Is This Your First War? (15 page)

Saeed felt the same way. “We are living in a country where for no reason they jail, kill, and torture people,” he said. “They have shaped society to their own purposes, and they don't allow views other than their own orthodox thinking. For us young people, it has reached a point where we can't tolerate it any more. But even though the government has shown it does not understand anything but force, our struggle will never come to violence. The people of Iran have been through a lot of wars and are tired of violence. We're also strategically opposed to violence. Our struggle against this government is a struggle against all forms of violence. We believe we can change it through civil disobedience. The era of violent revolutions is over.”

The parents of these young activists were once much like them. They had raged against the shah and tried to bring about a more humane and decent system of government. “At those times, almost everyone supported the revolution,” the father of one imprisoned activist said. “We believed we could reach freedom and democracy this way. If we knew what would happen, that our sons would be behind bars, we wouldn't have done it. It was a mistake.”

The father of another jailed activist, a doctor, moved about the room in a slow and painful shuffle. He, too, had opposed the shah, whose security forces arrested and stomped on his back with such fury that he was now virtually crippled. Two decades later, his son was in jail for protesting the shah's successors' dictatorship. The doctor was visibly distressed but stoic: “My son is thirty-five years old. He is independent. It doesn't matter what I might tell him, I can't stop him. And why should I? He believes he is doing the right thing. As a father, yes, I miss him. But as a militant, he must do what he sees as right. I'm proud of him.”

Much later that night we left the townhouse in pairs and walked off in different directions. The house where we met belonged to a prominent activist, and those inside assumed that it was under surveillance. At a busy street corner a few minutes later, a car pulled up and several of us climbed inside. We drove a short while and then got out again.

I fell into conversation with Behrouz Javid Tehrani, the tall man who had met me on the street and with whom I had exchanged passwords that evening. Five years earlier, in 1999, he was a university student and had taken part in the mass protests that shook Tehran that summer. Security forces and the pro-regime Basij militia stormed Tehran University's dormitories, arresting hundreds of students and murdering at least one. Behrouz was thrown in solitary confinement in Tehran's Evin Prison. Guards there hanged him from the ceiling by his hands and whipped his feet.

“They wanted information about the other members of the movement. I didn't want my friends to be punished like me, so I said nothing.” Behrouz was kept in solitary confinement for two months. It ended with his trial.

“The judge saw me for three minutes and sentenced me to eight years in prison,” Behrouz said. His sentence was later reduced to four years, which meant that Behrouz was released only a few months before I met him. The worst part of his incarceration was the death of his mother. Behrouz's jailers refused to release him to be with her during her final days or to attend her funeral. He was crushed.

“My mother's death was a gift to all people. She sacrificed herself, but I was heartbroken. She was the last thing in my life. Now there is nothing. It doesn't matter if I go back to prison. They can take nothing more.”

Behrouz's convictions were reinforced in prison, partly because of his mother's death, and partly because his time in jail forced him to confront his tormentors every day. “Those four years strengthened me,” he said. “It made me more motivated to face challenges, especially the cruelties of this government.”

It was striking how many of the dissidents I met that night and later had been repeatedly jailed without recanting their beliefs or scaling back their activism. They knew what the consequences of opposing the government would be, yet they did so repeatedly.

“When your goals become your loves, you're willing to die for them,” Kianoosh said. “In jail, we feel the oppression directly. It makes you more eager to fight it. We'll stand before the walls of the solitary confinement cells until they crumble. We won't crumble first.” Kianoosh was then only twenty years old. He had been arrested for the first time at seventeen and had spent twenty months since that first arrest in jail, more than seven months of it in solitary confinement.

Behrouz Javid Tehrani.

“Our friends in jail are proof of why we need to struggle. There is no way to free ourselves from this dictatorship without struggle. This leads someone to protest. And then by protesting, you can't help but ask yourself more questions: Why are my friends being attacked for protesting peacefully? Why does the government send thugs to attack students when they are asking for the smallest changes at their university? Why should the price of being politically curious in Iran be so high? Why can there be no opposition?”

Kianoosh was only sixteen during the 1999 student protests at which Behrouz and hundreds of others were arrested. These events were dramatically captured in a photograph that ran on the front page of the
Economist
magazine of protester Ahmad Batebi holding up the blood-splattered T-shirt of a fellow protester. The photograph became an icon, and Batebi was sentenced to death for the crime of reflecting Iran's cruelty to the wider world. His sentence was reduced to fifteen years, during which time he was beaten with cables, kicked, cut, suffered mock executions, and had his face forced into raw sewage. “Why should students like Ahmad be in jail for holding up a bloody shirt?” Kianoosh said that night. “I joined the movement to take Ahmad's place in the struggle.”

This solidarity among Iranian democrats was something the regime tried and tries to break down. “Their totalitarianism has made us bond together. When Ahmad is being tortured, we all feel the pain,” Saeed said.

To counter this, democratic activists are kept in solitary confinement, or those they love most are threatened to break their will. When Bina was arrested, they brought his wife in and sat her down in front of him. “I got their message. And I answered their questions,” he said. “They would have done it. Don't think they wouldn't.”

Around midnight we reached Evin Prison, where Zahra Kazemi was murdered and where some of the Iranian democrats I was with that night were held. The stone walls, which rose more than ten metres above the ground, were thick and topped with rolls of barbed wire. Chips of stone and concrete had crumbled and fallen off. They lay scattered on the ground.

Behrouz spent ten months inside Evin before he was transferred to Karaj Prison. “I have bad memories of this place,” he said, glancing upwards at the barbed wire above him. “My worst times were here, in the first few days after I was arrested.”

Behrouz drew on a cigarette. It glowed red in the darkness. Evin is located in a residential neighourhood, but street lighting is poor. “I'm only twenty-six years old,” he said. “I've spent four of those in jail.”

We drifted away from the prison walls, onto the sidewalk of a nearby street. An elderly man, hearing voices outside, opened his door and glowered at us. He was wearing a faded undershirt and leaned on a walking stick. He focused on Behrouz and berated him.

“What are you doing smoking? You're wasting your youth.”

In the small hours of the morning we parted company and made plans to meet again in a week, on my last day in Iran. I wanted to see Behrouz, Bina, Saeed, and Kianoosh again, and to confirm some details about Zahra Kazemi's murder. I spent the intervening days travelling elsewhere in the country, returning to Tehran late in the morning on a day when the spring sunlight was harsh. The rising temperature made my skin sweat as I walked along a street where Bina said he would meet me, outside Tehran's Museum of Contemporary Art. A car honked, and Bina pulled up in a hatchback. Behrouz, the tallest, was in the passenger seat. Saeed and Kianoosh were crammed into the back. I opened the rear passenger door and climbed in.

Immediately I started questioning the former detainees on what they knew about Zahra Kazemi's detention and murder. Frustrated with trying to take notes while Bina navigated Tehran's chaotic traffic, I asked if we could stop. Bina pulled over to the side of the street while I hunched over and scrawled in a notebook held on my knees. We had been stopped like that for a few minutes when a man stepped close to the car and took a photo of the five of us together. I hadn't seen him, but a shopkeeper signalled to Bina to let him know what had happened. The area around the museum was popular with those opposed to the government and was frequently patrolled or under surveillance by plainclothes members of Iran's security services. Many of the shopkeepers were sympathetic to the opposition and kept their eyes open for agents and informers, which is why one of them tried to warn Bina.

“Don't worry,” Bina said. “The guy took the photograph because of us, not you. We're all watched all the time. But they're incompetent. They won't even develop the film for days, and you'll be out of the country by then.”

Bina's face was drawn, though, and his lips were pursed tightly together. “Let's go,” he said. “It was dangerous to stop.”

Moments later a police car's lights flashed behind us. Bina grimaced and breathed out sharply through his nose.

“This is it.”

I stuffed my notebook away.

“What do I tell him?” I asked.

“Say you met us by chance,” Bina said. “Say that we stopped you. It's us that they're worried about. You'll be fine.” My skin was prickling with more sweat. I was ashamed that Bina was ready to take the blame for us being together, but I didn't have the courage to protest. I could feel a flush rising over my face.

It turned out that the police officer had pulled us over for a routine traffic violation, but everyone was a little shaken up as we pulled back into the slow-moving traffic. A young girl, maybe ten years old, obviously poor and wearing clothes that were dirty but brightly coloured, was weaving her way between the gridlocked cars with a pan of burning seeds. Bina called her over and dropped a few coins into her tiny hand. She waved smoke over the car's windshield and through its open windows. The smoke smelled like incense.

“It's an old Persian tradition. It brings good luck,” Bina said. He smiled thinly. “We could use some.”

We spent the afternoon in Behrouz's apartment with several other dissidents who met us there. I was already worried about getting stopped by Iranian security, either back at my hotel or at the airport. Bina tried to comfort me. Even in the midst of my panic, I knew that whatever might happen, neither Bina, nor any of the other Iranians who put themselves in danger by talking to me, could get on a plane to avoid it.

When the interviews were finished, we again left the apartment and dispersed in different directions. Behrouz and I took a taxi to shopping plaza, where I could disappear in a crowd before taking a cab back to my hotel without him. Behrouz got out of the cab and tried to give me a reassuring smile. He made a small wave with his fist and said something in Farsi that sounded like “Up with Iran!” We hugged and kissed each other three times on both cheeks. “
Khoda Hafez
,” he said. Go with God.

Inside I bought conspicuous souvenirs to show the hotel clerks and, in my nervousness, knocked over and shattered a glass lamp. “Okay. Don't worry,” the shopkeeper said in broken English. My heart was racing. A knot was tightening in my stomach that didn't loosen, even when I got to my hotel and found nothing amiss. I ripped out and destroyed several pages from my notebook containing names and phone numbers of people I didn't want to implicate if I was searched. I disguised other numbers, including Bina's, with a rough code. My flight didn't leave until three o'clock in the morning. It was a long wait.

When I got to the airport, however, I boarded the Lufthansa flight to Frankfurt without incident and finally began to relax as the plane accelerated and drove my back into the seat as it roared down the runway and into the air. Tehran was lit up below us. The women around me removed their headscarves. I tried to sleep.

I called Bina from a café in Berlin the next day to let him know that I was safe.

“Have a beer for me,” he said. “Make it a Budweiser. That used to be my drink.”

I returned to Canada and called Scott at the
Citizen
to tell him what I had learned about Zahra Kazemi's murder from the Iranians who had been jailed with her. He agreed to buy the story, and I took some satisfaction from the fact that the price we settled on was significantly higher than what it would have cost the paper had they stuck to our original agreement. The story ran with a banner headline across the front page of the
Citizen
and was picked up by other newspapers in the chain. As Bina, Saeed, Kianoosh, and the other dissidents had requested, I published their full and undisguised names. Reaction in Iran was swift. Five days after my first article appeared, in late May, Behrouz was tipped off that that secret police were coming to arrest him. He dashed off an email message: “I'm fine for now, but they have arrested some of our friends, and the homes of our colleagues are under surveillance. Probably I will be arrested tonight. Farewell … With hope and freedom.”