A State of Fear (6 page)

In fact, the engineering faculty became something of a revolutionary tourist attraction, with workers and peasants coming to gawp at ‘the kids with machine guns who have taken over the country’.

Our brand of open, libertarian education spread throughout the country. Once a week I would make the 100km drive to Ghazvin to lecture at the university. These lectures were open to anyone. They dealt with problems from the industrial shoras to the nature of the land reform. Hundreds of young people would turn up, most associated with the Fedayeen.

Khomeini himself returned in early 1979, two weeks after the Shah left for exile. On 1 April that year, the country voted to become an Islamic Republic. By the end of 1979, Khomeini had been declared supreme ruler. But it was soon felt that the revolution wasn’t making progress and I began to focus my own criticism on the reluctance of the new Islamic regime to make any progressive concessions to the workers and peasants. Our revolution was being taken from us. The regime began to take action against the workers’ and peasants’ shoras. Khomeini declared a jihad – a holy war – against the Kurds and sided with the feudal and capitalist forces against the workers.

This assault was not confined to Kurdistan and the workplaces of Iran. It showed its ugly face in the attacks by Hezbollah thugs against the universities and other places of learning. Calling itself the Islamic Cultural Revolution, it spilled the blood of the students and professors who had fought so courageously against the Shah. This counter-revolution brought with it sexual apartheid and shackled all freedom of expression.

T
he autumn after my arrest, guards came to the cell and told me to pack up what things I had and put my blindfold on. It came completely out of the blue and gave me no time to bid my farewells to my Komiteh Moshterak cellmates, most of whom I never saw again. It is a tragic certainty that the majority of them will have ended up in front of a firing squad or on the gallows.

I was escorted out of the cell and through the prison corridors. We descended the steps to the ground floor reception I had passed through over five months before. No words were exchanged during this walk. In silence, a guard passed me a plastic bag. It contained the pyjamas I had been arrested in. I was on the move – but where to, God only knew.

A guard led me through the yard and, for the first time in months, I briefly felt the sun on my face. We walked across the yard to a black Mercedes and I was pushed into the back seat. To one side sat a guard, cradling a Kalashnikov in his lap and on
the other was someone I could not quite see. The passenger seat in the front next to our heavily bearded driver was not in my limited line of vision either.

A guard outside shouted, ‘Do you have your guns and all your prisoners?’ The guard beside me grunted confirmation. ‘God be with you!’ came the reply. ‘Open the door and let them out’. Iron screeched on iron as the gate swung open. Once we were moving and swinging round the bends in the road, I took the opportunity to look at the person beside me. To my surprise I saw that it was Farhad, the man who I had sat next to the morning of my arrest, and who had been my reluctant accuser in my initial interrogation. He was wearing the same shirt, with a distinctive green stripe, that he had on when we used to meet. Then I caught sight of a woman in an Islamic black veil sitting in the front passenger seat. At one point she turned around enough for me to see that she wore a blindfold under her veil, so I assumed that it was Mariam, Farhad’s wife. I was relieved to see them both alive.

I began to believe that we had left the brutal interrogations behind us. It was my understanding – or at least my hope – that they were taking us to the Islamic court. My mind was racing, but I kept thinking that whatever the outcome of the court proceedings, at least I would not have face torture again.

The side and rear windows of the vehicle we were in had been blacked out, so it was only possible to see what was directly in our path through the windscreen. I drank in the familiar sights of Tehran rushing by. Women, hidden under black veils and with children hanging from their necks, asked for money from passers-by in the street. Some even tried to run after the cars during the journey. At busy junctions, when cars were forced to stop, women, old men and small children begging would swarm around them.

Our driver drove like he owned the road, like everyone else should be subservient to him. I swear he tried to overtake every
single car. It came as no real surprise when we had an accident, colliding with the back of a truck. Immediately, two escort vehicles accompanying us screeched to a halt. Our driver got out, approached the elderly driver of the truck and landed a swift punch on his nose. The old man staggered back, ran to the cab of his truck and pulled out an iron bar. A fight began and the guard inside our car leapt out and joined in.

I could hardly believe it: here was the opportunity I’d been waiting for and I turned to speak to Farhad. I was so frail and had lost so much weight through torture and my stroke that I only just had time enough to explain who I was before the guards returned. The poor old truck driver had worked out who his attackers were and had got away.

After another hour of driving through thick traffic in the streets of central Tehran, we reached the north of the city. We went through a large iron door and all three of us were hauled out of the car and handed over to a new set of guards. They were armed. Whatever this place was, it did not have the feel of a court. I could hear the voice of the muezzin from a loudspeaker in the building followed by the echo of evening prayers. Farhad and I were marched to the top of a staircase and they took his wife to the next landing.

‘Don’t move your head!’ a guard shouted. ‘Don’t touch your blindfold, and keep quiet.’

They put me on one side of the landing and Farhad on the other, both facing the wall. After waiting around 15 minutes I guessed we might be able to talk quietly. ‘Why did you give them information about my identity and whereabouts?’ I asked. ‘Don’t tell them that I have been a member of the organisation, I’ve denied it.’

He said nothing. To be honest, I didn’t really expect an answer. Just because we couldn’t see or hear anyone, it didn’t mean no one was listening. After about two hours, a guard returned, signed for us and took us to a new building. We were
led to a large hall where many other prisoners sat facing the walls. I heard a familiar, frightful sound that confirmed my worst fears: the shrieks of a young man being tortured nearby. His voice sounded like it hadn’t fully broken yet and I guessed he could not have been more than 14 or 15 years old. He repeatedly called out for his mother and father.

‘You are in Evin,’ a voice bellowed. ‘Evin is the house of repentance. Talk! Tell us everything you know. This is your last chance to save yourself.’

‘Brother,’ he screamed, ‘they just captured me in the street! I was on my way to play football with my cousins. I don’t know what you want. This is a mistake. I am innocent, believe me. I swear to God, I am innocent. Let me go! My parents are waiting for me.’

‘Speak or you will be sent to hell.’

The noise of the lashes and the screams of the boy echoed around the hall. It was sickening… but at least I now knew where I was.

Evin was synonymous with torture. It had a bloody 30-year history, from its construction with the help of Israeli experts as a maximum security prison to hold those who had escaped torture and interrogation during their stay in Komiteh Moshtarak. Evin was the Bastille for Iranian revolutionaries. They stormed it, the place that claimed many freedom fighters under the Shah’s regime. Among the executed were seven leaders of the Fedayeen group led by the socialist Bihjan Jazani and two Mojahedin. In 1972 they were ‘shot while attempting to escape’ – i.e., taken to the top of a hill and machine-gunned. Between 1981 and 1982, more than 10,000 Iranian revolutionaries died either under torture or in front of the firing squad.

The guard in charge of this hall appeared to be in his 50s. He was called Sayed and was very diligent, making sure that prisoners did not talk to each another or touch their blindfolds.
He even asked each of us what we were charged with, in order to ensure that no two members of the same organisation or group were sitting near each other. I was made to sit in a different place from Farhad, who I had been hoping to communicate with. As the night drew on, I tried to think of a pretext to allow me to move closer as I thought that we would be moved to court the next day. I was desperate to tell him to deny any link between me and the organisation. When a hand went up from the other side of the hall requesting permission to go to the lavatory, I squinted under my blindfold and saw that it was Farhad. I got up and followed him, making out that it was an emergency, running doubled up across the hall with my hands over my groin.

I arrived at the toilet door at exactly the same time as Farhad did. Inside, we pushed up our blindfolds a little higher so that we could see. There were three or four cubicles and a sink. ‘We need to talk,’ I said. ‘When we return to the hall I’ll try and sit next to you.’

Back in the hall I followed him to his place. We stayed facing the wall in silence until lights out, when it was less dangerous to talk. Now Farad told me his whole story. One of the members of the organisation had ‘repented’ and gave information to Savama, the Ministry of Intelligence and National Security. This person had taken the security forces to where Farhad’s parents lived and, after staking out the house for a week, the secret police told his elderly mother that her son and his comrades would be shot and she would be arrested and sent to Evin. The old woman was painfully aware that this was not an empty threat and made the leader of the security forces swear on the Koran that if she gave them the address he would spare Farhad’s life. Very early the next morning she took dozens of Hezbollah gunmen to the safe house. They seized various documents, including a list of activists in the underground cells within the factories.

Farhad explained that, to save the leadership, he had to give up other comrades. He lamented a failure to destroy valuable information lying around the safe house which he said had greatly increased the pressure. Mariam, his wife, was harshly treated, not least because she was pregnant at the time and therefore identified as a soft target. She withheld essential information that, had it come to light, would have resulted in my death. Despite the shock and disorientation of their arrest, both Farhad and Mariam kept much from their interrogators. I was not only grateful but also impressed, even though my arrest had followed the raid on their safe house. Farhad went on to warn that the secret police were also being fed information by collaborators within the prison itself.

Our clandestine discussion in that dark and silent hall continued until almost 4am. I will never forget that night, it felt historic: the first meeting with a comrade since my arrest, the first chance to exchange information. The time passed so quickly and, before I knew it, it was 5am and the guards were filing in again. The day started with the muezzin calling us to the compulsory prayer session over the prison sound system. The guards then collected up the dirty blankets we had slept in, exchanging them for dirty red plastic cups filled with the traditional yellow, foul-smelling tea (with bromide that made the stench worse), sweetened with two cubes of sugar. This, with a piece of under-baked doughy bread and a small slice of stale cheese, was breakfast.

After eating we lined up in single file. Still blindfolded, each prisoner put their right hand on the shoulder of the one in front. At the front of the line a huge, bearded guard held a piece of cable attached to the first prisoner, thus avoiding physical contact with the ‘untouchables’. Another guard, brandishing a stick, ran up and down the length of the queue. Every now and then he would start beating a prisoner on the head, shoulders and back and scream, ‘Why were you speaking?’ Bringing up the rear was a third guard.
I clasped Farhad’s shoulder and hoped that we would be put in a cell together and therefore able to continue our discussion.

Some prisoners were left behind on the ground floor while the rest of us were taken to another secure area in the facility. Farhad and I were separated and he was put into another cell. I never saw him in that prison again. The guards handed us over and the prisoners had then to wait for hours in the corridor until new guards opened the door into another block. One by one each of us was forced to strip down to our underpants and then we were searched. There were a few prisoners who still had decent clothes and even watches, rings and money. Everything was taken. We dressed ourselves in new uniforms.

I was led down more corridors and witnessed some horrendous scenes from underneath my blindfold. Prisoners lined the walls on either side of me, some of them bleeding from fresh wounds on their heads, hands and feet. Some appeared to be dead, a dirty blanket as their shroud. A few men and women had been manacled and were hanging from doorframes or the bars of the windows. They looked like they had been there for some time; some showed no sign of life.

The corridor was about two metres wide and between 40 and 50 metres long. Every five or six steps I took, I saw another corridor intersect the main one at right angles – each of them was lined with more huddled inmates. The familiar sound of torture filled the air, the screams of young girls and boys mixing with those of the old. There was another sound, one that was new to me: the cries of children, some of them infants, looking for their mothers.

The despair I felt was almost overwhelming and questions flooded my brain. Why had they brought me here? I had been through all this before. Weren’t those interrogations in the Komiteh enough? Was I going to be tortured again? What about those thick files that the guards had in their hands earlier were they related to my case?

My despair deepened when I discovered which section of Evin I had been moved to: block 209. This was a centre of torture. It was in the hands of the Islamic revolutionary prosecutor who worked closely with Savama and the information and security section of the Islamic committees. The committees, which were scattered throughout the different boroughs of Tehran and the provinces, sent all the reports they could gather on each suspicious case to the Islamic prosecutor. He could then give the order for further arrests.

Block 209 was run by a member of the Islamic Revolutionary Party who would later become Tehran’s deputy to Iran’s government, the Majles. His rise to power was not unusual. Many officials, deputies routinely among them, were involved in torture and massacres. He also later became managing director of the Al Hadi Foundation. Although ‘charitable’, it made large profits from many different companies – including one that produced women’s underwear. His position came by way of a fatwa from Khomeini.

For five long days and nights I was a witness to torture. Then a guard arrived and, standing in the middle of the corridor, read out a long list of names. I heard him call out my first name, Reza, followed by my father’s first name. Surnames were avoided so prisoners would not be able to identify one another.

I was taken into a room in which an interrogator was waiting. He was reading a file that I suspected was the same one prepared on me at the Komiteh prison. Looking up, he asked my name, political affiliation and charges. With the formalities over, he grabbed me by my uniform and pulled me out of the room, along the passageway, down a staircase leading to the basement and into another room. The first thing I noticed was the familiar sight of a metal bed frame. I was put face down and my outstretched wrists and ankles were secured with plastic ropes. Somebody sat on my neck and shoulders while two others beat me with cables on the soles of my feet and on my back. They
took turns to flog me, all the time shouting ‘Allahu Akbar!’ (‘God is great’.)