Persian Mirrors: The Elusive Face of Iran (39 page)

But Ganji’s focus remained on the murders. Existing institutions, he argued, were incapable of getting to the truth and he called for the establishment of a truth commission that included members of the victims’ families. “We will write, write, write until we find the truth,” he told an interviewer in late 1999. A few months later, he landed in prison again, this time on charges of defaming the state.

The repression fit a pattern, not so much of full-fledged totalitarian rule as of a cyclical recurrence of revolutionary terror. Even though Iran has never quite mastered the cold efficiency of a totalitarian state, officials have not shied away from broad psychological repression. I saw this in the chilling reaction to the student demonstrations and riots in the summer of 1999. Instead of dealing with the students’ demands, the Intelligence Ministry reverted to one of its old tactics: the confession. The confession is, in fact, an excellent lens through which to examine both the ambitions and the limitations of Iran’s brand of repression.

The confession comes in different forms—memoirs, letters, court testimony, press conferences, debates. Probably the most interesting and revealing is the videotaped interview, extracted in prison so it can be broadcast in prime time. Such a confession would appear on a slick, magazine-like television program called
Hoviyyat
(Identity), which apparently was operated under the supervision of officials within the Intelligence Ministry. It would be used as part of a profile of a prominent intellectual, artist, or writer in order to brand the person un-Islamic and tainted by the West. Footage of Iranian royalists and enemies of the Islamic system abroad would be spliced in, implying that the groups were connected. The ultimate “mastermind” was, of course, the United States. So for good measure, the portrait of Benjamin Franklin on the hundred dollar bill would dissolve into the face of the person under attack that week.

Stage-managing a confession was an important part of its presentation. Faraj Sarkouhi, a writer and literary editor, wrote in 1997 that when he was put into prison the previous year, he had been forced to memorize texts that were prepared for him to recite in a videotaped interview. He also was beaten and subjected to intense psychological pressure. “I spent eight years in the Shah’s prisons,” Sarkouhi wrote. “I was arrested and imprisoned several times during his reign. But all of those eight years together could not compare in pain and distress to a mere five minutes during these forty-seven days. . . . I am a broken man.”

The
Hoviyyat
program did not last long. Televised confessions had become too transparent to provoke real terror. Viewers had become more sophisticated and now saw through the claims that the regime was in permanent danger at the hands of its “enemies.”

Then suddenly, during the student unrest in the summer of 1999, the confessions were back. Nazila and I had just checked into a tiny hotel in the town of Behshahr on the Caspian Sea after a long, hard day of travel and we switched on the television to relax. Instead, we saw Manouchehr Mohammadi’s confession leading the news.

I have never taken Manouchehr Mohammadi very seriously. A self-appointed student leader, the young man seemed just a fast-talking self-promoter, speaking before he thought and latching on to others more serious than himself. He preached a message of fatalism, saying that a clash with the Islamic system would come sooner or later, and adding that he was willing to die for the cause. Mohammadi was in and out of jail, forever babbling about how he had just been released and how he expected to be arrested again.

Somewhere along the way Mohammadi had become the darling of the Iranian exile community. He gave interviews on Western radio stations in Persian that were broadcast back home. In the spring of 1999, he had visited the United States, participating in a panel on human rights held in Connecticut. Someone in the audience videotaped the session and sent the videocassette back home. When authorities needed to find someone to blame for the violence in 1999 and to display the consequences of such actions, they used Mohammadi.

On television that night, a deep-voiced announcer read a statement from the Ministry of Intelligence branding Mohammadi a mastermind of the unrest who had acted on foreign orders. On the screen, Mohammadi looked thinner and older than I remembered. His face was puffy and he had lost his fast-talking bravado. He admitted having had contact with outlawed political parties and holding meetings with unnamed groups and people in the United States and Turkey. The confession was undated and obviously heavily edited, which spawned rumors that it was coerced and might have been made during earlier incarcerations. I didn’t doubt that he had been tortured—at the very least sleep-deprived and beaten until he was too dizzy to think of anything but saying whatever they wanted him to say and signing whatever they wanted him to sign.

One indication of what might have happened had he remained defiant was the suffering of his brother, Akbar, who was sent to Evin prison for throwing Molotov cocktails, and who decided to protest the torture he endured there in a letter to the chief of the Judiciary. “I was hit with an electric cable, hung up by a rope, and violently beaten,” said the letter, which was published in a number of reformist newspapers after the Mohammadi family decided to make it public. The letter also said he had gone deaf in his right ear, lost two nails on his left foot, and suffered from kidney pain. “The prison doctor ordered me to the hospital, but up until now I have not been taken there and I continue to suffer,” the letter said. It was not clear whether Akbar had been offered a chance to confess publicly. What was clear was that his only remaining legal remedy against an execution order was an appeal to Iran’s religious leader, Ayatollah Khamenei.

On television that evening in Behshahr, a confession by a woman whose name was said to be Malous Radnia followed Manouchehr Mohammadi’s. Radnia looked away from the camera and swallowed hard after every few words. “I regularly gave false news to foreign media,” she said. She also confessed that she had allowed a fax machine in her home to be used to disseminate information.

In the next several days, other taped confessions followed. One young man said he had been the middleman between “foreign elements” and Mohammadi. Another confessed that he and Mohammadi had tried to provoke students to riot. A few days later, a second confession of Mohammadi’s was aired on television. Like the first, it appeared to have been heavily edited, but this time, a digital date was affixed, an apparent effort to prove to doubters that the confession was made after the riots. It gave new details, including the names of Mohammadi’s supposed contacts in America. Mohammadi confessed that he had received money from the United States and that his group staged street fights and then put the blame on right-wing vigilante groups. The goal, he said, was to make Iran “appear to be an unstable country.”

At this point the message from the confessions was clear: for those willing to believe it, there was something on which to hang the notion that the protests had originated abroad. More important, they included a warning for would-be dissidents: this could happen to you.

But in Iran, all swords seem to have double edges. Rather than stir unalloyed fear among potential dissidents, the televised confessions revived memories—and resentments—about others who had experienced such things. I discovered that at lunch one day at the home of my close friends, Farhad Behbahani and Fereshteh Farhi. I mentioned how chilling I had found Mohammadi’s arrest and the confessions that followed. The talk turned to prison.

“I have a friend who spent twenty-five years in prison under the Shah,” said one guest. “He was a communist. He was freed for one year with the revolution. Then the new regime put him back in prison for eight years. I asked him one day, ‘How would you compare the two?’ He said, ‘The Shah’s prisons were heaven!’”

Farhad is a British-educated chemist who now works for an engineering consulting firm. His great-grandfather, Ayatollah Abdollah Behbahani, was a leader of the constitutional movement of the early twentieth century. Farhad himself is a learned scholar of Islam. He had been a friend of the assassinated Dariush Forouhar and his wife from their days in the Freedom Movement.

“No one is safe in this country,” Farhad said matter-of-factly. “Four men can come to your house at midnight. They can blindfold you and take you away. Your wife may not know for two months where you are.”

I had known Farhad for years. He was speaking in general terms, but I knew he was talking about himself. In 1990, while he was working for the government-run National Iranian Oil Company, Farhad was one of ninety political activists and intellectuals who signed a letter to President Rafsanjani pointing out the deficiencies of the Islamic system and suggesting that the war with Iraq had been ended far too late. Several weeks later, Farhad and twenty-two of the signatories were arrested.

He had never talked about it to me before that day at lunch. But suddenly, he seemed to want to.

“Did they mistreat you?” I asked, not knowing how far to probe.

He laughed, and I felt as if I had asked a truly absurd question.

“Of course,” he said, spitting out the words. “But after about two months it wasn’t too bad. After I said what they wanted, the beatings were less brutal.”

What he didn’t say that afternoon he said several months later, in January 2000, in the form of a published letter to former President Rafsanjani. “Three of them grabbed me and took me to a small and dark room in the basement,” Farhad wrote. “They laid me down on my chest, chained my arms and legs to the wooden bed, and began whipping my feet. The pain was so awful that I screamed, ‘Oh, my God!’ As though this was the moment they were waiting for, ‘Haji Agha’ [an interrogator] ordered my beater to pick a wooden whip labeled ‘Number two.’ I fainted after two lashes with it. God knows how others survived whip ‘Number three.’

“Yes, Mr. Rafsanjani, this is what went on in the prisons those days.”

Khatami’s election three years before and the public explosion of the political debate since have left Farhad quite outspoken. That was true even the day we had lunch: he had already begun to write articles—most under his own name—in reformist newspapers and magazines that openly discussed some of the problems plaguing the Islamic system. His friends worried that he was going too far, and that he might find himself in prison again. “Do you miss the flogging?” a guest asked him. “If you do, we’ll flog you and make you feel better!”

The conversation about prison ended. But Fereshteh and I talked about it—and its impact on her family—a few days later. She told me that the day after Farhad’s arrest in 1990 a group of security officers came back to search the house. They took his passport and many of his writings, even his translations and textual studies of the Koran.

Titi, their fourteen-year-old daughter, had been brought up never to be afraid. She boldly told the security officers, “If one of these days my father shows up on television and says something stupid, we will know it was not his idea. My mother, I, everyone will know he was forced!”

When the men finished searching, they told Fereshteh and Titi not to mention their visit to anyone. “Why?” asked Titi. “Are you doing something wrong?”

Fereshteh was worried that perhaps she should have silenced her daughter. On the contrary, one of the men apparently felt sorry for her. Two hours later, he called to let her speak briefly to her father from the undisclosed location where he was being held.

The imprisonment changed the family’s life. Some friends advised Fereshteh to censor herself on the telephone. Many of Titi’s friends weren’t allowed to play with her anymore. Their twelve-year-old son, Behzad, wanted to quit his swim team; it would be bad for the team, he thought. It took his coach, his mother, his grandfather, and his uncles to persuade him to keep swimming. He won six gold medals for his team that summer.

Only two months later did Fereshteh see her husband. Four men escorted her from her office one day in a Mercedes and brought her to a street where Farhad was waiting in another car. The visit lasted just five minutes. “I almost didn’t recognize him,” she said. “He had lost about thirty pounds. He was disoriented and didn’t make sense. He told me to do whatever they asked of me.”

His television confession came one night soon afterward, after he regained some weight. He said nothing extraordinary—that he had contacts outside Iran, that he had traveled to the United States, that he had seen the error of his ways. But some of his political friends couldn’t understand it. Some criticized him behind his back for not being stronger. “We were used to these confessions,” said Fereshteh. “From the beginning of the revolution, we saw communists who went on television to proclaim they had seen Allah’s light. We never took these confessions very seriously. Whether it was this or the movie
Z,
it seemed the same. So my husband was the same. I said to myself, ‘He must have had a good reason to do this.’”

Then after six more months in prison, Farhad was released. Now, nearly a decade later, he is writing again, with a stronger, bolder voice than ever.

The confessions after the unrest in July 1999 didn’t quell the debate in the media about the nature of the Islamic state; in some ways, they intensified it. And the continuing debate proved that the authorities lacked the power to terrorize. Newspaper columnists and ordinary people started talking publicly about the absurdity of the confessions. The English-language
Iran News
ran a cartoon that showed a man standing next to a fax machine and the caption, “I have a fax machine! So I am a spy!”

“These people have been there for a long time but have now begun to talk about things in a different way,” Farhad’s sister-in-law, my friend Farideh Farhi, told me later. “Great leaps of bravery rarely occur in periods of absolute terror. I know it is too little and too slow but definite changes have occurred, even in the realm of terror. The kind of conversation that exists in Iran today has never existed before. Farhad takes great pleasure in this despite the fact that he knows that vestiges of a long history of terror will continue to haunt Iran for a long time to come. Cultures do not change overnight; neither do ways of conceiving politics.”