Is This Your First War? (14 page)

It was also apparent in the city of Shiraz, where, despite the poisonous anti-Semitic rhetoric of Iran's government, there is a large community of Jews. There are more Jews in Iran than any country in the Middle East outside of Israel. And while some have been the targets of trumped-up charges of spying for Israel, most are integrated into the wider community. They have, after all, been in Iran for some 2,500 years. When I asked a carpet seller on Shiraz's main street if any of his colleagues were Jewish, he pointed to three or four fellow merchants within shouting distance. I asked a cab driver in mangled Persian to take me to the “Jewish church,” and he easily found the nearest synagogue. Worshippers there were a little wary when I showed up, and our lack of a common language made communication difficult, but I was encouraged by the synagogue's existence and the apparent lack of security around it.

That might not seem like much. And it's also worth noting the horrendous treatment suffered by practitioners of the Bahá'í faith in Iran. Still, the bigotry of the Iranian government doesn't appear to be widely reflected in its citizens. In this, as in so many things in Iran, there is a disconnect between those in power and those they rule.

In a small village near Mahabad, in the Kurdish region of Iran, I attended the wedding of a friend's friend that was a riot of energy and joy. Women wearing beautiful, brightly coloured dresses and no headscarves danced hand-in-hand with men to form a line moving in a counter-clockwise circle, while a band of horns and strings drove a furious beat. A sinewy, white-haired man stood in the centre of the dancers and sang into a microphone, working praises to everyone present into his lyrics. Guests encouraged him by slipping a bill into his hand while whispering their names in his ear. The man leading the dancers spun a handkerchief above his head, inadvertently knocking blossoms from the branches of an overhanging tree that fell amongst the dancers like confetti. Exhausted, I stepped out from the line of dancers and found a friend watching on the sidelines.

“We Kurds dance together,” he said. “It causes some problems with the Islamic people, but I don't care. We Kurds are Muslims, too. But Islam isn't telling women to cover their faces. We don't do that.”

A Kurdish wedding near Mahabad, Iran.

The bride and groom.

Still, I knew there was another side of Iran. Someone, after all, was painting slogans on city walls demanding that immodestly dressed women be murdered. I wasn't naïve enough to believe that the entire country consisted of closet liberals. The Islamic Republic had persisted for twenty-five years by the time I got there. It had its supporters. I wanted to talk to them.

Ali, a man I had gotten to know at the guesthouse where I stayed in Esfahan, seemed like a promising candidate. He had a sad face and an eye that looked as if his pupil was leaking into his iris. His beard was thick, black, and long, in a style that I tended to associate with Islamists. I asked him to take me to some of the mosques and madrassahs in the city. We had barely left the guesthouse when, unprompted, he dove into politics. I had misjudged him.

“Religion and government should not be together,” he said. “Most of us feel this way. But the government doesn't want what the people want. Iran today is like Europe of the Renaissance. We want to become secular. It's happening, but slowly. Very slowly. I think if we can change slowly, bit by bit, we can do it without conflict.”

We were entering the tightly-packed streets of Esfahan's old city. “Come on,” he said. “I'll take you to a religious teaching centre and we'll talk to some mullahs. They don't like to be called mullahs there. They think it makes them sound like Osama bin Laden. But there really isn't much difference.”

We spent the afternoon in a madrassah. A mullah named Mohammad greeted us. He had a boyish face and only the tiniest of wrinkles around the corners of his eyes. He seemed happy to have a guest from the West at the madrassah and motioned for us to follow him through its courtyard. In shaded spaces, under low, vaulted roofs, mullahs sat with their students cross-legged in front of them, books scattered and opened amongst them. Mohammad found us a deserted corner and sent one of his students to bring us tea.

“The Quran gives us guidance for all parts of our lives — culture, science, family — so it is natural for religion to be part of government,” he said. “The two are connected.”

One of the students, Hussein, invited us up to his quarters. We climbed a steep and narrow staircase to his room, the white walls of which were bare except for loaded bookshelves and a photograph of Hussein when he was a boy. There was a loft sunk into the wall about six feet off the floor, where Hussein slept. He was twenty years old and said he would stay and study at the madrassah for another twelve years. “I want to spend all the days I am given promoting Islam — in a mosque or school. It's all part of the same life.”

Hussein was now fiddling with a butane burner on the floor of his room, near the balcony where it was safe to have gas and flame. He got it lit and began boiling water for tea. Through the window I could see the madrassah courtyard below. Poplar trees grew through square holes cut in the courtyard floor. Their leaves seemed to shimmer when a breeze gusted through them. Hussein wanted to talk about Christianity.

“Do people in Canada know that we Muslims respect Jesus?” he asked.

“I'm not sure,” I said.

“Why did Jesus die?”

“I'm not really a religious expert.”

“But you must know.”

Hussein was adding hot water to an extra-concentrated brew of tea to make it more drinkable and handed me a small, bulbous glass already thick with sugar.

“Christians believe he died to take away men's sins, so they can go to heaven,” I said.

Hussein wet his upper lip with his tongue before bringing the scalding liquid to his mouth. He winced, swallowed, and whistled air through pursed lips.

“Is it true that the three wise men came from Iran?” Hussein asked.

“Yes.”

Later that evening, I sat with Ali in a teahouse and ate
abgusht
, a lamb stew served in the clay pot in which it was baked.

“You have to admit they were welcoming,” I said to Ali.

He snorted. I tried to change the topic. “It's hard to believe that Mohammad guy is a mullah. He looks like he's still a teenager.”

“Of course he looks young,” said Ali. “Mullahs never do any work.”

We talked a bit about Canada. Ali had friends and distant relatives who had emigrated. “I hear the temperature can get to forty degrees below zero,” he said. “How can anyone live there?”

Ali continued talking before I could answer.

“Never mind. Your country is a paradise compared to this one.”

I left Esfahan and travelled south to Shiraz, and from there to the ancient Persian capital of Persepolis. Here, a local historian with the improbably appropriate name of Darius guided me through its glorious and sadly deserted ruins. Persepolis's stone stairways and walls are still covered with ancient carvings depicting messengers from the far corners of the Persian Empire — from Ethiopia to Kandahar — arriving to pay tribute to King Darius during Nowruz, the Persian New Year. Elsewhere in the Middle East I had sought out or, in Afghanistan, simply stumbled across places that had been marked by Alexander as he conquered so much of the known world before he was thirty-three years old. It was always a thrill. Alexander had fascinated me since I was a boy. He was a military genius who tried to merge the cultures of East and West. But his destruction of such a magnificent city was a crime. Visiting it was a wistful experience.

That night I received an email message from an Iranian I'll call Amir. We had spoken many times before my trip to Iran. I was hoping he could arrange for me to interview democratic dissidents in Iran. I liked Amir, and he was always forthcoming, but our conversations were inconclusive as far as him putting me in touch with anyone. He later told me he wasn't initially sure he could trust me. Midway through my trip, he decided to take the risk.

“You need to get back to Tehran,” Amir wrote. “There are some people I want you to meet.”

Resistance

W
hen
Zahra Kazemi was a young nursing student in Shiraz, in the years before the Islamic Revolution toppled the Iranian monarchy, the shah of Iran came to visit her school. All the students were expected to turn out to greet him, but two refused. Kazemi was one of them.

“She got in big trouble for that,” her son, Stephan Hachemi, told me some three decades later.

Kazemi was never the sort to defer to authority, he said. She challenged others. She challenged herself. Kazemi left Iran in 1974 at the age of twenty-four and later, in 1993, moved to Canada, settling in Montreal as a single mother. “It wasn't easy,” said Hachemi. “But she was a strong woman, even though she had modest resources.”

Kazemi, known to her friends as Ziba, began working as a freelance photographer. Her personality hadn't changed much since her student days when she snubbed the shah. She wasn't interested in politicians or other powerful people and didn't feature them in her work. What mattered to Kazemi were those who are often forgotten and overlooked: the poor; women in Islamic countries; children everywhere. She travelled throughout the developing world, usually selling her photographs to
Recto Verso
, a small Montreal magazine whose fees did not come close to covering her costs. That didn't bother her. Travelling on a budget allowed her to get closer to the people she was photographing. The money was an afterthought.

“In Iraq, she'd arrive, stay one night in a hotel, and then move in with local people,” Richard Amiot, Kazemi's editor at
Recto Verso
, said. “Systematically, she'd do that. Other journalists would stay in big hotels. She would never do that. And of course, as a result, she'd get different stories.”

In Herat, Afghanistan, Kazemi was there with other international reporters to cover the supposed grand opening of a new school. Unlike everyone else, she stayed there for months to document that it never opened. She also confronted the local warlord, Ismail Khan, to demand why women journalists were not allowed to work.

“It takes courage,” Amiot said. “She was defiant, but not stupid. She was not a fanatic. She could navigate and negotiate her way around military men from different places.”

Still, her son worried about her when she left on overseas assignments. “It scared me a little bit, the way she would stand up to everybody,” he said.

Typically, when Kazemi was preparing for a trip, she would pack a bag full of Hachemi's old clothes for people in the poor countries she was visiting. “And you have to remember that my mother was fifty-four years old, and she was very small,” said Hachemi. “She would get tired. But this didn't matter to her. She thought it was important.”

Hachemi respected his mother for this, and also for her photography. “It was a responsibility for her. It was her profession and her life. She showed people in everyday situations — common crimes, common injustices. She showed women and children in a beautiful way, with an artist's eye. In this way she made a difference.”

Kazemi never forgot Iran, the country of her birth. Her son said she wanted to capture on film the way that Iranian women would push back against their government in subtle ways — “by wearing their headscarves a little farther back on their heads, or by wearing a little bit of makeup. She'd show their resistance.”

In June 2003, Kazemi was back in Iran with permission from the Iranian government to work as a journalist. Hundreds of Iranian students and activists had been arrested for protesting against the government and had been taken to the Evin prison in northwest Tehran, where political prisoners are incarcerated. Worried family members gathered outside to demand the release of their loved ones or at least to learn what had happened to them. Kazemi was there, too. It was the sort of story she liked to cover: weak and marginalized people defying the powerful. She began snapping photos. Prison staff demanded her camera. She refused to hand it over and was arrested. State-controlled newspapers soon ran stories describing her as a spy. On July 11, less than three weeks after her arrest, Kazemi was dead.

Iran's official explanation changed several times over the following days and weeks. They claimed she had suffered a stroke, that she was on a hunger strike, or that she had fallen and hit her head. A fuller story emerged in the testimony of Shahram Azam, the Iranian doctor who examined Kazemi's unconscious body in the military hospital where she eventually died. Azam sought refuge in Canada in 2005. He reported extensive injuries to Kazemi that indicated a severe beating and brutal rape. Her body was so broken, there was little he could do for her. She died of respiratory arrest.

Amir called me on my hotel's lobby telephone. I had returned to Tehran as he had instructed.

“Check your email.”

I opened my inbox to find a detailed message from Amir instructing me to wear a red shirt and go to an address in a Tehran suburb. He gave me a password and the response I should expect to hear. I was supposed to be there in two hours. I called a cab and had the driver drop me off nearby.

The man who approached me was tall, with deep-set dark eyes, thick eyebrows, and a loosely parted flop of hair. He seemed friendly but reserved, even sad. Feeling a little self-conscious, I repeated the password I had memorized — a Farsi word I didn't understand — and shook his hand. “Behrouz,” he said, introducing himself, and smiled with his mouth. His eyes didn't change. I followed him into a nearby house.

Inside, about a dozen mostly young Iranians sat in a circle on cushions near the wall. Several smoked cigarettes. A few stood up to shake my hand. All were dissidents — activists and democrats, mostly current and former students, but also the parents of two political prisoners.

Among them, only Bina Darabzand, a barrel-chested man with dancing eyes and a quick smile, was older than thirty. He had been arrested for the first time in 1971 at the age of thirteen for protesting rising bus fares. A family friend got him out of prison and urged his parents to send him out of Iran. The worried friend could tell already that Bina had a rebellious streak in him. If Bina didn't leave Iran, maybe it would be best if he spent a bit of time in jail, the friend thought, just so he would know the consequences of standing up to the authorities before he got himself in more serious trouble. Bina didn't stop. He campaigned against the shah as a young man, and now, with flecks of grey in his moustache and thick, curly hair, he wanted to bring down Iran's theocracy.

Many of those present had been jailed at Evin prison, in some cases for years, usually for protesting against the government and demanding democracy and greater freedom in their country. Several had been in Evin when Zahra Kazemi was held there. They wanted to tell me what they knew about her murder.

“When Zahra Kazemi was in section 209, my father would listen to her screaming,” a young, pony-tailed man named Ali Tabarzadi said. “At first he didn't know who it was. But the agents told him. He could hear her moaning and weeping.”

Ali's father, Heshmatollah, a journalist and founder of the Democratic Front of Iran, was serving a seven-year sentence for various alleged crimes, such as disturbing public opinion and insulting Iran's supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamanei. Section 209 is run by Iran's Ministry of Intelligence, and it is where some of the worst abuses at Evin are inflicted on political prisoners. Heshmatollah was still incarcerated when I met with his son, but the two had spoken, and Heshmatollah had passed on what he knew about Kazemi's detention and murder.

The presence of the Canadian woman at Evin was well known, although she was kept in solitary confinement and wasn't seen. Prison staff and inmates would discuss her case frequently. Several of the guards were on friendly terms with the political prisoners. They would bring the prisoners kebabs before their trial hearings and share jokes about the interrogators and prosecutors at the prison. Kianoosh Sanjari, a student leader, had a frank conversation with one of his guards before he was released. The guard told him that a soldier had noticed Kazemi taking photographs of the protests from a parked car. He told his boss, who ordered her arrest.

“Right from the start, she insisted on her rights,” Kianoosh said. “Then she stood in front of the guards and ripped the film out of her camera. But they took her anyways.”

Bina Darabzand.

Kazemi was brought inside the prison, where she was interrogated and, we now know, beaten and raped. Saeed Kalanaki, another young anti-government activist, was also incarcerated inside. “The interrogators were visibly nervous. Usually they conduct their interrogations calmly, but in those days they were very agitated,” he said. “From the commotion outside the cell, I knew something wrong had happened.”

The guard who spoke with Kianoosh told him two nurses had noticed that Zahra Kazemi was barely conscious in her cell. They alerted prison authorities, who took her to the prison's emergency clinic. But according to the prison guard, Kazemi was already near death and was taken to the Baghiyyatollah al-Azam military hospital. “The guard told me that she had been beaten, that her head was smashed,” he said. “They didn't cover that up.”

Kazemi was officially admitted to the hospital with “intestinal problems,” and when she died, two weeks later, Iran's chief prosecutor, Saeed Mortazavi, declared she had suffered a stroke. Meanwhile, government officials at the prison began to cover up the murder. Separate guards told both Kianoosh Sanjari and Saeed Kalanaki that prison personnel who had been involved in the case were taken to section 209 and instructed on what to tell investigators who would be looking into the circumstances of Kazemi's death. Kianoosh's guard acquaintance also told him that relevant documents were altered or destroyed — an allegation that was later supported by Iran's parliament.

Iran's then-president, the reformist, Mohammad Khatami, ordered an inquiry. A junior-level Intelligence Ministry officer was eventually charged with “semi-intentional murder” and acquitted. The former Evin prisoners believed that the accused man, Reza Ahmadi, was a scapegoat anyway. The story that circulated in the prison was that Iran's chief prosecutor, Saeed Mortazavi, was responsible. Mortazavi had, and has, a fearsome reputation among political prisoners, often interrogating them personally. “Everyone knew that Mortazavi is a butcher, but we were still shocked,” Kianoosh said. “We knew this couldn't be a normal death.” An Iranian parliamentary commission accused Mortazavi of attempting to cover up Kazemi's beating and of forging documents pertaining to her case. It condemned his refusal to appear before their investigation. Khatami's presidential commission concluded that Kazemi had died because of a blow to the head that resulted in a skull fracture and brain hemorrhage. Getting to the bottom of Zahra Kazemi's murder and holding those responsible to account was a priority not just for Iran's outlawed democratic dissidents, but also for some reformers within the political system. Even so, the former prisoners with whom I met were taking an enormous risk by speaking to me — a journalist who was working in Iran without the permission of the Iranian government. All knew what punishments might await them. Yet most insisted that, when I was safely outside Iran, I quote them by name.

“We're already in trouble,” said Bina Darabzand. “We can't get in any more trouble than we are. If the government wants to execute us, it will.”

Saeed Kalanaki added that most of them had outstanding charges against them that the security forces hadn't yet acted on. “It's a sword over our heads. We know that at the next demonstration they can pick us up. It's like a game of chicken. I'll go as far as I can and see when they stop me.”

One of the dissidents sitting on a cushion and smoking crossed his legs and sat upright, so that both his hands were free. He took an orange off a table, broke it open, and displayed one of the pips inside on the blade of his knife.

“Consider a seed,” he said. “Heavy soil can be heaped on top of it, but it still pushes through to the surface and brings flowers and fruit. This is the pressure we're trying to bring on the government in Iran. We can see this pressure from those students protesting and from people sentenced to death. These are the signs that the pressure is growing.”

He knew there was a cost, that, as he put it, more soil could be piled on Iran's democratic seeds, that budding sprouts could be cut down. “In all times there must be people who will sacrifice themselves for others.”

The activists were willing to take these risks because they saw little alternative. Mohammad Khatami had been in power for more than six years. His election, in 1997, had brought with it hope that Iran might be reformed, that it could evolve into a more democratic state. But any democratic ambitions Khatami might have had were shackled by hardliners in Iran's unelected power structure, whom Khatami was unwilling to challenge. “Reform has been a dead end,” said Kianoosh. “The reformers think saving the system is more important than the needs of the people.” Kianoosh, however, like every other democrat I spoke to in Iran, wanted to change his country peacefully.