Persian Mirrors: The Elusive Face of Iran (38 page)

One day in the early 1990s, when he still lived at home, Arash was trying to find his favorite station on his bedroom radio, when he recognized a familiar voice. His father was in the living room meeting with some political associates and their conversation was playing on the radio. After days of searching the house, the Forouhars found an inch-long cylindrical transponder screwed in behind an electrical wall socket in the living room. After that, Forouhar opened his conversations with a hearty, “Good morning, listeners!” He closed them by saying, “Thanks to all the listeners!”

Over the years, the Forouhars became more vocal in expressing their opposition to Iran’s Islamic government. They said that the Constitution robbed people of democratic participation by putting so much power into the hands of one Supreme Leader. “Today in Iran like the past there is a stifling political atmosphere,” Forouhar said in one interview with the BBC in 1989. “In the Islamic Republic . . . all of ‘the nation’s rights’ provided for in the Constitution have been ignored.” He was so critical that on the eve of the 1997 presidential election, he predicted—incorrectly— that if Khatami were elected, the “reactionary elements of the regime” would cancel the results.

The Forouhars became increasingly fatalistic. They began to speak openly of imprisonment and even death. Still, the couple fortified the gate around their house with razor wire and put iron bars on the windows. Dariush took to carrying a gun whenever he left the house, even though it was against the law to do so. He put away his wristwatch and packed an overnight bag with a towel and a toothbrush to prepare himself for imminent arrest.

Sometime late on a Saturday night in November 1998, a year and a half after Khatami’s election, the murderer or murderers walked through the front metal gate and entered the Forouhars’ house. There was no forcible entry, the police report said. Much later, Mohammad Niazi, the Military Public Prosecutor of Tehran, told an interviewer that the assassins had accompanied a friend of the Forouhars to the house and that Dariush himself had let them in.

The Forouhars’ pet poodle was gagged and drugged. Dariush was engaged in a lively political debate with his guests when some of them turned on him. They tied his body onto a chair and stabbed him twelve times. Parvaneh, who had been ill, was already in her nightgown in the upstairs study when she too was stabbed—more than two dozen times. The neighbors claimed they heard nothing.

The bodies were discovered the next day by friends who came for a visit. The front door of the house was unlocked. The chair holding Dariush’s body had been turned toward Mecca. His wife’s body lay in a pool of blood upstairs. While the visitors were there, the phone rang. There was no one on the other end of the line.

The police sealed off the home. But some time after the murder the house was ransacked, the Forouhars’ papers and other possessions removed. Thousands of people attended the funeral. The Forouhars were buried in section eighty-nine of Behesht-e Zahra cemetery in plots reserved for the nationalist liberals who had opposed the Shah. “The lion and the sun are not on the flag anymore,” cried an old woman, referring to the ancient symbols of the country. “They’re in these two graves.”

One day one of the friends who had discovered the bodies was hit by a car with no license plates as he was riding his bicycle. One night a relative who was investigating the murders on his own got an anonymous call. “This is the last warning,” the voice said. “Get your nose out of this business.”

Repression is the dark side of the Islamic Republic.

The Iranian revolution was made in part to throw off the suffocating political repression of the Shah’s monarchy. Many of Iran’s revolutionaries, including clerics like Khamenei and Rafsanjani, had spent time in the Shah’s prisons, which were known for the scope and sophistication of their torture methods. According to human rights reports, those methods included beatings (particularly on the soles of the feet), rape, cigarette burns, nail extraction, sleep deprivation, electric shocks, glaring lights, solitary confinement, mock execution, near-drowning, and acid dripped into nostrils. SAVAK, the Shah’s secret police, had a long arm. It kept detailed dossiers on Iranian student activists abroad, often arresting them the moment they set foot in the country.

But the revolution did not end the repression. It simply introduced a new, revolutionary form of it, based on the new regime’s interpretations of Islamic law. The regime has executed people for nonpolitical crimes such as drug trafficking, gambling, homosexuality, prostitution, pimping, and adultery, as well as for murder and rape; it has also executed people for political crimes like spying, counterrevolution, and “sowing corruption on earth.” Some, but not all, of the methods of torture have changed from the time of the Shah. The Islamic state has forced prisoners to spend long periods of time in coffin-like boxes and to participate in the execution of fellow inmates. The beating of the soles of the feet has also increased, because it is the form of torture that inflicts the most pain with the least evidence.

Still, repression has not had its intended effect. Iranians have been swallowing their fear and finding ways around the Islamic Republic’s restrictions on individual expression and political activity. A remarkably expressive cinema and an even more outspoken press have emerged. Young people today are daring to express disagreement with the clergy’s restrictions and even to show contempt for its hypocrisies. There are limits on expression, of course. But the particularly Iranian tactic of open argument, subtle deception, use of private space, and even the manipulation of social courtesies can be combined into a form of political jujitsu that turns the Islamic Republic’s deepest-held principles into arguments against its most onerous restrictions. Khatami’s election has been perhaps the most startling single example of this, but it did not start the process; in many ways, it was a result.

When Westerners think of repression, their first association is usually with the totalitarianism of Stalinist Russia or Mao’s China, in which people were given a political line to follow with no debate allowed, and in which whole classes of perceived enemies of the state were sent off for years to gulags or reeducation camps. Perhaps some of the hard-line clerics would have liked things that way. But Iranian culture is simply too argumentative, too full of escape hatches and private corners in which dissidents can hide, both literally and intellectually. So even the hard-liners have had to adapt, leaving room at times for more than one party line and room for people to choose—even if with difficulty—among them. In addition, even when at its most rigid, the character of repression and surveillance has been episodic, rather than omniscient and pervasive.

That doesn’t mean, of course, that officials with totalitarian mindsets haven’t tried to clamp an iron grip on the country. There have been periods, particularly in the early years, in which the Islamic Republic has viciously suppressed its enemies, real and imagined. In 1981, for example, the regime was threatened by a campaign of terror and revenge by the opposition group known as the Mojahedin-e Khalq, or People’s Holy Warriors. Created in the 1960s as an armed Islamic opposition movement against the Shah, the Mojahedin struck at targets of the state and fought in guerrilla operations that facilitated his ouster. But the Mojahedin was also avowedly socialist and was cut out of the power structure built by the ayatollahs. The group openly turned against the new regime in demonstrations that turned violent; the regime struck back mercilessly. Thousands of Mojahedin were executed in the early 1980s; more than two thousand more died in a subsequent wave of executions in 1988. From a barren salt plain on the Iraqi side of the border, Mojahedin guerrillas continue to wage an armed struggle against the Islamic state next door. Iran struggles to crush them.

In some corners of the Ministry of Intelligence a KGB mentality has developed. The ministry, which conducts both foreign and domestic surveillance, is larger than its predecessor, SAVAK, and it intrudes more into citizens’ lives. While SAVAK focused on political dissidents, the intelligence service of the ayatollahs has gathered the most minute details about ordinary people.

Over the years, the Ministry of Intelligence apparently sent its assassins to an apartment in Paris to kill Shahpour Bakhtiar, who had been the Old Regime’s last Prime Minister; to an apartment in Vienna to shoot to death the Kurdish leader Abdol-Rahman Ghassemlou as he negotiated an autonomy agreement for the Kurds; to a Greek restaurant in Berlin to kill other Kurdish leaders. It has placed its agents in Iranian embassies abroad, where they have shopped for weapons and plotted operations.

The ministry’s primary mission has been to eliminate political dissidents at home. There has been a pattern to the way such dissidents have been treated. Usually they’ve been quietly arrested. Then, weeks or months later, they are paraded on state-run television recanting their anti-state activities, in detailed confessions that generally sounded more invented than real.

But repression and terror have not been constants. They come and go in waves and they have taken different forms. In 1994, after 134 members of the Writers Association signed a letter calling for an end to censorship in Iran, several of the signatories were killed or died afterward under suspicious circumstances. The next summer, the driver of a bus carrying more than twenty members of the group to a poetry conference in Armenia steered the bus toward a mountain precipice while most of the passengers were napping. When the driver tried to jump out to save himself, a passenger grabbed the wheel and steered the bus back onto the road. Again, the driver tried—without success—to run the bus off the road. This time, the bus struck a boulder.

The murder of the Forouhars in 1998 was the beginning of a new, unanticipated wave of terror that swept Tehran’s literary circles, which had become emboldened by Khatami’s election in the spring of 1997. Two weeks after the Forouhar killings, Mohammad Mokhtari, a member of the Writers Association, disappeared in broad daylight en route to a grocery store. Mohammad Jaffar Pouyandeh, another member of the group, disappeared en route home from his office, also in broad daylight. Their strangled bodies were found later. Another writer, Majid Sharif, was found dead in mysterious circumstances. The authorities said he died of a heart attack. A handful of other Iranian intellectuals disappeared as well.

These random murders, coming so close together, terrified people. The victims, moreover, were not the grand enemies of the revolution but merely bit players. Perhaps, some thought, the murders were meant to serve as a warning to others. “Some writers refused to walk out of their homes alone,” wrote the reformist monthly
Payam-e Emrouz.
“Many writers would not sleep in the same place at night. Every intellectual in the country felt that a noose was hanging around his neck.”

But fear did not mean silence. Intellectuals and an emboldened press, which had already been instrumental in the election of a reformist President—however embattled he was—had passed the point where they would accept killings by a repressive state as routine. News of the murders was spread across the front pages of the newspapers as journalists and even ordinary citizens openly criticized the specter of official terror.

One day, a stunning announcement came from an unnamed spokesman of the Ministry of Intelligence: a “rogue” unit inside ministry was responsible for the killings. Before then, no one even knew the ministry had a spokesman, so the announcement carried at least a hint of movement toward accountability. On the other hand, the statement itself revealed little. It did not identify what it called the “irresponsible, misguided, and unruly personnel” whom it said had been arrested. It did not say who had ordered the murders. It did not promise a wholesale purge of the ministry. So instead of stopping the public outcry, the mysterious announcement only stoked it.

Then, one month later, came much more stunning news: the Minister of Intelligence, Ghorbanali Dorri-Najafabadi, had resigned. Arrests of Intelligence Ministry officials followed. One of them, Saeed Emami, turned up dead in his prison cell. The official explanation was that he had committed suicide by ingesting
vajebi
, a hair removal powder that contains arsenic, while he was alone in the bath. Intellectuals had no sympathy for this particular character, but his death suggested a grisly effort to manipulate the real story. So even this event became ammunition in the struggle for more openness. Some newspapers wrote that
vajebi
does not have the power to kill, and demanded an investigation. The leftist newspaper
Salaam
dared to publish a document that detailed Emami’s efforts to clamp down on the media. The Press Court claimed that the document was top secret and shut down the paper. It was that closure, combined with consideration by Parliament of a restrictive press law, that sparked student demonstrations and widespread turmoil in July 1999.

A number of fearless journalists have told graphic stories of the mysterious deaths and disappearances of more than eighty writers, translators, poets, political activists, and ordinary citizens over the past decade. By far the most outspoken critic has been Akbar Ganji, a courageous forty-year-old muckraker whose daring columns in 1999 began to name high-ranking individuals as the ones behind the murders. An activist during the revolution, Ganji was imprisoned for three months in the late 1990s for a speech about fascism that authorities saw as an attack on the Islamic system. After his new verbal offensive, he received death threats by phone and fax.

A fierce supporter of Khatami, Ganji wrote story after story about how Intelligence Ministry operatives chose and executed their victims. He intrigued his readers by writing in code, refusing to name names but drawing attention to an “éminence grise” and “the master key” to the murders of late 1997, apparently the former Intelligence Minister Ali Fallahian. When former President Rafsanjani announced his candidacy for the 2000 Parliamentary elections, Ganji took an even more direct approach. Ganji accused him of lying when he said he knew nothing about the “arrests, mysterious killings, and slanderous television programs” under his watch. “Rafsanjani denies the truth and says no murders were committed during his term of office,” Ganji wrote. He “should clearly and openly apologize to the public for the serial murders committed by gang members.” Ganji added that even if Rafsanjani made it into the Parliament, the people of Iran would dismiss him as “a symbol of the past.”