. Khomeini himself is buried there, in a golden mausoleum for the faithful to visit.

Mojtabah was present at Khomeini’s version of the Sermon on the Mount and even helped organise it. He was one of the trusted bodyguards that day. But Mojtabah heard nothing from the man they regarded as their saviour about freedom and democracy – which he had come to see as the necessary outcome of the approaching revolution. He came away instead from this massive gathering among the graves with massive and grave doubts.

It didn’t take Mojtabah long to realise that Khomeini’s agenda was very different from that of the masses. Within the first year of the Islamic regime, he began to look for alternatives. It wouldn’t be found among the minarets of Qom, but through the left organisations represented among the students he worked alongside in Tehran University.

Here, he was drawn towards the revolutionary left, and soon became the organiser of one of the bookstalls there. He came to believe that the Islamic seizure of power was a counter-revolution and advocated its overthrow. Where he had previously distributed Khomeini’s works among the
pilgrims at Qom and the students in Tehran’s universities, Mojtaba now circulated Marx’s writings around the campuses in the capital. Where he had previously handed out religious material decrying the despotic regime of the Shah, he now distributed pamphlets calling for the overthrow of the Ayatollahs’ state apparatus.

Mojtabah’s enthusiastic apostasy was bound to bring him to the attention of the Hezbollah. When the universities were closed under the pretext of carrying forward the ‘Islamic cultural revolution’, many students and professors were weeded out. Mojtabah was one among thousands thrown out of the lecture halls and into the prisons. Like so many of us, he was tortured and interrogated in Evin’s block 209, and then rushed through a mock trial. His judge was none other than his former mentor, the senior judge Ayatollah Gilani, now the head of the Islamic judicial system.

Gilani combined this day job with a little early evening moonlighting. He hosted a popular show on TV: indeed, he was the regime’s equivalent of Oprah. He discussed at length – literally – how far it was permissible for the penis to penetrate the vagina before it became sinful during Ramadan. So many inches were still consistent with fasting. A good, all-sheets-to-the-wind fuck would have been deemed gluttonous and profane. Popular viewing as this was, it caused a real problem for families in getting the kids away from the tube.

Had one been able to dine out in prison, Mojtabah would have dined out for years on his account of the exchange between him and his old tutor he gave to trusted comrades in the Golden Fortress.

‘What is your name, my son?’ asked Gilani, who knew the answer very well.

‘Mojtabah, Haji Aghah’.

‘Why have you turned your back on Islam, God and Imam Khomeini?’

‘Ah, through bad associates and bad advice at the University’, sighed Mojtabah ruefully.

‘Do you know that what you have done is blasphemy – a crime which merits immediate beheading?’

‘No, I haven’t blasphemed. I was only politically active.’

‘Why did you lose interest in being active on behalf of God and Islam? What made you become active in politics against God?’

God obviously didn’t dabble in politics. Be honest, when did you last see a deity with a placard?

‘It was a mistake,’ said Mojtabah, playing the misguided political naïf – if his inquisitors had detected any sign that Mojtabah was convinced in these beliefs they would have taken pleasure in hanging a renegade former mullah that very night.

‘God will be watching you in prison!’ Gilani shouted across the court room. ‘Any ungodly behaviour will bring you instant death!’

This ‘trial’ took about three minutes. A short trial and a long sentence – ten years, and all the time his neck would be under the axe’s blade. The news of Mojtabah’s arrest brought shock and outrage in his home village and the first person to disown him was his father – less out of devotion to God than a desire to maintain his status among his customers in the village. In contrast, his mother, although amazed and distraught not only by his activities but also his plight, was more understanding. For many years, she would be the only person from the village to visit him in different prisons.

With the death sentence hovering over his head, Mojtabah was understandably more cautious and restrained than many other prisoners. He would be careful to whom he spoke, and about what.

There’s a lot more that could be said about Mojtabah. Like many others, he deserves his own book. This cannot be it, and it is unlikely to be written, at least not yet. Mojtabah survived
his prison term with honour and, like all those that did, has to watch his back while the Islamic regime survives. So I shall say no more.