A State of Fear (15 page)

F
rom the early days of the Islamic regime, the prison authorities used the Tavabs – ‘Repentants’ – in a systematic way. The fact that the Tavabs played such a role demands examination.

It is possible to draw a comparison between the Tavabs and those prisoners called ‘capos’ in Nazi prison camps. They were all inmates who acted as stooges and thugs for the prison guards. Indeed, that was our name for them. The difference was that the Tavabs where much more ideological, being compelled to become devout Muslims to prove their loyalty to the prison authorities. According to prison officials, Tavabs were those who had acted against the will of authority and committed a capital offence. If the person sentenced was to repent, and this repentance was accepted and verified by the religious authorities, the interrogators and torturers of the Islamic courts, then their life might be spared.

Firstly, it needs to be borne in mind that almost all of those in
jail were not active members of an organisation, had not tried to use force to overthrow the government, but were often picked up for reading a taboo newspaper or having a left-wing leaflet on them. Most of them were between 15 and 20 years of age. These ordinary, young and generally naive people were put through the Islamic torture mill. It was often this, rather than the pamphlet they might have been reading, that politicised them.

Politicisation, though, did take place under conditions of the defeat of the 1979 revolution, the rise of the Islamic regime, and the consequent dispersion, confusion and crisis of the left. Consequently there was a vacuum on the left. The coup attempt by the Mojahedin leadership in 1981, which led to the ejection of Bani-Sadr from the presidency and the massacres of opposition forces, all contributed to the collapse of resistance among wide swathes of previously active young people. Within the jails, the wave of executions plunged many into cynicism and despair.

The prison system focused on depriving the individual of his or her identity. Massive force was marshalled to cut the prisoner off from any associations, and to break his physical resilience. Once this had been achieved, the prisoner was their prey. Estranged from his comrades, he would be deprived of the links and ideas by which he had previously identified himself: freedom, democracy, social justice. Heart and mind had been emptied out by the prison system. The ground had been laid for total submission. The prisoner would be in a cultural and social vacuum, which the regime would then attempt to fill with its alienating and degrading values.

Before being accepted as a Tavab, each individual subject to this had to provide all the information he had, covering his relationship to political trends, inside and outside of prison, and all information regarding his family and close associates. Some young Tavabs got their whole families arrested as a result.

Unrestrained terror was used against any individual or group
of prisoners who gave any sign of resistance. The prison population was divided between religious and non-religious, Islamic and non-Islamic, Tavab and intransigents.

Prison officials used every opportunity to deepen the divisions between the left and religious organisations, and within the left itself. Former leading activists from such organisations as the Mojahedin, Peykar, Tudeh and Fedayeen Majority were used with devastating effect by officials after they recanted. These broken but still capable prisoners produced a publication,
The Tavabin,
and were put in front of the cameras to ‘confess their sins’. Kianoori, the leader of the Tudeh Party, and Ehsan Tabari, its leading theorist, are the two best-known cases. Some leaders of the Mojahedin uprising played a prominent role in these show-trial charades. The Mojahedin was probably the most vulnerable to this ideological assault because of its religious perspective. In addition, the Mojahedin possessed more teenage members than any other group.

Other Tavabs went so far as to assist in the arrest and execution of their erstwhile comrades, some even becoming full-time interrogators in Evin’s 209 and I had the misfortune to be one of their subjects on a number of occasions.

Hussein Rohani, from Peykar’s leadership, Ataolahi from the Fedayeen Minority, and Hussein Riyahi of the guerrilla group the Communist League, all took the stand in televised show trials. Their first proved to be quite an occasion.

Haji Lajiverdi organised a show trial in Evin. Many imprisoned leaders, of Peykar in particular, were lined up before the assembled thousands brought unwillingly from their cells to witness another spectacle. By Haji Lajiverdi were the Peykar leaders Hossein Rohani, Jigarehi, his wife Manijeh Hodayi, along with chief Tavabs from other organisations. This was in 1982, about two months after the Peykar leaders’ arrest. One of their number, Peykar’s general secretary Ali Reza Sepasieh
Ashtiani, had already died under torture as a result of his courageous resistance. Haji Lajiverdi introduced them, and said that they were assembled today ‘to share their experiences’.

First up to the microphone was Rohani. He told how he had been active for over 20 years, passing from the leadership of the Mojahedin to Peykar. He spoke in a calm and level tone. After summarising his political development, he went on to condemn it: ‘I have abandoned Marxism and embraced Islam.’

Manijeh Hodayi asked to speak. Instead of damning her political past, as expected, she turned her derision on Rohani: ‘Mister Rohani didn’t know what he was talking about when he was a Muslim in the Mojahedin. He didn’t when he was a Marxist in the Peykar. Listening to him now, as a “born again” Muslim, it’s obvious he still doesn’t…’

Lajiverdi, the Tavabs and the guards stood in shocked silence as she continued her attack. The thousands of prisoners, squatting cross-legged before the stage, were lifted by this unexpected display of courage. We could only watch as armed guards and club-wielding Tavabs strode up and down our ranks, looking for anyone that might appear in the slightest bit satisfied at this unexpected outcome. That had to be the only advantage of the women’s veils: they couldn’t see you smile.

Eventually, the guards regained their composure and the microphone was taken from her. Rohani pleaded with Haji Lajiverdi for time to answer. But his response wasn’t what Haji Lajiverdi might have hoped for: ‘I was extremely impressed with what Manijeh said. It took real guts. I can’t stand here and support the Islamic regime after this woman has put herself on the line defending her convictions. I retract that support, and reaffirm my commitment to Peykar.’

Haji Lajiverdi watched open-mouthed as all his careful preparation crumbled before him and 12,000 inmates. There had rarely, if ever, been such a collective lift to prison morale. He strode to the podium, snatching back the microphone.
‘Look at yourselves’, he sneered at those on the stage, ‘You have such weak personalities that a woman’s whimpering can change your minds within a minute.’ Then he turned to face the crowd. ‘These are the leaders that you have invested your faith in. You must be really naïve to be fooled by the likes of Rohani and Hodayi’.

Rohani asked for the microphone again and, surprisingly was given it. Now, he rejected Peykar and gave his support, once again, to the Islamic regime. It was apparent that he was totally confused; a shell of the man that had been arrested only two months before. These show trials were intended to shake the ideological foundations of the opposition, and tear them up from the roots. It was an attempt to flaunt the bankruptcy of any alternative to the Islamic regime.

Lajiverdi looms large in any account of Iran’s jails and demands an account of his progression to the de facto role of Lord High Executioner. He first came to note in 1969. He and six others were charged with throwing a Molotov cocktail through the window of the El-Al airways offices in Tehran: as they saw it, defending Islamic values against the ‘Zionist menace’. Up until his arrest as a part-time terrorist, Lajiverdi had been a small shopkeeper, selling pocket handkerchiefs in the bazaar. This little group of petrol bomb hurlers drew most of their support from people just like him.

Lajiverdi really personifies those who became the core of the Islamic regime. These were the men of the lower middle classes – small shopkeepers and bazaaris – squeezed by the development of capitalism in Iran. As they watched the traditional economy disintegrate, they felt the ground crumble from underneath them. They could neither prevent its forward march, nor understand why it was happening. For such people, the Shah’s attempt to enrich his dynasty by dragging Iran kicking and screaming into the latter half of the 20th century
posed a palpable threat to their culture and livelihood. They bitterly resented this process.

They loathed even more the working class movement which was emerging as a result of the industrialisation. It had a secular and democratic agenda which they felt was a threat. The greatest sacrilege of all, it challenged their last bastion of authority – their domination of women in the home. Around them they drew the ever increasing mass of landless ex-peasants, who had trekked from the countryside to surround the cities with their shanty towns built from corrugated iron, oil-drums and cardboard; an army of millions, vainly looking for work and a leader to champion their cause.

Lajiverdi and his six co-conspirators were tried
in camera
under penal code 310, one which was specifically directed at underground communist groups, which must really have offended Haji Lajiverdi’s good Muslim sensibilities, and given heavy jail sentences.

In the course of his incarceration, he became known for continually agitating for a separation between Muslim and
non-Muslim
political prisoners – a division that Savak lapped up. He and his ilk wouldn’t shake hands with a non-religious prisoner, or eat food touched by one, deeming it befouled. They used to hang up their own washing line in the small prison yards, refusing to let any left prisoners have use of it. In the confined space of the yard, this often meant that there was no room for any other line, a situation which inevitably led to fights between political prisoners.

The group was characterised by propounding this line, becoming known as the ‘Clean-Untouchables’, referring to the Islamic/non-Islamic division. Even at this time, this group’s hostility to the left far outstripped that shown to the Shah’s regime. As a result, of course, the majority of the prison population boycotted Lajiverdi, increasing his isolation and is bitterness against the left.

Many of Lajiverdi’s cell-mates and co-thinkers in block 2 at Evin immediately before the revolution were to take prominent positions with the consolidation of the Islamic regime. Rajai, who became the Islamic regime’s first prime minister and second president, met a bloody end from a Mojehedin bomb. Haji Katchoui, the first post-revolution governor of Evin prison, was blown up by one of his own guards in the jail. Abbas Shaybani, is now a four-term Majles deputy.

Haji Lajiverdi’s enthusiasm for the Tavabs during my time in prison seems ironic, since he himself was a ‘repentant’ under the Shah’s prison regime. In 1978, when the Shah was on his last legs, Savak’s chief interrogator Rasouli asked each cell in turn ‘Who has repented their crime?’ Lajiverdi was one of the people who raised his hand, and was given his freedom as a reward for his capitulation. Rajai was another.

Lajiverdi slunk out of Evin’s gates under a cloud, having been identified by those inside and outside the prison for submitting to the regime. He nurtured this shame, turning it against those he blamed as being responsible for it: the left prisoners who had stuck by their guns, only freed by the hundreds of thousands who smashed through Evin’s gates in a giant human wave in the revolution, only a few months later. Nevertheless, Lajiverdi and his entourage did well out of the revolution. They went on to become the heads of the Islamic regime’s prisons, with absolute authority over all those within.

Lajiverdi, who was assassinated by the Mujahedin in the early 1990’s, was a very little man – and not only in stature. His
mean-mindedness
towards those with more courage than himself was to take a terrible toll when he came to have direct authority over them. He did not respect another for his or her independence, but only felt secure with someone when he could completely dominate them. He didn’t have the intellectual or physical strength to impose this through his own qualities. He was nothing without the whole weight of the prison regime. This
man was the epitome of a spiteful, inadequate non-entity, given power over life and death.

Lajiverdi was short and cross-eyed, his face wearing a permanent sour look. Although I had stood within feet of him a couple of times, I had never used the opportunity to take a close, hard look at him. With such a man in such a position, you avoid any possibility of eye contact. To have your eyes meet with Lajiverdi’s when you were under his control often meant being summarily shot. The man’s very presence radiated a sickness born of his callous slaughter of tens of thousands of defenceless prisoners.

We called him the Eichmann of Iran. It is difficult to say which of these two butchers suffers most in the comparison. To be sure, Eichmann murdered far more people. But Eichmann had the opportunity. One can only be grateful – if that is the word – that Iran since 1979 is a smaller concentration camp than Europe under the Nazis.

The Tavabs organised and controlled the prison blocks, which covered every facet of prison life, from allocating food rations and cleaning to conducting prayers and looking after cells. Some Tavabs worked as torturers’ assistants. This was particularly the case in quarantine and doomsday, where they were given a free hand to break prisoners. Tavabs would also act as goons in the raids on the cells.

One way this worked was through what we called the Ku Klux Klan – Tavabs wearing Klan-like hoods to conceal their identities. They were brought into cells and the prisoners were ordered to take off their blindfolds so that the ‘Klan’ could identify those with any links to opposition groups. These visits spread fear among the prisoners: those picked out by the Klan would be sent to the torture blocks for the most intensive interrogation. Some of those picked out either died under torture, or in front of the firing squad.