Dreams and Shadows: The Future of the Middle East (51 page)

But on January 11, 2007, helicopter-borne American troops swooped down on Iran’s diplomatic liaison office in the northern Kurdish city of Irbil. The goal was to seize two of Iran’s highest-ranking security officials—General Minojahar Frouzanda, chief of Revolutionary Guards intelligence, and Mohammed Jafari, the deputy of Iran’s Supreme National Security Council. The two men’s frequent visits to Iraq predated the U.S. invasion. They came to Iraq with the full knowledge of Iraqi officials. They had just met with the two Kurdish leaders, Masoud Barzani and Jalal Talabani. Talabani was also Iraq’s president.

The two Iranians eluded capture. But U.S. troops netted five junior officers of the Quds Force. Iran clamored for their release, initially to no avail.

After ten weeks and intense pressure on allies in the Iraqi government, Iran announced that it expected the five to be freed for the Iranian New Year of
Nowruz,
a celebration on the spring equinox, March 21, dating back more than 3,000 years. It is the most important Iranian holiday of the year; Persian in its origins, it is shared by all faiths and ethnicities. It lasts two weeks and includes bonfires to celebrate the light winning over darkness, visits to neighbors, and feasts of special foods with friends.

But the Iranians—who became known as the Irbil Five—were not released on
Nowruz.

Three days later, a British naval team conducted a routine inspection of a ship in the Persian Gulf to ensure it was not smuggling goods. The British were the closest American allies and the second-largest force in Iraq. They operated in Shiite strongholds in southern Iraq and the Persian Gulf. The navy team, fourteen men and one woman on two small motorboats, were headed back to the HMS
Cornwall
when they were overtaken by six vessels of the Revolutionary Guards. The fifteen British sailors were taken hostage.

Iran claimed the British sailors had crossed into its waters, which was not unprecedented. It had happened in 2004, when eight British sailors were held for three days. But Britain claimed global satellite tracking proved its patrol boats were almost two miles inside Iraqi waters.

The abduction was interesting in another respect. It came one day before the United Nations voted on a new resolution to impose sanctions on Tehran for failing to suspend uranium enrichment. The sanctions were narrow, targeting banks, institutions, and twenty-eight officials believed to be involved in Iran’s suspected nuclear program. Among the individuals were the top seven Revolutionary Guard commanders of its ground forces, navy, air force, intelligence unit, and Quds Force.

Iran and Britain both insisted there were no connections between the seizure of the Irbil Five, the UN sanctions resolution and the capture of the fifteen Brits. But the common denominator was the Revolutionary Guards. Its Quds Force operatives were being held by the United States. Its top leaders had been sanctioned by the United Nations. And its naval unit had taken the British hostage.

Over the next two weeks, the hostage drama became an international incident. The United Nations Security Council issued a statement of concern. Pope Benedict wrote to appeal for the sailors’ freedom. Leaders from Islamic countries urged Tehran to release them. Even Syria weighed in.

For all the attention generated outside Iran during the drama, the internal reaction was telling. Unlike the 444-day ordeal after the American embassy takeover in 1979, the regime could not generate public fervor about the capture of British soldiers in 2007.

A small rent-a-crowd of less than 200 showed up outside the British Embassy for a noisy but comparatively tepid demonstration. It was a one-day affair. This time, the Iranians were more interested in their holiday. Iranian television showed videos of the British in captivity, and radio covered the diplomacy—but often not as the top story or at great length. Many of the papers were not published during the two-week New Year break, but when they resumed, the editorials focused on other issues and offered no encouragement to prolong the standoff.

The buzz of Tehran was the lack of buzz.

Two weeks later, on April 4, Ahmadinejad held a press conference. With lavish praise, he pinned medals on the Revolutionary Guards naval commanders who had captured the Brits. The Iranian president then rambled on to reporters for thirty-five minutes. He railed at America’s destruction of Iraq, the United Nations failure to protect the Palestinians, the world’s failure to help the Lebanese during Hezbollah’s war with Israel—and Iran’s innocent intentions on its nuclear program.

Near the end, in what almost seemed an afterthought, he announced that the Brits would be freed—in celebration of the upcoming birthday of the Prophet Mohammed and Easter. “This pardon of the British soldiers,” he pronounced, “is a gift.”

The broader confrontation was not over, however. Iran had milked that crisis for all it could get; the costs of holding the British military personnel began to outweigh the benefits. So Tehran shifted its focus. One month later, in May 2007, Iran began imprisoning Americans.

Ali Shakeri, a California businessman who went to college in Texas, was the first one. He had returned to Iran to see his ailing mother before she died; he stayed long enough to bury her. He was detained at Tehran’s International Airport after he had already checked in his bags for the flight to Los Angeles, in the wee hours of May 8. He was taken to Tehran’s notorious Evin Prison, a forbidding compound of buildings in the foothills of the Elburz Mountains. Hours later, Haleh Esfandiari, a diminutive grandmother who had been visiting her ninety-three-year-old mother, was ordered to report to the intelligence ministry. The director of Middle East programs at the Smithsonian’s Woodrow Wilson Center in Washington, she too was jailed in Evin’s Ward 209, the section where political detainees are held in solitary confinement. Three days later, New York social scientist Kian Tajbakhsh was imprisoned. Tajbakhsh, a consultant for George Soros’s Open Society Institute, had actually been trying to help Iranian government ministries on HIV/AIDS prevention and other health projects. Parnaz Azima, another grandmother and a correspondent for United States-funded Radio Farda, was also visiting an ailing mother. She was not jailed, but was forced to put up the deed to her mother’s home as bail to stay out of prison.

They were odd choices. All four were dual nationals who had lived for decades in the United States and taken American citizenship, but each had maintained extensive contacts in Iran and traveled back and forth frequently. Esfandiari and Tajbakhsh particularly had worked hard to bridge the gaps between the United States and Iran and to encourage dialogue at many levels.

Weeks passed before Tehran acknowledged that it had taken action against the four Americans—and why. Iran denied, however, any knowledge about Robert A. Levinson, a former FBI agent—more than a decade in retirement—who had flown in March to Iran’s Kish Island. Kish was a free-trade zone and popular vacation area where Iranian visas are not required. Levinson was on a private business trip. Through diplomatic contacts, the State Department and Levinson’s family repeatedly pressed for information on him—to no avail.

Tehran eventually charged the four dual American-Iranian nationals with unspecified “crimes against national security.” Iranian intelligence and judiciary officials accused them of promoting the kind of “soft revolution” witnessed in Eastern Europe in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Iran was especially suspicious about a seventy-five-million-dollar program unveiled by the Bush administration in 2006 to promote democracy in Iran. The imprisoned Americans, however, had no connections to the funding. With sometimes uncanny similarities to tensions between Washington and Tehran after the 1979 revolution, the new “soft hostages” became pawns to bigger issues.

Throughout the Middle East, the United States and Iran were by 2007 effectively engaged in a new Cold War. It was a race for supremacy in ideology and influence. And it played out over the full array of issues.

For the United States, the biggest problems were Iran’s alleged nuclear program, its arms and aid to extremist groups, its increasing role in Iraq, its rejection of the Middle East peace process, and its attempts to export a militant ideology. Washington’s goal was to contain Iran, prevent it from developing a nuclear weapon, and changing the regime’s behavior.

For Iran, the immediate issues were two U.S. invasions that positioned more than 150,000 American troops in neighboring Afghanistan and Iraq, a large U.S. naval force in the Persian Gulf, arms sales to the six Gulf sheikhdoms worth tens of billions of dollars, and attempts to influence several leaders in countries far from American shores. Iran’s goal was to get U.S. troops to leave the region, ensure friendly governments rules in Iraq and Afghanistan, and contain American influence.

In key ways, the Middle East’s strategic balance had begun to tilt in Tehran’s favor for the first time. In the Palestinian territories, Iranian-backed Hamas won the most democratic election ever held in the Arab world, then militarily routed its secular, American-backed rivals in Fatah to seize control of the Gaza Strip. In Lebanon, Hezbollah used Iranian weaponry to fight Israel—and fought to a draw, despite Israel’s vastly superior U.S. weaponry. In Syria, Iran’s closest ally let foreign jihadists cross into neighboring Iraq, funnel Iranian arms to Hezbollah, and support radical Palestinian groups opposed to peace—undermining Washington’s top strategic goals in the region. And in Iraq, Shiite militias armed and trained by Iran made Baghdad’s streets and the fortified Green Zone unsafe, even for the U.S. military.

The United States, however, remained the world’s most powerful country. When Tehran failed to suspend its uranium enrichment, Washington pushed for a series of UN resolutions that sanctioned top Iranian officials and institutions. It used its own economic clout to squeeze foreign banks and businesses to make a choice—business with the United States or Iran. More than forty major banks in Europe and Asia backed away from Iran. In a bold move to drive home its own determination, Washington even imposed its own sanctions on the Revolutionary Guards and the Quds Force.

In the run-up to President Ahmadinejad’s trip to the United States to give another speech at the United Nations in September 2007, the four American Iranians were released, in phases, from prison or allowed to leave the country. Yet tensions between Iran and the United States only continued to deepen. Indeed, the Cold War increasingly looked like it could become a hot confrontation.

The Compromises

T
he great debate in the Middle East is whether the region is really ready for democracy. It has become a chicken-and-egg argument.

Almost all leaders argue that conditions are not yet ripe for big change: Countries are either not stable enough for the initial shocks of democracy, or economies are not rich enough to meet expectations, or societies are not developed enough to wisely use democratic rights, or the region is simply too volatile to introduce a new political order.
¹
They contend that voters will merely elect new tyrants or undemocratic populists—as Germany did in electing Adolf Hitler in 1933 or Venezuela did in voting for Hugo Chavez in 1998.
²

Yet public-opinion polls, academic discourse, newspaper editorials, and overwhelming anecdotal evidence all indicate a yearning for real political change. Some call it reform. Others call it democracy. All agree it must be more than token or tepid steps. Their driving fear is what will happen down the road in the absence of change.

The debate is likely to rage for years to come.

Yet it is already clear that governments in the Middle East will have to cultivate compromise—now, or very soon—to survive in any form. Initiating action on three controversial issues—political prisoners, women’s rights, and political Islam—can start the process. Cooperation will signal intent to change. It will require ceding some power. And it will redefine the social contract between ruler and ruled.

It will still mark only a beginning, however. Without serious follow-up on other fronts, governments will only be buying a bit more time.

Morocco is the only country that has attempted action on all three—although largely in reaction to imaginative local actors and strong outside pressure.

The first compromise is for regimes to account for the secrets and abuses of their past. Reforms for the future will not be enough. They must also come clean about decades of injustice to build credibility and establish trust. The old adage can be adapted: The truth will set societies free.

Morocco took the first step in 2004, when Driss Benzekri received a summons from King Mohammed VI. The dapper young monarch wanted to discuss human rights abuses in Morocco, particularly during the rule of his father and grandfather.

The invitation, Benzekri later told me, was the last thing he expected.

Born in 1950, Benzekri was one of Morocco’s most noted political rebels. He was a wanted man by the time he turned twenty-five. Benzekri is a tall, trim man who wears rimless glasses and has a translucent white mustache. He has the long, lean face of many who live in the Maghreb, the vast region of arid desert and spiny mountains stretching across North Africa from the Nile River to the Atlantic. He also has the frail physique and hunched weariness of a survivor. His manner is subdued; he responds to questions in a quiet voice and not at great length. You have to keep asking to get him to tell a little bit more of his story. He expresses himself best, he says, through poetry. He seems to vent by chain smoking.

Benzekri grew up during what Moroccans call the Years of Lead, a notorious era of rule by the gun, when King Hassan II dealt ruthlessly with opposition by labor activists, leftists, tribal rebels, and his own military. He imposed a state of emergency in the mid-1960s that lasted five years. In the 1970s, the king survived two assassination attempts and a failed coup by military officers that deepened repression by the ruling clique in Morocco, which is known as the
makhzan,
Arabic for “storehouse”—as in storehouse of power.

During the Years of Lead, the monarchy’s secret police arrested, abducted, or executed thousands who dared to criticize or challenge the king. The plotters of the 1972 coup attempt were executed by firing squad, live on national television.

A linguistics student, Benzekri became a Marxist and youth activist who organized protests against autocratic rule on campuses across the country.

“I was the generation that came of age in the late 1960s and 1970s. We were the first generation after the independence of Morocco, and there was a need to do something,” he told me. “We came to Marxism through the literature of what was happening in France at the time and in San Francisco during the war on Vietnam.

“So we decided,” he said, drawing quietly on a cigarette, “that we wanted to make a proletarian revolution.”

In 1975, secret police went after Benzekri too. On a cold January day, they tracked him down to a hideout in Casablanca.

Over the next eighteen months, he endured prolonged solitary confinement and frequent torture—beatings, electric shock on the genitals, hanging for hours by rope, head immersed in buckets of chemicals or dirty water, and the rest of the time living with his head hooded, his hands tied tightly behind his back, his body left prone on the ground.

“There was a rhythm to it. The technique depended on the questions they asked and the answers they wanted,” Benzekri recalled, without emotion. “Sometimes they wanted a confession or specific information. Other times they wanted to humiliate and break your will.”

Benzekri was eventually tried for belonging to a subversive group and plotting against King Hassan II. He was sentenced to thirty years. He ended up at Kenitra Central, a prison notorious for its filthy conditions and ruthless guards. It was built for 5,000 but it held almost twice as many. Kenitra has often been called the Abu Ghraib of Morocco.
³

“One day, they put us in a common room to shave our heads, and while I was waiting my turn I saw one of the guards beating a young boy brutally. I was really outraged, so I detached myself and pushed the guard away from the boy,” Benzekri recounted three decades later.

“To punish me they tied me like a lamb, with four limbs together, and beat me until I was hemorrhaging. They tore the muscles in my leg. My feet were so swollen and bleeding I couldn’t walk. I had to be hospitalized.”

Benzekri languished in prison for the next eighteen years. He was released in a 1991 amnesty by King Hassan after pressure by international groups about Morocco’s political prisoners. When he was freed, he established the Moroccan Organization for Human Rights and an association for former political prisoners.

Thirteen years later, in 2004, the palace called.

King Hassan, who took only tepid moves to improve human rights toward the end of his reign, had died in 1999. When Mohammed VI assumed the throne, he immediately pledged major reforms. In one of his boldest steps, the new king told Benzekri that he wanted to establish an Equity and Reconciliation Commission to investigate abuses by secret police, intelligence, and the military from 1956 until 1999. The four-decade period began with Morocco’s independence from France. It covered both the five-year rule of his grandfather, Mohammed V, and the thirty-eight-year reign of his father, Hassan II.

The idea was unprecedented in the Middle East. It was modeled on similar panels in other countries coming out of repressive eras, most famously the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission that addressed the atrocities and assassinations during the apartheid era. Argentina and Chile conducted similar probes into torture and disappearances after their military dictatorships ended.

But no Arab government had ever confessed to widespread abuses, much less tried to investigate the past or reconcile with its victims.

The young king asked Benzekri to be president of Morocco’s commission.

So in 2004, Benzekri went back to prison—in fact, every prison, detention center, and major jail in Morocco—this time to document the abductions, disappearances, torture, and executions of thousands of Moroccan political prisoners. He and sixteen other former political prisoners and human-rights activists on the new commission investigated more than 20,000 cases.

At times, it was a journey into his own past. With other former prisoners, Benzekri went to the detention center where he had first been tortured. Several of his friends broke down and wept. Benzekri did not.

“Now they are only walls,” he told me several months after the visit.

“The jail is in a poor neighborhood in Casablanca. The area is very famous for its cultural richness. It gave birth,” he added, with a rare grin, “to many bands that play music like Bob Dylan. So in collaboration with the police and the local people, we agreed to turn it over to be used as a community center.”

Benzekri also met his torturers. He knew most of them only by their voices, since prisoners were usually blindfolded or hooded. Some of them apologized and said they were only executing orders.

I asked if he believed them.

“It has no importance for me any longer,” Benzekri replied. “They had lost their humanity.

“The important thing is that there is no longer the same culture of impunity, no executive privilege for top officials—not even for the king. In the past, the king was sanctified. No longer.”

“This is not the same Morocco that arrested, tortured, and oppressed me,” he said.

The commission then heard testimony—some of it broadcast live on Moroccan television and radio—from victims who detailed torture, families who recounted deaths of loved ones in prison, and wives and children who appealed for help in tracking down loved ones who had simply disappeared one day.

The testimony that gripped Benzekri the most, he told me when we first met in 2006, was from a woman in her seventies who was still searching for her husband. He had disappeared in 1957. She recounted to the commission every detail, every appeal, every official she talked to for almost a half century to find her husband.

Through official documents, Benzekri discovered that the man had been abducted by Morocco’s secret services and murdered. He made it a personal mission to find out where her husband had been secretly buried.

When we talked a second time several months later, Benzekri said the commission had recently located the concealed grave and matched the DNA.

In the end, the two-year probe concluded that the state had systematically used torture as part of deliberate political repression and “gross” violations of Moroccan law. Benzekri and his colleagues uncovered the fate of almost 800 political prisoners who died from torture, many after being abducted—the so-called “forced disappearances.” Prisoners who died or were executed were usually buried at night, without notification to families of their deaths or burial places, the commission revealed. Many families had not even known that their relatives had been seized by security services.

The reconciliation commission, its final report concluded, “achieved a substantial leap forward in establishing the truth about many events in this period of time, as well as about violations which had remained until then marked by silence, taboo, or rumors.”

To make amends, the commission proposed that the monarchy pay compensation to almost 10,000 victims or their beneficiaries.

Among the most poignant cases for compensation was Ahmed ben Saleek, whose father and grandfather both disappeared in the 1950s. Saleek went to search for them when he was thirteen, but he, too, ended up detained and tortured.
⁴
The two older men never returned home.

The commission called for many victims to be covered in a special health-care program because of their permanent injuries or disabilities. It also proposed a system of collective reparations—in the form of economic projects—to revive communities particularly affected by government abuses.

Finally, the commission recommended bold steps to ensure that the Years of Lead were truly over. It called for a legal ban on arbitrary detention, disappearances, torture, cruel and inhumane treatment of detainees, and all other crimes against humanity. It recommended that international human-rights law should have priority over Moroccan law. It demanded constitutional amendments to separate government powers, particularly to ensure an independent judiciary. It proposed massive revisions in the penal code, including the basic assumption of innocence until proven guilty. It called for an overhaul in the training and oversight of the nation’s diverse security services.

And, to get the ball rolling, the commission created a new body to track the government’s performance and monitor future abuses.

“To create a democratic society, people have to know the truth and their history. This is the only way to achieve a culture of transparency and the only way for people to know how to choose their future,” Benzekri said. “The report marked a fundamental rupture with Morocco’s past.”

But that was also the commission’s biggest limitation. Its mandate was restricted to the past—and just documenting it, not doing anything about it. Former political prisoners were not allowed to name specific guards, officials, or other individuals who engaged in abuse. Victims could detail the most gruesome torture. But they were barred from identifying or describing their jailers.

Benzekri also had no legal power to hold anyone to account once their abuses were revealed. The commission could not refer torturers for investigation, charges, or trial.

The commission also had no power to compel testimony from people in high places to answer questions. There was no penalty imposed on institutions or individuals who did not come forward with the truth. And there was also no incentive to cooperate, such as the amnesty granted by South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission.

The final report in 2006 complained about inadequate cooperation, “deplorable” records, and the failure of key officials to come forward.