Persian Mirrors: The Elusive Face of Iran (49 page)

Khalkhali’s courtroom that day was a cramped, airless, unlit room with no furnishings except dusty cushions and carpets on the floor. About twenty spectators lined the walls. The heat was so suffocating that the plump cleric removed his turban, his cloak, and his socks. He sat barefoot on the floor and picked his toes as he heard the evidence against the defendant, a thirty-two-year-old doctor accused of handing over wounded Iranian soldiers to Kurdish rebels. The doctor, unshaven and gaunt, dressed in Army fatigues, was not allowed to speak. He had no lawyer, and there were no television cameras. Khalkhali repeatedly left the room as soldiers and drivers testified about misplaced uniforms, hostages, a car that ran out of gas, an ambulance driver who didn’t know how to drive, an argument over a flashlight—everything but the charges against the doctor.

I never found out if the doctor was executed or set free. In that kind of atmosphere, it might have gone either way.

For a generation, the Iranian judicial system continued to be shrouded in secrecy. It wasn’t easy for outsiders to get into courtrooms, and most trials were held in closed session. But that changed in the spring of 1998 when the authorities decided to go public with a trial and televise it nationwide. In the dock was Gholam-Hosein Karbaschi, the mayor of Tehran and a close ally of President Khatami. The charge was corruption; the underlying issue was political independence. The nation was transfixed.

Karbaschi’s run-in with the law had started months before, not long after Khatami had assumed the presidency. As a mayor, newspaper publisher, and head of a newly created centrist political group called the Servants of Construction, Karbaschi had been in a position to help the Khatami campaign. And help he had, mobilizing city workers on behalf of the campaign and pumping city funds directly into Khatami’s campaign coffers. The conservative clerics retaliated a few months after Khatami’s victory, arresting fifty-four of Karbaschi’s senior aides.

Karbaschi himself was arrested in April 1998 on charges that he had misused and diverted city funds, particularly in elaborate public works projects. The arrest unleashed a storm of debate in the press about the rule of law. Abdollah Nouri, then the Minister of the Interior, complained that neither he nor President Khatami had been told the arrest was coming. But the
Tehran Times,
a conservative English-language newspaper, took the line that the Judiciary could do no wrong. “The Judiciary in Iran is based on Islamic principles and will never allow any injustice to be done to anyone,” it said. Thousands of student demonstrators who supported the mayor clashed with riot police, and the specter of a sustained, large-scale, violent public protest loomed so large that Ayatollah Khamenei intervened. After eleven days of detention, he ordered Karbaschi released on bail and sent back to work.

The trial was held at the Imam Khomeini Judiciary Complex, under the eyes of Khomeini and Khamenei, staring down from fifteen-foot portraits hung at the front of the high-ceilinged main courtroom. A hand-written banner strung along one wall read, “Prayer purifies the heart.” The section where an American jury might sit was reserved for dozens of reporters and photographers. Iran’s state-run television placed four cameras in the courtroom. The decision to show the trial in public reflected the extent to which public pressure had become a factor in Iranian politics. The first session was shown late at night. But after numerous complaints and the realization that the public was ready to stay up all night to watch, the officials caved in and aired the trial during prime time. Sessions began with flowery salutations to the Prophet Mohammad and lengthy readings from the Koran about the swiftness and harshness of justice.

For seven sessions over nearly five weeks, the trial gripped the nation. The mayor used wit and logic, bluster and anger to fend off charges that he had embezzled millions of dollars, taken bribes, peddled influence, financed political campaigns, and misused official funds. Parents kept their children up late at night to watch the broadcasts. The testimony was aired in restaurants, teahouses, railway stations, and airport lounges. A session I attended had been postponed for five days at the request of the media-savvy mayor, who wanted to avoid a broadcast conflict with one of Iran’s games in the World Cup soccer tournament.

This was not
Perry Mason
or
Law and Order.
Rather, as my friend Hosein Nosrat in the Ministry of Islamic Guidance observed, this was the Iranian version of the O.J. Simpson trial, in which the celebrity of the accused infused the trial with a disproportionate importance. And just as the lasting impact of the O.J. trial was not his guilt or innocence, but the illumination of the racial divide in America, the lasting impact of the Karbaschi trial was the exposure of the weaknesses of the Iranian political system. It quickly became clear that the trial’s true purpose was not to punish corruption but to thwart Khatami’s new reformist administration. The courtroom thus became an arena in which the political struggles and debates raging inside the system were there for all to see and that was the draw. The struggle had never been played out so publicly before.

The Karbaschi trial also exposed the arbitrariness of a judicial system in which the judge (a cleric chosen for his ideological commitment to the system) also serves as prosecutor, plaintiff, and jury. For a public unused to seeing political trials, the boisterous sparring between Karbaschi and the judge, Gholam-Hosein Mohseni-Ejei, raised questions about the judicial system itself. The reality was that Mohseni-Ejei, obviously confused by his multiple roles, could not stop himself from arguing with the defendant and his lawyers about the interpretation of facts, something a prosecutor would normally do. Karbaschi exploited the situation by pointing out the judge’s obvious bias. Such audacity was unusual in Iranian courtrooms. But Karbaschi was an unusual defendant.

Karbaschi showed no fear. Trained as a cleric in Qom, where he studied philosophy and religion for several years, he had been imprisoned for three years in the 1970s—much of it in solitary confinement—for political activities against the Shah. After the revolution, he was appointed governor of Isfahan, where he restored the city’s historical treasures and cleaned up its tourist sites. It helped that his father, a cleric, had studied under Ayatollah Khamenei and had worked for him in Qom for years.

Later, as mayor of Tehran, Karbaschi had not been afraid to make enemies. He had bulldozed apartment buildings and built office buildings without official approval, removed revolutionary graffiti from walls, planted thousands of trees, and built dozens of parks—all in the name of transforming Tehran into a city that works. He knew how to buy the loyalty of city employees by boosting their pitiful salaries with gifts and favors. Over the objections of many clerics, he built cultural centers that showed films and plays, held athletic events, and offered music lessons to young people. He started his urban renewal projects on the gritty south side, where the poor of the city live. To spread his message, he founded a newspaper,
Hamshahri,
with city money and ran it with city money. It became the largest-circulation daily in the country. He also launched a radio station, Radio Payam, which won listeners by giving regular traffic reports, and he started one of the country’s first, best, and cheapest Internet providers, Neda.net.

To pay for his campaign, Karbaschi improvised perhaps a bit too much. He raised taxes and extorted money from real estate developers, who he allowed to build high-rise apartment complexes in elegant neighborhoods, only to turn around and slap a tax of more than 30 percent on their projects. He did it not for personal gain—at least not that anyone ever proved—but to raise money for the city in the absence of a coherent local tax assessment and collection system. When shopkeepers refused to paint and fix up their storefronts, Karbaschi ordered their entryways dug up and trees planted; when traffic in Tehran paralyzed the city and destroyed the air quality, he banned all traffic except for taxis and private motorists who paid the city a hefty fee; when some small factories refused to move out of the city, he cut off their water supply.

When I first met Karbaschi, three years before his trial, he was scruffily dressed in an ill-fitting jacket and trousers and unpolished shoes. His beard was unclipped; greasy bangs fell into his eyes. I told him he had earned a reputation as the most loved and the most reviled man in Tehran. “Great people in history are like that,” he said, his smile showing blackened teeth. In later encounters, I noticed that he had trimmed his hair and beard and spiffed up his wardrobe, sporting well-cut suits, Calvin Klein eyeglasses, and cologne.

During his trial Karbaschi dared to turn the tables on Mohseni-Ejei, the judge. Karbaschi played the religion card, beginning each day’s testimony with prayers in Arabic praising the spiritual leaders of Shiite Islam.

He explained to the judge, “I must always start everything with the words of our leaders.”

“That is fine, but not here in a court of law,” Mohseni-Ejei said.

“I do not think that the words of Imam Ali would be against the rules of the court,” Karbaschi said at another point.

“Yes, they are,” said Mohseni Ejei. “They waste time.”

Karbaschi also questioned the competence of the court to try him and pointed out that the confessions against him had been coerced through pressure, threats, and even torture. Indeed, the most extraordinary testimony focused on the issue of torture in prison. Torture has always been one of the hot-button items of Iran’s revolutionary experience. Even though many of Iran’s top leaders had been tortured themselves as political prisoners under the Shah, the Islamic Republic was often accused by human rights groups of mistreating and torturing prisoners, though the government consistently denied such reports.

Until the Karbaschi trial, such accusations were written only in the memoirs and testimony of exiles. But now ordinary Iranians could hear about torture on national television and read about it in the newspapers: the deputy mayor who said he had been forced to stand all night on one foot and was beaten until he fainted; a second deputy mayor who said he had been beaten mercilessly with an electrical cable, deprived of food, and forced to drink from the same cup in which he urinated; a third deputy mayor who said he could hear other prisoners crying and groaning while they were being tortured; a fourth deputy mayor who said he was forced to listen to the screams of a woman being lashed and was told that the woman was his wife.

Mohseni-Ejei struggled to suppress the testimony, but it was too late; the torture taboo had been broken. More than half of the deputies in the conservative-dominated Parliament even called for an investigation after mayoral aides related tales of their mistreatment in a meeting with legislators. Ayatollah Mohammad Yazdi, then the Chief Justice, who had ordered Karbaschi’s arrest in the first place, dismissed the charges as “crocodile tears.” But he replaced the head of the prison system.

It became clear as the testimony unfolded that there was ample evidence that Karbaschi had exploited the lax rules of municipal management, moved money from one account to another, traded favors, encouraged poorly paid employees with bonuses and benefits, and pressured businesses to contribute to his various beautification schemes. In the end, he was found guilty of corruption, embezzlement, and mismanagement and was sentenced to five years in prison, along with a twenty-year ban on holding executive office, sixty lashes, and billions of rials in fines. The sentence was later reduced to two years’ imprisonment and a ten-year ban.

But in Iran there is always room for maneuver, even in prison. The newspaper
Khordad
reported that Karbaschi had been assigned a cell with convicts imprisoned for bouncing checks and that he had told his wife he was trying to resolve the financial problems of his new friends. The hardline daily
Qods
reported with disdain that he did not have to wear the standard prison uniform and had turned Evin into his own private office, complete with catered meals from restaurants and two mobile phones.

The photographer and cameraman Kaveh Golestan, whom I first met during the revolution when he was on assignment for
Time
magazine, took extensive footage of Karbaschi after his verdict; one clip showed a tear in his eye. “He really liked that close-up,” Kaveh told me. “So he had one of his staff call me and ask for copies of the film. But they said to me, ‘Golestan, there’s only one tear, only one drop. Can you show it in slow motion so that we can see the tear more?’”

Even from his cell, Karbaschi seemed to be plotting a comeback. Indeed, in January 2000, Ayatollah Khamenei suddenly granted him a pardon and set him free. Karbaschi didn’t even have to pay the fine. Within a few days, he was hard at work setting up another newspaper,
Ham Mihan.
He was, however, still barred from holding government office, at least for the moment.

The Karbaschi trial turned out to be a mild prelude to a much more daring and dangerous challenge to the legitimacy of the Iranian system a year later. This was the trial of Abdollah Nouri, who had served in Khatami’s cabinet. He was accused of betraying the Islamic Republic, through the ideas he had expressed. Nouri had argued that pluralism was justified under the Islamic system, which meant that the Iranian people could no longer be expected to obey a single interpretation of Islam, spoon-fed to them by the conservative clergy. The reformers and the traditionalists each claimed that both God and the late Ayatollah Khomeini were on their side. The courtroom thus became the ideological battlefield for irreconcilable beliefs about the future of the Iranian theocracy.

The stakes in Nouri’s trial were much higher than in Karbaschi’s. Nouri was accused not of mundane financial crimes, but of treason. Moreover, Nouri was a cleric who had been a trusted lieutenant of Khomeini and the religious guide to the Revolutionary Guards early in the revolution. He had served in Parliament. He also had been Minister of the Interior and a Vice President in Khatami’s cabinet until he resigned from the latter post in February 1999 in order to run in the Islamic Republic’s first local elections—in which he would receive the highest number of votes in the city of Tehran. He was already being talked about as the oddson favorite to become Speaker of Parliament in the February 2000 parliamentary election. Nouri’s supporters openly called the case against him a transparent effort by his conservative enemies to sideline him.