Roya Hakakian: Under the Veil

A year has passed since the 2009 elections in Iran, but the regime has not. Nor is this the same regime of pre -2009. A certain democratic mask, which many pundits once saw as the true face of an authentic Islamic — albeit imperfect — democracy, fell off Tehran’s face. The waves of assault on and executions of activists have all but ended whatever illusions had existed about Tehran’s brutality. As the global Christian community unanimously and justifiably pillories the Vatican over sexual abuse by their clergy, some even calling for the resignation of the pope for bygone cases, scores of young Iranian men and women activists were raped in Iranian prisons in recent months while the supreme leader, the pope of the Shiite world, looked on and continues to rule without a challenge from the global Islamic community (click here).

Any doubts that may have lingered about the nature of Iran’s republic fell away over these months as it became clear that it is the Revolutionary Guard Corp, the religious junta, who are in charge today.

These shifts in the perception of Iran, however, are mostly limited to observers around the world. The passage of this year has registered differently among Iranians living inside the country. A group of experts, who shall go unnamed, drew a random sample consisting of 500 individuals nationwide to measure the dominant perceptions within Iranian society — on the prospects of the regime’s fall, their faith in their own ability to enable this collectively, and their ideas about the tactics that could facilitate such a change.

The results, hardly uplifting, speak to the current general frustration nationwide. The pollsters have observed a sharp rise among the educated, upper middle class Iranians to emigrate —Australia and Canada are the two most popular destinations. Other alarming trends are also on the rise. There is a growing disappointment with the two former presidential candidates, Messrs. Moussavi and Karroubi, both with the depth of their commitment to a complete overhaul of the current political system and in their ability to lead the nation through the process. Disillusionment about the effectiveness of peaceful and nonviolent protests as the means for political change is also growing. 

Grim as they appear, these results are not surprising. In the grip of brutality at home, Iranians must undoubtedly feel forsaken by the international community which, despite their suffering, expresses a singular concern with Tehran: the nukes! The recent UN resolution and the murmur of a new rhetoric on the part of the State Department is only a fledgling voice that must yet to prove as genuine before it could be heard, or believed. Neither the EU nor the US has paid more than the occasional official lip service to fight the violations of human rights in Iran. Could it appear anything other than a grand riddle, if not a betrayal, to an average Iranian who sees the US invest billions in dollars and tens of thousands in uniformed men to install democracies in Iraq and Afghanistan while doing nothing to support Iran’s homegrown democratic movement that would cost America nothing?

The January earthquake in Haiti spurred one of the most glorious displays of global solidarity. The June 2009 political-quake in Iran has yet to do the same. What drives Americans to sport a yellow ribbon in the memory of soldiers fighting wars on behalf of democracy is all the logic necessary to drive them to wear a green wristband in the memory of those fighting the same war in Iran. But all this can only begin at home, in a White House that shows as much commitment to stopping Tehran’s nukes and its does to end its abuses.

At the 2010 Cannes Film Festival, the eyes of the actress, Juliet Binoche, were luminous with her quintessential innocence as she rested her award on the podium to hold up the name of the imprisoned Iranian film director and Green Movement sympathizer, Jafar Pahani, to plead for his freedom.

The festival had hardly ended when Panahi was released on $200,000 bail, and I realized that perhaps hope shines as brightly as innocence. While Binoche cannot singlehandedly be credited with Panahi’s release, she surely deserves co-directorial title. My hat goes off to her!

The news from Iran’s prisons is usually bleak, making the handful of miraculous tales that have defied the pattern worth pondering. Another success story worth revisiting happened in the fall of 1996, when Faraj Sarkouhi, the editor in chief of Iran’s most celebrated literary monthly, went missing. Having arrived at Tehran’s airport to board a flight to Germany, he seemed to have stepped into an abyss, sometime after he reached the tarmac and before his plane touched down on the other continent. The customs records documented his departure from Iran, but his family, expecting his arrival in Frankfurt, never received him.

Official Iranian press treated the incident as a mystery but the public did not buy it, and rightly so. Within days, a wrenching letter surfaced. The editor had written it in a rushed scrawl, bemoaning his captivity at the hands of the Ministry of Intelligence, which had snatched him away from the stairs of the plane. Still, the regime went on to deny that he was in their custody. Then a most unexpected event forced the hands of the captors. The global insurance company that covered Iran’s flights while airborne threatened to terminate its contract, citing the disappearance as evidence that Iran Air was unfit for coverage. The termination would have brought all international air travel — cargo and passenger, both to and from Tehran — to a halt.

Hours later, the missing man was found! Appearing even more gaunt and ashen than usual, the editor stood before a cadre of reporters and announced that he had accidently lost his way and strayed from the airport in the direction of Armenia for the past two weeks! Even in Iran, where absurdity was accepted governmental practice, the outrageous assertion, redefining Kafkaesque as Tehranesque, set a new record. 

My wise fellow blogger, James Kirchick, does not have such celebrity cases in mind when he voices his pessimism about the effectiveness of protest campaigns in stopping Tehran’s execution plans. Though I more than share his skepticism, these examples show that certain pressures do move even the most immovable. The world cannot ask Tehran to end its abuses — it’d be asking a vulture not to circle the air above a bleeding prey. But pressure can limit the scope and lessen the extent of those abuses. While global protest campaigns will not force the clerics out of power, they can at least end the open season on political prisoners in Iran.

Just as pressure on Iran’s nuclear program has hampered the regime, sending its leaders to the far-flung corners of the globe to seek the intervention of allies, so can pressure on the regime’s abuses be effective. Letter writing, among other efforts, as part of a broader campaign to exert pressure on Iran’s disregard for the human rights of its citizens, is something that everyone rooting for change in Iran can do to help the movement within. While the regime’s bullets can kill a few, silence and anonymity in the face of such executions can kill the thousands of spirits who are working for change in Iran.

A former senior intelligence officer at Iran’s Ministry of Intelligence once described to me Tehran’s diplomatic style with the West as “tractor-trailer diplomacy.”

“Give us what we demand, or we’ll blow up something of yours with a truck-full of explosives, or take a hostage, or whatever else it might take,” said the former officer, now a defector living in Germany. Then he went on to list the instances where the West had relented against Iran’s misconduct, dropped charges, deported individuals accused or guilty of crimes in Europe to the custody of Iran — in essence, rewarded the rogue behavior.

Which is how Iran successfully conducted “tractor-trailer diplomacy” again this week. Last July, Iranian officials arrested Clotilde Reiss, a young French student in Tehran who subsequently confessed, like so many other prisoners, to charges of espionage. From the staggering heap of spies caught in Iran since June 2009 — whose numbers far surpass the amount of intelligence that could possibly exist for gathering —  the French spy was picked to be freed. Her two five-year sentences were commuted for the price of three billion rials and one man. The relatives of Reiss supplied the three billion, and President Sarkozy supplied the man: Ali Vakili Rad — the assassin of Iran’s former prime minister, Shapour Bakhtiar.

If the mark of Europe’s great civilization is its rule of law, Tehran’s clerics have successfully exposed, time and again, the many imperfections of that civilization by forcing Europe to break that rule by allowing them to be above it. In a September 2009 interview, when asked if he would ever consider releasing Prime Minister Bakhtiar’s assassin to Iran, Sarkozy cast an indignant look at his interviewer and replied adamantly: “No!” in rejection of what he called “blackmail.”

Less than a year later, the presidential “no” turned into “yes,” blackmail mere bartering, and Sarkozy, Europe’s most staunch opponent of Iran, relented, as have so many of his predecessors in France and elsewhere since 1979. François Mitterrand, citing “national interest” had also released the Lebanese assassin who first attempted to kill Prime Minister Bakhtiar in 1981. When the beloved leader of Iran’s Democratic Party of Kurdistan and two of his deputies were assassinated in Vienna in 1989, the Austrian police worked tirelessly to finally arrest one of the killers, only to watch Austrian politicians escort their prisoner to the airport to return him to Tehran. Just as Germany, in December 2008, deported two prisoners sentenced to life on charges of a similar assassination within weeks after Iran released another “spy,” a German tourist named Donald Klein, who had been arrested while fishing in Iranian waters. And the list goes on.

Scores of Iranian exiles have been killed throughout Europe, yet Europe, in defiance of the US, or in loyalty to its own trade interests, has allowed Iran to breathe new life into the cliché “get away with murder.”

Is there any wonder, then, why Europe’s Middle Eastern immigrants resist assimilation? Over and over again, Europe has shown that not all murders are equally punishable and that some victims are more expendable than others. If the laws that are to be absolute bend and make exceptions for one group, for Iranians in these cases, why should any group of newcomers in Europe ever trust those laws or swear allegiance to those constitutions?

Five young Iranian Kurds were executed last Sunday in summary trials reminiscent of the era that immediately followed the fall of the Shah and the rise of Ayatollah Khomeini in Iran. Even according to government-backed press, the victims had been kept incommunicado for most of their imprisonment and had little or no access to lawyers — a violation of Iran’s own laws. Gone are the regime’s efforts at keeping up pretenses, at casting itself as the authentic but misunderstood regional democracy. The evolutionary clock, which the West briefly believed to have been ticking in Tehran, positively wound down last week. Tehran’s Neanderthals bared themselves to reveal their ancestral constitution, acting precisely according to the dictates of their immutable, reform-defying DNA, and resumed bloodletting. Iranians who remember waking up in late February and March of 1979 to the startling images in their morning papers of bare-chested corpses with unzipped trousers — executed atop the roof of Ayatollah Khomeini’s residence the night before — recognize the biological references of the last few lines.

Fear of collapse for Iran’s regime is always measurable by the number of heads that fall. Last week, Tehran’s paranoia shot up on the scale, and so, five were executed. It’s the kind of tragedy that can best be relayed with simplicity, even austerity, which Iran’s foremost contemporary poet, Ahmad Shamlu, once captured in the opening lines of a poem:

The news was brief 
They were executed.

And so, they were: Four men and one woman, a beloved 34-year-old teacher and social worker among them. Two were allegedly members of an armed group, though the evidence against them was not presented at the trial. Against the other three, the charges added up to a vague allusion to “intent.” They had surely been tortured, for the authorities refused to return their bodies to their families. Besides, they know that there is nothing like a coffin to draw out Iranians to the streets by the thousands.  

What distinguishes this particular round of executions from others in the past few years is the swiftness by which it was carried out. Not even the families of the victims had been informed of what was coming. Dispensing with previous, albeit hollow, decorum, the regime refused to abide by its own constitution and go through the motions of a trial. There were no efforts to disguise the process as fair, not even by the shabby internal standards. Unexpected as they came, the executions were meant to deliver the nation a jolt, a reminder that Tehran has shed all civilized facades. It was a brazen display to which the opposition leader, Moussavi, referred in a statement as the end of the judiciary in Iran and a clear sign that the court systems are nothing but an arm of the state.

The enmity between Iran’s regime and the Kurds is as old as the regime itself. The Ayatollah never had any use for ethnic diversity. When, in the early days after his rise to power, it became clear to him that the Kurds were not about to jettison their distinct heritage for the sake of his dream of a united Islamic front, he called for jihad against them, which he waged both within Iran and beyond, even in Austria and Germany, where prominent Kurdish leaders were assassinated.

But this latest round of executions is about more than the old enmity with the Kurds. It is Tehran’s signal to the nation about what to expect in case of any forthcoming unrest in the weeks ahead, as June 12th marks the first anniversary of 2009 elections. There is an alarming twist to this particular maneuver. Though the executions are clearly meant to force the Green activists to abandon their anniversary plans, the victims were not Green activists. Tehran would not risk shedding the blood of the Green leaders and hand a coffin to the already charged masses. Instead, it is doing what it has always done best — it leaves those in the spotlight unharmed to chase the vulnerable who are in the shadows. That, too, is an old pattern of the regime’s — a maneuver that was first tested in November of 1979 after the takeover of the American Embassy. When the world’s gaze was fixed on the gates of the embassy where the 52 diplomats were locked up inside, the regime rounded up newspapers and arrested, imprisoned and executed the opposition. Today, once again, Tehran is rounding up old enemies, ravaging the most vulnerable — Kurds, members of the religious Bahai minority, homosexuals, the old political opposition not associated with the Green movement.

And what ought the rest of us who reject such savagery do? For the moment, as the families of the dead are denied the right to mourn their loved ones, we must first heed our most primordial intuitions: Say prayers and hold vigils in their memory. Together, we must deny Tehran the luxury of shadows. We must illuminate all dark spaces, the anonymous faces, by remembering. Simply, even austerely, we must relay the names of the five victims — blog, tweet, text, post, scribe, and shout:

The news was brief
They were executed:

•  Farzad Kamangar
•  Ali Heidarian
•  Farhad Vakili
•  Mehdi Islamian
•  Shirin Alam-Houyee

Roya Hakakian will be on book leave to complete her manuscript: The Assassins of the Turquoise Palace to be published by Grove/Atlantic Press. Her next blog will appear at the end of the month.