Roya Hakakian: Under the Veil

He walks the streets of Stuttgart dressed in an indistinct plaid shirt and a pair of denims, which are further obscured by the long black winter coat men of all stripes hide themselves in against the cold. He would have entirely blended in the urban landscape as just another pedestrian were it not for the silvery hair that set him almost aglow, framing his deeply-tanned skin and dark mustache, giving him the appearance of someone more respectable than the rest. The impression is further accentuated by the way he walks so attentively beside the woman at his arm, his wife of 40 years whom he treats like a bride of four days. Nothing else distinguishes this nearly unknown German who seems like an existential speck in the routine life of this old city—the very same man who is a towering, yet unknown figure in the history of Iran’s democratic movement. 

His name is Bruno Jost. He readily admits that his life changed on September 18, 1992. And his wife, Angela, is quick to add that so did hers, and that of their two children. She tells this for my benefit, who, living on the distant American continent, might not be aware of the tsunami that day brought to their lives: The day her husband was assigned as the federal prosecutor to investigate the killings of four Iranian Kurds at a Berlin restaurant called Mykonos. In turn, I tell her that because neither she nor her husband ran from that tsunami, the lives of a whole generation of Iranians have forever changed. They grin doubtfully at me, thinking my statement another hyperbole by a sentimental Iranian. But I make my case:

Dozens of Iranian exiles had already been assassinated—in Washington, DC, Rome, London, Paris, Geneva, and Vienna. Though the trail of the killers always led to the doorstep of the Iranian embassies around the world, no other prosecutor had ever dared, or possessed enough evidence to, name Tehran as the mastermind behind those operations. In November 1996, after a four-year investigation, Bruno Jost presented his final statement to Berlin’s High Court, the Kammergericht, to become the first prosecutor to go beyond the incidental underlings in his custody and name their chief commander, Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.

Tehran was not alone in its rage over the fearless prosecutor, against whom many fatwas were issued by a medley of mullahs throughout the country. Bonn was also seething at the uncompromising lawyer to whom several senior officials referred as the “fucking prosecutor who is wrecking everything with Iran over a few dead bodies!”

These were the pre-9/11 days when the West thought itself impervious to the violence that Islamic radicals were waging against their own—in this case, Tehran was against its political opposition, as well as artists, writers, and intellectuals. Helmut Kohl’s administration did everything it could to make the case disappear. Oddly, the most fundamental lessons of WWII were lost on the very leadership that had more reason to commit them to memory than the rest—first, they assassinated the Iranian exiles on European soil and the Western politicians did not say anything, because they were not Iranians, until they came for the World Trade Center, and the London subway, and Madrid trains…

I doubt Bruno Jost had Bishop Niemoller’s warning in mind when he drafted his final statement from which some of his superiors asked that he strike the name of Iran’s Supreme Leader. (Jost only said that he would happily drop the name, but as the text would not be his any longer, he refused to be the one presenting it to the court). He was simply doing his job, he still insists, exercising the law just as he was taught, within the boundaries of what some argue to be the best and most independent judicial system in the world. Indeed much of the credit for that historic trial and judgment does go to the German justice system in which neither prosecutors, nor judges, are political appointees or beholden to politicians for professional advancement. Thus, they were able to consider the case on the merits of the facts before them, and ultimately implicate Tehran.

The trial that, to Tehran’s relief, finally ended in 1997, was only the beginning for the intelligentsia living inside the country. Thinkers and journalists, among them Akbar Ganji, began to investigate the unsolved murders of several prominent figures within Iran and they, too, began to name the clerical leadership as the culprit behind those crimes. Once the sanctity of the clerics was thrown into question, once the taboo was shattered, a whole new generation dared to question what they never had, albeit only few may know the origin of their transformation, or the unassuming man behind it—Bruno Jost.