Children of Paradise (32 page)

Nothing had prepared Ali for the ordeal he was about to suffer. For all that he’d called for setting activist sights “Beyond Khatami,” he was still a member of the loyal opposition, until recently a supporter of the political faction that held both the presidency and the parliament. Within the student movement, he had been a force for moderation and cooperation. Now he stood accused of insulting the Supreme Leader and propagandizing against the regime. He could have dealt with those charges. But he quickly
understood that his interrogators wanted him to confess to something more: to planning an armed insurrection against the Islamic Republic, to holding a secret arms cache in the office of Daftar Tahkim, and other treasonous crimes.

Unlike the Mohammadi brothers, Ali was not a scapegoat so much as a prize target. His arrest signaled that the hard-liners had come to view the student movement as a genuine threat. By imprisoning a student leader with national stature and friends in government, by breaking and debasing him, the hard-liners could hope to demoralize the movement that looked to him as a leader. Ali would not be left to die in prison or run off a provincial highway in darkness. Whatever happened to him, it was meant to be public and to demonstrate the irresistibility of his captors’ might.

Ali Afshari’s detention began in a part of Evin Prison he would later understand to be associated with the Revolutionary Guards. Interrogators came for him at sundown and questioned him all night, every night. There were as many as ten of them, though usually no more than three or four in the room at a time. They relieved one another in shifts all night long. He stood blindfolded facing a wall while one interrogator bombarded him with threats and insults and another soothed him with blandishments. If he’d only cooperate, said one, a fine position awaited him with the state television station. If he didn’t, said the other, he would find himself in Ganji’s dungeon of ghosts, from which no one returned alive. For a week Ali was not permitted to sleep at night and barely slept during the day. Then one morning the guards wrapped him in a blanket and put him in a car. Sleep deprivation had made him sick. He vomited in the car. By the time he arrived at a Revolutionary Guard prison known as Prison 59, he was very ill. He remained blindfolded until he was in his solitary cell, where the air pressed hot and close.

“Prison 59 isn’t like the other prisons you have been to,” his interrogator announced that night. “You will not be pampered here. Do as you’re told or die.”

Ali’s interrogators punched and kicked him, mainly in the head and on his sides. One interrogator wanted to talk about philosophy. Did good and
evil inhere in actions? the interrogator asked. Or did a person’s perceptions and intentions determine whether his acts were good or bad? Ali might have noted echoes of Soroush and the Mutazilites. But these discussions ended in beatings. The interrogators wanted Ali to confess to treason, but they also wanted him to parrot their beliefs—about current events, about the chain murders, about the reformists. Ali had two options, an interrogator told him: surrender or the grave. Stronger men than he had broken here.

Ali was too hot in his cell and too cold in the interrogation room. He ate little and slept less, as he was forced to stand for days on end. If he nodded off, his interrogators would jerk him to his feet by his hair. Once he was awake for four consecutive days. He was dizzy, disoriented, entirely alone. An interrogator whispered in his ear continuously, suggesting more and worse tortures to come. He would rape Ali if he didn’t surrender. He would sodomize him with a bottle. He would suspend him from the ceiling by his head and whip him to the edge of death. He’d pull the nails from his fingers and toes. He would keep Ali in prison for twenty years.

Ali spent a month in Prison 59 before returning to Evin. There he had a freezing underground cell, thin pajamas, and just one blanket. At mealtimes he had to stand facing the wall with his hands behind his neck until the guard had delivered his food and departed. He should have slept by day—the exhaustion had shredded his psyche—but his shivering kept him awake. At night he returned to the interrogation room. Sometimes there were as many as four interrogators there with him; he could feel two or three of them punching and kicking his head from behind. Once Ali was sitting in a chair when an interrogator kicked his side so hard that he fell to the ground. The interrogator lifted him by his hair to force him back into the chair. If Ali didn’t confess, they told him, he’d be consigning his father, his sister, and his friends to torture like his own.

One night an interrogator told Ali to prepare to be executed. He dragged Ali blindfolded into the prison yard. Another interrogator was talking on his cell phone, apparently begging a judge to show mercy. But a third voice rang out: “No. That’s not possible. The execution has to be carried out.” The man on the phone begged for clemency. “No,” said the first
interrogator. “This guy is a lost cause.” The man with the phone begged Ali to think of his parents and confess, rather than go before the firing squad that awaited him. For thirty minutes the interrogators bandied Ali’s fate among them. For the first time Ali felt his will collapsing. Maybe they didn’t really mean to kill him. But maybe they did.

He would confess, he imagined, against himself. But that was not what his tormentors had in mind. They wanted him to confess to things that would implicate other people and that would surely result in his own execution. He was to say that Daftar Tahkim had a weapons stockpile and that he’d intended to assassinate a provincial governor. He was to testify against specific people, implicating them in crimes they hadn’t committed. His torturers bound him to a bed like the one where they’d whipped the Mohammadi brothers, and they showed him the cable wires they would use to lash his flesh.

“
I felt like a lonely and vulnerable child who had lost his parents and was left among a group of strangers,” Ali would later say in a deposition to a human rights organization. For 140 days he had resisted. He feared that if he tried to hold out longer, the tortures would grow so severe that in the end he would confess to even worse things than he was being asked to confess to now. “As a result,” he told the human rights group, “I accepted some of their allegations regarding the smuggling of Molotov cocktails into the university dormitories. They then untied me from the bed.”

• • •

S
O BEGAN THE SECOND
and worst phase of Ali’s imprisonment. His captors returned him to Prison 59. In the interrogation room, Ali negotiated the wording of his confession. He’d agreed to deliver it on videotape, provided his interrogators allowed him to incriminate only himself. There was a script from which he could deviate but little. He was to confess that, under orders from the reformists, the student movement was acting illegally and destructively against the regime. He was to portray himself as a naïve, inexperienced dupe who now knew right from wrong and was ready to apologize to the Supreme Leader. Ali and his interrogators drew up a document and submitted it to something identified to Ali as the “experts” committee. The committee marked up the confession and returned it to him with orders to incorporate changes.

The editing process seemed interminable: back and forth, from Ali to his interrogators to the “experts.” Then there was the taping. Seven or eight times, by Ali’s later recollection, he was forced to rehearse the script, so that he would sound natural when at last he delivered it on camera. After that, they taped him four times. He began to feel as if he really were making a movie. Sometimes there were lines he refused to read, like one that claimed the students sought to overthrow the regime. He was transferred to solitary confinement, or threatened with beatings, until he accepted them. Altogether, the writing, the editing, the rehearsing and taping, took around two months. While the camera rolled, Ali’s interrogator stood behind it, out of the frame but directly in Ali’s line of sight.

One morning in May 2001, Ali awoke to a flurry of grooming. He was given a shave and a haircut; he was permitted a shower and given a change of clothes. Then came the blindfold and a disorienting drive to a Revolutionary Guard air force base that was a part of the Prison 59 complex. State television was there with a reporter and cameraman. So were Ali’s interrogators. He was to be interviewed, they told him, but it was not for public broadcast; they just wanted higher-quality footage than before. For one session an interrogator assumed the interviewer’s chair while the camera focused solely on Ali; for the other, the interviewer from the television station asked the questions while the interrogators stood just outside the frame. Ali was to answer according to the script he’d memorized.

The two sessions from that day were spliced into a single interview that was broadcast on national television. Ali sat in an office chair across a glass coffee table from an interviewer. He explained how the student movement had used tactics like civil disobedience in an effort to replace the Islamic Republic with a secular regime. Swallowing uncomfortably, Ali apologized to the Leader, the Iranian people, and above all to the Islamic Republic’s war martyrs and their families. He wore a gray plaid shirt and charcoal slacks. He was clean-shaven but for a dour-looking mustache, and his
shoulders sloped. He sat next to a plastic plant and a television set in a featureless, beige room. From time to time, the camera caught Ali’s eyes. Their expression was unfathomable.

Ali Afshari had been obliterated. He did not know himself. The person who uttered fluent falsehoods on national television was a malicious imposter. Years later he would read the accounts of Auschwitz survivors and learn that in the Nazi camps, people who were forced to act against their beliefs died earlier. They described feelings Ali had felt. He’d betrayed everyone; he’d evacuated his own character. Alone in his cell, he pounded his head into walls, hoping to die. He had no appetite. The impulse to kill himself was almost mad; it was frantic, devoid of any plan. Up on the ceiling were some exposed electrical wires. He grasped and strained and obsessively plotted, but he could not reach them. Then he had an idea.

He would let his interrogators torture him to death. They had every means to end his misery. Sure, it would be better to go by his own hand, but he was never going to reach those wires. All he had to do was to recant his confession and resist. His captors would take care of the rest. By doing so, they would also expose their own brutality.

Ali wrote to the judge in his case explaining that his confession was obtained under duress, the interview staged, and the statement dictated by his interrogators. The judiciary pressed him not to recant, but now Ali stuck by his story. Soon enough, he was back in the interrogation room. His father, in Qazvin, was summoned to court, allegedly over a satirical cartoon published in the magazine he ran. What Ali was about to endure, one captor told him, would make him forget all the other tortures. This did not impress Ali as it might have once. His cell was next to an airport runway, where the din of planes taking off kept him awake night and day. But something curious had happened to Ali Afshari.

To begin with, he was starving. He was served the same prison food, but now he ate voraciously. He saw the same interrogators and lived in the same isolation—he would spend the next six months in solitary confinement—but from the abyss of self-negation he had emerged beyond torture’s reach. He’d given up on life, and so his torturers no longer had
anything to hold over him. True resistance looked like this. He did not confess and he did not die. Instead he recovered himself. And he felt sublimely powerful. He understood that his torturers were not omnipotent—that it was up to him to submit or to refuse. After six months they gave up trying to get anything from him. The beatings stopped. He had seen power siphon from his own spirit into the system that imprisoned him, and he saw himself siphon it back.

When Ali Afshari was released from prison in December of 2001, he gave a press conference explaining that his May confession had been false and obtained under duress. He wanted the world to know what happened inside Iran’s prisons. He apologized again to the Iranian people, this time for having broken. He still had a sentence to serve, so he returned to Evin two months later and served two years in a general ward. This was nothing like what he’d already endured. He could study and play volleyball. He had visits from his parents. He wrote articles and letters that were smuggled back to campus.

Ali came out again in 2003. Daftar Tahkim had not forgotten him. The students all but drafted him, as a graduate student now, back to the organization’s central board. He’d come a great distance from the young man who’d organized field trips and advocated leniency for boys in short sleeves. He’d gone far beyond Khatami as well. He argued that Iran needed a new constitution. Nothing would come of elections. Iran should hold a referendum on the form its government should take. Where Ali Afshari went, so did the formerly reformist, now liberal wing of Daftar Tahkim.

But Ali did not stay to fight for the referendum. In 2005 the court handed him a six-year prison sentence on one of his still-open cases. If he served it, he would emerge at age thirty-eight, having given the Iranian penal system almost a quarter of his life. Getting to Dubai was easy, and from there to Dublin was not so hard. He wound up living in exile in Reston, Virginia, still a graduate student, now in systems engineering at George Washington University. If the Islamic Republic was made for anyone, it was made for Ali Afshari. But there was no place there for him.

  TEN  

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