by Robert Fisk
The Iranians, after all, had a motive. The destruction of the Iranian passenger jet, whatever Washington’s excuses, was a terrible deed. But would someone so wickedly plot revenge? I was in Paris when the BBC announced that a Pan Am jet had crashed over Lockerbie. This time it was 270 dead, including 11 on the ground. I didn’t need to imagine the corpses—I had seen them in July—and not for a moment did I doubt the reason. There were the usual conspiracy theories: a cover-up CIA drug-busting scheme that had gone crazily wrong, messing with the evidence by American agents after the crash. And Iranian revenge for the Airbus killings.
In the United States, this was a favourite theory. The news shows repeated the video—taken by a U.S. Navy team—of the Vincennes firing its missiles on 3 July. Captain Rogers saw the film again, writing later that he “felt a knot in my stomach and wondered if it was ever going to stop.” The parallel was relevant but had no moral equivalence. The annihilation of the Airbus had been a shameful mass killing but Lockerbie was murder. In Beirut, an old acquaintance with terrifying contacts in the hostage world calmly said to me: “It’s [Ahmed] Jibril and the Iranians.” Jibril was head of the Damascus-based “Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine—General Command.” Diplomatic correspondents in Washington and London—always the stalking horses for government accusations—began to finger the Iranians, the PFLP-GC, the Syrians. In Tehran, people would look at me with some intensity when I mentioned Lockerbie. They never claimed it. Yet they never expressed their horror. But of course, after the Airbus slaughter, that would have been asking a bit much.
In Beirut, the PFLP-GC became known, briefly, as “the Lockerbie boys.” I didn’t count much on that. But then, more than two years later, a strange thing happened. Jibril held a press conference in a Palestinian refugee camp in Beirut, initially to talk about the release by Libya of French and Belgian hostages seized from a boat in the Mediterranean. But that was not what was on his mind. “I’m not responsible for the Lockerbie bombing,” he suddenly blurted out. “They are trying to get me with a kangaroo court.” There was no court then. And no one had officially accused Jibril of Lockerbie. But scarcely nine months later, Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait and the diplomatic correspondents no longer believed in the Syrian–PFLP-GC–Iranian connection. Now it was Libya that was behind Lockerbie. Iran was the enemy of the bestial Saddam, and Syria was sending its tanks to serve alongside the Western armies in the Gulf. Jibril’s men faded from the screen. So did the only country with a conceivable motive: Iran.
In the aftermath of the shooting down of the Airbus, Ayatollah Hussein Ali Montazeri, who was intended to be Khomeini’s successor, said that he was “sure that if the Imam orders, all the revolutionary forces and resistance cells, both inside and outside the country, will unleash their wrath on U.S. financial, political, economic and military interests.” But the Vincennes attack finally convinced most of the Iranian leadership that the United States had joined the war on Iraq’s side. The Americans had destroyed Iran’s oil platforms, eliminated the Iranian navy and were now, it seemed, determined to use missiles against Iran’s passenger planes, all of which had previously been targets for Saddam Hussein. Iran’s economy was collapsing and, so Rafsanjani warned Khomeini, even the resupply of Iran’s vast armies was impossible. There could be no more Iranian offensives against Iraq, Khomeini was told by the country’s Revolutionary Guard Corps commander, Mohsen Rezai, until 1993. So to protect the Islamic revolution—to ensure its survival—Khomeini accepted UN Security Council resolution 598 and a ceasefire to take effect on 22 July 1988, “in the interests of security and on the basis of justice.” For the old man, it was a personal as well as a military catastrophe. “Woe upon me that I am still alive,” he concluded bleakly, “and have drunk the poisoned chalice of the resolution.”
But worse was to come. Seven days after Khomeini’s 18 July acceptance of the UN resolution, the Mujahedin-e-Khalq’s “National Liberation Army” swept across the Iranian border in Iraqi-supplied tanks and armour to overthrow the Khomeini regime. It was the ultimate treachery and the Iranians fought back against their invaders—who were, of course, themselves Iranians—with fury; across Iran, the government’s secret police began the wholesale liquidation of the Mujahedin’s supporters. The Revolutionary Guards and the Basiji, many of whom felt betrayed by the ending of the war, turned upon the mujahedin, summarily hanging their captured militiamen in Bakhtaran, Kangavar and Islam Abad. Now thousands of mujahedin militants and their supporters in jails all over Iran—many of whom had long ago been tried and sentenced to many years of imprisonment— were to be re-tried and hanged.
“We ask the Leader to deal harshly with murderers and as soon as possible, rid the people of their presence,” Resalat newspaper pleaded. Ayatollah Musavi Ardebili, the head of the supreme court, gave a Freisler-like speech at Friday prayers in Tehran. The monafeqin—the “hypocrites”—he said, “don’t know that people see them as less than animals. People are so angry with them; the judiciary is under extreme pressure of public opinion . . . people say they should all be executed . . . We will judge them ten at a time, twenty at a time, bring a file, take away a file: I regret that they say a fifth have been destroyed. I wish they all were destroyed . . .” “Hypocrites” was a word that embraced the idea of heresy or apostasy rather than mere double standards. To be one of the monafeqin was a capital offence.
Even before the war had ended, Iran’s prison population was re-interrogated and divided into those who still recognised the resistance to the Islamic Republic and those who had repented—the tavvab—and between those who prayed and those who refused to pray. At some point, Khomeini ordered that political prisoners should be liquidated en masse. Although this order was kept secret, we know that Ayatollah Montazeri protested vehemently against the massacres, an act that ensured his dismissal as the future Imam. “. . . As to your order to execute the hypocrites in prison,” Montazeri wrote in a private letter to Khomeini, “the nation is prepared to accept the execution if those arrested [are] in relation to recent events [i.e. the Iraqi-backed mujahedin invasion] . . . But the execution of those already in prison . . . would be interpreted as vindictiveness and revenge.”
In some prisons, inmates were lined up on opposite sides of a corridor, one line to be returned to their cells after “repenting,” the other taken straight to a mass gallows. On 30 July, Revolutionary Guards at Evin began their executions with mujahid women prisoners. The hangings went on for several days. Male communist prisoners were hanged at the mosque in Evin. “When [they] are taken to the Hosseinieh to be hanged,” an ex-prisoner testified, “some [are] crying, some swearing and all shivering but hiding their shivering. Some smile hopelessly . . . a number of the guards vie with each other to do the hanging so as to score more piety. A few are upset by seeing so many corpses. Some prisoners fight and are savagely beaten. The execution is swift.” The bodies of the hanging men were paraded in front of female prisoners to break their spirit. In Tehran alone, an Iran-based human rights group published the names of 1,345 victims of the “national disaster.”
Exile magazines opposed to the regime would, years later, publish terrifying eyewitness accounts of the prison hangings. Up to 8,000 inmates may have been put to death in the summer of 1988, perhaps 10,000. Secret executions were followed by burials in secret graves. A former female prisoner was to recall how:
One tavvab woman was taken from the block below us to witness the execution of her husband. She had seen the rope on her husband’s neck and another woman who had her chador tied round her neck. She herself was due to be executed but had escaped that fate by being tavvab and surrendering . . . Afterwards she became psychologically unbalanced . . .
Another ex-prisoner wrote of a militant leftist prisoner called Fariba who was taken to a dungeon beneath Dastgerd prison to see her husband. This was Fariba’s description:
What I saw terrified me . . . There in front of me was Massoud, my husband, bent and sickly with eyes that flickered
from deep black crypts. I screamed Massoud my darling, and leaped towards him. They held me back . . . A Pasdar warned: “Be silent! You can only look. You can only witness how accounts are settled here—or your place is next to him.” . . . Massoud, hands tied behind his back, noose round his neck, standing on a stool, looked at me with his whole being. A tired look but full of love, full of consciousness, trying to smile. In a weak and exhausted voice he said: “It was so good to see you Fariba!” . . . The voice of the interrogator rose from behind me . . . he said: “If you would be prepared to push the stool away and hang this apostate I will set you free this very second. I promise on my honour!” . . . I looked straight into the interrogator’s eyes and screamed: “Do you have any honour? Fascist! Executioner!” . . . The Pasdars grabbed me. The interrogator pulled out his Colt and shot Massoud. Another Pasdar kicked the stool from under him. Between my distress and my unbelieving eyes Massoud was hanged . . .
There is overwhelming evidence from ex-prisoners that female prisoners who were virgins were raped by their interrogators before execution. Of 1,533 Iranian female prisoners who were hanged or shot in the two decades that followed the 1979 revolution and whose names have been catalogued by a German women’s group—a fraction of the actual number of executed women—163 were twenty-one years old or under, 35 of them pregnant. The youngest was Nafiseh Ashraf Jahani, who was ten years old. Afsaneh Farabi was twelve, three girls were thirteen years old. Akram Islami was seventy. One woman, Aresteh Gholivand, was fifty-six when she was hanged and left six children behind her.
WHAT CAN ONE SAY TO THE FAMILIES of these thousands? We journalists have to take the regime seriously. We interview the ayatollahs and the hojatolislams and the more humble mullahs and we ask questions about human rights and we are lectured about the iniquities of the Shah and of our—Western—responsibility for his “Satanic” rule. Almost every Khomeini prison governor was imprisoned by the Shah. So, for that matter, were many of the mujahedin prisoners who were executed in 1988 and the years before. I am sitting in a north Tehran house and a widow is slowly turning the pages of a family photograph album. She points to a Kodak shot of a handsome young man in a brown shirt. “He was in the opposition and they arrested him. They killed him,” she says simply. The young man in the picture seems to come alive as she speaks, leaning forward towards the camera, one arm draped round his sister’s shoulder, the other in a gentle way around his mother. “His mother never got over it,” the woman says. Her young daughter is watching in silence. She is perhaps five years old, a pert, cheerful little girl with fluffy brown hair and a pixie smile. “She wears a chador to school,” her mother says. “Fereshteh, let’s see what you look like when you go to school.” Fereshteh runs into her bedroom and emerges in a kind of mourning, head to toe in black cloth, her hair invisible beneath the material. Then she becomes serious and walks slowly back to the bedroom to become a child again.
BUT NOT ONLY IN IRAN had the war masked a nation’s internal killing machine. Amnesty was able to list the names of 116 people executed by Saddam’s regime between 11 November and 31 December 1997, the youngest of them fourteen years old. In total during December 1997 and January 1998 at least 700 prisoners were executed in Abu Ghraib prison west of Baghdad, many of them bearing the marks of torture. The victims were from Baghdad, Suleimaniya and Baquba; most were under eighteen.
But for those millions who participated in the Iran–Iraq conflict—as for every soldier—the war never ended. After the 18 July 1988 ceasefire, Iran and Iraq would exchange 90,000 prisoners-of-war, but many other thousands would remain in captivity for almost another decade. Iran was still releasing POWs in 1997. At least 500 men, some of them held in prison camps for seventeen years, were freed by Iran in advance of the December 1997 Islamic summit conference in Tehran. But in 1999, Baghdad was still claiming that Iran held 20,000 of its soldiers, including 8,700 who it said were registered with the International Red Cross. Iran said that at least 5,000 of its own men were still POWs in Iraq.
When Khadum Fadel returned to Baghdad after sixteen years of incarceration, he could remember only sorrow and hunger and rheumatism in an Iranian camp surrounded by barbed wire and mines, often lying in chains. Many thousands of the Iraqi prisoners came home after ten years of near-starvation in Iranian camps, only to find that American-backed sanctions after the 1991 war in which they had played no part were now starving their families. A whole angry army of ex-prisoners—filled with hatred of Iran, of Saddam and of the United States— were now living in misery and impoverishment in Iraq. Amid the mud and sand, they and the millions of Iraqis who avoided both imprisonment and death had learned to live and to die. They learned to fight. Under the lethal imagination of their dictator, they held the line against Iran. They used their tanks as static gun platforms dug into the desert and they burned their enemies with gas or swamped them with tidal rivers or electrocuted them in the marshes. A whole generation of Iraqi lieutenants and captains came to regard war—rather than peace—as a natural element in their lives. If ever the day came when Saddam was gone, what would these lieutenants and captains and their comrades from the trenches do if they faced another great army? What would they be capable of achieving if they could use their own initiative, their own imagination, their own courage—if patriotism and nationalism and Islam rather than the iron hand of Baathism was to be their inspiration?
Of course, there were also the dead. More than three years before the war ended, Saddam began construction of a space-age monument to his greatest blunder. From the air it looked like a rocket platform. From the ground it had the appearance of a giant sea-shell, two acres of sloping, marble-topped concrete surmounted by an umbrella of cement. Visitors to Baghdad—and there were many tens of thousands of Iraqis who came here to try to mourn their lost relatives— climbed the lower lip of the structure, then descended into a fridge of air conditioning in a vault beneath the canopy. Here, said an inscription in gold Arabic letters, lay the unknown Iraqi warrior, the hero of the Arab nation, the martyr of the Second Qadisiya. Even five years after the end of the Iran–Iraq War, the memorial had still not been completed.
In 1993, I would visit the monument again to find an army of Iraqi stonemasons chipping into marble slabs, each slice—and there were thousands—containing the names of sixteen Iraqis who never returned from the titanic war. Private Ahmed Katem’s name was neatly carved onto a slab, and alongside him Mohamed Jadi, Abdullah Ahmed and “combatant” Salah Younis. Saddam’s martyrs were worthy, it seemed, of nothing but the highest honours; in Baghdad, they were building Saddam Hussein’s “Vietnam wall.” True, the marble was pale yellow rather than black. True, it was being constructed around the circular vault rather than below an ellipse near a presidential palace. True, the Iraqi “wall” was said to be Saddam’s brainchild. But then again, America’s dead in Vietnam numbered a mere 56,555; Saddam’s between 1980 and 1988 might have reached a conservative half million.
At that time, Saddam’s “martyrs’ wall” remained an official secret in Iraq. No one had been told of its construction and the wall would be revealed only at its completion in 1995, when families would be able to grieve before the names of their loved ones. “It is forbidden for you to take photographs,” a resolute young lady from the memorial’s executive announced uncompromisingly when I requested a snapshot of the unfinished palisade of names. “We may give you no information. We cannot talk to you about this. We have no details, no figures. Nothing must be said until this is completed. This instruction comes from the highest authority.” There was no doubt about who that might be. But could one not perhaps know just how many names would appear on the wall? The lady was adamant. “It is impossible to give any figure while so many of our soldiers remain prisoners of Iran, even five years after this war has ended.”
Quite so. Nor were the dead of the Second Gulf War—of the battle between Iraq and the American-led armies in 1991—likely to be commemorated here. Nowhere in Baghdad were they officially remembered
. For it was the eight-year Iran–Iraq War that had been enshrined in Baathist history as the most important, the most strategic, the most historic, the most glorious—more to the point, the most necessary—battle in Iraq’s history. The more the Second Gulf War was questioned by Iraqis, the more the First Gulf War was off-limits to all criticism. Even the 1990 Iraqi draft constitution demanded that any future president must accept that the Iran–Iraq War “was the only way to guarantee the integrity of Iraq and the safety of its sacred places.”
Thus might history be safely locked up. There were whole families, brothers, fathers and sons, listed together on the marble slabs of Saddam’s martyrs’ wall, the monstrous death toll broken up by carved quotations from the Koran, in their turn guaranteeing—as no constitution can—eternal paradise for those who were cut down by shells and bullets or who drowned in the mud at Howeiza and Fish Lake, Ahwaz, Khorramshahr, Qasr-e Shirin and Fao. In the defence of Fao, an Iraqi official blurted out to me in March 1993, Iraq lost 58,000 men.
Just one of the half million had been preserved—in chemicals that would supposedly prevent his decomposition for a hundred years—in a coffin suspended above the Unknown Soldier’s Museum 5 kilometres away, draped in an Iraqi flag amid the tattered remains of his dead colleagues’ battledress. Stained uniforms, ripped open by surgeons in their vain attempts to save Iraqi lives, were encased in glass, along with the long-dried bloody bandages of the deceased. “There are seventeen swords above us here—you see?” the young curator asked, pointing to the Arab swords suspended in black stone above the uniforms. “They represent the 17 July revolution and the stones represent the black hearts of our enemies.” Plaques were displayed around the hall, donated by the military attachés of socialist Romania, East Germany, the Soviet Union, Somalia, nations which had since died as miserably as any soldiers commemorated here.
