Children of Paradise (27 page)

Under cover of night, they ferried Mohammad Mokhtari through the necropolis, into the intelligence building, to a room where terrible things were known to happen. They laid him on his stomach and looped a length of rope around his neck. Men sat on his back and held his feet. One put a foot on his neck and pulled the rope. They put a cloth under his mouth to catch the blood. From experience, they knew how to tell when a man was
dead by the change in color under his fingernails. When Mokhtari no longer struggled or breathed, when his nail beds were gray, they put him in the trunk of the Peugeot and drove to the back of the Rey Cement Factory in southeastern Tehran. There they emptied Mokhtari’s pockets and dumped his body.

Mohammad Mokhtari’s wife watched, with a group of friends and family members, as her husband’s coffin was loaded into a hearse. Then she stepped forward. She placed a pen in his coffin. She said, “
I see him off with his weapon.”

• • •

B
EFORE THE REVOLUTION
, Iran’s literary elite issued largely from the secular left. After the revolution, when the secular left was hunted and silenced where it was not exterminated, Iranian poets and writers retreated into private life. To write in the old literary style was to invite censorship, imprisonment, exile. Mohammad Mokhtari, secretary of the Iranian Writers Association in 1981, served a two-year prison sentence in 1982. The Writers Association was banned. A new literature, coaxed from the revolution’s doctrinaire cadres, praised the imams and retold religious narratives. The secular writers spent a decade in deep and perilous estrangement. Mahmoud Dowlatabadi, a novelist and playwright who had risen from poverty into the old elite, would later say that he lived permanently with the sense of a dagger at his back. No mainstream political figure or institution existed to defend the secular writer. The strictures of the constitution did not protect him.

Then came the Rafsanjani years, and with them
Kiyan
and the Center for Strategic Research. The religious intellectuals, including Soroush, Kadivar, Ganji, Hajjarian, and many others, had not been nurtured within the country’s old intellectual milieu. They were lower-middle-class, traditional people whose intellectual prominence came, sui generis, with the revolution. They spoke the language of religion and revolution. It was a language riven with contradictions, Shahram felt, starting even with Shariati: religious intellectuals could never quite reconcile Islam with the revolutionary
drive for self-determination and free will. But because the reformists were insiders—so it seemed—they could issue bold, provocative calls for political freedom at far less cost than the secular intellectuals. The religious intellectuals were closer to the system. Some were even among its architects. They imagined they would be tolerated.

Some of these new religious intellectuals believed they could go so far as to declaim the injustice, even the impiety, of the theocracy and call for the separation of mosque and state. In a 1992 lecture, the former premier, Mehdi Bazargan, made what looked for all the world like a plea for secularism.
Kiyan
printed an elaboration of that lecture a year later. “
Wherever religion and government (even ideology and state) are merged and put in the hands of one ruler,” Bazargan wrote in the
Kiyan
piece, “people are deprived of freedom of opinion and the will to manage their affairs. It is always religion that loses, not government.” Indeed, he wrote, Iranians “have seen such a face of Islam and Muslimness, of those who claim to act in the name of religion and government . . . that they have come to doubt their own religious beliefs and knowledge.”
Kiyan
’s editors prefaced Bazargan’s contribution with an apology to the former prime minister for his mistreatment at the hands of Islamic radicals, among whom were some of the
Kiyan
Circle’s own number: “
Now that the fervor has subsided and fiery radicalism is over, and also the direction of social developments has become evident, many are now trying to ask for his forgiveness, especially the young generation who attacked his policies.”

The secular intellectuals observed with cautious excitement the slow shift of the reformist intellectuals toward a nearly secular vision of the state. Their situation was infinitely more precarious than that of the reformists. Still, the religious dissidents had helped create breathing room for their secular peers. Taking advantage of the more liberal issuance of publishing licenses in the first years of Rafsanjani’s presidency, secular-minded editors began founding magazines, including
Adineh
. There the secular writers began to publish again. And they began to reencounter one another at clandestine gatherings they called “consensus meetings.” When Shahram Rafizadeh moved to Tehran, this was the circle of writers he entered.

For their part, the religious intellectuals extended a tentative hand to
their secular peers. The gesture was not without self-interest.
The inclusion of the old literary elite in the reformists’ circles would prove the sincerity of their call for tolerance and free speech while also burnishing their literary bona fides, since the secular writers were still the culture’s standard-bearers of taste. The secular intellectuals, meanwhile, understood that the country had changed and that they could no longer speak for its high culture without recognizing and including some of their religious peers.
They opened their consensus meetings to a handful of human rights and women’s rights activists from the religious reformist camp.

The intellectuals shared one agenda above all, and that was to widen the space for free speech under the Islamic Republic. In October of 1994, 134 Iranian intellectuals issued an open letter. They called it “We Are the Writers!” It was a call for reactivating the defunct Iranian Writers Association and for an end to censorship. The signatories declared:

We are the writers! This means that we express and publish our emotions, imagination, ideas, and research in different forms. It is our natural, social, and civil right that our written work—be it poetry or novel, play or scenario, research or critique—as well as our translations of other writers of the world, reach our audiences without any interference and impediment. No individual or institution, under any circumstance, has the right to hinder this process. . . .

The rest of the petition underscored the signatories’ benign intent. Their purpose was not political, they asserted, whatever the government or any other political force wished to project onto them. They wanted only to establish a collective presence as writers in order to secure a space for free expression. If political forces inside or outside the country endorsed their call, the writers could not be held responsible. Still, “defending the human and civil rights of any writer, whatever the circumstances, is the duty and obligation of all writers.”

Among the letter’s signatories were Mohammad Mokhtari, Mohammad
Jafar Pouyandeh, and other victims of what would come to be known as the chain murders, or serial killings.

• • •

T
HE PHRASE “SERIAL KILLINGS”
was apt. Like a serial killer, the assassins had a type. They mostly bypassed the religious intellectuals, targeting secular writers, translators, and intellectuals, many of them not even all that well known. Like serial killers, they had signature methods: strangulation, heart attacks brought on by potassium injection, the occasional florid slaughter as in the case of the Forouhars. The victims disappeared on their way to work, appointments, errands. Their corpses were found days later. The murders were cold-blooded and systematic, and they had gone on for nearly a decade before Mohammad Mokhtari was killed. The 1998 killings incurred a crisis because there were so many of them in such a short time; because their similarities were obvious; and because they happened in the first year of Khatami’s presidency, when Iranians had reason to expect that the state was growing more tolerant rather than less.

From the Islamic Republic’s very inception, powerful forces existed beneath the surface of the state, beyond the reach of the elected government and its ministers. Now they issued from the intelligence ministry, which was the most secretive arm of a security apparatus linked to the Supreme Leader. By some later accounts, the violence could be traced past its executors in the intelligence ministry to its ideological progenitors, a circle of hardline clerics who had footholds in the Guardian Council, intelligence ministry, and judiciary. These clerics were called the Haghani Circle, after the seminary where they’d been trained under the tutelage of Ayatollah Mohammad-Taghi Mesbah-Yazdi, who believed it was the duty of the righteous to physically eliminate those with whom they disagreed. “
Killing hypocrites does not require a court order, as it is a duty imposed by the sharia on all genuine Muslims,” Mesbah-Yazdi would declare in 1999, in the midst of the controversy over the serial killings. “The order of Islam is to throw them down from a high mountain and kill them outright.”

Something about “We Are the Writers!” must have touched a nerve in the most violent defenders of
velayat-e faqih
. The resurfacing of the secular literary elite after its long banishment was a threat to the new cultural order. And the specter of an alliance among religious and secular intellectuals was intolerable, particularly as the religious intellectuals began ever more explicitly to question
velayat-e faqih
. An appeal to the authority and charisma of Ayatollah Khomeini used to suffice to end such discussions. But with the advent of religious intellectualism in the 1990s and the increasing popularity of Western-style social science, reasoned debate faced off against calls for obedience or revolutionary rectitude.
An unbridgeable divide had opened within Iran’s intellectual and power elite—between those, like Mesbah-Yazdi and the Haghani Circle, who believed that the authority of the Leader was absolute and infallible, and those who expected it to be conditioned upon logical consistency and some degree of popular sovereignty.

By killing off the secular intellectuals, who had no foothold within the power structure and no legal recourse, perhaps the shadowy forces in the security establishment believed they were simply doing their divine duty. Maybe they thought they could liquidate the country’s pre-revolutionary literary culture in all its wrongheadedness. Maybe they also understood that their political adversaries, the reformists, were, for now, beyond their reach, as they had not explicitly breached the constitution; but that by targeting the secular thinkers, they could draw a sharp red line and send the reformists a warning that there they, too, should fear to tread.

The religious intellectuals did not edge away. To the contrary, Soroush joined his voice with Bazargan’s in the same issue of
Kiyan
and elsewhere, arguing that theocracy did violence not only to the rights of man but to the dignity of religion. When Bazargan died in 1995, his memorial service was held at Hosseiniyeh Ershad, the birthplace of Iran’s revolutionary Islamism. There, at the very lectern Shariati once inflamed, Soroush declared: “[
A] society in which religion becomes the tool of oppression and humans are crushed and deprived is more sinister than a society without religion, where the oppressor does not commit his criminal acts in the name of God and does not attribute them to religion.”

Iran’s secular intellectual elite had become the quarry of a merciless apparatus of death. By some tallies, from 1990 to 1998, more than eighty secular Iranian writers and intellectuals died in like fashion: abducted, disappeared, found dead. A former aide to Shariati, Hossein Barazandeh, was suffocated in Mashhad in January 1995. Ahmad Mir Alaei, a writer and translator in Isfahan, died under suspicious circumstances in October 1995. Ahmad Tafazzoli, a writer and translator, was found dead with his skull smashed in Tehran in January 1996. Ebrahim Zalzadeh, an editor and publisher whose fax machine was used to distribute “We Are the Writers!” was abducted in February 1997 and found stabbed to death in March. Six former political prisoners were separately abducted and found dead in Mashhad in 1996. Former prime minister Mossadegh’s granddaughter was stabbed to death in April 1998. In September 1998, in the city of Kerman, Hamid Hajizadeh, a teacher and poet, was stabbed to death in his bed, along with his nine-year-old son.

In August 1996, a group of about twenty secular writers, many of them signatories to “We Are the Writers!” chartered a bus to a literary festival in neighboring Armenia. In the middle of the night, they awoke to find the bus hurtling toward a cliff. The driver had released the hand brake, thrown himself out his door, and fled. A passenger lunged for the brakes and managed to stop the bus with its nose over the precipice, one of its tires about to churn the air. The writers were warned never to speak of the incident.

That same summer, security forces raided a dinner party at the home of the German cultural attaché. The writers and intellectuals in attendance were detained and interrogated. One of them was Faraj Sarkouhi, then the editor of
Adineh
and a signatory to “We Are the Writers!” In the two years that followed, Sarkouhi was repeatedly imprisoned and forced to confess to his part in a Western plot to undermine the Islamic Republic.
Adineh
, he was forced to say, was following an ideological script from the German government.

Throughout these years, Shahram’s friends in the Writers Association spoke often of a man, identified only as Hashemi, who summoned them for
questioning at the ministry of intelligence or stopped them at the airport when they tried to go abroad. Later, Shahram would learn that Hashemi’s real name was Mehrdad Alikhani and that he was the intelligence official assigned to the poets and writers of the secular left. The purpose of this program was evidently liquidation.

Then came the late fall of 1998, when the Forouhars, Majid Sharif, Mohammad Mokhtari, and Mohammad Jafar Pouyandeh all disappeared within three weeks of one another. Iranian writers and intellectuals understood that they were living under siege. Lists surfaced: columns of names that purported to enumerate the intellectuals who would now disappear. Hossein Bashiriyeh, the sociologist who had attracted a following at the Center for Strategic Research, turned up on some versions of that list. Although he fit and even exceeded the profile—a secular leftist intellectual with real influence on the thinking of Islamic reformists—he did not believe anyone would harm him. He considered himself too private a figure, a scholar disengaged from politics. Still, his wife put two locks on their door, and friends advised them to sleep elsewhere. Haunted writers roamed Iranian cities looking for couches to sleep on, startling at the sound of footsteps, packing their families off to provincial homesteads for safety’s sake. Some cut off contact with all but their closest friends and family. Others left the country to wait out the storm. The reformist press, which had just begun to flower under Khatami, clamored for resolution and justice, suggesting that the intelligence minister, Ghorbanali Dorri-Najafabadi, resign if he could not guarantee the safety of Iran’s intellectuals.