A State of Fear

by Dr Reza Ghaffari

  As a result of his elevation from scrapyard to slaughter house, he began to consider himself a theorist. In his own eyes he became a great authority on every subject from imperialism to the atom and would inflict a lecture on these matters at any provocation. He believed he was an expert on political prisons and their inmates. Yet this devout servant of the Imam was also a dirty old man. He forced one group of women involved in prison resistance to confess in public alleged sexual activities in safe houses. This performance was filmed. The women were so broken by the brutality of quarantine and doomsday that they acquiesced to this show trial in the hope that it would get them out. As much as they tried to plead the sincerity of their repentance, the Tavab section of the crowd would shout ‘Death to the hypocrites and communists! Down with Israel, America and the Soviet Union! Long live Khomeini, Imam of the epoch!’ Following the orchestrated barracking, a pronouncement would be made: ‘You have not passed this test of sincerity. You will stay here until you rot.’

  These show trials took place many times, usually in the early afternoon, and would go on till eight or nine at night. The Tavabs would direct the prisoners from each block down to the main corridor and order them to sit. Thousands of prisoners provided an audience for hours at an end, crammed in, squatting on the floor, with the privileged Tavabs in the front row seats. It was not simply those on the platform who were undergoing psychological torture. The audience was a seething mass of the injured, diseased and infected.

  This was not the only public duty of the prisoner. Each was required to pray five times a day. Imagine, six to seven hundred prisoners in a block, all forced to leave their cells to pray in the corridors. We would be assembled into groups of six, sometimes more than a hundred rows of us. The front were always reserved for the Tavabs. One of them would lead the prayer session. Nobody could avoid attending prayer sessions. All but the Tavabs despised them and would try to conduct their own prayer afterwards with their own appointed Imam. Some prisoners suggested that prayers should be conducted individually, not en masse led by Tavabs, arguing that God would accept individual prayer. But the ritual was part of the brainwashing prison system.

  Groups of prison guards or Hezbollahi (hand-picked thugs, trained in the martial arts and conditioned to attack without provocation) were tasked to attack prisoners following Tavab reports. Sometimes a cell would be singled out, sometimes even the entire block. They would come with wooden clubs and whips made from steel cabling. These raids would also occur if the regime had suffered a setback in the war, had been humiliated by Saddam Hussein, when an assassination attempt had been made on the regime and on holy days.

  The Islamic guards would be assembled in the corridor. They would be singing or shouting ‘God is great!’, ‘Khomeini is Imam!’, ‘Down with hypocrites, down with communists!’ Then they would launch their attack. Anything in their way would be broken up. Prisoners would be taken away with them on Tavab intelligence. Three or four guards would attack a single prisoner.

  Those not selected would be sent out into the prison yard. The guards would then launch a search and destroy operation, ransacking cells, searching through belongings for any material that constituted opposition to the regime or subversive material. They would attempt to locate an owner to interrogate. Sometimes everyone in the cell would be taken for questioning. Whatever the outcome of these raids, the guards would leave a complete mess behind them. All of our belongings would be thrown across the floor, many items would be ripped up or broken. It would take us hours to clear up and restore normality, or at least what we understood as normal life. Despite covert attempts by prisoners to help those injured by the guards, the Tavabs would be on the lookout to report any signs of co-operation. Indeed, they would often take part in the raids. A report would be made by the Tavabs on the effectiveness and findings of the raid, directly precipitating torture and even the death of many prisoners.

  Everyone in the Golden Fortress had a unique tale to tell. Each revealed the upheaval that had shaken our whole country – particularly its poorer sections, the landless peasants, the workers and the youth. One story was that of Mohsen, who left the land and came to the tin shanty towns on the edge of Tehran. At 14, he became active in the upheaval against the Shah and went on to be an organiser in his shanty town, distributing leaflets and papers. He was a well-known activist of the left.

  In 1981 he was picked up by the local Islamic committee and brought to Evin. He went through all the stages of interrogation, was sentenced to five years by an Islamic court and sent to the Golden Fortress. His conduct in the prison was good: he stood by his comrades and so he was sent to cells where the intransigents were kept. He came across another boy, Mohammed, from a similar background in his neighbourhood, but who had become a Tavab. Both were around 16 or 17 at the time. Mohsen told me that he was talking to the Tavab to convince him to at least become neutral. As a result of these discussions, both of them moved to a passive cell.

  Mohsen was picked up from the block and sent to the prison central office. All of us associated with him became worried. Maybe he had been singled out because of his links with other prisoners. Three days later he returned, exhausted and beaten about the face. He told us that he had been made to stand for three days and nights and that he had been beaten with a stick.

  Mohsen had been singled out, he said, because Mohammed had claimed that Mohsen had made a sexual advance towards him. Mohsen went back to the intransigents, Mohammed back to the Tavabs.

  In truth, it was the Tavabs who were guilty of uninvited sexual advances. A physical attack on a prisoner could turn into a sexual assault, especially for women prisoners. Young people would often be put under the care of Tavabs, to protect them from ‘corruption’ by the intransigents. These youths – often only children – would be vulnerable to sexual abuse by the Tavabs and had no way out.

  CHAPTER 10

  DOOMSDAY

  In the still of an autumn night in 1983, the quiet was shattered as about 50 guards attacked the cell blocks, concentrating on the intransigents’ cells. They targeted anyone who looked un-Islamic or unrepentant in any way – which they took to mean anyone with glasses or a moustache.

  It was a regular raid. They marched down the corridor, two or three of them staying by the doorway of each cell. As the ‘wild bunch’ reached the last cell, they turned and began their most savage attack, pulling prisoners from their sleep and dragging them into the corridor. They were beaten until they could no longer stand. The contents of the cell were turned upside down again. Then they would move to the next cell and repeat the process. All the while the Tavabs looked on and sometimes joined in the beatings.

  The governor always made sure that he was at the heart of these raids. Here he was in his element. He loved this carnage. Running around, in and out of the cells, he would be drenched in his own sweat, panting heavily as he heaved his bulbous frame from one cell to the next. Anyone unfortunate enough to catch his eye received a beating.

  That night I saw him slapping and chopping at Mohammed Abrandi, a prisoner in his 70s we called Amou – uncle. Amou was an oil worker who had criticised the Tavabs in the block. Then, with one wild movement of his arm, the governor lost his balance and his colossal bulk came crashing down. He landed heavily on his right arm, which promptly broke and he screamed in agony. It took five of the guards to haul the howling governor to his feet. As they left, they shouted ‘God is great, long live Khomeini! Down with communism!’

  Far from being a cause for amusement for us, we knew that Haji’s misfortune would spur on the other guards. The blameless Amou was quickly surrounded by guards. As he looked up at them encircling him, they started beating him on all sides with fists, feet, clubs and lengths of cable. He was pushed from one guard to the next, in a savage game of pass the parcel until he lost consciousness. Then the guards meted out the same treatment to others in the cell.

  Amou had been singled out for rough treatment. When he arrived in the block, the guards put him lo
w down the danger list, in cell 5 close to the control room. They thought he was just an old, sick and illiterate worker. One day Amou offered some of his food to a young cellmate who he thought looked as though he needed it more than he did. The Tavab overseer in their cell, who was only about 16, grabbed the food from the young man and threw it into the plastic bag in the room that served as a rubbish bin and shouted to Amou that he would report this ‘communist behaviour’. Amou had been simmering with anger ever since he had been put in that cell. The Tavabs incensed him. Now this anger exploded.

  Amou would have been naturally tall, over two metres, with long, gangling arms and legs and big hands and feet. Now, though, he was bent almost double. But he drew himself up to his full height and slapped the Tavab across the face, a stinging blow that knocked the brat to the floor. This won Amou a beating by five other Tavabs and an immediate move to cell 24 – promotion to intransigents and elevation to hero status in the eyes of the prisoners.

  The night of the mass beating in our block, between one and five prisoners in each intransigent cell were punched, kicked and stamped unconscious by the guards, and then dragged out of the block by the Tavabs. This happened throughout the prison that night and those that followed. This was the start of what was called ‘doomsday’ and included attacks on the women’s blocks. Those prisoners taken away were moved to another complex in the prison. They were put in front of a wall, given pencil and paper, and asked specific questions about their attitude to the Islamic regime, the war with Iraq, Israel, the US and the Soviet Union. They were asked questions about the different prisons that they had been at, and how they had acted in them. Pressure was put on them to identify other prisoners who had shown opposition of any form within the prisons. They were asked similar questions about others in their cells. The last question was, would they become a Tavab? If the answer was ‘Yes’, they were expected to prove it, by giving all the information withheld so far – details about their political activity before their arrest, about their family and friends, and information gathered within the prison. In particular they were pressed for information about the activities and identities of the intransigents within their cell and block.

  Those who managed to pass this test, some giving evidence they knew to be out of date, could get back into the regular blocks. Some found themselves back at Evin’s 209 with lengthier sentences and beginning a new round of interrogation and torture. Those who refused to co-operate, or had nothing further to tell, made up the doomsday block. This regime, which had developed in an ad-hoc manner, involved the prisoner in solitary: blindfolded, standing facing the wall, forced to listen to a constant barrage of sermons, speeches and Koran readings broadcast around the clock. These were interspersed with replays of interviews with oppositional leaders who had capitulated to the Islamic regime. Khomeini was heard crying in front of adolescents about to be sent to the front in the war against Iraq, ‘I wish I was a Pasdar. You are God’s chosen. Dead or alive, you will go to heaven. I am the loser, because I have not been chosen to share your glory’.

  There would be live broadcasts from the trenches the night before an attack as the young Pasdars psyched themselves up to go over the top. They were used as human mine detectors, one detected mine equalling one boy blown to bits.

  At its inception, doomsday inmates were forced to stand for days on end, deprived of sleep, and kicked back onto their feet when they collapsed from exhaustion. They had three breaks a day to eat and to go to the lavatory. Further punishment was equally arbitrarily imposed. The prisoner would be forced to sit cross-legged on the floor, blindfolded and facing the wall, presumably because the Tavabs had grown tired of kicking them to their feet. This lasted for a couple of days. The last stage was the separation of prisoners from each other with plywood partitions.

  Doomsday’s laws evolved from day to day as the governor, the guards and Tavabs patrolled doomsday. No one knew what was forbidden and what was not. The residents of doomsday would discover a rule when he or she had broken it and earned a beating – this rule, though, might have changed entirely by the next morning. Moving your hands got you beaten. Stretching your legs got you beaten. So did turning your head, or adjusting your blindfold. Whatever you do, do nothing was the message.

  The guards seemed equally at sea. What appeared to be a carefully thought-out strategy to disorientate, confuse and distress the prisoners in fact was the opposite – random, ill-conceived and inconsistent… but hell, nevertheless. At 11pm, all doomsday’s prisoners were ordered to lie down. At 6am they were ordered to sit back in position; facing the wall, legs crossed. Bodhiramma, the Buddhist saint, squatted for years facing a cave wall. That was his choice: the prisoners in doomsday had no such luxury. Days rolled into weeks, and so into months. Some inmates capitulated. They would cry out, ‘Bring in the papers. I’ll write anything you want’. They were filmed and used in the performances that the governor staged, where they confessed to things they had never done. Often, they would sit on the stage, sobbing or laughing uncontrollably. Others crumbled physically and mentally through trying to hold out. Of those who returned, some had lost their voices. Some could no longer concentrate and lost their memory. Many developed twitches. Suicide was not uncommon.

  One man who spent ten months in doomsday would wander back and forth in a straight line, talking to himself, totally oblivious to his surroundings. During his time in doomsday, he had learnt to trust no one, to associate with no one, indeed to forget himself. Four years after his experience in doomsday, he too killed himself. Years after others were released, some still chose to end their lives as a result of what had happened to them. It was from the scattered testimonies of these human husks that we discovered what was happening in the governor’s latest creation.

  CHAPTER 11

  THE RED PRIEST

  Mojtaba was born in a village called Khomein in central Iran sometime in the late 1940s, not far from where Khomeini himself came from. Mojtabah’s father was the village shopkeeper. This was a stable and respectable background, where the remnants of Iran’s feudal past still clung on tightly. Religion and the patriarchal family dominated. As a young man, with the encouragement of his proud parents, Mojtabah entered a small seminary in the locality from which he graduated to Iran’s religious capital, Qom. Here he was given financial support and a roof over his head in order to continue his religious studies, under the guidance of some of Khomeini’s closest associates.

  He was a pupil of Gilani, who would become the most senior judge of the Islamic revolutionary courts, responsible for the execution of tens of thousands. After the establishment of the Islamic regime, Khomeini handpicked Gilani as one of the founding members of the Council of Keepers – a religious body that oversaw all legislative matters dealt with by the Majlis. Without their explicit approval, no law could be enacted. At the time of writing, he was still the most prominent member of this body.

  As opposition to the Shah gained strength in the late 1970s, Mojtabah, along with many of his young contemporaries in the clergy, organised a group to distribute Islamic propaganda material, including reprints of Khomeini’s speeches and writings from exile in Najaf, the religious city in Iraq. They would circulate pamphlets among the pilgrims who flocked to the holy city of Qom. This political activity led him to visit Tehran regularly, opening him up to secular contacts. He wanted to get into the student milieu, to widen both his knowledge and his political activities. Once he was picked up by the Shah’s secret police and received a beating within the holy Fatima al-Masumeh shrine itself! He was so sore after this that he could not journey anywhere for several weeks to spread his message of freedom.

  By 1977 Mojtabah had established a foothold in the most vibrant areas of opposition– among students, in the universities in Tehran – the centre of political opposition to the Shah’s regime – and in the seminaries of Qom – the centre of religious opposition. He sought out prominent student activists and tried to convince them to make a stand of religious oppositio
n. He had some success in this, but as the movement deepened and expanded, so did his own reading and experience. The rising power and confidence of the workers’ movement, and its political expression in the Marxist left, set new questions that neither the Koran nor Khomeini could answer in the opinion of this inquisitive and socially conscious priest.

  Each summer, the seminaries in Qom would close for three or four months. The religious leaders there would assign him to travel to remote villages to preach to the peasants. In addition to daily prayer sessions, there would be weekly sermons during which Mojtabah would subtly criticise the rule of the Shah and present the teachings of Islam and Khomeini as the only salvation.

  In February 1979, Khomeini made his famous journey by Air France jet from Paris, arriving at Tehran airport to be greeted by eight million people. Emerging from the luxury of his ‘Ayatollah Class’ cabin, he and his entourage were driven towards the city centre, where millions thronged the streets hoping for a glimpse of him. So dense were the crowds that he had to be taken by helicopter the last few kilometres to Tehran’s newest and largest graveyard.

  Amid the headstones, Khomeini denounced the Shah for creating the most thriving industry in Iran. The bitter irony that history so often repeats was later to see this same graveyard extended a hundred fold, stretching out into the desert. Khomeini himself is buried there, in a golden mausoleum for the faithful to visit.

  Mojtabah was present at Khomeini’s version of the Sermon on the Mount and even helped organise it. He was one of the trusted bodyguards that day. But Mojtabah heard nothing from the man they regarded as their saviour about freedom and democracy – which he had come to see as the necessary outcome of the approaching revolution. He came away instead from this massive gathering among the graves with massive and grave doubts.