Children of Paradise (15 page)

None of this much distinguished Mousavi from his political peers at the time. These were ordinary positions and in some cases hackneyed slogans that originated with Ayatollah Khomeini. Still, the notion that Mousavi would one day become the symbol not only of vanquished revolutionary hopes but of a movement for democratic reform was inconceivable during his premiership. His transformation would say less about Mir Hossein Mousavi than about the fast-moving current of Iran’s history, which not once but twice would seize him as its vessel.

• • •

A
MONG
M
OUSAVI,
K
HAMENEI
, and the spoiler Rafsanjani, Ayatollah Khomeini played a role much like Marshal Tito’s in the former Yugoslavia: not impartial arbiter but nimble balancer. If his view was Olympian, that stemmed less from moral sagacity or political neutrality than from an overwhelming interest in the perseverance and stability of the form of government he had created. No faction could achieve a victory without Khomeini’s handing one to its rival as well. On the economy, he veered from left to right and back again, seemingly less concerned with its ultimate structure than with assuring the political survival of all three power brokers and the triumph of none of them.

In the end, for the faction leaders no less than for Khomeini, the eighties were a decade of reversals and compromises. The revolutionaries were inexperienced in matters of governance. They had come to their task armed with ideological commitments that ultimately offered few solutions to urgent practical problems. Politics won out over ideology; but the politicians struggled to dress their pragmatism in revolutionary colors, to reassure a mobilized populace and keep its fervor from turning on the regime itself.

Perhaps the clearest indication of the Islamic Republic’s creeping pragmatism was the Iran-Contra affair, in which Iran, hard up for spare parts and newer models for its American-made armaments, conducted secret dealings with the United States and Israel. The Americans were to supply Iran with arms via the Israelis in exchange for Iran’s help in securing the release of American hostages held by Iranian proxies in Lebanon. When word of the clandestine arrangement got out, Mousavi and Rafsanjani were at pains to deny the story’s details and assert their implacable enmity toward the country’s two sworn adversaries.

What had been the de facto drift of the Islamic Republic became its policy in 1988, when Ayatollah Khomeini issued a fatwa that unambiguously placed politics above ideology, and even above religion. The
survival of
velayat-e faqih
was the Islamic Republic’s highest priority, Khomeini declared. At the ruler’s discretion, the regime’s interest could even override the injunctions of Islam, like fasting, prayer, and the yearly pilgrimage to Mecca. The fatwa was a breathtaking assertion of power.

Khomeini must have understood that a precarious moment was upon him. The country’s resources had been strained to the limit—Mousavi was estimating the military budget at zero—and
Iran would need seven times the number of men it already had on the ground in order to defeat Iraq’s Western-equipped forces, military leaders told Khomeini in private. Moreover, an American warship in the Persian Gulf had just shot down an Iranian civilian airliner with 290 passengers on board. The United States claimed that the shooting was an accident, but from Tehran that hardly seemed possible—more likely, Iranian politicians surmised, the incident was a harbinger of direct American intervention in the war, which would render the fighting all the more costly and unwinnable. Whether the Iranian regime actually believed this or simply used this line for internal propaganda purposes is still open to debate. For Khomeini had now to talk the public down from a war he had sanctified. To do this, he would need not only sweeping powers but the ability to persuade the people that there was such a thing as national interest that could trump divine command.

On July 20, 1988, Khomeini accepted the United Nations Security Council’s call for a cease-fire with Iraq. Explaining his decision to the public, the Leader intoned that death and martyrdom would have been more bearable, but political and military experts had concluded that the war was no longer supportable. “
I know it is hard on you,” he pleaded with his “revolutionary sons,” “but isn’t it hard on your old father?” Khomeini was standing down, he emphasized, in the name of Iran’s national interest, but also because it was his religious duty: “
Taking this decision was more deadly than taking poison,” Khomeini said. “I submitted myself to God’s will and drank this drink for his satisfaction.”

Ayatollah Khomeini could not have known that June 1988 marked the first month of the last year of his life. But at eighty-five, with advancing
cancer, surely he did know that his time could not extend forever and that with his passing would come the end of what some would call postrevolutionary Iran’s First Republic.

The war’s exigencies, and the bathos of its martyrs, could no longer inflame the public or call it to sacrifice. The Revolutionary Guard and Basij would return to the home front, where they would have to be reintegrated into ordinary life. The economy needed drastic reconstruction, which might even call for foreign investment. In all of this, radicalism was no longer helpful. Khomeini needed the society, and the Islamic Left, to stand down. But he had somehow to appease these forces, for the Islamic Republic rested on their unity with the state.

And so his last year was the year of two of Khomeini’s most floridly extreme acts. The public one was the February 1989 fatwa calling for the execution of the novelist Salman Rushdie on the grounds that he had written a blasphemous novel. The fatwa kicked up a storm of Western denunciations and it satisfied Mousavi’s faction, which pushed legislation through the parliament calling for an end to diplomatic relations with Britain, where the novel was first published. But in the context of Iran’s domestic politics, the Rushdie affair was less an affirmation of revolutionary steadfastness than a colorful and distracting sideshow as the state prepared for the transition to a technocratic era of reconstruction.

Khomeini’s other, ultimately more consequential act of extremism took place behind the high barbed-wired walls of Iran’s prisons. The timing and extremity of this action would leave a puzzle for historians and a trauma on the national psyche.

• • •

I
N THE FARTHEST NORTHWEST REACHES
of Tehran, in a pleasant middle-class neighborhood of steep residential alleys and winding roads, Evin Prison is an optical illusion. Where the vast prison complex should be, there is a mean-looking no-man’s-land in shades of brown, uninvitingly but thickly vegetated, remote even from its perimeter. The occasional fence or guard tower winks through the branches, but these could also pass for
other things. Before long, the road climbs into a mountainside park bisected by a stream, its banks lined with glistening fruit stands and carpeted outdoor teahouses.

The shah built Evin to house 320 prisoners in 1971, when he understood that his regime was fighting for its life. Throughout the country, the monarchy held as many as 7,500 political prisoners in the early 1970s. Among them were many of the men who would become the Islamic Republic’s leaders. The shah’s prisons were brutal and brutalizing, and Evin was particularly notorious. Interrogators lashed the soles of prisoners’ feet with a knotted electrical cable known as a bastinado. The nerve shock could travel from the feet all the way to the brain, permanently damaging the kidneys and the nervous system. Few victims of torture imagined that Iran’s prisons could grow immeasurably worse.

By 1983, under the Islamic Republic, a somewhat expanded Evin held 15,000 prisoners. Rooms built for fifteen housed seventy-five; even the corridors were packed with blindfolded prisoners. Bazargan’s former deputy prime minister, Abbas Amirentezam, spent two and a half years in
a cell so crowded that the inmates took turns sleeping on the floor, each of them getting just three hours of sleep every twenty-four hours.

The denizens of these fortresses of misery were there for new reasons. The Islamic Republic had criminalized and even instituted the death penalty for things like apostasy, alcohol consumption, “insulting the prophet,” and “crimes against chastity,” which included extramarital sex and homosexuality, among other things. Prisoners accused of “sowing corruption on earth” or “waging war against God” faced execution as well. The latter crime was defined by Islamic law as taking up arms to cause civil unrest, but under the Iranian penal code its definition expanded to include membership in any armed dissident group, even if the accused never touched a weapon. Members of the country’s largest and
most severely persecuted religious minority, the Bahai, served lengthy prison terms on trumped-up charges. Many were executed.

The chief warden of Evin, and Tehran’s prosecutor, was a former drapery merchant named Asadollah Lajevardi. He’d done prison time himself
under the shah for attempting to blow up the offices of the Israeli airline, El Al. Lajevardi had giant, arching black eyebrows behind oversized plastic-rimmed glasses; he wore the stubbled beard of the Hezbollah faithful, and his features crowded themselves in the direction of his chin. He moved his family into the prison, avowedly because he was proud of the institution he ran, but later as protection from would-be assassins, as Lajevardi’s name became synonymous with the worst abuses of an abusive decade.

Unlike the ancien régime, the Islamic Republic prohibited torture and forced confessions—but it allowed corporal punishment and “voluntary” confessions, which amounted, in the end, to the same thing. Evin’s jailers were Revolutionary Guardsmen, the interrogators young clerics and seminary students. Their job was to extract a self-incriminating “interview” from each political prisoner. Until prisoners agreed to grant the interviews, interrogators would whip the soles of their feet, deprive them of sleep, submerge them in water, burn them with cigarettes, force them into stress positions, and put them through mock executions.
They would twist and crush prisoners’ forearms and hands, insert sharp instruments under their fingernails, and threaten their family members. Amirentezam, who served 555 days in solitary confinement, was taken blindfolded to the execution chamber three times. Once he sat there for two days.
In 1994 he estimated that he had seen hundreds of prisoners die or be driven insane.
Another former prisoner recalls being suspended from the ceiling by his ankles and forced to submerge his nose and mouth in a bucket of his own feces. He could smell and taste nothing else for weeks; he vomited continuously and starved nearly to death.
More than 7,900 Iranian political prisoners were executed between 1981 and 1985—at least seventy-nine times the number killed between 1971 and 1979.

More even than the executions, the confessions, at least in the early 1980s, appeared to be the point of it all. They were elaborately staged and filmed in Evin’s two-story auditorium before an audience of prisoners and aired on two-hour prime-time programs through the fall of 1983. Those who missed them on television or radio could read the transcripts, which
were issued in pamphlets called Black Report Cards. Most of the recanters were Mojahedin or leftists. They were forced to denounce even their closest intimates: husbands, children, parents, friends. Some of those onstage had clearly gone insane, adopting split personalities, breaking into hysterical tears or laughter, or begging the wardens to kill them.

The confessions were not meant to be convincing. They were meant to demonstrate the bankruptcy of the opposition and the irresistible power of the regime. The followers of prominent political prisoners found it particularly soul crushing when their leaders repented; one said it was “
as painful as observing an actual death.” Another wrote that the night the leader of the Marxist wing of the Mojahedin recanted, “
something snapped inside of all of us. We never expected someone of his reputation to get down on his knees. Some commented it was as revolting as watching a human being cannibalize himself.”

For some repenters, public recantation was only the beginning of their service to the regime they had opposed. Afterward they came under the total control of the wardens, and they lived among the others in the overcrowded cells, spying on their former colleagues and dispatching fellow prisoners to the gallows. Known as
tavob
s, these repenters were morally disfigured by torture and complicity.
The
tavob
s enjoyed better and more plentiful food than other prisoners, lighter sentencing, and access to prison workshops; the wardens set up a special Repenters’ Society and a newspaper called
Repenters’ Message
. But the
tavob
s paid for these small privileges in a currency that was unrecoverable. He became an iconic figure in the Iranian imagination, a totem of shattered humanity, hated for what he did no less than he was feared for what had been done to him to make him do it.

At least two clerics within Khomeini’s inner circle had occasion to witness prison life and found what they saw so troubling that they brought their complaints to the Leader. One was the chief justice and head of the judiciary, who brought torture victims to see Ayatollah Khomeini and describe what they had undergone. The other was the man who had been designated to succeed Khomeini as Supreme Leader.

• • •

H
OSSEIN
A
LI
M
ONTAZERI WAS PERHAPS
the only living ayatollah of rank and learning comparable to Khomeini’s. He, too, had elaborated the theory of
velayat-e faqih
and lobbied for its inclusion in the Iranian constitution. But he could not have been more different from Khomeini in affect or character. Montazeri grew up rural and poor, and he retained the accent of his youth, such that educated men sometimes thought him a buffoon. He wore owlish glasses on his squat nose, and his resting expression was a half smile. He was a radical in matters of foreign policy, pressing Iranian involvement in Lebanon and Afghanistan. He was also a staunch defender of human rights as a matter of simple decency.