A State of Fear

by Dr Reza Ghaffari

  Karim chose three political poems, well-known by most prisoners. One was written by Said Sultanpour, who had also been a prisoner of both regimes – he had been arrested at his wedding ceremony by Islamic guards and was executed almost immediately after reaching Evin for a second time. The poems were recited with great conviction and emotion and many people remarked later how moved they were. Karim was to be executed in 1988-89, despite his prior activities as a Tavab.

  A third section had been planned in which messages from organisations and individuals could be read out. But although one Rahe Kargar comrade read out his personal message to Hassan, understandably no other message was delivered. To have done so would have identified individuals with specific organisations – something that no one was prepared to do. Thus the ceremony ended with one comrade standing up and thanking everyone for attending. People were then asked to leave the room discreetly so as not to attract undue attention.

  The whole ceremony, its organisation and the period of consultation brought about a new mood of unity and co-operation in the level of resistance offered to the prison authorities. Hassan’s death had acted as a spur for us to organise ourselves better to oppose the regime’s oppression of all prisoners.

  The prison authorities increased the pressure from then on. There were mixed reactions from the prisoners. Some would look back to the Golden Fortress – the Tavabs, quarantine and doomsday – and retreated back into themselves, fearing a return to such conditions. Others felt it was even more important to show the utmost resistance, to make it hard for the officials to reassert their total authority over us.

  Even with this division, the mood in favour of fighting back was strong. The flash point occurred in the spring of 1987. The officials cut our paraffin ration in the wake of a suicide and the same week prison guards confiscated all our paraffin cooking stoves. This was a significant attack on our living standards. Prison food was not enough to live on, so we had to supplement our diet with food from the prison shop. But if we could not cook it, we could not eat it.

  Even those who wanted to finish their sentences with the minimum of fuss reacted angrily to this. There was no point keeping your head down if it meant starving to death. This brought together prisoners in a way the exercise issue, which could be seen as a Mojahedin-only problem, had not. The provocative action of the officials united prisoners in all blocks, without exception. Each block, according to its capabilities, organised its own way of resisting. The officials tried to defuse the anger by telling us that they would pay for the stoves, but under no circumstances would they return them.

  In the discussions about the way to proceed, a number of proposals were submitted from our cell. A block-wide hunger strike was proposed by the left. The right countered with a wait-and-see attitude. Some of us suggested that on the visiting days, we refused food and explained the situation to our families, to involve those outside. This was eventually accepted by the cell, and forwarded to the block.

  Other cells proposed that we should boycott the prison shop, apart from washing and cleaning materials. It was also proposed that we should refuse to use the exercise yard. We decided to leave the shop boycott and use of the exercise yard to the discretion of each cell, as many prisoners needed to use either or both for health reasons. The proposal from our cell was adopted by the block, with the addition that the first ten prisoners called for a visit would not go, and the next ten would go to explain why this was the case. We hoped that this would lead families to put pressure on the officials immediately – which is what happened. So this struggle between the prisoners and their jailers broadened out to include our families, who acted as the backbone for our resistance.

  During the first week of our co-ordinated fightback, we crowded round the big iron door to the block, hammering on it and demanding to see the officials. Every trend and organisation was keen to be represented in this campaign, which continued day after day, in the hope of wearing down the authorities.

  We have met Amou – Mohammed Abrandi – already in the Golden Fortress. An old worker, weathered from the sun of the oilfields and bent from a lifetime’s labour and living in shacks constructed out of oil barrels. He’d never been to school, but taught himself to read in Persian and Arabic so fluently that he could write poetry in both.

  When he was young, he was a giant of a man – wide-shouldered and long-limbed, with a reputation as no mean fighter. He had taken part with other oil workers in strikes in southern Iran after WWII, and remembered bitterly the capitulation of Tudeh at this time. Amou brought his experience to bear in the development of the movement that overthrew the Shah. The oil workers played a crucial role in this opposition movement. Their strikes and protests cut off the regime’s life blood.

  With the consolidation of the Islamic government, Amou joined the Fedayeen, the largest left group in Iran. When the organisation split, he sided with the Minority, which refused to support the regime. He was still active among the oil workers, despite his advanced years. His troubles began when Time magazine photographed him addressing a meeting of striking oil workers and printed it in full colour on their front cover. The Islamic regime took this as irrefutable evidence that he was inciting workers.

  When the regime cracked down on the left, the Minority encouraged the development of armed cells in factories and towns and Amou was associated with one such group. Within a year, in 1983, he had been captured. He was tortured in 209 and, in unimaginable pain, he gave information which led to the capture of the woman who was the secretary of his cell. She was shot.

  Amou was sentenced to seven years and sent to the Golden Fortress. Many captured with him from the Minority refused to speak to him and asked others to ostracise him as well. Ironically, according to what Amou told me, this boycott was organised by a member of the Minority who agreed to be part of a firing squad in Evin. When Amou, further down the same line, had been asked, he excused himself as being ‘too old and too frail for that kind of stuff’. This person, Amou said, was trying to cover his own tracks by maligning the old man but because Amou had shown weakness under torture, few would listen to his story. He was blanked and became lonely and isolated. He lived as an intransigent throughout, refusing to associate with the Tavabs. But he met a blank wall of hostility from many fellow prisoners.

  When I arrived at the Golden Fortress, he told me the circumstances in which he had given information in an effort to win my sympathy. ‘I’m a typical working class activist,’ he told me. ‘There was no way I could be effective in the Minority’s armed cells, disconnected from the workplace. We were just waiting to be captured there – fish out of water, flapping about on the beach. In effect, I got burned out. I only really began to read Marxist works after the overthrow of the Shah. I got arrested too soon – I was only just beginning to get to grips with the essentials of Marxism. I needed to learn this. I was a good speaker, a good activist – the form was good but I lacked the content that Marxism could give me. I really felt the lack of this talking to workers during our oil strikes.’ He would fall into despondency, which accentuated his hunched appearance and sigh, ‘I don’t think we will live to see the daylight of revolution and socialism in Iran.’

  I was constantly warned not to associate with him. But I felt I understood his strengths and weaknesses, and knew I was safe with him. In fact, I tried my best to integrate him back into the main body of left prisoners, with some success. Amou’s own (generally) buoyant and sociable disposition helped no small amount.

  On prison high days and holidays – such as they were – he would throw his all into the proceedings to make things go with a swing. We celebrated May Day, International Women’s Day, the anniversary of the Russian revolution and the like. As the guards had their calendars ringed in red on these days and were on the lookout for any untoward joviality, we celebrated covertly and a couple of days in advance. Such festivities amounted to getting spruced up as best as was possible – a wash and shave was all that could be done – and go ro
und the cells bringing greetings. Statements were read quietly, and certain individuals on your block would be invited to discreet gatherings in a particular cell some time later.

  Amou, our master autodidact, would do the rounds of the cells with me and a couple of younger comrades. One May Day he composed a poem, which he had set to a jazz-like rhythm. He schooled us as his ‘scat’ backing vocalists. He read out his composition, while our backing group lined up behind him to set the tempo. ‘Dang dang-dang dang, Dang dang-dang dang.’ Over this, Amou went into what was a rap, albeit performed by a septuagenarian Persian, about workers’ unity and the road to socialism. Fluid, staccato Persian was interspersed with pidgin-English which made its appearance to cover key words and concepts which would have incurred the wrath of the guards had they overheard and understood.

  The prison had discovered its own beat poet. Word went round the block and our performance became much in demand. The word went out to come to cell 24, one of the larger rooms in the block, on May Day after 8pm, when the presence of the guards was at a minimum. Each bunk bed became a tightly filled stall as the audience swelled in anticipation of the night’s entertainment. Not quite Carnegie Hall, but it did much to lift morale, especially Amou’s.

  When the struggle hotted up in Gohardasht, Amou was at the forefront. He hammered on the door and harangued officials with the best of them during the protest over the confiscation of our stoves. On one such occasion, in the spring of 1988, he was snatched from the front of the crowd and dragged away. He was taken to the central office, where five guards set upon this old man. Fists, clubs and cables fell upon a body that bore all the scars of 70 years of injustice in Iran. Two hours later, he was thrown, half-dead, back into his block.

  During the night, Amou burned up with fever and pain. His cellmates hammered on the door, demanding that he should be taken to the infirmary. The guards sneered, ‘Let the old bastard die.’ Amou did not recover. In the heart of that dark night, he closed his eyes, and never opened them again. The daylight he waited for is still below the horizon.

  One night, at about 10pm, two officials came to our block. One of them was Haji Mahmoud, a young mullah from the religious city of Qom. He was one of the prison authority’s troubleshooters and also a censor. They sat in the main corridor and asked about our grievances – although they knew already. Group after group told them, citing the particular needs of individuals who needed more food, exercise and the like.

  Our demands were met with a rebuke: ‘We no longer recognise your elected representatives. From now on, we will decide who we deal with on your block, or we will deal with no one.’ So now we had another demand – to get our own representatives recognised.

  The next day we drummed on the door with greater insistence. Between 80 and 100 angry prisoners queued, demanding to see the officials. The doors opened, Haji Mahmoud and a crony came forward and the mass of prisoners surged through. The two officials turned and ran, fleeing like frightened chickens. They had been humiliated.

  Half an hour later, once we had been forced back inside, the block doors reopened, admitting 50 club-wielding guards. They went from cell to cell, starting where the disturbed and deranged were kept. Beating and breaking, they wreaked havoc in all 22 cells. Everything and everyone in the cell was smashed and thrown into the corridor. Not one possession was left intact, not one prisoner escaped a beating.

  We were hauled to our feet and told to go to the prayer room. Those who couldn’t walk were dragged. Those who could walk were ordered to take all their possessions, which were stacked in the centre of the room: a mountain of books, clothes, bedding, cutlery. The guards rummaged through each prisoner’s sack, looking for anything that might be incriminating. Then we were instructed to return to our cells while the guards continued their search. Of course, we lost watches, money and other valuables. But our real worry was that they might unearth material that would allow them to send prisoners back to court for organising resistance. Books, letters, the fabric of our sacks, were picked through. Handwriting samples and books were taken out for further investigation.

  Three large plastic cases of wine were also unearthed. We had been making wine in an Islamic prison! A poet, Kamal, was in charge of our illicit vat. We had fermented wine out of grapes, raisins and berries bought at the prison shop. Our moonshine was concealed under bedding and sacking in the corner of two or three cells – and in the prayer room!

  Our sacrilege enraged the guards, who went from cell to cell trying to find out who the underground vintner was. Fortunately, not many people knew – the wine was a closely guarded secret. And with a knife at your neck, you learned to shake your head in denial. If you nodded, the movement of your head would push the knife point into the soft underside of your chin.

  Beatings, threats and solitary did not yield any results, and Kamal’s role remained hidden. He had another vulnerable point. He would write poetry on prison conditions and resistance, which he would ask me to translate into English, so that even if the guards found them they would not understand. But this exposed me: as the translations were in my hand, I could be shot.

  We hoped other secrets would remain hidden. What they’d taken from the blocks in the form of messages on paper and in books was in carefully concealed code, which we hoped wouldn’t be detected, let alone deciphered.

  The next week was spent clambering over this mountain of possessions, trying to reclaim our shirts, bedding – even our bloody toothbrushes, buried somewhere deep within. Then came the slow process of putting our cells back in order. At the end of all this, there was stuff left unclaimed in the pile: possessions that had been at the bottom of prisoners’ sacks so long, they’d forgotten they had them. So we ‘nationalised’ it. Anyone who needed anything from this residual pile could come along and take it.

  But the authorities were able to piece together evidence of an organisational network among the Mojahedin in one or two blocks. A couple of prisoners were fingered and put into solitary. They caved in under tremendous pressure, and were paraded in front of the other prisoners in their block. They ‘confessed’, asked forgiveness and appealed for other prisoners to follow their example. This was the authorities’ response to developing resistance. We heard on the grapevine that the fight was not confined to Gohardasht. In other jails in Iran, prisoners were rising up and asserting their rights.

  At this time, each prisoner was interviewed by a panel. He or she would be asked, ‘Are you a Muslim? Do you pray? Do you support the Islamic Republic? Are you ready to go to the front to fight Iraqi aggression? Do you still have any affinity with the political group you were working with to overthrow the Islamic Republic?’

  All those who answered that they were Muslims and prayed, were put together in one block, whether Mojahedin or left. Those who said they were Muslim but did not pray, were put with us. Now all the blocks were arranged on religious lines.

  Prisoners were also split up according to the length of sentence. Those serving more than ten years were isolated inside two blocks within Gohardasht. One block was reserved for intransigents, the other for passives.

  Within a month of the interviews, the whole of Gohardasht was organised along these lines. This disrupted resistance and it was a number of months before we were able to get our bearings and once again build up our network of contacts.

  CHAPTER 18

  MASSACRE!

  A new block was formed from Evin intransigents of men who had completed their sentences but whom the regime refused to free because they had not said the right things at their release interviews. They had refused to appear on televised interviews denouncing the opposition in Iran. Such prisoners were to be held indefinitely. Some had received two-year sentences but were still behind bars six years later. There were about 200 of them and their families campaigned for their release.

  As tentative contacts were renewed, each block in turn began to test the regime’s resolve. How would it react to a new round of prison resistance? In my block we e
stablished good contacts with those around us. But there was still a mood of suspicion over why we had been segregated in this new way.

  The Iranian war effort was waning. Iraq was growing more confident and successful, and international pressure, focusing on UN Security Council Resolution 595 calling for the immediate cessation of hostilities, was stepped up. The Iranian front line crumbled in parts of the north west and Iraqi forces broke through. Khomeini took the poisoned chalice of the forced peace.

  For the first time prison television showed the advance of Mojahedin commandos from bases in Iraq. Then things changed: one Friday afternoon in late July 1988, a couple of days after this news item was screened, all televisions were removed, scheduled visits from our families due the next day were cancelled until further notice; exercise periods were withdrawn; access to the infirmary and all other medical treatment for the sick was stopped; and we were confined to our blocks. Our isolation was total: we were not even permitted to read the Islamic regime’s official daily paper. Everyone in Gohardasht was in quarantine. Even the guards were not allowed to leave the prison compound.

  Days passed. The daily radio news broadcast at 2pm was stopped. We were desperate for news. Inmates in blocks closest to the guards’ quarters would try and overhear what was said on the guards’ radio. At 2pm these blocks would go deadly silent. Those with the sharpest ears would lie on the floor, put their ears to the narrow gap between the heavy iron block door and the ground, and try to pick up the faint strains of the broadcast. What they gleaned would be relayed to other blocks by Morse code tapped out on the floor and ceilings. In this way we could compare notes on what each block had gathered, piecing together the fragments of half-heard news. Information gathering and dissemination became the particular remit of certain blocks.

  We discussed the likely effects of the military defeat throughout the country – in particular, what its effect would be in the prisons. I argued that Khomeini would seek an accommodation with the West and reactionary regimes in the region to give the regime a breathing space. If the regime was forced to adopt such a policy it would have to reduce pressure in the prisons as part of the public relations exercise to ingratiate itself with the West. Other comrades were more hesitant and feared the worst. Unfortunately, their pessimism was to prove well founded…