On Saturday August 8, 2006
a demonstration was held in London over the Israeli attack on Lebanon.
As part of the protest hundreds of children’s shoes were placed in a pile in
front of the gates leading to No 10 Downing Street to symbolise the children
killed in Israel’s latest onslaught..
When I saw the pile
of shoes in a newspaper I did not link it to the death toll in Lebanon. Instead
it reminded me of scene, described to me by an Iranian political prisoner in
1995, that has been etched into my mind.
In 1989 the Islamic
government of Iran was afraid it might lose the war with Iraq and worried that
increasing unrest in the country could lead to the overthrow of the regime. It
decided on a purge of political prisoners, massacring 15,000 in accordance with
a fatwa issued by Ayatollah Khomeini.
This Iranian political prisoner had his worst fears
confirmed when, peeping through a doorway at Ghohardasht prison, a jail 20
miles or so west of Tehran, he spotted a pile of yellow and green prison-issue
sandals and, craning his neck further round, saw the corpses of 30-40 men
hanging from an iron bar.
These were the shoes of dead people, some of them his former
cell mates. Rumours had been circulating around the jail for weeks but nothing definite was known. Now he knew.
This news was passed around the prison that night, using the steel blinds at
the windows of the cells, which were constantly lit, to send out coded messages to other blocks or by simply banging
out warnings on the water pipes.
The mullahs were giving prisoners a choice: recant any
allegiance to the Mojahedin, a political grouping with an armed exile movement
in Iraq, recant any belief in socialism, and become good Shi’ite Muslims
supporting the state, or face the
consequences.
Until then nobody
had dreamt that meant death. Many socialists had already told the mullahs to
get stuffed and “been taken to the top floor”. The coded messages explained in
detail what questions would be asked and how they should be answered. Better to
live to fight another day than die for some ludicrous piece of symbolism.
The prisoner who witnessed this episode, Reza Ghaffari, a
former professor of economics at Tehran university, finally got out of prison in 1989 and escaped to Turkey and from
there made his way to England.
He had spent seven years in prison in Iran accused of being
a member of a left-wing organisation. When he got to England he lived at a
secret address and lived under the pseudonym of “Mehran”. His life was still in
danger. The Iranian secret police had already assassinated three Iranian
Kurdish dissident leaders in and were
known to be roaming Europe.
He wrote up his
experiences as best he could (he has never recovered physically from the abuse
he received) and the book has been published in Farsi, Geman and Turkish. It
has yet to find an English publisher.
As I read Dilip Hiro’saccount of this same Iranian regime,
replete with benign comments from apparently civilised ministers, I had flashbacks to episodes in Reza
Ghaffari’s memoirs, scenes that still fill me with cold shock years later.
The emaciated man
they had to pull out of the toilet after he died on the lavatory; the torture
Ghaffari underwent in Commiteh Moshtarack in central Tehran (using cells from the shah’s era) that led to a
heart attack within 24 hours of his arrest; the bloodied bodies propped against
walls in overcrowded prisons such as Evin, Ghezel Hessar (Black
Fortress) and Gohardasht that he saw as he came out of brutal
interrogations. The scene of horror, reminiscent of ones in Costa Gavras’s film Missing, about the 1973 coup in Chile,
when at Gohardasht he spotted guards shoving dozens of corpses covered in
plastic sheeting into refrigerated meat lorries. Was Dilip Hiro talking about
the same government?
Most of us feel reassured if we are told that the author of
a book or an article in a newspaper or magazine is written by a specialist.
This person is not a Johnny come lately, who bases his work on secondary
sources and stick and paste. We expect to be told things that we didn't know
before and perhaps to be able to put some trust in the judgments he or she
reaches, whether it is boxing, health or international politics.
Hiro is certainly a specialist writer, who has written a
number of good books about the Middle East over the last 25 years, and
the reader will certainly learn many useful things that he or she did not know.
But the fact remains that this one should be read with caution, extreme
caution.
The difficulty with specialist writers as a breed is that
they tend to hoard contacts, especially those in high places, because that is
where they can obtain their juiciest and most authoritative information. The
relationship is instrumental, a means to and end, whether the end
is an article in a magazine or a book on Iran. The problem, of course, is that
the contact, especially if he or she is an important figure in the national
life of a country, is also encouraging the relationship for instrumental
reasons. The contact wishes to put the best gloss on the actions of his or her
government, company, or whatever.
The difficulty arises if and when the source starts to do
unsavoury things, or rumours begin to emerge linking the contact with those
unsavoury actions. What to do? Interrogate? Shine a light into those dark
corners? Ask the awkward questions, outrage the rich and powerful, and move on.
Slash and burn. Will the specialist do this?. Would someone like Hiro? The
author, a good journalist, has built up
his reputation over decades so that he is now more of an institution than an
investigative journalist.
You only have to
pose the question to guess the answer. Better to tiptoe around with anaemic
code words like “ruthless” and leave it at that. If the specialist starts going
down the other road his best contacts will freeze him out. The minister will
“not be available”. His raison d'etre will have gone up in smoke.
He might send out few coded messages (as Hiro does) but more
likely he will become, almost without recognising it, a sort of apologist for
the regime, or the magnate, or whatever, in order to preserve his privileged
status as a courtier to the powerful.
For instance, a tiny almost trivial example. He refers to
Shirin Ebadi, 59, a human rights lawyer and one-time judge who won the Nobel
Peace Prize in October 2003, and notes how this was downplayed in official
media coverage. He gives a synopsis of her career and mentions that she was
arrested and briefly “detained” after one investigation. But the whole benign
truncated quality of this narrative distorts the enormity of what happened to
Ebadi, who is not a socialist, not a Marxist, just a sort of courageous liberal
“good soul”. She was locked up in Evin (think Lubyanka) and held in solitary
confinement for 25 days before she was released. She apparently had a trial (but not one we would recognise as the
cleric in charge would act as police force, crown prosecutor and judge) before
she was freed. The whole performance was an exercise in intimidation
reminiscent of some Stalinist show trial in the 1950s. The message, of course,
was clear: you are not immune, next time will be worse.
This is not to say the book is a write-off. Far from it. The
chapter on the conditions that led to the nationalisation of the Abadan oil
refinery, and the overthrow of Mohammed Mossadeq, for instance, is worth the
price of the book in itself. Vivid, succinct, comprehensive.
Ditto the chapter on 1930s and the influence of secularism
and the Nazis. The coverage of the jockeying for position between popularly
elected, if religiously vetted, MPs in the Majlis and the elected president on
the one hand and the religious hierarchy on the other illustrates the fact that
the Islamic regime is a hybrid form of dictatorship.
The brief but illuminating synopsis of the career of Mahmoud
Ahmadinejad, the new president, illustrates the popular support that it has.
But in a sense this all makes it that much worse. Dilip Hiro is a good
operator. He knows what he is doing.
The truth is that Hiro has too many contacts among the
high-ups in this Twelver Shi'ite regime and not enough among those that have
been brutalised and murdered by it. The effect is to give his narrative a
neutral quality that is totally inappropriate and an affront to its victims and
the many thousands who continue the
fight both in Iran and outside.
(Some of the men who orchestrated the 1989 massacre are, for
instance, now leading officials in the
government. Mostafa Poormohadi was on the original “death” committee of three
and is wanted by Germany over the
murder of the Kurdish dissidents. He is now a Home Office minister. Said
Mortazavi, implicated in the death of an Iranian photographer, is now the Islamic
republic’s human rights commissioner at the United Nations. Neither earns a
place in Hiro’s book.)
At a time when Iran is correctly standing up for itself
against American imperialism it is crucial not to be gulled yet again (as many
were in 1979) into turning a blind eye to the viciously anti-women,
anti-secular, anti-liberal, anti-trade unionist, anti-socialist, anti-national
minorities, and anti-religious minorities nature of the regime.
In the 27 years
since this theocracy of thugs came into power the death toll of political
opponents (socialists, liberals, trade unionists, members of religious
minorities and so on) is put at 150,000. Some might say that the regime has
mellowed over the years, but there is little evidence of that. Reza Ghaffari,
for instance, has been a thorn in its side since he got out of prison,
analysing the political and economic situation in Iran and talking about his experiences on radio,
television and in the press, mostly in the US.
The regime didn’t
like it and made its feelings clear to a member of his family. Five years ago
he had to leave his home in the UK and go into hiding for a number of months
under the protection of the British security service, which was satisfied that
his life was in danger.
Mike Wagstaff
This article was first published in the magazine Island. For
more details go to irelandfrombelow@yahoo.ie
or www.booksteps.ie