The Great War for Civilisation

by Robert Fisk

  Many who faced the firing squad that March were found guilty of shooting at demonstrators during the great anti-Shah marches. On 11 March, Lieutenant Ahmed Bahadori was shot for killing protesters in Hamadan. In Abadan, four more ex-policemen were executed for killing a nineteen-year-old youth during demonstrations. On 13 March, revolutionary courts sent another thirteen men accused of being censors and secret police agents to the firing squad. Among them were Mahmoud Jaafarian, the Sorbonne-educated head of the Iranian National News Agency, and former television director Parviz Nikkhah. Before his death, fifty-six-year-old Jaafarian would say only that “I hope when I die my family and my countrymen will live in freedom.” Nikkhah was believed to be the journalist who wrote the inflammatory article against Khomeini that provoked the first bloody religious riots in the holy city of Qom in 1978. One newspaper carried photographs of all eleven with their names written on cardboard around their necks. Jaafarian stares without hope at the camera. Nikkhah looks angrily to the right. The eyes of one ex-secret policeman are directed at the floor. In their minds, they must already be dead. Kayhan published two pictures of former Qom police officer Agha Hosseini. In one, he is tied to a ladder, his eyes covered in a white cloth, his mouth open and his teeth gritted as he prepares to receive the first bullets. In the other, his knees have buckled and he sags against the ladder.

  Mehdi Bazargan appeared on television, condemning the kangaroo trials as a disgrace to “a wonderful revolution of religious and human values.” Bazargan was angered in April when he heard that the Shah’s former prime minister Amir Abbas Hoveyda had been taken from his prison—in which the Shah had confined him in a last attempt to curry favour with the revolution before fleeing the country himself—and charged with “corruption on earth” and “a battle against God.” Only hours before Hoveyda was to go before a firing squad, Bazargan drove at speed to Qom to speak to Khomeini, who immediately set new rules for revolutionary courts. To no avail.

  Hoveyda, an intellectual, urbane man whose interests included Bach, Oscar Wilde and James Bond and whose contempt for the corruption surrounding the Shah had earned him the trust of statesmen and diplomats—but not of ordinary Iranians—had been brought to the revolutionary court from his bed at Qasr prison just before midnight, bleary-eyed and pleading that “my doctor has given me a sedative and I can hardly talk, let alone defend myself properly.” But he knew what was coming. “If your orders are for me to get condemned, then I have nothing more to say. The life of an individual is not worth much against the life of a whole nation.” What does a “battle against God” mean? Hoveyda asked the court. If it meant that he was a member of the “system,” then up to 700,000 people had worked in the Shah’s civil service. “I had a share in this system—call it the regime of a battle against God if you so wish—and so did you and all the others,” he told the court. He wanted time to gather evidence in his defence. “My hand is unstained both by blood and money,” he pleaded. “ . . . You have brought me here as prime minister while five prime ministers have left the country. Couldn’t I also be walking on the Champs Elysées or in the streets of New York?” He had no control over Savak, he said. “In all Savak papers, if you find a single document showing that the prime minister had any role in the organisation, then I shall say no more in my defence.” Hoveyda turned to the reporters in the audience. “What’s the news?” he asked them. “I haven’t seen any papers or heard the radio for some time.”

  Hoveyda was eventually sentenced to death as a “doer of mischief on earth.” Immediately after the sentence, Ayatollah Sadeq Khalkhali, the “hanging judge” of the revolution, disconnected the telephones in the prison, locked the doors, and had Hoveyda dragged into the prison yard, tied to a stake and shot. “The first bullets hit him in the neck but did not kill him,” William Shawcross wrote in his gripping account of the Shah’s last days. “He was ordered by his executioner, a mullah, to hold up his head. The next bullet hit him in the head and he died.” Paris Match was to carry a photograph of his corpse with a grinning gunman looking at it. Alongside, the magazine carried a picture of the exiled royal family swimming on Paradise Island. Put not your trust in Shahs.

  In those early days of the revolution, Iran was in too much anarchy for the new authorities to control journalists. Revolutionary Guards on the roads would send foreign reporters back to Tehran, but they never thought to look for us on the trains. And with a student card—I was using my free time during the stoppage at The Times to take a Ph.D. in politics at Trinity College, Dublin—I bought an all-rail card that allowed me to travel across Iran by train. They were long revolutionary trains, the windows smashed, portraits of Khomeini and poster tulips—symbols of martyrdom—plastered over the rolling stock, their restaurant cars serving chicken, rice and tea for breakfast, lunch and dinner. Unable to write for my own newspaper, I sent a long letter to Ivan Barnes, the foreign news editor, to describe Iran’s unfinished revolution. The Shah’s acolytes, I told him, had usually been insufferably arrogant.

  I found that this arrogance had disappeared with the revolution. I was treated with courtesy and kindness almost everywhere I went and found Iranians much more aware of the implications of world events than . . . the inhabitants of Arab countries. There was a straightforward quality about Iranians in the country as well as the towns that I couldn’t help admiring. They were thirsting to talk about anything. The only trouble I had was on the train to Qum [sic] when a gang of Islamic Guards (green armbands and M-16 rifles) opened the compartment door and saw me recording a cassette with train sounds. I was immediately accused of being a CIA spy (what else?) but explained that I was a journalist working for Canadian radio. The interpreter, a leftist student who travelled with me everywhere . . . repeated the same thing and they relaxed a bit. I had been told in Tehran to always say Deroot do Khomeini, marg ba Shah! to anyone nasty (“Long live Khomeini, death to the Shah!”). I said my piece, at which the Khomeini guards all raised their right fists in the air and shouted their approval. Then they all shook hands with me with giant smiles and tramped off down the train to torment someone in another compartment.

  From the desert to the north, Qom stands like an island of distant gold, the cupolas of its mosques and its plump, generous minarets an oasis of beauty at dawn. Like the spires of a medieval English university, its ancient centre appears to reach up to heaven. But my train pulled in after dark, the suburbs thick with exhaust and dust and vast crowds, dark-jacketed, bearded men and black-veiled women moving like a tide towards a grim red-brick building surrounded by big, muscular men with automatic rifles. My leftist student friend turned to me. “There is a trial,” he shouted. “They are trying one of the Shah’s men.” I dumped my bag in a hotel crammed between shops opposite the Friday Mosque, pulled out my old clunker of a tape recorder and ran back to what was already called the “court.”

  Warrant Officer Rustomi of the Shah’s Imperial Army sat on a metal-framed chair on the stage of the revolutionary court, his hands clasped in front of him and his gaze fixed on the wooden floor of the converted theatre where he was now on trial. He was a middle-aged man and wore an untidy grey-brown beard. He had long ago been stripped of his artillery regiment uniform, and he appeared in court in a creased green anorak and a pair of dirty jeans, a crumpled figure relieved only by the snappy pair of built-up French shoes on his feet. He looked for all the world like a bored defendant awaiting judgement for a minor traffic offence rather than a man who was waiting only for the legal niceties—if “legal” was the right word— of a death sentence. He was accused of killing anti-Shah demonstrators.

  The Islamic court in Qom had dispatched its fifth victim to the firing squad only six hours earlier. He was a local policeman accused of killing demonstrators in the revolution, the man who had appeared on the newspaper front page, tied to the ladder, gritting his teeth in front of the firing squad. Someone had cruelly shown the newspaper to Rustomi; maybe it was the inevitability of his sentence that made him so calm, sitting up ther
e on the platform above us. Every few minutes he would take a packet of American cigarettes out of his pocket, and a gunman with a rifle—yes, an American rifle—slung over his shoulder would step over to him obligingly with a match. Rustomi dragged heavily on the cigarettes and glanced occasionally over towards us with a kind of lifelessness in his eyes.

  There were more than 600 men—no women—in the audience and most of them were talking of that morning’s execution, although it was difficult to understand why the event should have occasioned any excitement. There had been no acquittals in the revolutionary courts and the only punishment handed out had been death. The crowd had come to watch the prisoner, to see if he cried or pleaded for life or walked defiantly to the firing squad, to watch the mighty fallen. George Bernard Shaw once claimed that if Christians were thrown to the lions in the Royal Albert Hall in London there would be a packed house each night. These excited men in the audience must have been wearing the same faces as the mobs that gathered before the guillotine during the French revolution.

  You could see why death would be the only possible sentence as soon as Rustomi’s trial started. An Islamic priest in long brown robes and a civilian lawyer appointed by the mosque walked onto the stage of the converted theatre and announced that they were to act as prosecuting counsel and judges. Rustomi did not even glance at them. They sat at two iron desks and behind them, fixed on to a starlike design of strip lights, was a crude oil painting of Ayatollah Khomeini. There was no doubt under whose authority this court was sitting.

  The mullah made a brief address to the crowd, stating that the trial would be held according to the rules of the Koran, and that the prisoner should be allowed to reply to the charges against him. The mullah was a tall, distinguished man with a long white beard and a kind, honest face. The civilian lawyer looked angry and vindictive, and said something abusive to Rustomi before he sat down. The mullah waved a sheaf of papers in his hand; a series of written testaments by witnesses to anti-Shah demonstrations, each claiming that Rustomi had ordered his company of soldiers to fire at civilians.

  One by one, the witnesses were called from the audience to give their evidence—a process occasionally interrupted by shouting at the back of the theatre where more men were pushing their way through the doors and fighting for places in the court. Rustomi pulled his chair up to the mullah’s desk and listened. The first witness was a young man with his shoulder in plaster and the second witness limped onto the stage. They had seen Rustomi order his men to fire at the demonstrators, they claimed, and a third man ran onto the stage and yelled that Rustomi had broken through the door of a mosque and killed a boy hiding in the shrine. There was much discussion of dates and street names—there was, in fact, a genuine if chaotic attempt to define the events surrounding the shooting—before Rustomi stood up.

  The crowd bayed at him and for several seconds the mullah did nothing. Rustomi looked down at us with an uncomprehending expression. He wanted to talk. Yes, he said, he had ordered his men to disperse the demonstrators, but he had told them to fire into the air. If anyone had been hit, it must have been a ricochet. There was a momentary silence in the court before another man, scarcely twenty years old, clambered onto the stage and pointed at Rustomi. “You’re lying, you bastard,” he screamed, before the judge ordered him off.

  Rustomi fought his corner against obviously impossible odds. He had no defence counsel. He admitted that on another date, he had indeed fired his rifle into a crowd of people who were demanding the overthrow of the Shah. He had questioned the orders to open fire, he said, over his two-way radio, but his major had threatened him with a court martial if he did not obey. At this, an old man in the theatre leapt to his feet. “The Holy Koran does not allow any man to take that attitude,” he shouted. “If a Muslim kills another Muslim in those circumstances he is not true to his religion.” The old man went on and on, abusing Rustomi, and the mullah with the wise, kindly face nodded in an agreeable fashion and allowed the abuse to continue. Rustomi seemed on the verge of tears.

  Then the civilian lawyer walked round and shouted “Liar!” in the prisoner’s ear. For a dreadful moment I was reminded of those scratched archive films of the Nazi People’s Court trying the plotters against Hitler’s life in 1944 when Judge Roland Freisler swore at the defendants. At the end of the first day in Qom, the civilian lawyer walked over to me smiling. “It’s a fair trial we’re giving him,” he said. “As you can see, we allow Rustomi to answer the charges.” The court resumed next morning, and Rustomi watched unhappily as two members of his own riot squad condemned him as a murderer. Another soldier did bravely step forward to defend the prisoner, but he was ordered to shut up after being accused of muddling the date of the incident.

  When the mullah called a break for lunch, a man of about thirty walked up to me outside the theatre. He was watched suspiciously by a group of Islamic Guards, gunmen wearing the distinctive green armband that showed they were appointed by the mosque. It turned out to be Rustomi’s brother, and he was a frightened man. There was no way we could talk there on the pavement, so we walked down a street together, followed by the gunmen from the court. “Do you think this is a fair trial?” he asked. “My brother has no defence counsel. They told him to find one if he wants, but I have been to Tehran to the committee of lawyers, and I’ve spoken to twenty lawyers. Not one of them will take his case. This court has killed every prisoner it has tried.” There was a sad pause while the man tried to stop himself from weeping. “My brother has a little boy. He has told the other children at his school that he will kill himself if the court killed his father.” Then we said goodbye and Rustomi’s brother walked off, the gunmen mincing after him. That same afternoon, I asked Ayatollah Kazem Shariatmadari, one of Khomeini’s closest advisers, why Rustomi was allowed no defence counsel. The white-bearded Ayatollah sat cross-legged on rich ornamental carpets. “A prisoner at an Islamic court should be allowed a lawyer to defend him,” he said. “I do not know what is going on at this trial at Qom—I do not know the circumstances of this trial. I do not know the answer to your question.”

  He was a gentle old man and a moderate among the divines in the city of Qom. But what did “moderate” mean any more? Shariatmadari simply had no idea what was going on in the courts, and I’m sure he preferred not to find out. I still have the tapes of the old man’s excuses and—far more difficult to listen to—the recordings of the “trial,” of the lawyer shrieking “Liar!” in Rustomi’s ear, of the condemned man trying to explain his military rules, of his brother’s tears outside the “court.” They carry an authentic, painful reality, of injustice by the many against the few. Khomeini’s ruling after Bazargan’s frantic visit to Qom did not spare the prisoners brought into the converted theatre. Executions started again the morning after I left Qom, and although the identity of the victims was not at first made clear, one of them was a former soldier in the Shah’s army. I knew his name.

  There would be no counter-coups in this revolution, no “Operation Ajax,” no CIA men operating from within the U.S. embassy to buy up the bazaaris. Indeed, very soon there would be no U.S. embassy. The demands for the return of the Shah were being made not for his restoration but in order to put him on trial. Only when the head of the snake had been cut off would the revolution feel safe. Just as the Americans believed twenty-four years later that only the capture of Saddam Hussein would bring them tranquillity in Iraq, so Khomeini and his retinue were convinced that only the death of the Shah—preferably hanged as a criminal in Iran for “crimes against God”—would free Iran from its corrupt past.24 In reality, the Shah was already dying from cancer. Many Iranians saw in his pathetic exile the true justice of God, his cancer the ultimate divine vengeance against one who had “sinned on earth.” The Shah’s gruesome odyssey through the hospitals of Central America, New York City and, eventually, Cairo gave grim satisfaction to the mullahs who had already ordered his assassination.

  Not long after his departure, I had sat at the feet of
Sadeq Khalkhali, the “hanging judge,” as he listed those of the Shah’s family who had been sentenced to death in absentia. Around him sat a score or so of Revolutionary Guards who had been maimed in the revolutionary war against the Kurds of north-western Iran, each of them clacking his newly fitted artificial metal fingers, hands and feet as the prelate outlined the fate that so surely awaited his aristocratic enemies. Khalkhali it was who had sentenced a fourteen-year-old boy to death, who had approved of the stoning to death of women in Kermanshah, who earlier, in a mental asylum, would strangle cats in his prison cell. Gorbeh, the “Cat,” was what he was called. “The Shah will be strung up—he will be cut down and smashed,” the Cat told me. “He is an instrument of Satan.”

  In fact, the Shah was a poor substitute for the Devil, scarcely even the equal of Faustus; for he sold himself for the promise of worldly military power and seemingly everlasting American support. The chorus of harpies that pursued the Shah halfway around the world were the bickering, greedy surgeons, doctors and nurses who bombarded the dying man with pills, blood platelets and false hope, agents of darkness who only too well represented the technology of the world to whom the Shah had long ago sold his soul. His erstwhile friends from that world—King Hussein of Jordan, King Khaled of Saudi Arabia, King Hassan of Morocco, the Swiss, the Austrians, President Carter and Margaret Thatcher—either terminated his residence, turned him away or broke their promise to accept him when they realised the political cost. It was sobering to reflect that his only true friend—the only potentate to honour his word to Carter when the Americans wanted the old man to leave New York—was President Sadat of Egypt. President Torrijos of Panama— who gave temporary refuge to the Shah and who wanted to seduce Queen Farah but was swiftly given the brush-off by the Shahbanou —produced the pithiest obituary of the “Light of the Aryans.” “This is what happens to a man squeezed by the great nations,” he said. “After all the juice is gone, they throw him away.”