Children of Paradise (59 page)

• • •

T
HERE WAS NO QUESTION
in her mind that the stoning had taken place, and that it was done in secrecy. She brought her knowledge to the
judge in the case. He refused to be interviewed. That was fine, Asieh said, but could he tell her if he’d issued the sentences?

He’d followed the law, the judge replied. He didn’t make the law, but he was bound to impose it.

Asieh reminded the judge that the head of the judiciary had ordered an end to stoning. The judge scoffed. Sharia law was supreme, he explained, not the judiciary. As a judge, he was answerable not to any official in Tehran but to the law itself. He would make his own decisions, independent of treaties or legislation or the policies of Shahroudi.

Asieh would take this statement, and the insight it offered into the function of the judiciary, back to her friends in the Iranian women’s rights community. They had made discriminatory law the focus of their protest. And now they understood something they hadn’t understood before. They could take their demands to the government, and even to the head of the judiciary, where they might find a responsive hearing. But under the Iranian system, judges were clerics trained in Islamic jurisprudence. The most hardline judges believed they answered to a higher law than the legislation approved by the parliament. Asieh would soon learn that the Iranian constitution and penal code, in their infinite ambiguity, supported both this view and its opposite.

• • •

A
SIEH HAD WORKED WITH THE LAWYER
, Shadi Sadr, informally on all her cases. Asieh did the research and made contact with the defendants. Shadi offered legal advice and defense. Now Asieh came to Shadi with what she’d learned in Mashhad. She was sure that this stoning had taken place. But she had no documentary evidence. If she published a story, the judiciary would say it was a lie, and Asieh would be able neither to prove her case nor to protect herself from reprisals. Those responsible would seek to silence her before she uncovered more evidence. Under Khatami, to publish such a story would have been risky; now, with the increasing repression and opacity of hardline rule, it would be foolhardy.

Asieh had met some Pakistani women’s rights activists at a conference
in Lahore earlier that year. She’d talked to them about stoning in their country, before she’d understood that it still took place in her own. In Pakistan, stoning was not a judicial punishment but a vendetta voluntarily carried out by villagers. The Pakistani feminists had started a campaign to eradicate it through exposure and condemnation. Asieh proposed that she and Shadi try something like this. They wouldn’t publish anything; they would talk to people, and meanwhile Asieh would go on researching the Mashhad case until they could bring it before the public.

Shadi liked the idea, and she brought in a third partner who was a well-known older feminist with roots in the revolutionary movement and the Islamic Left. The three women founded the Stop Stoning Forever campaign together with two women living abroad who could broadcast their findings and raise their international profile at less risk.

Asieh would remember the campaign’s early days as among the best of her life. Now her solitary work on execution cases had gravity, company, larger purpose—and now she had a fierce knot of solidarity gathered around her. She and her partners worked on cases every bit as harrowing as the earlier ones. But they expended their anxiety and energy after hours in giddy parties where they danced and drank and sang. Once the three of them rented a bus and took their children north to Kelardasht, a lush valley in Mazandaran. They spent the weekend at the vacation home of a friend of Asieh’s, relaxing but also planning for the campaign’s future.

When women staged a sit-in outside a soccer stadium to protest their exclusion, Asieh and one of her partners were there. Her partner’s foot was badly injured by the attacking police. When other groups organized a women’s rights protest in Haft-e Tir Square in Tehran on June 12, 2006, Asieh went to show her support. The women confronted a cordon of security and police, who fought them off with batons, pepper spray, and colored paint that they used to mark fleeing protesters for arrest. Seventy people were arrested that day. Asieh was not one of them. Of those who were, fourteen were to be tried and sentenced to prison terms for “acting against national security” or “disturbing the public order.”

The time was as dark as any Asieh had known. But it was also the time when Iran’s women’s movement coalesced. The movement was of a piece with its hardships, like a city built into a granite mountainside. After the demonstration in Haft-e Tir Square, some women’s rights activists launched what they called the One Million Signatures campaign. They printed pamphlets detailing laws that discriminated against women. Activists distributed the pamphlets among women in private, explaining their contents and collecting signatures for the repeal of those laws.

Asieh and her partners worked differently. Their weapon was transparency, and so their campaign relied on media. They also shouldered a reporting burden: they needed real evidence that the judiciary had not complied with the moratorium on stoning.

Asieh had one of the campaign’s expatriate partners publish an interview with her in which Asieh mentioned that she’d heard about a case of stoning in Mashhad and was researching it. That interview finally provoked the response Asieh had hoped for: a friend of one of the victim’s families came forward and offered to take Asieh to the stoned woman’s children.

Asieh went back to Mashhad for the full story and a couple of relevant documents. According to the family, Mahboubeh M. was married to an abusive man who beat her bloody and brought other women into the home. She had never wanted to marry this man; her father had insisted. When she tried four times to divorce her abuser, her father told her she would have no place to go if she did, because he would not support her. Abbas H. loved Mahboubeh M. and killed her husband. Under torture, Mahboubeh M. was forced to confess that she and Abbas H. had a sexual relationship, and that this was the reason for the murder. Asieh would never know for certain whether this was true. The family denied it. But it was the pretext for stoning both of them.

The family gave Asieh two documents. One was from the court, confirming the sentence. The other was a forensics report confirming the cause of death. Now Asieh published what she knew on her blog. It was a story no newspaper dared to touch. The minister of justice, Jamal Karimi-Rad, gave
a press conference. This stoning story was a lie, he said, spread by feminists who wanted to be famous. They took money from foreign countries and spread fictions that served Western prejudices about Islamic law.

• • •

S
TONING WAS NOT TECHNICALLY
a women’s issue. The sentence was levied at least as often on men accused of sexual relations with married women. But adultery was, in the end, a women’s issue. Men could legally have up to four wives and many lovers. There was only limited recourse for a woman who objected. Women didn’t have equal rights in initiating divorce, and they automatically lost custody of all children over the age of seven if they did manage to leave. Married women could not so much as hold jobs without permission from their husbands. Those who took lovers could be stoned, with their lovers, for adultery. Asieh and her partners in the campaign hoped to hold the whole battery of discriminatory family laws up to the light by exposing the persistence of stoning.

The campaign’s founders gave interview upon interview. Asieh canvassed the country from north to south, east to west, city to city, prison to prison. She spent only two weekends with her family in the summer of 2006. She and her partners located seventeen people sentenced to be stoned, and they tracked down their families and their lawyers. Shadi set up a network to help those who had no lawyers. Soon the campaign had a big advisory board. Asieh did the legwork; Shadi did the legal work; and their third partner ran the activist campaign. When they couldn’t publish inside, they got word of their cases outside, to groups like Amnesty International, and the information boomeranged back into Iran.

• • •

A
SIEH WAS BUSY PLANNING
Delara Darabi’s exhibition in the fall of 2006. By now she had met Delara in prison, and she had met Delara’s judge. For some reason, like Atefah’s judge before him, he seemed determined to execute the delicate girl, Asieh believed. She hoped she could forestall him by making Delara an artistic celebrity.

Asieh found Delara a gallery. It belonged to Lili Golestan, the sister of Kaveh Golestan, the photographer killed by a land mine in Kurdistan. When Asieh and Javad brought the paintings to Lili Golestan, she was floored. She had not cared one way or the other about their quality; she was donating space for a cause she considered important. But the paintings were, Lili told Asieh now, “amazing.” On the merits alone, Delara deserved a showing.

The opening was like nothing the Golestan Gallery had ever seen. Five ambassadors came, along with a crowd of filmmakers, journalists, and activists. The press coverage was global. Delara’s likeness, in a blue headscarf and with downcast gaze, her knuckles to her lips in contemplation, appeared on placards of demonstrators as far away as Italy and Burkina Faso. So did the haunting images from her show.

“
The paintings in front of you are not wordless images and colors, they are the painful photo realities of our life,” Delara wrote in a statement posted on the gallery wall. “The only face I see in front of me every day is a wall. For three years, I have been defending myself with colors, forms and words. These paintings are an oath to a crime I did not commit. Unless the colors bring me back to life, I greet you who have come to view my paintings from behind that wall.”

Delara remained behind the wall for another two and a half years. Then the judge proceeded in secret, with no witnesses and no notice. Delara Darabi called home at seven o’clock on the morning of May 1, 2009.
The last words anyone heard her speak were these:

“Oh, Mother,” she said, “I see the hangman’s noose in front of me. They are going to execute me. Please save me.”

• • •

J
AMAL
K
ARIMI-
R
AD
, the justice minister, had all but named Asieh and her colleagues in his weekly press conferences. Certain forces inside the country dared to threaten the judiciary, he intimated darkly, and they would be dealt with. The minister was gunning for Asieh’s arrest, she heard from others; her work enraged him. If anything or anyone gave Asieh pause, it was he. But she pursued her stoning cases.

In the city of Takestan in the province of Qazvin, a man named Jafar Kiani and his alleged lover, Mokarrameh Ebrahimi, had been sentenced to stoning for adultery nearly ten years earlier. The court was preparing only now to carry out the sentence. The campaign sprang into action, publicizing the case every way it knew how. Asieh heard, at length, that the sentence had been dropped—a victory for the campaign. But three days later she heard something else: Kiani had been taken in secret to a mountain outside town, where he was stoned.

Asieh went to that mountain, where a villager showed her the bloodied stones. She gathered them to bring to Tehran as evidence. She took photos and videos and interviewed the villagers. Then she stopped in Qazvin to see a local activist who had summoned her. That activist had an important document. Someone had surreptitiously taken a paper from the desk of the judge in Kiani’s case and scanned it. The scan was on a CD. Asieh was to read the document, its pilferer directed, and then destroy the disc.

The document was a letter from the Takestan judge to Shahroudi, explicitly defying the moratorium on stoning. No decree of Shahroudi’s would stop him from issuing the sentence, the judge declared. Islamic law, he claimed, was on his side. And he cited the text of a law Asieh had never seen before. This law granted judges discretion over stoning and the hundred lashes punishment for crimes against chastity. Any judge who deemed these punishments justified could impose them independent of the system. For although one article of the constitution demanded that courts make decisions only in accordance with the laws of the state, another stipulated that if the state provided no relevant law, the judge should refer to “Islamic sources and credible fatwas.” A similar inconsistency could be found in the penal code. Ayatollah Shahroudi might be the head of the judiciary, the Takestan judge concluded, but there was nothing he could do in the case of Jafar Kiani.

Asieh broke the CD, as she was told. But she committed its contents to memory. She understood now that a profound battle was raging inside the judiciary. Some judges decided their cases based solely on the country’s
penal code, while others went beyond it, appealing to sharia. A growing number of fundamentalist judges did not accept Shahroudi’s authority. And Shahroudi kept publicly silent, which was, Asieh felt, an unfortunate boon to his enemies.

Asieh would not be silent. She gave interviews to Deutsche Welle and the BBC in the taxi that took her home to Tehran. She awaited the consequences. But some days later, on December 27, 2006, Jamal Karimi-Rad died in a car accident. Asieh was ashamed to admit that she felt a smidgen of relief.

• • •

A
SIEH GOT A LETTER
from some of her activist colleagues in the early spring of 2007. Five of the women arrested at the previous year’s demonstration in Haft-e Tir Square were scheduled to go on trial on March 4. The community of women’s rights activists should show their support for these women, the letter suggested, by appearing in front of the courthouse in silent protest.

The police began arresting the silent protesters almost as soon as they converged on the courthouse. They handled Asieh so roughly that they ripped her manteau. The defendants and their lawyers, including Shadi Sadr, walked out of the courtroom in coordinated protest. They were arrested, too. Asieh and thirty-two other women were taken first to Vozara, the detention center normally used by the morality police. The police holding them were women, and the activists saw an opportunity.