Descendants of Cyrus

by Thornton, Christopher;

  On the day I had dropped in there were other visitors, all foreigners—a couple from Australia, three Indians, two students from China—the same tourists one sees at religious and historic sites all over Iran. But here there was a difference. At Golestan Palace or any of the major mosques or shrines, the foreigners, myself included, will stand in awe, gazing upward and outward at great expanses of space framed by architectural beauty rare in the world. In the drab corridors of the former U.S. embassy the strongest sensation is one of claustrophobia, of physical space as well as the history it represents. The rooms and hallways are tight and cramped, the distance between the main building and the front gates surprisingly short. The tension of the time can be sensed, like the aroma of cigarette smoke that hangs in the air long after the butts have been snuffed out. At other tourist sites, visitors usually have a good idea of what they are expected to experience, and they perform to expectations—awe, admiration, curiosity, maybe even a bit of perplexity. Here, visitors walk the halls and look intently at the displays with an undefined sense of meaning. The museum is a snapshot in time but one without any clear context, only a prevailing impression of chaos and confusion, which is fitting for the events of 1979 but only adds to a feeling of unease.

  Tehran has more museums that address its recent past, which has not been a happy one. On the north end of City Park, near the entrance that opens onto Fayaz Bakhsh Street, is a small building that houses the Tehran Peace Museum. It was opened in 2005 with an aim to “promote a culture of peace through raising awareness about the devastating consequences of war, with a focus on the health and environmental impacts of chemical weapons,” according to its mission statement. I had found it by chance one evening while jogging through City Park, a short distance from my hotel. The simplicity of the name and the building itself, tied to its stated purpose, was intriguing—a museum for peace?—so I decided to have a look.

  The emphasis on chemical weapons needs little explanation. During the eight-year Iran-Iraq War, from 1980 to 1988, Iran was on the receiving end of the first large-scale use of chemical weapons since their introduction in World War I. Mustard gas, tabun, sarin, and nerve gas rained down on both soldiers and civilians, primarily in the later years of the war. The numbers are sobering. In a single attack twenty thousand Iranian soldiers were killed immediately by nerve gas. In June 1988 five thousand people in the city of Sardasht were burned in a mustard gas attack. According to estimates by the CIA, at least fifty thousand of Iran’s casualties in the war were the direct result of chemical weapons, but, as more have died from their effects in the succeeding years, that number has doubled. The weapons, and the materials used to make them, were supplied by companies in the United States, the Netherlands, West Germany, Australia, France, and Italy. The United States also provided the Iraqi air force with surveillance information with complete awareness that in the subsequent attacks chemical weapons would be used.

  Reza Taghipoor, the director of the museum, was not a victim of a chemical attack. His legs were blown off when an Iraqi missile hit the ambulance that was transporting him away from the battlefield after he had been wounded by gunfire. He told me the story while giving me a tour of the museum, in his wheelchair. The use of child soldiers by Iran was widespread, particularly in the latter stages of the war. Reza was only fifteen in 1982 when he was caught up in one of the battles in Khoramshahr, one of the first cities to be captured by the Iraqis after their invasion but later retaken by the Iranians. Reza was struck by rifle fire but not severely. He managed to crawl to an ambulance and was loaded into it by combat medics, but before it could leave the battlefield, the missile struck. His legs had to be amputated just a few inches below his hips.

  Most of the employees of the museum are veterans of the war, and many were victims of chemical attacks. Hassan Sadi suffered mustard gas exposure twice and is awaiting a lung transplant. Ahmad Salim has had corneal transplants, and Ahmad Zangiabadi worked as a volunteer guide until he died of collapsed lungs in 2014. All of the others have their own stories.

  Word must have reached the museum that an American visitor was on the way, for the staff had a lunch buffet waiting when I arrived. Reza greeted me at the reception desk and started the tour with Elaheh, the museum’s international relations officer, on hand to interpret. Reza is a large man, even in a wheelchair, yet his voice is soft and sober. He speaks in the matter-of-fact tone of someone who knows that war is nothing to be championed or spoken of in ringing tones. As he recounted the number of deaths and pointed to the graphic photos showing the effects of chemical weapons on the human body—skin lesions and eye damage—he remained remarkably demure, even droll, in his delivery.

  Not all of the displays focus on the use of chemical weapons. Others recount violations of international law and crimes against humanity in other parts of the world—the civil war during the breakup of the former Yugoslavia, Israel’s use of cluster bombs in the 2006 war with Lebanon, the Rwandan genocide of the 1990s. It was the kind of experience we should all have once in a lifetime—like a visit to the Hiroshima Peace Museum or the Auschwitz concentration camp—to remind us of the limits of human depravity, which evidence shows appear to be nonexistent.

  Then our food was ready. Members of the staff had been unpacking delivery containers in the museum’s combination conference room and lunchroom. Reza had other business to attend to and wheeled himself away to one of the inner offices while the rest of us gathered around the long multipurpose table to dig in. The aluminum trays were piled with dill rice, chicken and meat kebabs, and skewers of grilled vegetables. For once, I was glad not to be treated as a guest of honor. Elaheh and the other men seated at the table, all of whom bore the scars of war and had come face-to-face with its full horror, took turns filling their plates and pouring drinks with an ease that said that the message of the museum—the need to eliminate chemical weapons—was one that they had grown accustomed to. Unacknowledged was an uncomfortable truth: chemical weapons had also been used in the civil war in Syria by the regime of Bashar al-Assad, which the Iranian government backed. No mention was made of this, and most of the men in the room may not have been government supporters anyway, as few Iranians are. Consequently, the issue was one no one wanted to address, as it would have complicated the message of the museum as well as the lessons from their own experiences that they wanted to share with the museum’s visitors.

  While we dug in, and the aromas of Persian cooking filled the room, questions were tossed my way: What was my interest in coming to Iran? Where had I been? Where was I going next? These were, of course, coupled with the expected expressions of Persian politeness: “We appreciate having you. We don’t get many American visitors.” And I was showered with tourist tips: “You should really go to Esfahan.” “Have you seen the gardens in Shiraz?” When we had had our fill there was a group photo shoot, the American visitor placed in the center and Reza wheeling himself back into the reception area to join, and then it was time to leave.

  Curiosity about the Iran-Iraq War and the effect it had had on Iranian society had prompted my visit to the museum. All wars are choreographed barbarity: The rituals of organization and planning give them a veneer of respectability, but during the Iran-Iraq War this mindless slaughter reached new depths.

  The two countries had engaged in petty border spats for centuries, but they seemed settled by the Treaty of Zuhab, signed in 1639. Three centuries later, the 1937 Treaty of Saad Abad reinforced what had already been tacitly observed—that the border ran along the Shatt Al-Arab waterway, which had become important for the export of both nations’ oil. In the 1950s Iraq began encouraging the ethnic Arabs who had lived for centuries in the Iranian province of Khuzestan to secede, a campaign that gained momentum after the death of Egyptian president Gamal Abdul Nasser. Iraq’s president, Saddam Hussein, fancied himself and his country becoming the new leaders of the Arab world. Iran’s oil-rich Khuzestan Province, with its population of ethnic Arabs, became a prize to capture.

>   After the Islamic Revolution of 1979 Saddam saw his chance. The Iranian military had been decimated by the execution of dozens of senior military officers who had served under the shah, and the country was in chaos. He also counted on the ethnic Arabs of Khuzestan to abandon any allegiance to Iran and rally behind him. The late 1970s saw border skirmishes and territorial incursions as the two sides tested each other’s mettle and supported potential rebels on the other side—for Iraq, the Arabs of Iran, and for Iran, the Kurdish minority in Iraq.

  On September 22, 1980, Saddam Hussein launched a major invasion, and the Iraqi forces quickly took the city of Khoramshahr at a combined cost of fifteen thousand deaths. Saddam’s rationale was to blunt any spread of the Shiite Islamic Revolution, which gained him favor in the West and the mainly Sunni Gulf countries that were caught between the two regional heavyweights. But the “flip” he expected of Iran’s ethnic Arabs never occurred.

  What followed was eight years of attacks and counterattacks, the firing of missiles at population centers, attacks on oil tankers and infrastructure, Iraqi attacks on military and civilian targets with chemical weapons, bellowing nationalistic and religious rhetoric, the kind of mano a mano trench warfare not seen since World War I, and the use of child soldiers to serve as “martyrs” for vaguely defined ideological causes. The Argentinian writer Jorge Luis Borges described the Falklands War as “two bald men fighting over a comb.” The Iran-Iraq War could be described as a cockfight, the two sides thrashing each other to annihilation with little regard for what kind of societies would emerge, only who would survive as the dominant power in the Middle East. Nationalistic and religious fervor dominated. In April 1985 Ayatollah Khomeini would proclaim: “It is our belief that Saddam wishes to return Islam to blasphemy and polytheism. . . . The issue is one of Islam versus blasphemy, not Iran versus Iraq.”

  The war didn’t have to go that way, or as badly, or last as long as it did. In 1982 Saddam Hussein offered Iran a truce, as it was apparent that the war was going nowhere, but Ayatollah Khomeini spurned it, as Iran was gaining ground and he saw the war as a way to whip up nationalist spirit and support for his Islamic Revolution.

  “The propaganda was terrible,” a friend of mine who had lived in Tehran at the time told me. “It was all about defending Islam and the new revolutionary government. They persuaded young kids to go to war, and they were told they would be martyrs if they died in battle. He even gave them keys that were meant to represent the keys to Paradise.” By the end, more than 100,000 child soldiers were sacrificed as morale waned and younger recruits were needed to replenish the ranks due to battlefield deaths, draft dodging, and desertions.

  Iran resorted to “human wave attacks” to overwhelm and disorient the Iraqi forces, raising the death toll. Masses of soldiers, primarily young conscripts and members of the loosely organized basij militia would be sent headlong against the Iraqi positions to pave the way for the regular army to continue the attack. In return, Saddam launched his “War of the Cities,” bombarding Iranian population centers in the west, but also those as far away as Tehran. As many as one-third of city dwellers fled, fearing a massive chemical attack, which Saddam had threatened.

  From 1984 to 1988, the last four years of the war, the conflict had become a stalemate. Neither side was able to make any significant progress. The Iranians threatened to close off the Strait of Hormuz to stifle the world’s oil shipments. In July 1988 an Iran Air passenger airliner was shot down by the U.S. Navy cruiser Vincennes, killing all 290 passengers and crew members. Finally, on July 20, 1988, then speaker of the parliament Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani persuaded Ayatollah Khomeini to accept a ceasefire. The Iranian death toll was estimated at half a million, though some claim it was double that, or somewhere in between. In Iran, more than 100,000 children were orphaned. The border dispute that started the war remained unresolved and returned to the prewar status quo. Nothing was gained for either side.

  One of the striking features of the war, which left a lasting impression on Iranian society, was the extreme imbalance in outside support. Almost all Western countries, including the Soviet Union, showered Iraq with weapons sales, intelligence information, financial aid, and, most important, chemical weapons or the ingredients to make them. Iran was isolated. Its only backer was Syria, too small and feeble in the face of much stronger global powers to help in any way.

  I’d long thought that the experience of the Iran-Iraq War had had a stinging long-term impact on the collective Iranian psyche, which appears in current defense policies. Iran has no natural allies in the region. Aside from the arrival of Islam in 651 CE and the introduction of Arabic script, Iran has no substantial historic or cultural ties to the Arab world. For a few centuries the Silk Road established economic and cultural links between Iran and Central Asia, China, and Turkey, but Iran’s distinctive history kept it a world apart. Therefore, when either regional or international conflicts boil over, there are no longstanding brothers-in-arms to rally to its defense. Although the United Nations named Iraq as the aggressor, throughout the war Iran received no international support. In a documentary film on Iran’s recent history, former president Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani put it simply: “What can I say? We were all alone.”

  Another friend who remembers the missile attacks on Tehran and other cities told me: “We were begging for one anti-aircraft gun, and no one would give it to us.”

  In August 2018 Iran committed itself to investing in the development of new fighter jets, and the reasoning was again drawn from its experience in the Iran-Iraq War. “We learned that we cannot rely on anyone but ourselves. We saw that wherever we are vulnerable no one will have mercy on us,” said the minister of defense, Amir Hatami.

  The peace museum threw some light on the use of chemical weapons in the war, and the displays about other war crimes in recent memory only laid bare, once again, the depth of systematic barbarity that has become commonplace in the modern day. But it wasn’t the end of the story. After a sincere thank you to Reza and Elaheh I headed back to North Tehran to another memorial of the war, the dubiously named Holy Defense Museum. It is more memorial than museum, but as either memorial or museum I took a particular dislike to its name. It was this kind of propaganda that compelled tens of thousands of young Iranians to swap their lives for a place in an illusory Paradise long after the war was deemed unwinnable. It framed the war as Ayatollah Khomeini and his hardline clerics would like it to be seen, as a jihadist cause to defend the newly formed Islamic Republic from secular, Sunni, Baathist infidels, funded by Western imperialists, or any combination of these.

  Fortunately, the interior of the museum is spared the revolutionary rhetoric. Instead, it resembles the kinds of war museums, or memorials, found wherever young men have sacrificed their lives for their nations, sometimes justifiably, sometimes as a result of nationalistic hubris, often a blending of both. Behind the glass display cases are the customary presentations of everyday objects found on the battlefield and in the possession of the dead. There are snapshots of dozens of victims—martyrs, in the Iranian context—framed by tongues of flame, each a miniature shrine to memorialize the lost as individuals rather than anonymous martyrs for a collective cause. As in almost every country that has seen war, there is a shrine for the unknowns, the true anonymous. And then there is the artwork.

  This exhibit was the most moving. Radiating from the main entrance along a dimly lit hall was a line of paintings that depicted soldiers set against backgrounds drawn from another world—stylized landscapes, a heaven of stars or clouds, at times nothing but a backdrop of bold color. Each was meant to stand for a victim of the war removed from space and time, in the midst of their own onward journey. There was nothing heroic about the portraits. Many of the heads are bowed or turned away from the viewer. Aside from the military uniforms and occasional colors of the Iranian flag, nothing suggests the glory of war or the deaths that were the result. I walked the line of paintings, stopping before the most poignant to look
a little more closely, hoping it might answer the question of the why of war, or offer a hint of its redeeming value, but the only sentiment to take away was the only appropriate one—of needless loss and sorrow.

  This was enough gloom for one afternoon. Outside the winter sun was shining bright, and there was no Siberian air blowing down from the north carrying a frigid chill, so I left the museum to have a look at the latest addition to the Tehran cityscape. It was the Tabiat Bridge, more pedestrian walkway and urban social center than bridge, though to do justice to its name, it does connect Taleqani and Ab-va-Atash Parks on opposite sides of the Modarres Expressway that runs along the east side of Tehran.

  The bridge was designed by Leila Araghian, and is a curving, swirling tetherwork of cables and suspension arcs propping up a two-level walkway that sports cafés and a food court in the middle of the 270-meter span. On a sunny afternoon it is one of the best places to admire the sweep of the city under glittering winter light. There were masses of Tehranis doing just that—absorbing the late-afternoon sun from the south-facing benches, sipping lattes and cappuccinos at the café tables, lingering along the high-rise sidewalk to enjoy the freedom of the open air and empty space, removed for a few moments from the burdens of past memories and the worries of the present. I, too, was able to let go of the images from the peace museum and the honors paid to the martyrs, at least for the moment. It was what Iranians have done for decades to sustain the promise of a brighter future, and I see the popularity of the Tabiat Bridge as representing this hope rendered into form. For brief moments, like a sunny winter afternoon, it is something not only to imagine but to experience.