Persian Mirrors: The Elusive Face of Iran (29 page)

Iran’s new revolutionary fighters launched pinprick strikes into Iraqi territory. Khomeini gave moral and financial support to outlawed Shiite groups in Iraq. In response, on September 22, 1980, Saddam Hussein launched a massive ground and air assault across the border. Within two days his troops occupied a thirty-mile-wide strip of Iranian territory. He wanted nothing less than Iraqi control over most of Iran’s Arab-speaking, oil-rich province of Khuzestan, and over the Shaat al-Arab waterway that divides the two countries.

But the Iran-Iraq war was not just a dispute over boundaries. It was also a struggle for power between two despotisms, each lusting for regional supremacy. Saddam denounced Khomeini’s pretensions to the leadership of the Islamic world. The role of regional leader, he declared, was his. “The Koran was written in Arabic,” he claimed, “and God destined the Arabs to play a vanguard role in Islam.” In Iran, paintings and rhetoric portrayed Saddam Hussein as Caliph Yazid, the general of the Sunni army that had slain Hosein at Karbala. “If you can kill Saddam before we execute him, stab him in the back,” Khomeini told Iraqi Shiites. “Paralyze the economy. Stop paying taxes. This is war between Islam and blasphemy.”

More important for Khomeini, the war became the glue that bound the Iranian nation—and excused the regime for demanding sacrifices of its people. When Iran drove the Iraqis back across the border in 1982, Saddam declared a unilateral cease-fire, withdrew his forces from most of Iranian territory, and called for peace. But Khomeini rebuffed Saddam’s peace gesture, instead calling for his ouster and for the annexation of Iraq. Now the war became a vehicle to consolidate Khomeini’s hold on power and to create an Islamic empire in the entire Persian Gulf region.

It was that sweeping goal that inspired believers like Hamid to volunteer for martyrdom. The passion play of Imam Hosein could be performed on a real battlefield every day. The cult of martyrdom prompted Khomeini to send human waves of child-martyrs with little formal military training to die on Iraqi battlefields in the name of Islam. Iran, after all, had manpower to spare. Its population was more than that of Iraq, Saudi Arabia, the other Gulf Arab states, Jordan, and Syria combined.

Hamid and others like him tied blood-red bandannas around their foreheads. On some were written the words, “Warriors of God.” Others read, “Revenge for the blood of Hosein.” I saw Iranian soldiers ready for battle wearing small gold keys on their uniforms where other soldiers might wear medals. They were the keys that would immediately take their souls to heaven if they should die. In some battles, soldiers carried their own funeral shrouds.

I had witnessed firsthand the religious zeal that drove men and boys like Hamid. During one tour of the southern Iraqi border after a particularly grisly battle in the early stages of the war, Iraqi victors showed me the shriveled bodies of a dozen Iranian soldiers and the crude weapons they carried. An Iraqi soldier dumped an Iranian suitcase on the ground. Out poured pocket-sized copies of the Koran, stained with blood, pictures of Imam Ali, and prayer stones inscribed with Koranic verses. The most interesting artifacts were laminated plastic cards showing Khomeini’s portrait on one side and an image of Karbala on the other. Khomeini had promised to liberate Karbala. He probably didn’t tell his soldiers that Karbala was over three hundred miles inside Iraq.

The end of the slaughter would not come until 1988, precipitated by the mistaken downing of a civilian Iranian plane by the USS
Vincennes
in July of that year. It was an accident, but Iran’s leaders were convinced that the United States was determined to get involved in the war. And that judgment helped them to see that the war that had boosted Iran’s revolution for so many years had begun to destroy it. On July 18, Khomeini accepted a United Nations cease-fire resolution, using the rhetoric of death even then. “I had promised to fight to the last drop of my blood and to my last breath,” he said in a statement read on Tehran Radio that stunned the nation and the world. “Taking this decision was more deadly than taking poison. I submitted myself to God’s will and drank this drink for his satisfaction.”

Khomeini had reason to be bitter, for that act reversed the hopes that he had set out for his revolution. Iraq’s Shiite majority would not become a satellite state of Iran. The dream of universal revolution throughout the Muslim world was dashed, replaced by “Islam in one country.” After the cease-fire, banner headlines in Tehran newspapers declared, “War, War and Now Victory.” But there would be no more calls to arms, no victory.

The war had lasted just one month short of eight years. Although estimates of casualties vary widely, it is believed that at least 300,000 Iranians were killed and between 600,000 and 750,000 were wounded. Another two million were uprooted from their homes. Billions of dollars were spent. The war was fought largely on Iranian territory, and sixteen of Iran’s twenty-four provinces—with two thirds of its population—were targets of Iraqi bombs and missiles, including Tehran itself. The war devastated Iran’s economy, causing massive losses to its infrastructure, oil industry, industrial centers, cities, and farmland.

*   *   *

By far the best way to keep the memories fresh, Hamid told me, is to watch war films in the cemetery’s theater hall. On the day of my visit, we were the only people in the audience. The theater was stuffy, the films grainy and grisly. He chose one of his favorites. It was about the return of the remains of Iranian soldiers years after the war. In one scene, a widow is given the bones of her husband. She picks them up one by one and kisses them, smiling, as if in a trance. She caresses the skull and speaks to it. “Your baby child is a man now!” she cries.

In another film a group of teenage soldiers prepare for a battle. They strap on their weapons and fire artillery against the enemy. They run up hills and fire handheld weapons and machine guns from behind sandbags. Then they begin to die. In one scene, two soldiers drag the body of a wounded comrade who has lost both his legs. The camera focuses on the bloody stumps. In another, the camera zooms in on the body of a decapitated soldier propped up on sandbags. In a third, a body has been cut in two. In a fourth, a sixteen-year-old soldier with both legs sliced off screams in agony, “Allah! Allah! Allah! Allah! I die for you, Hosein! I give up my life for you!”

As we watched, Hamid wept so deeply that I wanted to reach out to console him. But I knew my touch would be rebuffed. “These are the scenes I have seen!” he moaned. “I can never come back to life. I feel martyrdom with my two hands!”

The only time Hamid smiled in the hours we spent together was when he showed me a three-minute black and white film of his unit preparing for their fateful operation the day their truck was hit. One shot showed a much younger Hamid looking shyly at the camera as he boarded a bus headed to the front.

“We gave up the best days of our lives,” Hamid said. “We gave up our education. Some of us died. Some of us were wounded. Now the ideals we fought for have been buried. The new generation doesn’t want us anymore. This country is becoming so materialistic. It is losing its martyrdom mentality. Even worse, there is a plot to eliminate the fighting generation.”

Hamid cursed the authorities in Tehran for building cultural centers and high-rise apartment complexes instead of better graves for the martyrs and more museums in their honor.

He cursed society for forgetting the sacrifices of his generation, telling the story of how he once fell ill on the street, but was turned away from a hospital because he didn’t have the money to pay.

He cursed the privileged sons of high-ranking officials who drove fancy cars and carried mobile phones and even socialized openly with young women.

He cursed commercial filmmakers for presenting sanitized versions of the war. “They show soldiers clean, their hair full of gel,” he said. “It’s humiliating. It makes a joke of what we endured.”

He cursed the United States for the “crimes” it committed over decades—in Vietnam, in Iran, in Nicaragua.

Nicaragua? I hadn’t thought about Nicaragua in a long time. “What were America’s crimes in Nicaragua?” I asked Hamid.

“I don’t remember,” he said. “But I know they were bad.”

He also blamed the United States for Iraq’s war with Iran. In that, at least, I found a refrain that was common among Iranians of all political leanings and all degrees of religious fervor: the United States and its Western partners wanted Saddam Hussein to go to war against Iran to keep their country weak and force its experiment with revolution to fail. Iranians found proof of that in the world’s reaction to Saddam’s invasion in 1980. The United States merely cautioned that it “could not condone” Iraq’s seizure of Iran’s province of Khuzestan. It took the United Nations Security Council more than a week to pass a resolution that urged the combatants “to refrain immediately from any further use of force.” The resolution did not call for a cease-fire or for a withdrawal of Iraq’s troops to its borders. And it did not threaten any military action against Iraq as it would ten years later after Iraq invaded Kuwait.

Though there is no evidence that the United States played a part in Iraq’s invasion, the American tilt toward Iraq after Iran went on the offensive in 1982, and the coordination of a global arms embargo of Iran convinced Iranians that the United States had taken sides. Toward the end of the war, the United States shared intelligence with Iraq on Iranian troop strength, which the Iraqis used in their offensives. And as part of its protection of oil tankers in the Persian Gulf, the U.S. Navy sank Iran’s ships, destroyed oil platforms, and captured and killed Iranian crew members. Hamid saw America’s continued military presence in the Gulf as evidence of a strategy to dominate Iran.

Hamid’s final curses were reserved for President Khatami, who, he felt, had abandoned the generation of the war. Khatami had not even come to visit the martyrs’ graves to commemorate the twentieth anniversary of the revolution.

Khatami, in fact, was no believer in permanent sacrifice. He had even stopped groups from chanting “Death to America” during a speech he gave to tens of thousands of students at the University of Tehran in May 1998, on the first anniversary of his election as President. “In any gathering in which I am present,” he said, “I would prefer there to be talk of life and not death.”

But Ayatollah Khomeini’s singular focus on the rhetoric of death had created another vexing problem for Khatami as well. After he assumed the presidency and began seeking better standing for Iran in the eyes of other nations, Khatami found himself struggling to close the chapter on Khomeini’s call to the world’s Muslims to kill the novelist Salman Rushdie. Khomeini had branded Rushdie a blasphemer for his novel
The
Satanic Verses.
“I ask all Muslims of the world rapidly to execute the author and the publishers of the book, anywhere in the world, so that no one will any longer dare to offend the sacred values of Muslims,” Khomeini said in a fatwa or religious ruling of February 14, 1989. Anyone who died in the process would die a martyr, Khomeini promised.

Khatami had kept silent on the Rushdie matter during his first year as President, but in September 1998 he used a breakfast meeting with journalists in New York to reverse policy. Even so, he did it so subtly that its meaning was nearly lost on those of us who attended. The announcement came in response to a question from Andrew Rosenthal, the foreign editor of
The New York Times.
Rosenthal noted that Khatami had spoken at length about the importance of understanding among nations, adding that the American people just did not understand the death sentence against Rushdie. So why didn’t Khatami simply lift it?

Khatami looked annoyed. He shifted his robe and paused. Then, in a sharp tone, he said: “I was hoping and expecting that this question that has been repeatedly asked over the years would not be mentioned or asked today! In our opinion the issue of Salman Rushdie is a symbol of war between civilizations. It began by the West attacking Islam. We naturally took a defensive stand. If you are implying that we are against the freedom of thought let me state bluntly that we have no opposition to freedom of thought. . . . We don’t consider insults and disrespect for a religion as thought. We should consider the Salman Rushdie case as completely finished. Imam Khomeini as an Islamic jurist gave us his opinion about this matter and many other religious leaders have given us their opinions. The Islamic Republic of Iran has announced that in practice it made no decision to act on this matter. From now on we want to push a dialogue among civilizations, not a war, and we hope we have entered this era . . .”

Andy leaned over and whispered to me, “What was that all about?” Khatami had seemed angry and defensive, not revelatory. I whispered back, “I think he made news.”

Indeed, buried in Khatami’s long discourse was the statement that the Rushdie affair was over. The official position of the Iranian government had long been that the decree by Ayatollah Khomeini could not be revoked, but that Iran had no intention of carrying it out. Khatami went further, suggesting that Iran wanted to put the matter behind it and that Khomeini had been expressing only a personal view as one Islamic jurist. Khatami’s statement paved the way for the upgrading of relations between Iran and Britain, where Rushdie lived. The novelist himself said that he felt safer.

But was the Rushdie affair truly over? In February 1999, on the tenth anniversary of the ruling against Rushdie, more than half of the deputies in Parliament signed a statement declaring, “The verdict on Rushdie, the blasphemer, is death, both today and tomorrow, and to burn in hell for all eternity.” On the eleventh anniversary, Ayatollah Hassan Saneii, the head of the 15th of Khordad Foundation, which had offered a $2.6 million reward for Rushdie’s assassination, said that the sentence remained valid and would be carried out, the reward paid with interest. But then, it was widely known in Iran that the foundation was bankrupt.

For Hamid, the fatwa was not only still valid; he would have tried to carry it out himself if he were not so ill. He heeded the words not of President Khatami but of Ayatollah Khamenei, who in 1993 had called the death sentence “irreversible.” “Rushdie should be and will be executed,” the Supreme Leader said at the time. “It is the duty for all Muslims who have access to the mercenary to carry out the sentence.” Khamenei was Hamid’s hero, a “war-disabled” himself, Hamid said, because of the injuries suffered in a 1981 assassination attempt. “The leader came here and prayed in the martyrs’ section for an hour,” Hamid said. “He thanked us. He told us to stay on the path of the martyrs. I kissed his hand.”