by Robert Fisk
The Hojatolislam strode briskly from the courtyard towards a wire fence, but as he did so, something very strange happened. Dozens of black-veiled women— the wives and sisters of the very men whom the Ayatollah would soon be sentencing—ran across a lawn towards him, clutching babies and crying, “Hail to Khalkhali.” The Hojatolislam affected not to notice them as the soldiers held them at bay, and he pushed his way through a gate in the fence. For a few moments, he talked of holding a formal press conference before entering his tiny courthouse. But then a policeman walked over to us and told us that the judge had become “angry.” Sensing that a Hojatolislam’s fury could embrace a journalist or two, we brought this most extraordinary public event to a hurried conclusion. We fled.33
For Westerners, Khalkhali represented a special danger. If the American hostages in the embassy were to be tried by an Islamic court, what if Khalkhali was let loose on them? All Khomeini’s promises of protection could be reinterpreted now that the embassy documents were being slowly put back together to reveal that the Iranian claims of a “spy nest” in Tehran were not entirely without foundation. Thus when the Shah moved from the United States to Panama—a journey of which the Iranians were forewarned by three Western diplomats acting at Washington’s request—the “Students of the Imam” put out a statement repeating the promise to “try” the Americans.34 In the end, of course, there was no trial.
Inevitably, the Iranians lost their patience with the foreign journalists in Tehran. The day after the “trial” statement, Abolhassan Sadeq walked into the Iranian Ministry of Islamic Guidance with the troubled expression of a headmaster forced at last to deal with a persistently unruly class. Harvey Morris, shrouded in his usual smoke haze—mercifully for him, it was to be at least a decade before Iran would ban smoking in government buildings—knew what was coming. “Well, Fisky, we’ll see who’s going to get the order of the boot today,” he murmured. The ministry contained an underground auditorium that looked uncomfortably like a school hall and there we waited to hear the worst. Sadeq, the school director, took his place at a desk on a small raised podium and stared down at us severely. We all knew that an expulsion or two was in the air.
“Gentlemen,” he began—Harvey always liked the “gentlemen” bit—“I want to share with you a bit of agony we are going through with regard to the foreign media. With great displeasure, we are expelling the entire Time magazine crew from Iran.” It mattered little that the “entire” staff of Time in the country numbered just two. This was not how Sadeq saw things. There were over three hundred foreign journalists in Iran from more than thirty countries, he said, but Time had gone too far. He flourished a clutch of front covers from the offending organ, one of which carried an unflattering portrait of Khomeini.
“Since the problem of hostages came up,” Sadeq said, waving the latest issue of Time in his hand, “this has done nothing but arouse the hatred of the American people. The front covers have been like a hammer on the brain. The magazine has created some very irrational reaction on behalf of the American people.” Time was not the only news organisation to feel Iranian wrath. Eight days earlier, Alex Efthyvoulos, a correspondent for the Associated Press—a bearded part-Russian Cypriot who looked like Rasputin—had been expelled for allegedly distorting news of rioting in the Azerbaijani provincial capital of Tabriz. Even the British had fallen foul of Iranian anger. In early December, Enayat Ettehad of Iranian television had been watching BBC News in a London hotel and was angered by a report on the hostages in which Keith Graves described in unpleasant detail how their hands were bound with rope and how they were forbidden to speak to each other or receive news from the outside world. I wasn’t surprised. Over the next two and a half decades, Graves would infuriate the Taliban, the Israeli army, the U.S. government, the IRA, the British army, NATO, the Egyptians, the PLO, the Hizballah, the Syrians, the Turks and even the Cypriots—the latter an astonishing achievement even for a man of Graves’s abrasiveness—and survive them all. But the BBC was made to pay for it. Ettehad instructed Iranian television to refuse BBC crews any further use of satellite facilities. The BBC was forced to ship all their film unprocessed by air to London, where it usually arrived a day late. It was clear, however, that Ettehad was far more upset by the BBC’s Persian-language radio service, and Sadeq brandished a sheaf of papers above his head—complaints, he said, about the Persian service from “all over Iran.”
Sadeq was confident about his broadsides. He loudly referred to the fact that one of the two Time correspondents had once worked for the CIA. “Yet still I let him into Iran.” He was referring to Bruce van Voorst, who worked as a CIA research officer in the late 1950s but who now said that he had severed all links with the agency—whose own activities in the country were now, thanks to the embassy documents, a national Iranian obsession. The American CBS network was in trouble for comparing the students in the embassy to the German Baader-Meinhof gang, the ABC network for a State Department analysis “that would make any Iranian look like an idiot.” But there was a pettiness about the government’s response to overseas coverage, a gut reaction that sprang from patriotic anger rather than forethought. Sadeq, who in argument was given to drawing unhappy parallels with events in American history, unconsciously revealed this when he reminded us that “in 1834, Colonel Travis defended the Alamo against the Mexican army and when he was told to surrender he replied with gunfire. He stood up for his principles. And that is what Iran is doing today.” I heard Harvey Morris sigh. “Good God!” he exclaimed. “I thought Travis lost the battle of the bloody Alamo.”
The revolution was a tempest and we were all trapped in its vortex. We interviewed Khomeini, we watched the epic demonstrations, we watched America writhing in impotence. U.S. warships entered the Gulf. Khomeini called for an army of tens of thousands of schoolboy volunteers to defend Iran. I travelled back from Iranian Kurdistan on a bus whose passengers spent an hour watching a weapons education programme on the coach’s specially installed television: how to strip and reassemble an automatic rifle, how to pull a grenade pin, how to master the mechanism of a heavy machine gun. I swayed at the back of the fast-moving bus as the audience sat in silent attention. And today, I thought, we have naming of parts.
But I was seeking some other way of reporting Iran, away from the events which were so obstinately staged for our benefit, especially for American television reporters. I was in Harvey’s office, staring at the stained map of Iran on his wall, when I had an idea. What if I closed my eyes and stuck a pin into the map and then travelled to the point I had marked and asked the people there about the revolution? “Close your eyes and I’ll give you a pin,” Harvey announced. “And I bet you stick it in bloody Afghanistan.” He produced the pin, I closed my eyes, stabbed at the map and then opened my eyes again. The little sliver of silver had landed in the “h” of a village called Kahak, south-west of the city of Qazvin. I set off at dawn next morning.
Kahak was the sort of place no one ever goes to visit. It lay, a rectangle of mud and clay single-storey houses, at the end of a dirt road with only a gaggle of children and a dung-heap picked over by fat chickens to welcome a stranger. Through the dust and the heat haze to the north, the Alborz Mountains ran along the horizon, forming the lower lip of the Caspian Sea basin. Foreigners never saw Kahak, except perhaps the passengers on the night train to the Soviet frontier as it skirted the village orchards. Even then, it was doubtful if they would notice anything. Kahak was so small that its 950 inhabitants could not even support a mosque of their own.
A prematurely ageing man of sixty-four with a slick of perspiration running down his face from beneath his turban and a shirt front covered in dirt had to travel up from Qom to minister to the faithful. But he was a man capable of extraordinary energy as he walked nimbly around the heaps of manure and puddles of gilded, foetid water, talking about the village in a possessive, slightly rhetorical, almost sermonising way, his voice rising and falling in the cadences of a formal speech rather than a con
versation. What had the revolution done for these people, I asked, and Sheikh Ibrahim Zaude pointed to the hard, unwatered land beyond the mud huts, a desert of grey, unyielding earth.
“The villagers own everything on both sides of the road,” he said. “But they do not know how much land they have.” The heat shimmered and danced on the dried-up irrigation ditches: there were no deeds of ownership, no papers and no legal covenants in Kahak now that the landlords had gone. Just when the landlords did depart was something that bothered Sheikh Zaude. “In the past regime,” he explained, “there were two big landowners—Habib Sardai and Ibrahim Solehi. The villagers lived in very bad conditions. Some of them were so poor that they owed many debts but Sardai and Solehi came here and took their grain in payment. I remember seeing these villagers going to other villages to buy back their own grain at high prices. So the people had to borrow money for this and then pay interest on the loans.” More than a dozen villagers gathered round me as Sheikh Zaude talked on. They were poor people, most of them Turkish in origin with high, shiny cheekbones. Their grey jackets were torn and their trousers frayed where the rubble and thorns in the fields had scratched them. They wore cheap plastic sandals. There was only one girl with them, a thirteen-year-old with dark hair who had wrapped herself shroud-like in a pink and grey chador.
“Then things improved for us,” Sheikh Zaude said. “Sardai and Solehi left with the land reforms.” There was no perceptible change in the mullah’s face. He had been asked about that year’s Islamic revolution but he was talking about the Shah’s “White Revolution” seventeen years earlier when the monarch’s reform laws ostensibly curtailed the power of the big landowners. Private holdings were redistributed and landowners could retain only one village. Poor farmers were thereby brought into the economy, although most labourers and farm workers remained untouched. Kahak, it was clear, did not entirely benefit from the Shah’s “revolution.” “There were good things for us in the reforms,” Sheikh Zaude said. “The number of sheep owned by the villagers went up from two thousand to three thousand. But the village itself, instead of being owned by two men, was now run by the government agent, a man called Darude Gilani, a capitalist from Qazvin. He was a bad man and he collected rent by demanding half of the villagers’ crops.”
There was an old man with an unshaven chin and a cataract in his left eye who now walked to the front of the villagers. From his grubby yellow shirt and broken shoes, I could not have imagined that Aziz Mahmoudi was the village headman and the largest farmer. He looked at the mullah for a moment and said, very slowly: “Darude Gilani is in Qazvin prison now.” Mahmoudi walked across the village square, followed by a small throng of schoolchildren. He pointed to a crumbling, fortified mud house with two storeys, a sign of opulence amid such hardship. “That is where Solehi used to live,” he said, gesturing to the broken windows. “Now Gilani is gone too. He will not come back.” There was no reason why Gilani would return, even if he was released from prison. For on the first day of the revolution the previous February, when the villagers saw the imperial army surrendering in Tehran on the screen of a small black-and-white television set, they walked down to the fields that Gilani still owned on each side of the railway line. There they planted their own barley as a symbol that the revolution had arrived in Kahak.
Above the blackboard in the village’s tiny clay-walled schoolhouse was a poster of Ayatollah Khomeini. It depicted the Imam bending over the bars of a jail while behind him thousands of Iranian prisoners wait patiently for their freedom. One after another, the boys in the seventh-grade class stood up and recited their admiration for Khomeini. Jalol Mahmoudi was twelve but talked about corruption in the Shah’s regime, Ali Mahmoudi, who at fourteen was head of class, launched into a long speech about the Imam’s kindness to children. “I am very pleased with the Ayatollah because in the past regime I was not taught well—now there are three extra classes and we can stay at school longer.” Master Ali might be expected to receive a firm clout round the back of the head from his colleagues for such schoolboy enthusiasm. But the other children remained silent until asked to speak. And I knew that if I had visited this same village in the aftermath of the 1953 coup against Mossadeq in which “Monty” Woodhouse had played so prominent a part, I would have heard the fathers of these same children talking about the corruption of Mossadeq and the Shah’s kindness to children.
Karim Khalaj was a teacher in his late forties and he said little as we sat in the staff room. He poured cups of tea from a large silver urn and sweetened it by drinking the tea sip by sip and nibbling lumps of sugar at the same time. Outside, we walked across the dusty fields towards the railway line. He was briefly imprisoned in the Shah’s time. He was fired from his job for complaining about a government teacher’s bribery.
The wind was picking up and the trees in the orchard were moving. A far belt of smog moved down the horizon. Somewhere near Kahak, more than a quarter of a century earlier, “Monty” Woodhouse must have buried his guns. Did any of the villagers support the Shah? I asked Khalaj. “None,” he said firmly. “At least I never knew any who did.” Savak never came to the village. It was too small to capture anyone’s attention. So whose picture hung above the blackboard in class seven before the Ayatollah returned to Iran? Mr. Khalaj shrugged. “They had to put a picture there. Of course, it was the Shah’s.”
CHAPTER FIVE
The Path to War
Perfection, of a kind, was what he was after,
And the poetry he invented was easy to understand;
He knew human folly like the back of his hand,
And was greatly interested in armies and fleets;
When he laughed, respectable senators burst with laughter,
And when he cried the little children died in the streets.
—W. H. Auden, “Epitaph on a Tyrant”
IN MARCH 1917, TWENTY-TWO-YEAR-OLD Private 11072 Charles Dickens of the Cheshire Regiment carefully peeled a poster off a wall in the newly captured city of Baghdad. It was a turning point in his life. He had survived the hopeless Gallipoli campaign, attacking the Ottoman empire only 250 kilometres from its capital of Constantinople. He had then marched the length of Mesopotamia, fighting the Turks yet again for possession of the ancient caliphate and enduring the “grim battle” for Baghdad. The British invasion army of 600,000 soldiers was led by Lieutenant General Sir Stanley Maude and the sheet of paper that caught Private Dickens’s attention was Maude’s official “Proclamation” to the people of Baghdad, printed in both English and Arabic.
That same 11 by 18 inch poster—now framed in black and gold—hangs on the wall a few feet from my desk as I write this chapter. Long ago, it was stained with damp—“foxed,” as booksellers say—which may have been Dickens’s perspiration in the long hot Iraqi summer of 1917. It has been folded many times, witness, as his daughter Hilda would recall eighty-six years later, “to having travelled in his knapsack for a length of time.” She called it “his precious document” and I can see why. It is filled with noble aspirations and presentiments of future tragedy, of the false promises of the world’s greatest empire, commitments and good intentions and words of honour that were to be repeated in the same city of Baghdad by the next great empire more than two decades after Dickens’s death. They read now like a funeral dirge:
PROCLAMATION
. . . Our military operations have as their object the defeat of the enemy and the driving of him from these territories. In order to complete this task I am charged with absolute and supreme control of all regions in which British
troops operate; but our armies do not come into your cities and lands as conquerors or enemies, but as liberators. Since the days of Hulagu35 your citizens have been subject to the tyranny of strangers . . . and your fathers and yourselves have groaned in bondage. Your sons have been carried off to wars not of your seeking, your wealth has been stripped from you by unjust men and squandered in different places. It is the wish not only of my King and his peoples, but
it is also the wish of the great Nations with whom he is in alliance, that you should prosper even as in the past when your lands were fertile . . . But you, people of Baghdad . . . are not to understand that it is the wish of the British government to impose upon you alien institutions. It is the hope of the British Government that the aspirations of your philosophers and writers shall be realised once again, that the people of Baghdad shall flourish, and shall enjoy their wealth and substance under institutions which are in consonance with their sacred laws and with their racial ideals . . . It is the hope and desire of the British people . . . that the Arab race may rise once more to greatness and renown amongst the peoples of the Earth . . . Therefore I am commanded to invite you, through your Nobles and Elders and Representatives, to participate in the management of your civil affairs in collaboration with the Political Representative of Great Britain . . . so that you may unite with your kinsmen in the North, East, South and West, in realising the aspirations of your Race.
(sd.) F. S. Maude, Lieutenant General,
Commanding the British Forces in Iraq
Private Dickens spent the First World War fighting Muslims, first the Turks at Suvla Bay at Gallipoli and then the Turkish army—which included Arab soldiers— in Mesopotamia. My father, Bill, was originally in the Cheshire Regiment but was serving in Ireland the year Charles Dickens entered Baghdad, and would be sent to the Western Front in 1918. Dickens had a longer war. He “spoke, often & admirably,” his daughter Hilda would recall, of one of his commanders, General Sir Charles Munro, who at fifty-five had fought in the last months of the Gallipoli campaign and then landed at Basra in southern Iraq at the start of the British invasion. But Munro’s leadership did not save Dickens’s married sister’s nephew, Samuel Martin, who was killed by the Turks at Basra. Hilda remembers “my father told of how killing a Turk, he thought it was in revenge for the death of his ‘nephew.’ I don’t know if they were in the same battalion, but they were a similar age, 22 years.”36
