By Kelly Jane Torrance
Hassan
Rouhani was sworn in for his second term as president of Iran on August
5,
surrounded by fresh flowers, fervent followers, and around 500 foreign
officials. Representatives of the United Kingdom, France, the United Nations,
and the Vatican rubbed shoulders with the Syrian prime minister, Hezbollah
second-in-command Naim Qassem, Palestinian Islamic Jihad leader and FBI Most
Wanted Terrorists list member Ramadan Abdullah Shallah, and murderous
Zimbabwean dictator Robert Mugabe. The Westerners didn’t seem uncomfortable in
such company; indeed, European Union foreign policy chief Federica Mogherini
was described as the star of the show after Iranian members of parliament
elbowed through the crowd to take selfies with the diplomat.
But
why should they have been bothered? They were in Tehran, after all, to
celebrate the renewed rule of a man who has overseen a steady increase in
killings—Iran has the world’s highest per capita execution rate. Three days
before Rouhani’s inauguration, Amnesty International released a damning report
on conditions in the country: “Iran’s judicial and security bodies have waged a
vicious crackdown against human rights defenders since Hassan Rouhani became
president in 2013, demonizing and imprisoning activists who dare to stand up
for people’s rights.” The press release capping Mogherini’s visit didn’t
mention the European-based organization’s report—or human rights issues at
all—instead focusing on “the EU’s unwavering commitment to” the Joint
Comprehensive Plan of Action nuclear deal. It’s unlikely Mogherini brought up
the subject even in her private meetings: She was pictured smiling in multiple
photo-ops with government officials.
A month earlier, a
young Iranian woman told me how she and her fellow reformers feel when they see
such images. “We know with every negotiation with this regime, every shaking
hand with this regime, it means one more gallows in the streets,” Shabnam Madadzadeh
said sadly. “They close their eyes to human rights in Iran,” she said of
Westerners who deal with the regime and many members of the media who report on
it. “They kill humanity, in themselves firstly, and after that in Iran.”
Madadzadeh speaks with
a seriousness that belies her age. In a hound’s-tooth blazer, black pants,
glasses with wine-colored frames, and a headscarf in shades of deep rose, the
29-year-old unfurled her passion in complete paragraphs. Her mustachioed and
bespectacled 32-year-old brother, Farzad, wore a black suit and white shirt,
sans tie. Intense but friendly, he continued his sister’s thought: “The biggest
mistake that anybody can make when looking at Iran is to distinguish between
Rouhani and [Supreme Leader Ali] Khamenei. If you just look at the law related
to the elections in Iran, nobody can become president of Iran unless Khamenei
has endorsed them. So whatever differences they have on one thing, they are
united maintaining this regime, keeping it in power at any cost.”
It’s no surprise the
pair project a certain depth. Shabnam and Farzad Madadzadeh spent five years as
political prisoners in Iran. The siblings were tortured in front of each other
and repeatedly threatened with execution. They fled the country: separately,
illegally, dangerously. What is extraordinary is that after so lately enduring
such horrors, never knowing if they’d make it out alive—and learning that many
friends did not—they’re able not only to smile but laugh repeatedly in the
course of a five-hour conversation. They were joined in the lobby of a Paris
airport hotel by a fellow dissident, Arash Mohammadi. He had the same mustache
as his countryman but wore a blue blazer, blue pants, and a blue checked shirt.
He’s only 25 but can be as grave as the Madadzadehs. A jocularity comes through
in his playful smile, however—even though he’s been jailed three times,
enduring torture in each stint.
All three escaped from
Iran recently: Shabnam less than a year ago, Arash about a year ago, and Farzad
just under two years ago. And here they were, cracking up in mirth watching a
YouTube video. They’d wanted me to see an example of the work of Mohsen, a
comedian whose parodies make Pake Shadi the most popular
program on a subversive satellite television network. He’s so famous in Iran
that even prison interrogators mention his material. In this one, he inserted
himself into state television footage of the funeral earlier this year of
former Iranian president Hashemi Rafsanjani. Khamenei watches as Mohsen leads
the crowd in a chant of mourning. In the front row, top regime
officials—notorious thugs such as Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps commander
Mohammad Ali Jafari and Quds Force leader Qassem Suleimani—play up their grief
for the camera. Mohsen intones, “Hashemi is waiting for us; let’s go” . . .
to hell. The comedian notes that Rafsanjani, as a founder of the Islamic
Republic, was buried next to longtime supreme leader Ruhollah Khomeini: “Now it
is Khamenei’s turn!” In between laughs, the Iranians explain just how provocative
the video is. “So in the middle of the mourning ritual, he starts dancing like
that. It’s ripping all the taboos,” said Hanif Jazayeri, the men’s translator.
“And this means that Hashemi is waiting for Rouhani,” added Shabnam, who speaks
fluent English.
The video is a
high-quality production and YouTube offers an English translation. But
Westerners might need explication anyway: Rafsanjani and Rouhani are regularly
referred to in the West, by politicians and the press, as “moderates.” The
Iranians find that notion almost as hilarious as Mohsen’s satire. I read them a
line from the recent election analysis of a major American newspaper: “Many
Iranians gravitate toward Mr. Rouhani because of his relatively tolerant views
on freedom of expression.” All three laughed heartily. But the talk soon turned
serious.
“If there was freedom
of expression in Iran, what are we three doing here? I mean, leaving behind
your family is not easy, you know? We had to leave our university, our family,
our best friends,” Arash said. When they do talk to people back home, they do
so very carefully—contact with escaped dissidents could mean imprisonment for
their friends and family. The trio did not want the exact dates of their
escapes published, nor the location of their current homes, other than that
they’re in Europe. The siblings don’t even live in the same city, for security
reasons.
Iranian foreign
minister Javad Zarif declared in a 2015 interview with Charlie Rose, “We do not
jail people for their opinions. The government has a plan to improve, enhance
human rights in the country, as every government should.” The PBS interviewer
did not question these claims. Neither did the many friendly—almost
gushing—reporters Zarif spoke with on his visit to the United States last month.
Arash Mohammadi and Shabnam and Farzad Madadzadeh provide more evidence—if any
is needed—that such statements are simply lies.
Shabnam and Farzad
were arrested in 2009, before the uprisings over the suspicious reelection
results of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad that would turn into the Green
Movement. They were seized on the street. Their family, not knowing what had
happened, called hospitals to see if they’d been in an accident and searched
for the pair for months. Shabnam was studying computer science at Tehran’s
Tarbiat Moalem University and was a leader in the reformist student group
Tahkim-e Vahdat. Farzad was a nonviolent activist and supporter of the
resistance group People’s Mojahedin Organization of Iran (PMOI), best known in
the West for revealing details of the regime’s theretofore hidden nuclear
program. “I was 23 when I was arrested, and the torture started then,” Farzad
recounted. He and his sister were held separately in solitary confinement for
months. Questioning would begin around 8 a.m. and last 12 to 14 hours. “In each
of the interrogation sessions, I was beaten. They wanted me to confess to
crimes that I had not committed,” Farzad said. They wanted him to publicly
renounce the PMOI (also called Mujahedin-e Khalq, or MEK) and the NationalCouncil of Resistance of Iran. “They told me, ‘You come and do an interview
against the PMOI, the MEK, and the NCRI,’ ” he said. “They would throw me on
the ground and treat me like a football between three people. . . . Several
times they did this to me in front of Shabnam’s eyes in order to break her.”
His sister will never
forget her own months in solitary confinement. “The interrogator told me,
‘Okay, nobody can hear you. We are alone here, and we can do everything we
want.’ ” She could regularly hear the voices of other prisoners being tortured;
some later told her they had been raped. She was tortured herself, and the only
time she could see her brother was when they brought him to be tortured in
front of her. Even after she left solitary confinement, she was often deprived
of the few visits allowed with family because she told them about the appalling
conditions of the prisons and the gruesome treatment of prisoners. Four people
would share a cell, with three thin blankets each to sleep on; windows would be
left open even in winter. Captives were taken to use the bathroom just three
times a day, and not at times of their choosing. Having to hold it in gave
Shabnam serious medical problems. “About 11 months to a year after our arrest,
there was a trial. For five minutes, it lasted,” Farzad said. They were both
given five-year sentences and moved from Evin Prison to the even harsher
Gohardasht Prison.
“Many of my friends
during this period that I was in prison, they were executed. Some of them, they
died in front of my eyes because of the illnesses they had or because they were
tortured so much and because of their conditions they died in front of me,”
Farzad reported. He can rattle off the names of friends executed after death
sentences. “Ali Saremi. Jafar Kazemi. Mamadali Hojari. Farzad Kamangar. Farhad
Vakili.” Mohsen Dokmechi died of pancreatic cancer after jailers refused him
medical treatment.
He expected the same
fate. “I remember the moment that I was arrested, taken to the car, and I was
in front of the door of Ward 209 of Evin. I told myself, ‘You’re going in here,
but you’re not coming out of here.’ Because I knew where I had come. Because I
had heard what happens here.”
While the siblings
each served one long sentence, Arash had multiple shorter stints in prison: He
was arrested twice under President Ahmadinejad and once under President
Rouhani. He was a 19-year-old studying industrial management at Tabriz
University when he started gathering with other students concerned about the
plight of workers in the country, especially children (factory work can start
at ages as young as 6 or 7, and drug addiction with it). “If somebody just goes
and walks down the streets for 10 minutes, maybe they would see a hundred kids
working on the streets,” Arash said. Besides toiling in factories, children
sell small items: chewing gum, socks, even “luck poems,” often randomly chosen
excerpts from the work of 14th-century Persian poet Hafez. “If they don’t work,
they will be starving,” Arash said. “When the government rounds them up and
arrests them, instead of assisting them, helping them with their problems, they
take them” to juvenile correction facilities, where the conditions can be worse
than on the streets. “They are even raped there, in those centers.” He knows of
a 9-year-old girl who worked in a sewing factory who underwent such trauma.
“The main problem is
that the Iranian government actually doesn’t even acknowledge that such a
problem exists,” Arash said. Calling attention to it was an implicit criticism
of the government. “Although we were campaigning for children’s rights or
worker’s rights, they would charge us for things like insulting the supreme
leader, insulting the sanctities, and things that nowhere in the world is a
charge,” he said. “Because the Iranian regime, they want to say that this is
the best place on earth. Neither during our time in prison, neither now, the
regime does not accept that it has political prisoners.” Arash was taken from
his home at 5 a.m. “They told my family, ‘We have to speak to him for about an
hour, then he’ll come back.’ ” He spent a couple of weeks in solitary
confinement and was sentenced to a year in prison. “They constantly brought a
paper in front of us and said, ‘Either you have to answer these questions like
this, or you’re going to be executed.’ ”
He was next arrested
after trying to aid victims of the 2012 earthquakes in the Iranian province of
Azerbaijan. “The government didn’t want people to know what had happened
there,” Arash said. It wasn’t the natural disaster the regime was trying to
hide. “There were a number of villages that didn’t have even the basic of
facilities like electricity, water,” he reported. “The IRGC, the RevolutionaryGuards, had come there and they had closed off the routes to the villages.”
Dozens of people were arrested for trying to help victims and locate survivors
trapped under the rubble.
“The primary thing of
importance for the regime is for the people not to become alert as to the
problems that exist there. That’s their number-one priority,” Arash said. “It’s
100 percent a danger as a threat to the regime because it’ll become clear that
for 38, 39 years, this government has done nothing for the people.”
Arash was detained yet
again the day after Rouhani was announced the winner of the 2013 presidential
race. “During his election and campaigning, he had promised to free all
political prisoners. And so as soon as it was announced, we went in front of
his campaign headquarters, and we started to chant, ‘All political prisoners
must be freed,’ ” Arash said. He quickly became one himself.
That third stint in
prison was the final straw. He realized that if he didn’t leave the country,
he’d eventually be sentenced to death. Farzad and Shabnam also made the
difficult decision to flee. “When I was released from prison, immediately a lot
of problems started to come about, and I was being followed and being
monitored,” Farzad said. “I couldn’t work. I couldn’t get by, live.”
Shabnam had the same
experience. “When I was released, they didn’t allow me to continue my studies.
They didn’t allow me to have a job.” She still worries about her female
friends, especially, “under the clutches of the misogynistic regime.”
Recalling why he left
his homeland reminded Arash why he started fighting for its freedom in the
first place.
We
are some youth, and naturally no youth want to see hardship. The youth of Iran
are just like the youth in America and Europe. They want the same things. But
when we reached a certain age, we looked around us and we saw that there are
some things are happening, and people are being killed in the streets. People
are being hanged in the streets. We also knew that in this regime, for the past
38 years there has been a current, a faction, that constantly says, “We’re
reformists, we’re reformists.” But we saw that there was no reform. So we
realized that the dictatorship needs to be overthrown.
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