Children of Paradise (64 page)

Fahimi summoned her friends in the women’s network to a ceremony at Behesht-e Zahra. Asieh went with Aida Saadat. Their group was surrounded by Basijis and Revolutionary Guards, but Parvin Fahimi held nothing back on their account. She was, and would remain, so outspoken that she would become a celebrity of sorts in her grief and rage, known everywhere as “the mother of Sohrab,” holding a dark mirror to a state that did not see her child as its own.

Asieh published a report about Sohrab on Roozonline. Within twenty-
four hours the news was everywhere. Parvin Fahimi held ceremonies at the cemetery and in her home. At one such gathering, three days after Asieh’s report was published, a stranger arrived at the Fahimi residence. She was a handsome, gray-haired woman with an arresting presence, dressed from head to toe in black. Her name was Hajar Rostami.

“I am Neda’s mother,” she told the assembled mourners, who embraced her and cried.

Rostami had apparently kept silent at the behest of a young lawyer who’d sought her out after her daughter’s death. He’d promised the family that he could help them so long as they kept their heads down. The authorities had forbidden Rostami from so much as hanging a black banner outside her home. But now she was ready to shed the lawyer and speak out.

Rostami told the activists not to organize a ceremony for her daughter’s fortieth day: she would do that herself. But they helped her publicize it. When mourners converged at Neda’s gravesite, the riot police dispersed them with tear gas and beatings, arresting at least fifty. Karroubi attended the ceremony, but Mousavi was barred from exiting his car.

• • •

S
OUTH OF
T
EHRAN
, past Shahr-e Rey and just outside the Behesht-e Zahra cemetery, in a small city called Kahrizak, lay a detention center designed in 2001 for the abuse of drug addicts, rapists, and so-called thugs. Kahrizak Detention Center was built to hold fifty prisoners in underground cells and metal containers that superheated in the summer months. The holding pens were airless. There were no toilets. The facility had been flagged as substandard back in 2007, but the treatment and fate of the criminals imprisoned there were little remarked, except by Iran’s indefatigable human rights activists, before the summer of 2009.

On July 9, the tenth anniversary of the Eighteenth of Tir, in a police station courtyard in Tehran, Saeed Mortazavi’s deputy informed 147 detained demonstrators that they were to be bused to Kahrizak. Most of the detainees had already sustained injuries in clashes with militiamen during the demonstration or been beaten in the police yard. Some had broken arms
and legs, blood clots, or eye infections. They would not receive medical care. Rather, on arrival in Kahrizak, they were packed tightly together in a metal holding pen fetid with vomit, urine, and human waste. The guards were exceptionally brutal,
by one account beating several prisoners comatose and killing four before morning. This same account held that there were as many as 200 people in that single metal cell—the 147 demonstrators, plus common criminals of the roughest sort.

The July heat cooked the tin container, and the only water the prisoners were given smelled of urine. They were denied food or given scraps of leftovers to distribute among them. Guards burned detainees’ hands and feet with molten tar, broke their teeth, put them through mock executions, and raped and sodomized them violently and repeatedly. At times the air in the crowded cell was poisonously polluted by exhaust from the generator just outside it. On the second day of the demonstrators’ detention, the guards transferred a dozen new inmates into the cell. They’d come from a place called “the cage,” where men with infectious diseases were held. “
They were zombies more than human beings,” a witness told the
Los Angeles Times
.

Prisoners from Kahrizak were transferred to Evin on overcrowded buses in the heat of the day. The regular prison authorities balked at the sight of them.
They had to log the physical condition of prisoners on admittance, and these prisoners arrived missing toenails and teeth, with extensive bruising to their rectums, some of them in critical condition after just five days in Kahrizak. One, twenty-four-year-old Amir Javadifar, died on the bus. Two others, eighteen-year-old Mohammad Kamrani and twenty-five-year-old Mohsen Ruholamini, were transferred to hospitals. Kamrani was chained to a bed, even though he was comatose, and inadequately cared for, while in Ruholamini’s case, the transfer came too late. Both young men died of injuries sustained in Kahrizak. The victims’ families were forbidden to hold proper funerals.

While Kamrani lay comatose,
a visitor to another patient helped change his bandages and told a reporter that she would never forget what she saw. The young man was missing all but two of his top teeth and a number of his nails; his head was
bashed in, his kidneys wrecked, and the stitching
around his rectum suggested sexual torture. Ruholamini’s father was told his son had died of meningitis. But when he recovered the body and the medical records, it was clear that the young man did not have meningitis. He did have a massive infection that had invaded untreated wounds administered by his torturers; and he apparently died from cardiac arrest and bleeding to the lungs as a result of severe physical stress and repeated blunt trauma. His mouth, his father noted, had been “bashed in,” his jaw broken.

• • •

L
ATE ONE SUMMER NIGHT
, Aida Saadat got a strange e-mail from a woman she didn’t know. The woman had access to the office of the medical examiner at the city morgue. She and others from the morgue had seen evidence that eight detained demonstrators had been raped and killed. They did not know what to do with this information. A mutual friend had persuaded them to approach Aida about arranging a meeting with Karroubi. Aida set up the meeting for the following day.

Karroubi listened to the report without obvious emotion. The allegations were probably not the first he’d heard, and they would certainly not be the only ones.
In a July 29 open letter to Rafsanjani, Karroubi made clear that he had spoken to sources who knew the detention centers from the inside. Officials who held “sensitive positions in the country,” he wrote, some of them even veterans of the Iran-Iraq War, had informed him that some detained women had been raped so brutally that their uteruses had ruptured. “Young boys held in detention have also been savagely raped. . . . The young boys are suffering from depression and serious physical and mental damage since their rapes,” the cleric wrote. These reports were so awful, lamented Karroubi, that “if even one of them is true, it would be a tragedy for the Islamic Republic” and would “overshadow the sins of many dictatorships including that of the deposed Shah.”

To talk about rape, let alone about rape carried out by the supposedly pious guardians of the Islamic Republic, was to shatter a taboo. And there was no one better, or more shocking, to do it than a man of the cloth. The security forces were prepared for him: the day after he met with some of
the witnesses, they raided his office. And the witnesses were prepared, too: at least one of those Aida knew left her job and fled to the provinces.

Karroubi’s letter called for the parliament to investigate the rape charges and the abuses at Kahrizak. He found support for this request in unlikely places, for the Kahrizak abuses turned out to have been visited upon the wrong people. Kamrani was the nephew of an Ahmadinejad aide. Ruholamini’s father was a close adviser to conservative presidential candidate and former Revolutionary Guard commander Mohsen Rezaie. These were the sons of the hardline elite, and their families’ complaints could not be dismissed as sedition. Khamenei himself ordered Kahrizak temporarily closed at the end of July, around the time of Karroubi’s letter.

The hardline judge Gholam-Hossein Mohseni-Ejei had recently been appointed prosecutor general of Iran. He headed a judicial inquiry into the rape charges and summarily dismissed them as unfounded. Tehran’s police chief conceded that mistakes were made at Kahrizak, but brushed them off as minor. As for the parliament, it, too, dismissed the sexual assault charges out of hand, quite possibly under pressure. But it did take up Rezaie’s call for an investigation into other abuses at Kahrizak. The parliamentary deputies who insisted on that investigation were fundamentalist conservatives, but they would be the ones to carry the flag for civil liberties in years to come.

Mohsen Ruholamini’s medical records and death certificate bore the signature of a young doctor about the same age as the deceased. The doctor had been assigned to Kahrizak for his military service. When the investigation began, the bosses at Kahrizak pressed the doctor to alter Ruholamini’s records so that it would appear the young man had died of meningitis. The doctor did no such thing. Instead he told the committee: “
He was brought to me after being physically and severely tortured. He was in a grave physical condition and I had limited medical supplies, but I did my best to save him. It was then that I was threatened by the authorities of Kahrizak that if I disclose the cause of death and injuries of the detainees, I will cease to live.”

Former inmates from Kahrizak were skeptical. That doctor had been
cruel to them,
they told the
Los Angeles Times
, refusing them treatment and beating prisoners himself. Regardless, the doctor died under mysterious conditions in November. First, police claimed the twenty-six-year-old had died of a heart attack, but when no medical evidence supported this, the story changed to poisoning and finally to suicide. A different doctor who had also examined Kahrizak inmates was mysteriously shot to death the following September.

Not for the first time, a parliamentary investigation fingered Saeed Mortazavi. The prosecutor had signed the order sending demonstrators to Kahrizak. He was also the source of the story that the three young men had died of meningitis there. He was alleged to have ordered false documents drawn up to this effect. Later he would say that the deaths were the result of overcrowding and that the prisoners had arrived with their injuries. But as the Kahrizak investigation closed in on Mortazavi in 2010, Ahmadinejad swept him out of the way, removing him from the prosecutor’s office and appointing him to an antismuggling post.

The parliamentary committee on Kahrizak issued its final report in January 2010. It would definitively refute the claims about meningitis, and it would even establish that Mortazavi had falsely claimed that prisoners were taken to Kahrizak because Evin was full. In fact, Evin wasn’t full, but Kahrizak was. The committee members excoriated the judiciary for claiming ignorance of the conditions in one of its facilities. The detainees, they said, had died of “
lack of space, weakness of health services, inappropriate nutrition, lack of air conditioner . . . and as a result of beating and neglect.”

However, the committee hastened to add, the ultimate fault lay with the reformists. None of this would have happened if Mousavi and Karroubi “
did not attempt to break the law and incite the emotions of the people.” The presidential candidates should “be accountable and the judicial system must not be dismissive of such criminal acts.”

• • •

I
T COULD BE SAID THAT
when Ayatollah Khomeini rejected his heir apparent for defending the rights of prisoners and objecting to the
massacre of thousands back in 1988, he set the Islamic Republic’s course. His anointed successor, Ali Khamenei, would exhibit no such compunction about the use of violence against political enemies. And the man who would have been Leader, Ayatollah Hossein Ali Montazeri, would end his life as the voice of conscience from outside the system he had helped create.

Montazeri was eighty-seven years old in the summer of 2009. Of the election, he remarked that “
nobody in their right mind” could believe that the votes had been fairly counted. “This is neither Islamic, nor a republic,” Montazeri stated. He reminded the security forces who beat unarmed protesters that “receiving orders will not excuse them before God.” On the matter of Kahrizak, Montazeri would admonish Khamenei that to close the facility was not enough. The building had committed no crime, but those who had would go on to torture and kill another day.

In a fatwa of July 11, 2009, the ayatollah addressed those who demanded that Mousavi furnish evidence of fraud. The burden of proof was on the other side. It was the duty of public servants, Montazeri insisted, to convince the public that they deserved its trust, and to do so before a truly impartial judge. As for the people, if they believed their government was illegitimate and that it persisted in power “by force or deception,” they had a positive obligation to demand its dismissal. Just as Khomeini had done in 1979, he quoted Imam Ali, the leader of the Shiites: “Do not abandon the principle of ‘enjoining to righteousness and dissuading from evil’ for then the worst among you will dominate you and your prayers will not be heard.” The Islamic morality police had long insisted that by flogging women for improper hijab, they were “enjoining to righteousness and dissuading from evil.” Now Montazeri reclaimed that principle as a call for resistance against an unjust state.

When the regime abandoned its commitment to justice, Montazeri wrote, its people were no longer obliged to protect it. The real attack on Islamic rule was the one carried out from within the regime: “How is it imaginable that through injustice and un-Islamic acts, a just and Islamic regime would be secured and strengthened?” Montazeri reminded the clerics in power that the Prophet Mohammad would not have accorded “one iota of legal or religious value” to confessions attained in prison, and
that as servants of the people, politicians had no business abridging the freedoms of speech and assembly. Said Montazeri:

A regime that is based on club-wielding, injustice, violation of rights, usurpation and adulteration of votes, murder, subjugation, incarceration, medieval and Stalinist tortures, repression, censorship of newspapers and means of communication, imprisonment of the thinkers and elites of the society on trumped-up charges and extraction of false confessions—especially when these are extracted under duress—is condemned and unworthy before religion, reason and the world’s wise observers.