The Great War for Civilisation (60 page)

I toured one of the new hospitals where a doctor told me that the war was a “necessary” event in his life, as in the lives of all who fought. “I was twenty-one at the time and had a friend, Hossein Sadaqat from Tabriz. He was an Azeri, a good friend, very loyal. And one day during an advance, he was hit in the head by something and his brains came out all over me. I was right beside him, you see. I didn't want to believe it. There were no last words, nothing. Then I got hit in the shoulder by a piece of eighty-millimeter mortar shell. I was half-conscious and felt nothing at first, the pain came later.” He pulled up his shirt to show me the wound. All over Iran, men showed me wounds, in their arms, their necks, their legs. One man talked to me through a false jaw—the original had been shot off—while another coughed through his words. He had been gassed. But when I asked the doctor if it had been worth it—all the pain, suffering, sacrifice—his face lit up. “Of course. We were defending our earth and our Islamic heritage. And we were angry, angry at our enemy.”

That was what the Dezful poet Ghaysar Amin Pour felt when his home city came under nightly air attack. Perhaps because of this anger, his poem seems closer to us than others, touched with spite, even cynicism:

I wanted to write a war poem
But I knew it wasn't possible.
I would have to put down my cold pen
And use a sharper weapon.
War poems should be written with the barrels of a gun,
Words turned into bullets . . .
Here it's always red alert,
The siren never ends its moaning
Over corpses that didn't finish their night's sleep,
Where bat-like jets which hate the light
Bomb the cracks in our blind blackout curtains . . .
We can't even trust the stars in case they're spies,
We wouldn't be surprised if the moon blows up . . .

Sometimes, this sense of indignation becomes political. Here, for example, is what Yahya Fuzi—thirty-one years old now, twenty-four when he fought in the war—said at that same Tehran University philosophy seminar:

War taught us about why people in the West who say they believe in freedom and human rights were ready to relegate these ideas to the background during our war. This was a major lesson for us. When Saddam invaded us, you were pretty silent, you didn't shout like you did when Saddam invaded Kuwait ten years later. But you were full of talk about human rights when he went to Kuwait. The crimes of Saddam were much more publicised then.

Another student, bespectacled, interrupted:

In our revolution in 1979, anti-dictatorial slogans were our cries against the Shah. But the war with Iraq completed this process of nation-building. At the top of a hill under shellfire, we would have guys from Baluchistan and Kurdistan and other provinces all together. We all had to defend the same hill. And we had a lot of immigrants because of the war, people from Khuzestan driven out of their homes by the Iraqis, who fled to Tehran and Tabriz. There was this interaction with the rest of the population, an ethnic infusion. In this war, we were isolated, abandoned by everyone else, so we came to the conclusion that it was good to be alone—and we learnt about our fellow citizens, we felt united for the first time.

The idea that the Iran–Iraq War was, in a sense, the completion of the Islamic revolution in Iran—at the least, an integral part of it—was widely felt. The middle classes, who tried their best to stay out of the war, cut themselves off from history. The sons of the rich, using their visas to Canada, the United States, Britain or France, saw no reason to participate in what they regarded as a war of madness. “I spent the war in Canada, watched it on television and was glad I wasn't there,” a twenty-nine-year-old told me at a party in Tehran. I couldn't dispute his logic but I wondered whether it had not deprived the rich, the old guard Iranians who regretted the revolution, of their claim to Iran. They, too, were isolated by the war, because they refused to defend their country.

But it is the dead rather than the survivors who speak most eloquently. South of Tehran, at Behesht-i-Zahra, close to the tomb of the old man who sent them to die, lie tens of thousands of Iranians who returned in body bags from the war. Still they arrive there today, in plastic bags, a skull or two with a body tag, recovered from the battlefields as the Iranians go on digging for lost souls along the western front. New graves are still being dug for corpses yet to be found.

The tombs are not marked, like those of our world war dead, with simple, identical gravestones, but with slabs of inscribed marble, engraved pictures, photographs, flags, sometimes even snapshots taken by frightened comrades in the minutes after death, the shells still falling around them, pictures of bodies covered in blood. I had seen this before at Chasar in the mountains above Tehran. But this graveyard is on a galactic scale, the
Gone With the Wind
of cemeteries, Iran's city of the dead. There is even a fountain that squirts blood-red water into the sky, the polar opposite of Saddam's seashell and concrete monument in Baghdad, although both, in their way, possess the same dull, frightening sanctity.

So here lies Namatallah Hassani. “Born August 1st, 1960, martyred October 30th, 1983 at Penjwin, student of the Officer's College,” it says on his grave. “You have to sacrifice yourself before love—that is to say, you must follow the Imam Hossein.” A face printed on a cloth screen shows Hassani, young with a small goatee beard. And here lies Mohamed Nowruzbei, “Martyred 1986, place of martyrdom Shalamcheh,” and Bassim Kerimi Koghani, “Born 1961, martyred April 22nd, 1986, place of martyrdom Fakeh.”

Many of these young men wrote their last messages to their families just before they died, long rhetorical speeches that begin with flowery praise of Khomeini and then disintegrate into humanity when they finish with personal wishes to their family. “I hope that I have done my duty by sacrificing my blood in the name of Islam,” wrote Mohamed Sarykhoni, born 1963, killed in action March 17th, 1984, at Piranshahr in Iranian Kurdistan. But then he goes on:

Give my best wishes to my father and mother, my sisters, my brothers, my friends. I hope they have been satisfied with me. I ask God to protect, forgive and bless you. To my wife, I say: it's true that my life was very short and I couldn't do all that I intended to provide for you. But I hope this short time we were together will be a wonderful memory for you. Take care of my child because he is my memory—for you and for my family too.

They speak from among the dead, these men. Hassan Jahan Parto, who was twenty-one when he was killed at Maimak in 1983, writes to his parents: “I advise my generous father and my family not to cry if I am martyred—don't be sad because your sadness would disturb my soul.” But they do cry, the families, praying over the graves each Friday afternoon, eating beside their dead sons and husbands and brothers.

Mustafa Azadi, a
Basij
volunteer, was fighting in the hot desert at Shalamcheh when he was given the news that his nephew Haj Ali Jasmani had been killed. He offers me dates at the graveside. “He was one of the first men to join the Revolutionary Guards, and he fought until his martyrdom. He was hit by a shell. I was in the battle front when I heard the news. We were close to each other but it wasn't possible for me to see his body. What do I think now? That all the martyrs have put a responsibility on our shoulders to defend our faith.”

This sounds too anachronistic to us Westerners, too much like John McCrae's “In Flanders Fields,” whose martyrs warn the living that “If ye break faith with us who die/We shall not sleep, though poppies grow/In Flanders fields.” Today we have seen through this martyrocracy: dictatorship—as opposed to government— by the dead. We think now of waste rather than responsibility. Robert Parry, a British soldier of the Second World War who participated in “regime change” in Iraq and Persia—he was part of the occupation force in Baghdad and Basra after the overthrow of Rashid Ali in 1941—was to write to me in 2004 with his own observations about the “lie” that dead soldiers “gave their lives for their country”:

Some magnificent men did just that by volunteering for suicide missions. Others gave their lives to save comrades. But for the vast majority coming back alive was their sustaining hope. Death took them without asking whether or not they wished to
give
. I lost a cousin in the 1914–18 war. Little more than a boy, half-trained, he was marched up into the front line. Arrived there, and out of curiosity, he looked out over the parapet. A German sniper got him. No time, like Hamlet, to choose.

To give or not to give. That is the question.

I had taken Mujtaba Safavi, the ex-POW, with me to Behesht-i-Zahra, and he translated for each mourner, slowly, sometimes very moved by their stories. Bahrom Madani described his dead cousin Askar Tolertaleri, killed at Maout, as “fascinated by God.” Mohamed Junissian saw his son Said just ten days before his death. “We were talking at home. And his mother asked him: ‘Why are you going back to the front again?' My son said he had to defend his country. His mother said: ‘But you can be more useful to us here.' He said it was good to be at home but that the enemy was in our land and we have to push them back. I agreed with him.” An old man with a grey beard said he had lost his nineteen-year-old son Hormuz Alidadi in a minefield twelve years ago at Dashdaboz. “It was God's will,” he said. “We thank God he fought for Islam and his country.”

Mohamed Taliblou only got his son Majid's remains back in 1994, “a few bones” dug up in the mud at Penjwin. “I have no feelings. He went to defend Islam and his country. It was in 1985, and I heard he had been wounded. One of his friends who was with him at the front came to see me and said: ‘I saw Majid fall down, but I didn't see if he died or not.' It was during a counter-attack by the Iraqis. He was killed by a single bullet.”

Mohamed Reza Abdul-Malikian wrote of last goodbyes in a poem called “Answer”:

“Why are you fighting?” my son asked.
And me with my rifle on my shoulder and my pack on my back,
While I'm fastening the laces of my boots.
And my mother, with water and mirror and Koran in her hand,
Putting warmth in my soul.
And again my boy asks: “Why are you fighting?”
And I say with all my heart:
“So that the enemy may never take your light away.”

The war had been over seven years now. Iranian diplomats were visiting Baghdad. The sons of the revolution—those who came home from the war—didn't find a land fit for heroes; it was they who were now angrily denouncing corruption in President Khatami's new “civil-society” Iran. But they came back, it seemed, having found faith rather than lost it, after an ecstasy of martyrdom that must leave us—horrified at the slaughter of two world wars, fearful of even the fewest casualties when we at last intervened in Bosnia, fixated by our own losses in Iraq— aghast and shocked and repelled. We mourn lost youth and sacrifice, the destruction of young lives. The Iranians of the eight-year Gulf War claimed to love it, not only as a proof of faith but also as the completion of a revolution.

For Iraqi soldiers, the war remained a curse. Hussein Farouk, an Iraqi military policeman, remembers the ceasefire as the moment an officer told his men that if they wanted to take revenge for the death of loved ones, now was the time. “One of our soldiers went into an Iranian prison camp. He had a brother who was killed. He just chose one of the Iranians. Then he shot him. He was the only one who did this.” Farouk recalled the day he was himself guarding a group of Iranian prisoners. “They were all standing together and one of them asked me for some water. Of course, I gave him water. But then he picked up some soil from the ground and mixed it with the water and swallowed it. I watched in amazement. Then after a little while, the Iranian walked away, right past the guards. I ran after him and asked him what he thought he was doing. The Iranian looked puzzled. ‘What?' he asked. ‘Can you still see me?' ”

Fati Daoud Mouffak, the Iraqi cameraman who had filmed the first casualties on the border in 1980, found that his experiences grew more crippling as the war continued. “We would go to the headquarters on the central front and they would say ‘battle in Fakr' and they'd tell us the direction and we would go to the front and find a hole in the sandbags and point our lens through it. I saw many martyrs of both sides—I considered that both Iraqis and Iranians were martyrs.” Mouffak filmed Iraq's prisoners—“Some were very young, fourteen or fifteen, they had gone through the minefields on motorbikes and were captured”—and saw an act of heroism that briefly lifted his spirits: an Iraqi soldier running onto the battlefield under fire to rescue a wounded Iranian, lifting his enemy onto his shoulder and bringing him to safety in the Iraqi lines. But he was to see other, more terrible things.

Outside Basra, an Iraqi military intelligence officer was screaming at an Iranian prisoner, demanding to know when the next attack would start. “The Iranian wouldn't talk and so our officer said he'd cut off his ear if he didn't give the information he needed. We journalists tried to stop this but we were told that this was none of our business. The Iranian still remained silent. So the Iraqi intelligence man cut off his ear. Then all the other Iranian prisoners started to talk.”

We were paid three dinars each day to be at the front—that was nine dollars then—and we would pay for our own food at a hotel behind the lines. We'd come back tired and start drinking gin and tonic and whisky. We had another cameraman with us, a friend of mine, Talal Fana. He was so worried that he never had breakfast; he just drank Iraqi
arak—
he wanted the power to die. He would get completely drunk—that was how he would go off to the front because he was sure he was going to die—but he survived. Many soldiers drank. At al-Mohammorah [Khorramshahr], one of our television cameramen Abdul Zahera was wounded in the hand and lost a finger. Abbas, another film crewman, was hit in the chest. In 1987, Abdul Zahera was killed filming on the front at Qaladis on a hill called Jebel Bulgha. Abbas was killed in Fao in 1988, in the last battle there.