A State of Fear (23 page)

W
omen have long faced an uphill struggle for recognition as full human beings in Iran. They have shared the prisons with us, and carried their own burden around with them everywhere: the black, voluminous chador that symbolises their imprisonment by the misogynistic doctrine of the mullahs. Throughout the century, the women of Iran have trod the long and painful road to liberation. Unfortunately, it has not been a straight one.

My grandparents' generation overthrew the old absolutist order. One of the principal gains of their constitutional revolution between 1905 and 1907 was that it weakened the stranglehold of the religious hierarchy over the educational and judicial system. Before this time, education was solely the province of the mullahs. Justice, such as it was, was down to the whim of the presiding mullah. The result of the overturning of this system was that women were, for the first time, recognised as citizens, rather than chattel of the Kajar
dynasty's lowly subjects. As Iran dragged itself painfully into the 20th century, women were offered the possibility – and all too often it was to remain no more than that – of transforming themselves from property to active participants in the moulding of our country.

This was the grey tyranny that millions of women thought they were finally casting off with the 1979 revolution. In reality, we entered a chapter of our history that reversed the limited formal gains of the constitutional revolution of some 70 years earlier. Iran's feudal past hung round the necks of its women like a dead weight.

After the establishment of the Islamic regime, hundreds of thousands of women were thrown out of offices and factories throughout the country. Tens of thousands were flogged in the streets for not veiling themselves. Throughout the country, Islamic courts sentenced hundreds of women accused of adultery to death by stoning, public hanging or being hurled off a cliff. Iran was thrown back a century in its social attitudes. The 20th century, so far, has been a long detour between religious absolutism and… religious absolutism.

Today, if you travel through some of the more backward provinces of Iran you will see many women, all wearing the anonymous chador which proclaims them a non-person. But you will not see one alone. In the metropolitan centres such as Tehran a woman may walk alone – but if she walks in the company of another man, it has to be with one who is seen as having the authority to accompany her – a husband or a brother. On any excursion, documents can be demanded to prove such a link. A woman virgin up to the age of 50 cannot be married without the permission of her male guardian.

A woman can't leave the country without the authority of a male member of the family. She can't book a hotel room or anything else in her own name. She can only do it in lieu of a husband or father. A woman is at most the bearer of someone
else's authority. She has none of her own. We have almost complete sexual apartheid in Iran.

But, try as they might, the mullahs can't get the genie back in the bottle. There can be no going back to the last century. The whole development of the intervening period has made women aware, and has inspired them to fight. Paradoxically, even those women who swarmed in a seething black mass of chador in support of Khomeini came into conflict with his grand design. In combining in support of the Islamic ‘revolution', they subconsciously revolted against its intent to crush and consign them to the home life of their great-grandmothers.

The regime's attack on women could not have passed without meeting resistance from women who have studied in the classrooms and universities, and who have been educated in struggle en masse, in the workplaces and on the streets. Women flocked to those parties demanding the overthrow of the Islamic regime, and its replacement by a democratic form of state, as soon as the feudalistic implications of Khomeini's aims became apparent.

This process of radicalisation was met with the arrest of tens of thousands of women. They were imprisoned, interrogated and tortured. Many were shot. The policy of sexual apartheid against women meant, too, that women in prison suffered more than their male counterparts.

Women prisoners had to wear the smothering black veil, thick leggings and trousers. In stifling, sweaty prison conditions, this sealed each woman within their own personal hell in the wider hell of the jail. Those who refused to conform to this dress code were moved from the political blocks and placed in cells reserved for prostitutes.

Mothers were compelled to look after their children in the bleak cells and corridors of the prisons. A verdict against one woman would mean jail for all her young children. Even if the father was not himself imprisoned, and had no political
connections to besmirch his character in the eyes of the regime, he would not be allowed to care for the children, so tender was the concern for the Islamic regime for the role of motherhood.

On the rare occasion that there was no one outside to care for the prisoner's children, the interrogators would threaten to throw the children out if their mother did not co-operate. The children became the eyes and legs for their mothers who were in darkness under a blindfold and unable to walk as a result of tortures. They also tended their mothers as best as they were able. These were enormous responsibilities for a child of maybe three or four.

In 1983, 20 cells in Evin's 209 alone had 26 children distributed between them, some four or five years old when they had the doors bolted behind them, others who were born in prison. As a result of torture, many women had lost the ability to give their children milk. This gave the torturers another lever to use against them: they would be told that if they wanted milk for their babies, they would have to give information in return.

The children's concept of the adult male was drawn entirely from what they saw of the guards and interrogators. They had no idea of the outside world. They had never seen a flower, the moon or the stars – they could not envisage a world outside their grey concrete box. Their mothers would draw them pictures in the dirt on the floor to try and convey to them some vision of a bigger, brighter and happier world. But it must have seemed like just some incredible fairy story to young minds whose only experience was of grey walls, ogres in khaki, and victimised, wounded women cloaked in black.

Young children in the jails were interrogated. As a result, they didn't play cowboys and Indians or doctors and nurses, like other children. The main prison game was prisoners and interrogators. I was told by a woman comrade about just one example from Evin in 1983. A four-year-old boy, Yavar, got 12 of his playmates to line up, facing the wall, while he went down
the line, shouting at each in turn in his high-pitched voice, ‘Where is your daddy?'

Women sentenced to death were systematically gang-raped by the prison guards beforehand, to ensure the victim had ‘no chance of getting to heaven' – the destination of all virgins, according to Iran's clergy. Some women were raped during and after interrogation.

Pregnancy bought no pardon or delay, either from torture or the firing squad. Shahnaz Alikhani, a sympathiser of the left, was tortured and eventually executed in the last stages of pregnancy in Evin. One 209 interrogator, Ghasem, justified this by arguing, ‘If an innocent stands between us and our enemy, then we must remove that innocent to kill our enemy. The scriptures give us this right.'

Nor were women shown any favours during the massacres; quite the reverse. Whereas men were told to embrace Islam or face the firing squad, the ‘choice' open to women was still more horrific: take up Islam or be flogged to death. Evin, in particular, saw many women tread this slow agonising path to eternity.

Following are the results of interviews I have done with several female ex-prisoners of the regime.

Mehri was a prisoner from Kurdistan, captured in Sanandaj in September 1983. From there, she was brought to Komiteh Moshterak, along with her three-year-old daughter. Here she was held, blindfolded, sat in a corridor, facing the wall. Her daughter was placed on her lap and also made to face the wall. The corridor was lined with women in the same position, many bleeding as a result of interrogation.

She was kept there for 15 days and then transferred to Evin. As a result of beating during interrogation, Mehri bled continuously from the vagina. This did not stop for three months. Upon her arrival at Evin's block 209, she was taken straight to a women's ward in the infirmary. Ages ranged from girls of 13 to women in their 70s.

‘One who was in her 60s was known by all as “Mother Mary”.' The guards had arrived at her house, pretending to be friends of her son, an activist. When her son failed to show up, they arrested Mary instead. ‘The skin on her soles had been flayed off through torture,' recalled Mehri. ‘By the time I arrived she had already been operated on twice. But she hadn't told the guards where her son was.

‘One pregnant woman had the flesh literally hanging off her feet as a result of the systematic lashing of her soles. Another woman, Leila, was the sister-in-law of the revolutionary poet Said Sultanpour, who had been arrested during his wedding ceremony and shot within the week. Leila's legs were bandaged up to the knee. Her feet had been smashed to a bloody sponge, and red smudges were left on anything her feet touched.'

Later, Mehri and her child were transferred to a cell with eight other women, two of whom were Zoroastrians from the Fedayeen Minority, two members of Peykar, two from the Communist league and two from Rahe Kargar. There was also another little girl of four in the room. ‘We put the children under the sink, and the rest of us sat around the walls of the tiny cell.' To make matters worse, the two Peykar women were Tavabs. One, Lida, was a polytechnic student, and the other, Zari, was the head of the women's block in 209.

‘The sanitation in 209 was unspeakable,' explained Mehri. ‘We didn't have any sanitary towels and pleas for them got us nowhere. My baby and the other small girl weren't given any milk. My toddler was obviously disturbed. When I was tortured, she was brought into the room. She cried and the interrogators hoped that this would be extra pressure to make me talk. One day in 209, she blindfolded her foam doll, and then beat the little doll so vigorously that it disintegrated under the blows.

‘The air in the cell was stifling, and my daughter developed a heart condition. She would hit herself and pull her hair in frustration at being unable to breathe properly. The only thing
that seemed to bring her comfort was the noise of the trolley that brought us food twice a day. Years later, when people would come to our house, she would ask them to show her the soles of their feet. She wanted to see if the visitor had been through torture.

‘While I was spending time in block 209, every now and then I would be taken from my cell by the guards for interrogation. My interrogator was a mullah. Many girls I met in 209 alerted me that this mullah would take me into a quiet room and would try to sexually molest me. He put me on a chair in front of him. He was sitting in a chair opposite me and he edged slowly towards me so that his knees were pressing against mine. Then he asked me, “Do you smoke?”

‘“Yes.” I replied.

‘“We don't give any cigarettes to women.”

‘“A cigarette does not distinguish between the sexes,” I said.

‘When they brought me back from Evin to Sanandaj prison, I came across horrifying encounters between prison guards and women prisoners.

‘At Sanandaj there was a prison guard who went by the name of Kadkhoda – God looking over your shoulder. He was from Azerbaijan, very tall and with extremely wide shoulders. He had two responsibilities in Sanandaj. The first and foremost was as the official flogger – any prisoner picked up in their cell for “mischief-making” or other acts of resistance would be tied face down on a bed and whipped. At these whipping sessions, each time he raised the whip above his head he would utter in a loud, deep voice, “God is great! Khomeini is our leader!”

‘His other responsibility was as the official representative of the Islamic court. He would escort prisoners from one prison to another, from the Komitehs to prisons all around the country. He had the use of a large Land Rover for this purpose. This was like those used by the military, with a two-seater cabin at the front and two benches at the rear which faced each other, where
the prisoners would be seated, sometimes up to ten at a time. Like a good Islamic guard, he was married with two wives and six children. His face was sunken, with a thick, black beard which fell over the top half of his chest. After the court sentenced me, I was handed over to Kadkhoda's jurisdiction.

‘“I will be taking you to your house so that you can have a meeting with your family,” he told me. “After that we will drive straight to Evin.”

‘On the journey to my house I was so appalled at the thought that someone might see me in his Land Rover that I hid my face below the level of the dashboard for the entire journey. As soon as we reached the house I saw about 50 people, all dressed in black. They came out of the house – all of them were weeping openly. I tried to ask people the reason for their sorrow. No one would answer me. Finally, my father told me that my cousin had been shot to death by the Pasdars during an attack against Kurdish guerrilla opposition forces in the mountains. So my temporary homecoming was blackened by this tragic episode.

‘My father thanked Kadkhoda for bringing me to see my family at this time. Then we climbed back into the Land Rover and headed off for Tehran. It was customary, and Kadkhoda knew it, that prisoners arriving after dark would not be admitted into prison. It was obvious that Kadkhoda had detoured to my family's house precisely so that we would not arrive at Evin until after dark. He had pulled this stunt many times with other women prisoners. As we drove into Tehran, he stopped the car in the city outskirts and turned off the engine. He turned around to me and asked, “Are you sleepy?”