Children of Paradise (16 page)

For a time in the mid-1980s, Khomeini removed Lajevardi from Evin and placed Montazeri in charge of Iran’s prison system. The wardens Montazeri appointed were disgusted by what they inherited from Lajevardi’s crew. One referred to his predecessor as having been “
truly crazy.” On Montazeri’s watch, observers from the United Nations and the Iranian parliament were admitted to the prisons, where inmates were at last permitted family visits, warm showers with soap, courtyard time, cigarettes, language classes, writing materials, political discussions, and nonreligious books. The forced public recantations and prayer sessions were replaced by short “letters of regret,” and to ease the overcrowding, Montazeri’s associates released many
tavob
s as well as prisoners who had completed their sentences but were being held until they recanted.
By mid-1986, political prisoners at Evin had shaken off the lassitude of terror long enough to organize a hunger strike, successfully demanding the removal of more
tavob
s and common criminals from their wards.

It was not that Montazeri’s condemnation of the Mojahedin, whose members overwhelmingly populated the political wards, was equivocal. His own son had died in the blast that killed Beheshti. But Montazeri did not see the Islamic Republic the way Khomeini and the ruling party, with all three of its factions, apparently did: as fragile as it was righteous, besieged from within, married to a war it could not win and utopian hopes that
could either sustain or destroy the all-too-human state they had built. The dawning pragmatism of the principals, including Khomeini, may have been a moderating influence on foreign policy, but on the domestic side it militated against many of the revolution’s finest aspirations, suggesting that, toward the end of sustaining the Islamic Republic, the means needed to be neither Islamic nor Republican. Montazeri was of a different cast of mind.

Montazeri had been Khomeini’s heir designate for just a year when
Khomeini wrote him a letter in 1986 expressing disapproval of what he saw as leniency in the prisons. Montazeri, the Leader lamented, was excessively influenced by the regime’s internal critics, and his inclination to discuss their negative views publicly was inappropriate. Moreover, Khomeini implied that Montazeri had been soft on the Mojahedin, and he alleged that the release of Mojahedin prisoners had already resulted in “explosions, terrors and thefts.”

In late 1987, Khomeini began to transfer the prisons back into Lajevardi’s control. The old masters reentered with a spirit of revenge nurtured during their period of absence. Lajevardi declared that under Montazeri, the Mojahedin—the hard-liners referred to them by the rhyming term
monafiqin
, meaning “hypocrites”—had been treated softly, in a manner “
contrary to the expediency of Islam.”

In reality, the Mojahedin had all but vanished from Iran’s domestic scene by this time.
The regime boasted that 90 percent of the group’s members were in prison. The group’s leaders, including Massoud Rajavi, had fled with Bani-Sadr to Paris in 1981. They were not very effective from that distance, and many of the rank-and-file members had given up the movement and expected to return, on their release, to quiet and ordinary lives.

But in 1986, Massoud Rajavi took a fateful decision. He moved to Iraq, where he set up a base of operation for something he called the National Liberation Army of Iran, a ragtag force of exiles supported by Saddam Hussein. On July 22, 1988—two days after Khomeini announced the cease-fire—the Iraqi army crossed into northern, southern, and central Iran, supposedly in a last effort to topple the Islamic Republic. The National Liberation Army participated in this operation, contributing a reported
force of seven thousand fighters under Iraqi air cover and with the code name Eternal Light.

The Mojahedin had at one time stirred passive support among Iranians who saw it as the likeliest alternative to clerical rule. Teenagers, in particular, had gravitated toward the group as the only opposition force that harnessed the radical utopianism of the revolution and was willing to confront the theocrats by force. But it was one thing to disagree with the course the revolution had taken, and even to fight hezbollahis behind barricades in Tehran. It was quite another to join forces with a merciless external enemy in a bid to overthrow one’s own government. By allying itself with Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, in a war that had terrorized Iran for nearly a decade, the Mojahedin forfeited forever the sympathy of the Iranian people. (In the course of time, under the unrelenting desert sun, the Mojahedin would wither into a sinister and dangerous cult.)

Cutting supply lines and attacking with gunships, the Iranians defeated the invaders handily. But Khomeini was not done with the Mojahedin. He would exact his revenge not only on those captured on the battlefield but on the group’s sympathizers from days gone by: the ones who clogged the prisons and who most likely heard about the incursion from Iraq only afterward, on the prison radio. On July 28, 1988, the ailing ayatollah issued a fatwa that would seal one of the great crimes of the twentieth century, although it passed nearly unremarked in the fearful gloom of Iran’s isolation.

In his order, Khomeini decreed that
“those who remain steadfast in their position of hypocrisy in prisons throughout the country are considered to be waging war against God and are condemned to execution.” The “enemies of God” were to be given a cursory examination by trusted officers of the state and condemned to death. Khomeini appointed a three-man commission to undertake this work in Tehran and detailed the composition of similar commissions for the provinces. Of the commissioners, Khomeini wrote, “I hope that you satisfy the almighty God with your revolutionary rage and rancor as regards to the enemies of Islam. The gentlemen who are responsible for making the decisions must not hesitate, show any doubt or concerns, and [should] try to be ‘most ferocious against infidels.’” In
response to questions from the head of the judiciary—did the fatwa cover prisoners who had not been tried and those whose sentences were already partially served?—Khomeini clarified: “In all the above cases, if the person at any stage or at any time maintains his position of hypocrisy
,
the sentence is execution. Annihilate the enemies of Islam immediately. With regard to the case files, use whichever criterion speeds up the implementation of the verdict.”

• • •

O
N THE MORNING OF
J
ULY
19, 1988, prisoners’ relatives thronged the gates just as they did every other morning, to demand visits or news of their loved ones. But the gates were sealed, the relatives forced to leave without a word of explanation. For the prisoners on the other side of those gates, there would be no phone calls, letters, packages, television, or radio—not even medicines or trips to the infirmary for the sick. The cell blocks were sealed off from one another, communal spaces closed. The prisoners had dropped, it seemed, from the face of the earth.

One by one, the prisoners, starting with the Mojahedin, were called before the three-man death commissions and asked their affiliations. If the prisoner said “Mojahedin,” he went straight to the gallows. If he or she said
“monafiqin,”
or “hypocrites,” there would be further questions: Was he willing to denounce his colleagues on camera? To put the noose himself around the neck of an active Mojahed? To unmask false repenters? To walk through minefields for the Islamic Republic? If he answered no to any of these questions, the victim would be forced to write a will and forfeit any personal belongings, like rings, watches, and glasses. He would then be blindfolded and escorted to his death.

For the leftists, whose inquisition closely followed that of the Mojahedin, the questions were designed to determine whether or not the prisoners were apostates. Was the prisoner a Muslim? Was he willing to publicly recant historical materialism? Did he fast for Ramadan? Did his father pray, fast, and read the Quran? A Muslim, after all, could be considered an apostate only if his or her father had practiced Islam, implying that the child had
rejected the teachings of his upbringing. Those raised in ignorance were largely spared and offered a chance at redemption if they submitted to lashings and forced prayers. So were the women leftists, because they were not considered autonomous adults who could be held responsible for their actions. In later years the eyewitness accounts of these survivors would bore like penlights into the calculated obscurity of those summer weeks.

At Evin, according to one former prison official, every half hour from seven-thirty in the morning until five o’clock in the evening, prisoners were loaded onto forklifts and lifted onto six cranes from which they were hanged. This continued through the months of July and August 1988.
The executioners complained of overwork and asked to use firing squads instead, but silence and secrecy were of the essence.
Some former inmates at Gohardasht Prison in Karaj, near Tehran, would later recall the arrival of freezer trucks in the lead-up to the killings, and the wordless gestures of an Afghan prison worker who tried to warn them that they would be hanged. According to Saeed Amirkhizi, a survivor from Evin, the inhumanity of the executions even traumatized some of the prison’s hardened torturers: “
Hajj Amjad, a guard . . . famous for his short temper and brutality, became unbelievably quiet and introverted after the carnage. . . . Another torturer, named Mohammad Allahbakhshi, was in a similar situation.”

Nobody knows how many prisoners were executed in the summer of 1988, but popular estimates tend to converge around the four to five thousand mark. Only the city of Isfahan, where Ayatollah Montazeri still controlled the prison system, was spared.
Montazeri would later estimate the number of Mojahedin killed nationwide between 2,800 and 3,800 and the number of leftists at 500. Added to the thousands already executed since 1979, the numbers—and the efficiency and senselessness of the killings of longtime captives—were enough to send a cold terror through the populace.

Families of the deceased, informed in batches starting in November, were forbidden to observe the traditional forty days of mourning. Many of the victims were buried in unmarked graves, in the sections of graveyards reserved for the damned. In Tehran the authorities dug huge ditches and filled them with bodies, which rose so close to the surface that one witness
recalls seeing bones and personal effects littering the soil.
The site was heavily patrolled by security forces, who forbade family members to touch the ground or to sit.

• • •

W
HY, IN THE WANING DAYS OF HIS LIFE,
the very week of the war’s end, and seven years after he overpowered all significant opposition to clerical rule, did Ayatollah Khomeini personally order a crime against humanity that would forever blight his Islamic Republic? The historian Ervand Abrahamian speculates that the prison massacre was a “baptism of blood and a self-administered purge”: it would weed out the faint of heart and leave behind a ruling elite that had made a blood oath to the system Khomeini had devised. No one has yet come up with a better explanation.

Khomeini and his lieutenants had prolonged the revolutionary moment to the greatest possible extent, first by mobilizing their supporters against the regime’s internal enemies—the liberals, the left, and the Mojahedin—and their ideological foe, the United States; later by mobilizing Iranians in a war of martyrdom and sacrifice against Iraq. If fervor, fear, and Khomeini’s personal charisma had mingled to charge the country’s atmosphere with divine purpose, their dissipation threatened to leave a charred landscape disenchanted and exposed. Perhaps Khomeini feared a demobilized Iran and felt that drastic measures were necessary to shore up the survival of the Islamic state, to make clear beyond the shadow of a doubt the permanence and totality of
velayat-e faqih
.

With the prison massacres, he enclosed the supporters of his regime in a circle of complicity. According to Ayatollah Montazeri, Khomeini’s heir designate, the decision had been closely held; neither the president nor the prime minister was privy to it. But the regime’s inner circle defended its actions after the fact.
Speaker Rafsanjani claimed that only one thousand political prisoners had been executed, which was neither true nor exonerating. In December 1988, President Khamenei alleged that the executed prisoners had “links” with the National Liberation Army: “
Do you think we
should hand out sweets to an individual who, from inside prison, is in contact with the
monafiqin
who launched an armed attack within the borders of the Islamic Republic? If his contacts with such an organization have been established, what should we do about him? He will be sentenced to death, and we will execute him. We do not take such matters lightly.” Prime Minister Mousavi, too, suggested that the prisoners were legitimately executed because they were engaged in a conspiracy.

Only Montazeri himself refused to toe the line. His distaste for prisoner abuse was rooted in moral instincts for which he fought without political calculation. On July 31, 1988, Montazeri wrote Ayatollah Khomeini a letter arguing that while there was nothing wrong with executing the Mojahedin who had been captured on the battlefield, those who had languished in the prisons for years were clearly innocent in the matter of the invasion. He listed nine reasons for Khomeini to reconsider his decision, including that “
to execute people who have been sentenced by our courts to punishments other than execution, without any process or new activities, is a complete disregard for all judicial standards and rulings and will not reflect well on the regime.”

When this letter failed to stop the executions,
Montazeri tried again in a missive dated August 4. A provincial religious magistrate who served on the death commission at a provincial prison had come to see Montazeri, the heir designate wrote to Khomeini. The magistrate was upset because one of the prisoners who appeared before his commission had renounced the Mojahedin in every way, but when he was asked if he would walk across minefields, he had replied, “Not all people are willing to walk over mines! Moreover, you must not have such high expectations from a new Muslim such as me.” The intelligence officer on the commission sentenced the man to death over the objections of the religious magistrate. The intelligence ministry’s men, Montazeri observed, were in control of the whole operation, overriding the religious judgments of their colleagues. Wrote Montazeri, “Your Eminence can see what types of people are implementing your important decree that affects the lives of thousands of prisoners.”