A State of Fear (7 page)

I begged for them to stop, explaining that I had already been interrogated for six months in Komiteh and that I should be awaiting trial.

‘We only rely on our own information, not anyone else’s,’ they said, as the beating continued. ‘The information in this file is useless. Speak, or we will send you to hell.’ This was my introduction to life on block 209.

The chief interrogator responsible for my questioning called himself Masoud. His underlings included two guards, Ghasem and Mojtabah, and two prisoners who were former members of the organisation I was accused of belonging to and had ‘defected’ to the regime. It was felt that they could add extra ‘intelligence’ to the interrogation, as well as four more fists and boots when called upon.

I at last passed out and was only pulled back to consciousness by the sharp pain from the lacerations on the soles of my feet but I could not physically speak for 48 hours. When the interrogators eventually came for me again I was handed a piece of paper with two questions written on it: what were the names and addresses of each and every person I had met in political circles? Would I give information on each of them?

After more beatings to my back and feet, I was again subject to the ghapani torture. My hands were chained together so that my forearms crossed diagonally behind my back. I was suspended by the chain at my wrists over a hook from the ceiling, my feet dangling in the air. My collar bone was still damaged from the last ghapani session and the agony was doubled. I was taken down when I passed out and my limp body was thrown back into the corridor.

The torture session continued every two or three days and I looked and felt like I had been pulled from a serious car wreck: both of my feet were bleeding; my collar bone had broken again;
a particularly vicious blow to the head had led to the loss of 95 per cent of vision in my right eye; both of my eardrums had ruptured; the vertebrae in my lower back were bruised and damaged from guards constantly kicking and stamping on me; teeth had been punched out. My back was incredibly painful; I would scream so loudly that other prisoners would carry me on their shoulders to the infirmary, pleading for injections of painkillers. To this day, loss of balance, constant tinnitus and back injuries continue to make my life miserable. The damage is irreversible.

Four months into my ordeal I was taken to a room where, under the blindfold, I could make out a large table around which a number of people were sitting. I could hear voices from different parts of the room – different accents and dialects including Azeri and refined Persian. I had a strong feeling that those around this table held my life in the balance. ‘Is anyone else in your family involved in political activity against the Islamic Republic?’ A lumpen southern Tehran accent, very coarse.

‘No.’

‘How about your in-laws? Weren’t they helping you financially?’

‘No. In fact, they’ve made a fortune as a result of their activity in the market in this war, so they wouldn’t be interested in politics.’

‘Lumpen’ specifically asked if two of the named in-laws had helped me. He seemed to know them – and me – calling us by first names throughout.

‘Do you believe the Islamic Republic is revolutionary?’ A voice from my left side this time – a strong Arabic accent.

‘The Islamic Republic came about as a result of a revolution against the Pahlavi regime, which was a stooge of American imperialism.’
Dodge the question altogether.

‘Do you believe the Islamic Republic is a stooge of imperialism.’

‘The Islamic regime is acting independently from American influence.’ I was phrasing my answers very carefully. Here I simply repeated the position of our organisation about the regime’s foreign policy.

‘Do you believe in the Islamic revolution? Are you ready to go to the front to fight Iraqi aggression?’

‘I participated fully in the revolution which overthrew the Shah, and I am still a believer in those principles. As for going to the front, I can’t stand on my feet. I’m old and frail. I don’t have anything to contribute.’

Another question from another man, this time with a thick Azeri accent and an educated tone: ‘What are your views on the Soviet Union?’

‘I have always rejected any intervention and influence in my country’s internal affairs by any foreign power, be it American imperialism or the Soviet Union.’

‘If so, then why have you tried to raise discussions on socialism?’

‘I am in favour of a balanced representation of all views,’ I said, quickly adding, ‘including the Islamic point of view.’

‘What are your views on current developments in the Soviet Union, and the successes they have had so far?’

Tricky question.
Be
careful
. ‘You are asking me to talk about the successes of the Soviet Union. My understanding is that at this stage they themselves don’t claim that they have achieved all their goals. In a country where you still have queues for essential goods, I can’t see how you can claim they have succeeded.’

After more questions, accusations and abuse, they called in a guard who took me to an adjacent corridor, where another guard led me to a solitary cell.

Solitary was a relief because this was only the second period since my arrest that I was free to remove the rank prison blindfold. The first thing I saw was a big iron toilet and, to the left of the door, an iron sink. In the corner beyond it was a
covering and behind that were a series of pipes and cables – the perfect hiding place for listening devices. I had to be wary of every word. There were three threadbare, woollen,
military-issue
blankets and, in one corner, a battered red plastic tea cup. When I lay down and stretched out to sleep, the top of my head touched one wall and the soles of my feet the other. I stared up at the lightbulb. It had a wire cover to prevent prisoners from removing the bulb and electrocuting themselves. I’d heard that some prisoners had attempted to do this by standing on the sink late at night when there were fewer guards around. If that didn’t work, they had instead broken off jagged bits of the wire guard and slashed their throats or wrists and bled to death.

The walls in my new cell were grey concrete, so hard that you could not even scratch your name on them. In lieu of any graffiti were passages from the Koran and a portrait of Khomeini painted directly onto the concrete. Calls to repent and denunciations of America and Iraq faced you on every wall of the prison.

The door had a barred, oblong hole through which the guards could watch and I was never warned before this would be opened. Meagre meals were pushed through a hatch on the bottom of the door. Whenever it was opened, I had to put my blindfold back on and face the wall. There was also a very small window in the cell – barred, of course. It was positioned too high to look through, but it was appreciated nonetheless. Time passed painfully slowly in solitary and I used to follow the passage of the sunbeams as they made their journey from one corner of the cell to the other.

I tried to exercise and rebuild the strength I had lost over months of torture. Late at night and early in the morning I would stretch my muscles and run on the spot as slowly and as quietly as I could, so I could not be heard outside the cell. Any form of exercise was banned.

Just a few days had passed when the cell door was opened at around 10 o’clock one morning and a tall, bearded man wearing a blindfold was led in. The door was locked, the man removed his blindfold and he sat in the opposite corner of the cell to me. He looked to be between 35-40, his hair was light and brownish, his skin light and he had blue eyes and a bright face.

‘What are you accused of?’ I asked.

‘I was a leader of a guerrilla organisation in Sanandaj, Kurdistan.’ The city was the capital of the Kurdish province of Iran. ‘I studied in America and graduated in engineering. You?’

At first I found it refreshing to have someone to talk with, but I soon got the feeling that something wasn’t quite right. He kept asking me about the details of my case and my attitude toward the regime. ‘They got me by mistake,’ I insisted. ‘They will soon let me out of here when they find out I am innocent.’

‘This is the second time I have been captured,’ he told me. ‘The first time the Islamic regime exchanged me for a number of their guards held by our organisation. But now I have come to understand that the Islamic regime has the support of the masses and those who are fighting against the regime in Kurdistan are acting in America’s interest. I have repented and become a Tavab [one who accepts Islam and becomes a collaborator with the prison officials], and I pray five times a day. I am working in prison to enhance the Islamic revolution’s fight against subversives. What are you going to do? If you don’t repent, you know they’ll put you in front of the firing squad.’ We called collaborators ‘kapos’. Fortunately, I had been very careful what I told him.

‘Who, me?’ I said, trying to sound as indignant as I could. ‘I have nothing to repent. If it wasn’t for the likes of you, who took things into their own hands, rampaging through the streets, I wouldn’t be here. As for praying, I’m an innocent man. If I start to pray now, the guards will think that I have done something wrong and am repenting. I’ve never prayed inside
prison and I see no reason to start doing it now. They’d think I’m trying to fool them.’

Each morning at about three or four o’clock, when the guards hammered on the door and bellowed ‘Prayer time!’ the sound system relayed the wailing voices calling us to prayer. My cellmate would rise and put a large prayer mat in front of the small hole in the prison door so that if the guards looked in they could see him ‘hard at it’.

Two weeks after the man had walked into the cell he was removed. Sure enough, after two more days, he reappeared at the cell door with a file in his hand. There was another Tavab with him, another former member of a Kurdish group. These two both had a long discussion about articles in an internal prison newsletter called The Tavabins (‘The Repentants’), which they and others had put together to undermine prisoners’ morale. From their discussion, I gathered that it contained articles directed against revolutionary organisations in Kurdistan and elsewhere in Iran, which they branded as anti-Islamic and pro-American. The man would arrive in the evening and work on the file he had with him until the early morning. Initially, I thought that this file contained his written answers to the interrogators’ questions, much as I had been asked to write, but it seems that he was making comments on the files of other prisoners for the interrogators. He was in fact helping the interrogators in their persecution of the prisoners. It was clear he was evaluating me. A few days later they again took him out of the cell.

I remember him asking me about the films I liked which had affected me, ploys like this. So I would respond, giving him a synopsis of some films I had seen, with beautiful landscapes and mountain climbing – anything I could think of that didn’t have any political connotations. He asked me if I’d seen a particular film about a peasant revolt in pre-revolutionary Russia. ‘No’, I lied. ‘I don’t go to political films.’

My time in solitary came to an end – finally – in the spring of 1982. I was moved out of the hated block to a cell shared with other prisoners. Outside the walls of Evin, there were now constant clashes between the Islamic guards and the various shades of opposition to the government. Whenever the guards raided the underground organisations and killed some of their members, they brought the corpses to Evin. Haji Lajiverdi, Evin’s revolutionary prosecutor, would force us prisoners out of our cells to look at the bodies, supposedly to identify them. This was only a pretext because they already had more than sufficient information. This gruesome routine was really to break the prisoners’ resistance.

Early one cold morning, at about three or four, my cell door was flung open. I had my uniform on and was blindfolded but had no shoes. The guards took me down to the lower floor, near the slaughter house used by the firing squad which executed thousands of prisoners, often two or three hundred at a time. I was marched along with about 80 other inmates. This was a confusing moment. Prisoners had already been told by Haji Lajiverdi that if the Islamic government was in any danger of losing power, ‘We will clean the prisons by putting the lot of you in front of the firing squad’. My mind was racing. I had the distinct feeling that my time had come and I was to be executed.

One of the prisoners sung a revolutionary song, others started to shout slogans: ‘Long live the revolution!’ and ‘Down with the counter-revolution!’ We were ordered to remove our blindfolds. I will never forget the horrific scene in front of me: a line of corpses lay stretched out on the floor. Men and women together. All had been shot. Some of the bodies were missing feet, hands and entire limbs – their flesh ripped apart by machine-gun bullets. Others, while intact, had been mutilated beyond recognition by head shots. Prosecutor Haji Lajiverdi was there. He ordered us to look closely at each
corpse, one by one. If we were able to recognise any, we should inform him of their identity.

Many of the people who had been killed were members of a group of Mojahedin militia, which had been active in the armed struggle against the Shah. Their leader was Mousa Khiabarni. Alongside his body were those of other central committee members, including the wife of Masoud Rajavi, another leader of the Mojahedin. Her body had been mutilated. Above them on the wall hung banners with a verse from the Koran. Haji was triumphant at having killed so many key figures. He carried a baby in his arms, which he said belonged to Ashraf, the dead woman. He gloated, ‘These are your leaders’ corpses. You will have the same fate.’ He called on prisoners surveying the scene, ‘Repeat loudly: “God’s curse be upon them! Long live Khomeini!”’

Prisoners murmured the slogans and Haji wasn’t satisfied. He wanted it loud and clear. Picking on one of the prisoners, he ordered, ‘Repeat it, or do you want me to kill you in front of everybody here?’ The poor prisoner shouted loudly, ‘Long live Khomeini! God’s curse be on them!’ and saved his neck.