Читать книгу A State of Fear - My 10 Years Inside Iran's Torture Jails - Dr Reza Ghaffari - Страница 9
ОглавлениеThese days, as I stare up at the ceiling, unable to sleep because of constant nagging pains from my injuries, I sometimes ask myself how the hell I got into such a mess. My answer starts with the stories of Iran’s own tragedies. It was once Britain’s unofficial colony. During the 19th century it was strategically important but took on a new importance with oil. When BP moved in, the British government was not far behind. They began to buy off the backward tribal chiefs and destabilise the democratic government introduced after 1907.
In 1920 the British played a key part in installing Reza Shah as dictator – a man who had a nasty little habit of cutting out the tongues of those who criticised him openly – but he started paying court to the Nazis. While I was growing up in the early 1950s, the British were at it again. This time, under a Labour government, they didn’t like a democratically-elected government wanting a fairer share of the oil riches.
Everyone in our family was kept informed about what was going on by my grandfather. He would come home each evening with a basket of food in one hand and a copy of the nationalist paper Shouresh (Rebellion) in the other. We would sit and listen to him reading the latest court intrigues. I sat close, keen to hear every word. In the paper I saw and liked a cartoon of Churchill, complete with dicky bow and tails, dancing cheek to cheek with the Shah’s twin sister, Ashraf. The editor, Karimpur Shirazi, hammered the political point of the cartoon with an editorial raging against the monarchy’s collaboration with imperialism, and in particular BP.
My father was a carpenter who left home around half past five every morning to work in a factory two miles away that produced doors and windows. I was the first born and, when I was six, I went to help my father at his work. I used to hold the end of the planks as my father fed them through the machines. He called me his right hand. The noise and smells, hustle and bustle of the workshop were captivating. I was very happy, playing with the piles of fine sawdust on the factory floor. It was official: I was a grown-up.
We used to get home at about six in in the evening, where our evening meal would be waiting. But not everyone was happy. When I was ten, my grandparents decided to have it out with my father and told him I was out of control and needed to go to school. In truth, when I watched my friends carrying their books to and from school, I did feel jealous. Even at that young age I knew that, without any real education, I faced a bleak future. My father could not read or write a word, even his own name. He agreed that education was essential if I was to avoid his fate and so I started school, albeit as a late developer. I realised from the outset that this was my only life-raft; the penalty for failure was to finish up like my father.
My mother was born in 1927, some two decades after the proclamation of the universal right to secular education. Nevertheless, like my father, she never learnt to read and write. She was married at 11 and was 12 when I was born. By 20 she had given birth to no less than six children. She was dead by 35, totally exhausted by the birth of her tenth child. She was always a distant figure to me, having yet more children, suckling one baby from the breast, breaking ice during the freezing winter to get water to wash clothes for the others. She never had any opportunity to get to know any of us – that was the way things were in a society that saw child brides as perfectly normal. Her own mother died in her mid-40s of a heart attack while she was washing clothes by hand. The cycle went on, unfortunately. My sisters never had any education to speak of and Khomeini went on to ‘turn back the clock’ so women could be buried up to the neck and stoned to death for such crimes as adultery.
The years after World War II were a golden age by comparison. Ideas of all kinds were allowed to flourish. Britain had been seriously weakened and its grip on Iran had slackened. The introduction of Soviet troops in the north had inspired many and rocked the ruling class. The country was ripe for change. My grandfather was a simple working man who made quilts for a living – for the Shah’s court – but rather than being a sycophantic flunkey, he somehow knew who his real friends and enemies were. Like millions of others, we were all strong supporters of Mohammad Mossadegh, the prime minister who was democratically elected in 1951.
He was overturned in 1953 with the help of the CIA and Britain’s MI5. My family’s favourite newspaper editor, Karimpur Shirazi, was murdered in prison and his charred remains displayed on posters to ensure that everyone got the message. Richard Nixon, the new vice president of the United States, came over to review the handiwork of the leaders of the new regime. He condemned Mossadegh as a communist and told the Shah that, ‘the coup would establish an island of stability in the turbulent waters of the Persian Gulf.’
Massacres and persecutions were a feature of this new ‘island of stability’, including the arrest of 500 Tudeh sympathisers in the officer corps, most of whom were executed. Everyone kept their heads down. I buried myself in my studies but stayed true to my allegiance to Mossadegh’s ideals, joining others to chant support for him during our 15-minute meal breaks, taking part in demonstrations, and distributing leaflets in support of his party, the National Front. There was no going back for me and I threw myself into the world of the political activist.
I was far to the right of the Tudeh party but I agreed to distribute their leaflets at the school. My luck ran out when, two months after the coup, a hostile teacher caught me and I was hauled before the military authorities and interned in an open air military camp in the centre of Tehran. I was badly beaten, once after my arrest and again after reaching the camp. My home was ransacked and the few books I had confiscated. My arrest even made the national news when they said that I had been arrested for failing to stand up in the cinema before a patriotic song for the Shah. I was eventually released after five months, but was barred from school for a year.
Years later I entered a military training college. The principal hauled me in and, after praising my grades, stated bluntly that I had no future in the armed forces as I would always be politically suspect. This had a devastating effect as my dream had been to work my way into the officer corps and to get rid of the Shah, opening the way back to democracy. But if I left now I would be required to pay back the entire cost of my education. I had to find a way to square the circle. Six months later, after I had passed all my examinations with distinction and moved to the officers training corps, I sneaked out of my barracks. My heart racing, I used a lamppost to clamber over the barbed wire perimeter.
After some time in hiding I was free to go to the University of Tehran. I passed the entrance examinations in five faculties but I still didn’t feel safe. I qualified for a place at a foreign university, but was not granted a visa despite many applications. An exasperated official eventually whispered, ‘You might have passed our exams but you have failed Savak’s. Talk to them if you want to know.’
I finally got permission through my one and only contact with the intelligence services. My father was appalled at the astronomic costs of the US, but the family had a whip-round and, in 1961, I made my way to Wyoming. I took any job that would pay. My fellow students were convinced that I owned at least half a dozen oil wells in Iran and I gave them some cock and bull story about a delayed inheritance. College jobs and summer holiday work enabled me to pay my way to a degree at Brigham Young University in Utah. Initially, I studied petroleum engineering, but moved into economics. I did not forget the huge sacrifice the family had made and saved enough to send back $1,000.
After moving to New York I was able to combine my doctorate with covert campaigning against the Shah (I still have copies of my articles for International and the American Militant, credited to ‘Kaveh Ahangar’). By 1974, the year I returned home to Iran, I had established a reputation as a young tenured lecturer.
Savak had not forgotten me and were unimpressed by the name I had made for myself in the US. With the temperature rising at home I found myself in the firing line once again. But by this time I had learned to box more cleverly, despite regular and extended chats with the secret police who watched my every move. I was a man with a mission. In Tehran I was working at one tenth of the salary I had been offered in the private sector. But money was not important. The real agenda was making contacts and building up influence as the regime moved inexorably into crisis. I accepted invitations to lecture at provincial universities throughout Iran to learn more about the people of my country, their problems and aspirations. It was also a useful method of familiarising myself with the geography of Iran as, after 12 years away, I was something of a stranger.
The 1953 coup had forced the left in Iran to reassess the future and take a long hard look at the nationalist politics of Mossadegh. Tudeh was discredited by failing to act to defend the gains made by the nationalisation movement. It then lost even more credibility when it appeared to subordinate itself to the foreign policy interests of the Soviet Union, which was trying to gain an economic foothold in Iran.
Young people in Tudeh and the National Front found alternative models in both the Cuban struggle as personified by Che Guevara and in the Vietcong’s battle in Vietnam. Their revolutionary ideals led to the formation of a dizzying array of political and religious groups, determined to change the regime. The Fedayeen was one of these groups and they were set up in 1970. Out of this organisation emerged the Rahe Kargar, originally called the Prison Boys. These Marxists broke with the politics of Guevarism and identified the working class as the main agency of revolution. Other young people in the National Front and the religious movement formed the Mojahedin, committed to armed struggle and social change. They were linked with Islam and their secular equivalent was Peykar, a Maoist group with overtones of Marxism-Leninism. They considered Albania ‘the most progressive socialist state in the universe’.
I had moved on too, politically. I still had a soft spot for Dr Mossadegh but now leaned towards some kind of socialism rather than nationalism. Yet the Soviet Union had shown itself to be repressive and China’s Maoist quasi-religious dogma was equally unappetising. Vietnam had demonstrated that the Third World could buck the trend and Castro’s Cuba seemed to offer the way out of tyranny. The Shah made his last visit to Washington to see President Carter in 1977 and we all seethed as he mouthed Nixon’s monstrous phrase about Iran being an ‘island of stability’. Could it be made to happen again? Could 1978 or 1979 be the year of another revolution… and more?
