Trying to find Darioush and Parvaneh Forouhar’s house for the first time, at the end of last year, I walked up Ferdowsi Street. I walked up Ferdowsi Street because I had got out of the taxi at the wrong place. Rather, the taxi driver, who was from south Tehran, and rarely ventured as far as the centre of the city, had stopped at the wrong place, in the wrong street, and I had got out without thinking. When I looked up, I saw I was way down Ferdowsi, a good twenty minutes from the Forouhars’ alley, which intersects Hedayat, about a mile to the northeast. I started walking up Ferdowsi’s eastern pavement, alongside the channel that runs north to south, its meltwater oily and black after flowing through half the city. I walked past the wall of the British Embassy. The shared taxis and buses kicked up a vile smoke.
It was hard to believe that this had been a sought-after area when the Forouhars, handsome and recently wed, moved in. But that, of course, was thirty or forty years ago, when it was glamorous to live in the lee of the smart European embassies, when being nice to foreigners was part of the Shah’s plans to attract inward investment, and part of his cronies’ plans to get rich. And the Forouhars, despite distrusting foreigners conceptually, rather liked them personally. What had been the source of Darioush Forouhar’s nationalist ideas, not to mention his secular republicanism, if not the outside world?
As I turned right off Ferdowsi, heading east down Hedayat, I saw a middle-aged man with grey, clean-shaven skin, wearing a tweed jacket and tie, also turn east, and walk ahead of me. His tie, an unmistakable statement of political nonconformism, made me think of Forouhar. I was delighted that we were going in the same direction. I began to imagine that this man, like me, was going to the Forouhars’ house.
In the old days, these streets must have been full of tie-wearers. There would have been the westernized Iranians and their self-conscious ties, and the foreigners and their broad loud ties; the expensive perfumes of their wives may have lain delicately over the fumes and the sweat. It was the time, in the mid-Seventies, when the five-star hotels (Hilton, Sheraton, Inter-Continental) were roaring with businessmen who had come to suggest to the Shah ways to dispose of his surplus oil revenues, and to stuff themselves with caviar poised on thinly sliced, crustless bread. (It was the time when almost all foreigners—save for a bright chap at the French Embassy, whose prescient report went unheeded—seemed not to have realized that Iran stood on a precipice.) The Shah’s westward-marching kingdom, its heart pumping (how weakly, it would turn out!) in central Tehran.
That was the time when, as the rest of the city trembled with fury and anticipation, the shops in Ferdowsi and the surrounding streets did brisk business in imported booze and Swiss Army knives, and head waiters spoke a smattering of French. It was the time when the streets were full of big American sports utility vehicles, some of them bearing diplomatic wives from the large US Embassy compound a little to the north, and the wives clutched the calling card of an antique dealer who would sell them a topless Qajar beauty (reproduction) and a mildewed handwritten nineteenth-century Koran (genuine) for less than the cost of a tank of gasoline back home.
We had come 200 yards up Hedayat. The grey-faced man had slowed down, and he seemed to be looking for something, perhaps a building number. He was the only person in the street who was wearing a tie. There was not a foreigner to be seen. He paused outside an electrical shop, and looked in the window.
1979. The Islamic Revolution. The Shah’s departure. Khomeini’s return from exile. The students’ occupation of the US Embassy compound, and the severance of bilateral relations. The banning of alcohol and the imposition of an obligatory head-covering for women. The replacement of the monarchy with the Islamic Republic. Eight years of war with Iraq. The Rushdie fervour and fatwa. Khomeini’s death, and the mourners flowing around him, like lava. The Rafsanjani presidency. All the while, the Islamic authorities, the clerics who now had the power, denouncing the corrupting influence of the necktie.
The man came out of the shop, holding a length of electric cable, and carried on walking up Hedayat, only this time much faster. A minute or two later, I realized that we had overshot the Forouhars’ alley; we had almost reached the far end of Hedayat. Disappointed that my hunch had been proved wrong, I retraced my steps, and found the alley. For some reason—pride? loyalty? economy?—Forouhar had carried on living in the middle of Tehran even after everyone else of his class had left. A man of the people, Forouhar, as only a patrician can be.
In the alley, most of the small brick houses with their wooden window frames had been knocked down and replaced with tiled tenements, storeys piled high. I came to a high, white gate, and rang the bell.
As I stood, waiting, I thought of Mahmoud Emami and four or five others, members of Forouhar’s tiny political party, waiting at the same gate one evening in 1998, wondering why the door had gone unanswered.
Emami had asked the youngest and most athletic of his companions to climb over the gate and let the rest of them in. Parvaneh Forouhar’s Renault 5 had been parked in the driveway. The outside light had been on.
My thoughts were interrupted by the sound of footsteps, and the white gate opened. The servant who had opened it gestured for me to come in. An old poodle waddled towards me to say hello. We climbed the low flight of steps that led to the front door, and went in.
We were in a gloomy hall. A woman’s voice called from upstairs. The servant ambled away from me and up the stairs, leaving me alone in the hall. To my left, there was a door leading into a large room, a sitting or dining room, whose only visible wall was dominated by a large portrait of Dr Mossadegh, the old nationalist prime minister who in 1951 dared to nationalize the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company, and got toppled (by the Shah, the army and the CIA) for his impertinence two years later. Darioush Forouhar would have been twenty-five years old then.
On the right-hand side of the corridor there was another room: Forouhar’s study.
That was where Emami and the others had found him, sitting in the chair nearest the door, his hands hanging by his sides, his mouth open. Later, during the rush of interrogations, leaks and rumours, they discovered that, before stabbing him twenty-five times, Forouhar’s killers had orientated him towards Mecca. (This is what reliable Muslim butchers do when slitting an animal’s throat—if they do not, the meat becomes haram, and unfit for a believer to eat.)
They had found Parvaneh’s body lying on her bedroom floor. Then, the men had stood in the hall for a while, trembling and trying to decide what to do. That was when the telephone had rung and one of the men had gone to answer it. The line went dead when he put his ear to the receiver.
The servant came downstairs. He appeared surprised to see me in the hall, and chided me gently for not having gone into the room with the Mossadegh portrait, where I would have been able to make myself comfortable.
He led me in. It was an L-shaped room. On another wall, there was an unflattering picture of Parvaneh Forouhar, draped in an Iranian flag. The wall space next to her had been covered in black-and-white photos of her and her husband. Many of the photos had been taken when they were young. Next to a window that looked on to the courtyard were two chairs draped with Iranian flags. I sat down at a big table, in front of Parvaneh’s picture.
Darioush Forouhar was seventy when he was murdered. Twenty years before, he had served briefly as a minister in the provisional government that followed the Revolution. He had to die because he made no secret of his belief that religion should be kept separate from government—a belief that makes you enemies in the Islamic Republic, which has been built on the principle of clerical sovereignty. Shortly before his death, Forouhar had declared a limited opposition to capital punishment, a declaration that some had equated with apostasy.
He had made light of all the surveillance and the harassment, mocking them with the salutation, ‘Salaam to all our listeners’, whenever he picked up the telephone. He had kept an elderly poodle inside his house, and dogs, as Ayatollah Mohammad Yazdi reminded his fellow countrymen not so long ago, are ‘unclean’.
He had a moustache, unwaxed but rising at the tips. Like his ideas, it was a loose adaptation of western exemplar, an inadmissible expression of contempt for their bearded, Islamic way.
Parvaneh was the sort that would have raised hell to win justice for her dead husband. She had been the poet and performer in a house heavy with politics, the wife who had promised the Shah’s last prime minister that she would immolate herself publicly if he didn’t tell her where the secret police had detained her husband. Her adoration for Dr Mossadegh had led her to preserve the wrappers of sweets that he had sent her daughter. You might very well accuse Mrs Forouhar of gharbzadegi, Westoxification, and of questionable adherence to the Revolution’s tenets. All good reasons for her to die.
The murdered couple’s daughter, Parastu Forouhar, came down the stairs and into the room. She greeted me, and then sat down opposite me.
I felt like asking her, ‘How can you bear staying in the house where your parents were murdered?’
She said, ‘I hope you didn’t have any trouble getting here.’
Death to Tyranny
When Darioush Forouhar was murdered, he went from being a little-known ex-minister to a martyr. Around the same time, at the end of 1998, there were four other murders and suspected murders, all of dissident writers: Pouyandeh and Mokhtari (suffocated); Davani (disappeared); Sharif (suspicious heart attack, rumoured to have been induced). But the people reacted more intensely to the Forouhar killings than they did to any of the others. The Forouhars had been killed despicably—he in his favourite chair and she in her bedroom—by men who had not bothered to take off their shoes.
Dissidents had disappeared or been killed before—at a rate of one a month, it is reckoned, since the beginning of the 1990s. But these victims were hardly discussed in public; that would have been dangerous. What the dead people had in common was a record of active or presumed political dissidence, and an abrupt, violent end. Either their deaths had not been acknowledged as murders, or judicial investigations into them had been abandoned for lack of evidence. In some cases, the families of the deceased had been quietly advised to drop their enquiries.
At the time when Forouhar and the writers were killed, however, things were different. They had become different in May 1997, when Khatami was unexpectedly elected president. Khatami was a cleric who had been close to Ayatollah Khomeini. But when he became president Khatami announced his intention to change the Islamic Republic, to make it freer and less beholden to a group of powerful clerics. His supporters called themselves reformists. His opponents were called conservatives, because the people were sick and tired of them.
Khatami had a gentle, probing touch. He was nicer to newspapermen than his predecessors had been. The previous government had tolerated ten national newspapers, only one of them wholeheartedly reformist in orientation. Khatami, on the other hand, encouraged just about everybody to start publishing news. There was an explosion of reporting and opinion—twenty-odd new dailies, weeklies and periodicals appeared—and the great majority of the new publications, faithful to the great majority of Iranians, were pro-Khatami. They printed what had never been printed before, and they goaded each other into an increasingly grave traffic of truths.
Iran became voluble again, which some people think is her natural state. The inky conservative broadsheets suffered. It was rumoured that the people at Kayhan, the biggest of these, were shredding a vast quantity of newspapers every day. It was a rather basic way of protecting a print run which had been computed according to machismo and nostalgia, rather than realistic sales expectations.
Before Khatami, a great many of the texts submitted by poets and novelists to the Ministry of Culture and Islamic Guidance for approval had been returned with the word BANNED written across them. After Khatami’s election, however, the same authors resubmitted the same books, and they were returned with just a few corrections. A dozen publishing houses were set up to print all the un-banned books. Akbar Ganji, an investigative journalist who would do more than anyone to enlighten Iranians about the serial murders of the 1990s, called it the ‘Tehran Spring’.
A lot of this washed over Forouhar. Khatami was a cleric and clerics, to his mind, were all the same. Khatami had been nurtured by the political system which had been introduced after the revolution—his presidency was a long way from the more secular regime that Forouhar had envisaged. Khatami had held ministerial office in the Islamic Republic; it was unthinkable that he would do anything to change fundamentally the regime that had so privileged him. Forouhar, on the other hand, dreamed of the day when the clerics would be removed from politics altogether.
Forouhar’s killers, and those who gave their orders, were afraid that Khatami’s pluralism would give heart not only to reformists, but also to outright opponents of the regime—they suspected Forouhar of being such a person. Khatami had promised to restore credibility to the Islamic Republic. The killers feared that, even if he didn’t mean to, he would end up destroying it.
But killing Forouhar and the writers turned out to be a mistake, because the reformist press was ready and waiting. No matter that Forouhar was not one of them; he was surely entitled to express an opinion without being murdered. The killers found their actions denounced and picked over by Iran’s new newspapers, which fell over one another in their enthusiasm to uncover the truth. ‘Find the killers!’ they demanded. ‘What about the previous murders? Who gave the orders? This is nothing short of an attempt by Khatami’s enemies to hound the president from office!’
There were more people at Forouhar’s funeral than you might have expected, and lots of them shouted ‘Death to tyranny!’ in a way that suggested they meant it.
Khatami, who was at the peak of his political attractiveness at the time, said: ‘When we don’t accept someone, we make of him a counter-Revolutionary, a monarchist, corrupt, pro-western, a threat to national security and an apostate. Then, if some ignoramus says this counter-Revolutionary must be killed—well, they kill him.’ With his delicate silver beard and his smile, his cream cashmere gown and careful anger, Khatami was everything the people hoped for in a seyed, a descendant of the Prophet.
People started to refer to the murders as Iran’s biggest crisis since the Sacred Defence—the eight-year war against Iraq—back in the 1980s. It seemed as though not only the murders, but the state’s very relationship with its citizens might be under review. Khatami took no chances with a conservative-minded judiciary: they might try and whitewash the affair. Instead he deputed three of his own men to investigate the murders and report back to him. The president, his busy triumvirate and the newspapers—it seemed as though they would drive all before them.
The conservatives were stirred by the cacophony. They manufactured theories: the perpetrators of Forouhar’s death were friends of the family; the killers were linked to Iran’s exiled opposition, counter-Revolutionary elements, and to foreign radio and television journalists; the writers were killed by people who favoured reopening relations with America; the Turkish government had had Forouhar killed to pay him back for his sponsorship of Kurdish separatism inside Turkey; the victims had been sacrificed by their paymasters, the CIA, in order to wreak havoc inside the Islamic Republic; Khatami’s supporters had committed the murders, in order to discredit the conservatives.
‘Even in the furthest recesses of the brain,’ Kayhan said, ‘there can be no room for the suspicion that the perpetrators of Forouhar’s murder were from the forces of the Revolution! In fact, there’s no logic behind the idea that the Revolutionary forces could have been behind a counter-Revolutionary action!’
On January 4, 1999, Khatami’s persistence paid off. With great reluctance, the conservative-dominated Information Ministry announced ‘the involvement in this affair of a handful of irresponsible, evil-thinking, deviant and obstinate figures within the Ministry. These irresponsible figures committed criminal acts as the agents of secret elements, and with the aim of fulfilling the designs of foreigners. The perpetrators of the murders have not only betrayed the warriors of the Occulted Imam (may His return be hastened by God), but also struck a heavy blow against the prestige of the sacred regime of the Islamic Republic.’ It was an unprecedented admission.
Then the case was handed over to the judiciary. The people of Iran began to hope that they might actually discover who had ordered the murders, and that these important and prominent people would be arrested. Perhaps, for the first time, the people running the Islamic Republic would become properly accountable to the people they served.
Then, one day, the judge running the case made an important announcement: ‘In spite of the surveillance under which he was placed, Saeed Emami, one of the pivotal masterminds of the murders, committed suicide during bathing period on Saturday in the detention centre, by swallowing hair remover.’
Few Iranians had heard of Saeed Emami, but they understood the meaning of his death. Suddenly, it seemed unlikely that they would learn who had ordered the 1998 murders, or find out anything at all about those that had been committed before. Emami would take the information to his grave. Perhaps, the people concluded gloomily, Iran wouldn’t change for the better, after all. In the offices of This Morning, the biggest of the reformist newspapers, Akbar Ganji smiled to himself and said: ‘Over my dead body!’
Two Men
Akbar Ganji is a short, jolly man, who trims his beard rather than shaves it, in conformity with a semi-official code of the Islamic Republic, which contends that shaving is an effete Christian affectation. Soon after I arrived in Iran, he became my hero. His two books about the serial murders—made up mostly of articles he had written and interviews he had given on the subject—were the first books I read in Persian. Reading them was as close to him as I could get, since he was already in jail—although he had yet to be tried for anything. I envied those of my colleagues who had met him, before his arrest. He sounded slightly off the wall.
I saw him last November, when he appeared at Tehran’s Revolutionary Court. No one was sure if he would turn up; at a previous court appearance, at the Press Court, he had refused to wear prison clothes and the judge hadn’t let him in the door. Just as we started to fear this would happen a second time, from behind us we heard the sound of feet being scuffed along the linoleum, and some grunts. We turned around, and there was Ganji, being manhandled by two bewildered conscripts. He shouted: ‘They tortured me! I’ve been tortured!’
Ganji was directing his comments at us, the members of the foreign press. As soon as we got back to our offices that afternoon, our editors rang to say they’d seen news wire headlines flashing TORTURE and MAVERICK JOURNALIST. But it was pretty obvious that Ganji hadn’t really been tortured—not in the vicious, premeditated sense that our editors had in mind. It’s probable that he got some fists in the face as the warders struggled to stuff him into the prison uniform they forced him to wear that day.
Ganji was determined to enjoy his day out. He harangued the judge and public prosecutor (whose roles seemed suspiciously interchangeable). He was sharper and wittier than either of them. He refused to shut up when the judge entreated him to. He grinned. He had his back to us, but every now and then he would turn around and tip his chin up, the way little people do when they want to see across a crowded room. He wanted to catch the eye of his wife and brother, and to see which Information people were there, so he could embarrass them by pointing them out publicly. He nodded at his former colleagues from the domestic press. At the end of the hearing, he announced that the state had tried to blackmail him, to try and stop him writing about the killing of dissidents. They had warned him he’d get fifteen years if he didn’t shut his mouth. (And that, incidentally, is what he got, a few weeks later.) More news wire headlines. When the hearing was over, Ganji was carted back to prison, his prison jacket tucked petulantly under his arm.
Akbar Ganji, fearlessly enquiring journalist, Saeed Emami, secret plotter of murder; by the late 1990s they had inimical beliefs, and yet there was a time when they might have got along fine. Back in the days before the Revolution, they were both garrulous and devout young men, and they both loathed the Shah’s rule, with its despotism and its sin. When the Revolution came, they pledged to work for the regime that took the monarchy’s place. In 1979 Iran was shaking up the world’s complacent polarization. In Tehran, there was a new creature, looking neither to Moscow nor Washington—nor to the vapid posturing of the non-aligned movement—but upwards, to God.
Before the Revolution, Ganji hung out a lot at the Naziabad Mosque in Tehran, where he would meet friends to pray and discuss whether or not it would be possible to replace the Shah with a government which answered people’s yearnings for God and freedom. The words of an exiled ayatollah called Khomeini suggested that it might. Ganji distributed illegal tapes and transcripts of Khomeini’s speeches. When the Revolution started, he and his friends took to the streets. The Shah went. Khomeini came. Grand days.
Ganji joined the Revolutionary Guard and, because he was an ideas man, they assigned him to Doctrine and Politics and sent him to Qom for training. It was from Qom that Khomeini supervised Iran after his return from exile, and from Qom that the seminary students sent their ideas on Islamic government whizzing around Iran at large. After Saddam invaded, Khomeini’s strategists realized that, since they didn’t have the American and European backing that Saddam did, they would have to rouse their men with the words of the Shi’a philosophers and the deeds of the Twelve Imams. After finishing his studies, Ganji returned to Tehran, where he helped instil in the officers of the Revolutionary Guard a love for the Islamic Republic that would make of them fearless warriors.
And Emami? Emami wasn’t there. He had left Iran to study at Oklahoma University and watched the Revolution’s vital moments on US television. But he watched them with enthusiasm. When he graduated, he went to work for what remained of Iran’s diplomatic representation in Washington, and then for the mission to the UN. Already he was passing bits and bobs to the new Information Ministry in Tehran.
Then Iran recaptured the town of Khorramshahr and its refineries, and Saddam sued for terms. Iran’s leaders had a choice: enjoy the fruits of victory, or fight on—until Baghdad had fallen, Saddam had been toppled, and a Shi’a theocracy installed in his place. They chose to fight and, although their objectives remained distant, they promoted a triumphal Revolutionary religiosity that took six years to fade. The young Iranians who died (while Baghdad stood firm) before the 1988 ceasefire were to become the Revolution’s great moral example. But Ganji, among others, suspected that Khomeini’s advisers were keeping from him the terrible casualty figures, and disguising from him the impossibility of the task Iran had set itself. His conscience troubled, Ganji got himself transferred to the Ministry of Culture and Islamic Guidance.
At the end of the 1980s, the war ended, Khomeini died, and the economy ground to a halt. The hardline conservative clerics were rampant throughout the bureaucracy and the government. The moderates were being put to flight. The war, the old justification for the harshness and repression, was over. But the harshness and repression—and the bared teeth—remained.
Rafsanjani, the new president, chose a man called Ali Fallahian to be his Information Minister. This was a controversial choice, since some people suspected that Fallahian could be rather brutal. The new minister took to Saeed Emami—who had by now returned from the United States—enormously. Before his thirtieth birthday, Emami had become one of Fallahian’s deputy ministers.
It may be that Emami was ashamed of having been abroad during the Revolution, of not having witnessed at first hand the rebirth of Iran and Islam. This regret, and the desire to distinguish himself in the eyes of those who had participated—those who considered themselves to be the true Revolutionaries—may have spurred him to greater zeal, to a more unbending reading of history and correction.
Ganji, dabbling in journalism by now, was going in the opposite direction. He and people like him were concerned by the gap that had emerged between the aspirations of the ordinary Iranians who had supported the Revolution, and the stagnant lives they were being obliged to live. They had also started to examine the way the clerics had appropriated most of the plum administrative positions. Murmurs grew; people said that theological knowledge had itself been dishonoured by the clerics’ thirst for power. They asked whether a more flexible approach to the interpretation of religious texts might allow Iran an escape route from its morally superior poverty. They were fed up with being hated by the rest of the world, and longed for Iran to be allowed into the family of nations. To Emami, such ideas smacked of surrender.
Emami’s Lecture
There is a grainy amateur film of a speech made by Saeed Emami to a hall full of students at Hamedan University, in western Iran, which took place on or around December 23, 1996.
The cameraman has missed the first part of the speech; when the film starts, Emami is in full flow, and the camera is panning across the audience. On the left-hand side of the hall, neatly segregated, are the women, almost all of them in chador. When the camera pans across the men, who make up the majority of the audience, it catches a solitary cleric, sitting in his robe and a ruffled turban in the front row, coping with a winter cold. The rest of the audience are non-clerics; they wear thick coats and trousers, and different types of beard to show off their virtue, and their listless eyes attest to a Revolutionary zeal that is being pounded by doubts. Having been gloriously dynamic during Khomeini’s lifetime and the Sacred Defence, the Islamic Republic is now inert. No, the situation is worse than that; Iran is being deliberately disabled from within, by liberals intent on corrupting and westernizing the regime, throwing about phrases like ‘human rights’ and ‘representative democracy’.
Looking at the film more closely, it appears that most of the men in Emami’s audience are too old and tired to fit the international stereotype of the student. Rather than attend university, many of these men spent months or years in the trenches of western Iran; they lost brothers and friends to Saddam’s mines and gas, but the pain of mourning was dulled by the knowledge that these brothers and friends had at least died ecstatically, martyrs to the cause of a pristine, Shi’a Islam. Then the war came to an end and Khomeini passed away. Back home, the war veterans found themselves undefended—from poverty and unemployment and from the ingratitude of the people for whom they fought; many of these people had got fat from profiteering.
Now, hurt, the old soldiers have crowded into a lecture hall to hear Emami. They have in mind, perhaps, Khomeini’s admiration for the Ministry of Information; he called its employees the ‘anonymous foot soldiers of the Occulted Imam’. It’s true; at least the Information boys give the impression that they haven’t abandoned the struggle against vice; at least they seem willing to take the battle to the enemy, to strike pre-emptively against the hypocrites and other enemies of the state. ‘Of course,’ says Emami reassuringly, during the course of his talk, ‘we’ve killed hypocrites, and we’ve killed members of other groups as well…what are we to do with hypocrites: sit down and play chess with them?’ If anyone can provide the veterans with words of comfort, and remind them of the values of the Revolution, Emami is the man.
He wears a beard, and square-framed glasses high up his aquiline nose. When he cracks his jokes, there is a flash of teeth and a lick of tongue across voluptuous lips. The way he talks makes him at once one of the boys and way above them. His Persian is colloquial, because the Revolution was supposed to answer the call of God in a way that is intelligible to man; but he patronizes his audience, too, because he’s risen fast, and he has his pride. By the time his hour and a half is up, he has conducted his listeners on a tour d’horizon of his prejudices, his fancies and his faith.
At the time of the Hamedan speech, Emami is in his late thirties, and no one can be appointed to a high post in the Ministry without his say-so. Fallahian has entrusted him with an astonishing degree of autonomy. Emami will use that autonomy to try unilaterally to sabotage Khatami’s attempt to win next year’s presidential election. He dabbles in the arts; state television ran a programme of ‘confessions’ of opponents of the regime, made by Emami.
He is active in foreign affairs. In 1995, Emami’s boys carried out a jolly raid on a dinner party held by the German cultural attaché. At the time of the Hamedan speech, Emami’s boys are trying to pin charges of spying for Germany on a dissident magazine editor whom they have tortured and plan to kill. (The plan will fail.) Later on, there will be the case of Hofer, a German businessman caught with his pants down—a capital offence in the Islamic Republic—and, later still, the ten Jewish ‘spies’; their arrest, trial and conviction will upset relations between Iran and most of the rest of the world. All this, it came to be reckoned, was the work of Emami, and his boys.
Why?
Mykonos, of course! That’s the name of the restaurant in Berlin where four Iranian Kurdish dissidents were killed in 1992. At the time of the Hamedan speech, a German court is trying Iran’s leaders in absentia for having ordered the crime. (The following year, Kubsch, the judge, will find them guilty of a ‘flagrant violation of international law.’) It’s an intolerable affront to the Islamic Republic, and Emami has made it his business to come up with ways of avenging the slight.
For Emami, the man opposed to his point of view is like misshapen clay. The strength in Emami’s fingers may derive in part from the close relationship he enjoys with his boss. It is possible, too, that Emami experiences a kind of joy when he breaks his subjects—once he’s taken their honour and they’re begging for death. But most of all, Emami is driven by love. He loves the Revolution, and he loves the memory that he cherishes of Khomeini, a love he has now transferred to Khomeini’s successor as Supreme Leader. Above all, he loves his fellow-Iranians, even those he destroys. His particular brand of Islam is totalitarian, paternalistic and brash.
Emami’s understanding of his own worth is apparent from his conversational style of address, from the easy way he sits on his chair, and from the audacity of his boasts and his lies.
‘I want to give you the example of Saeedi Sirjani,’ he says. ‘The Saeedi Sirjani that came into being after we became pals—and there’s quite a story there!’
Emami’s audience know about Sirjani. He was a writer, a homosexual, a drug addict. Kayhan revealed that Sirjani worked for SAVAK, the Shah’s secret police, before the Revolution. But Sirjani was guilty of a more sinister crime; he exploited the benevolence of the Islamic Republic—which cannot, after all, be boundless!—in order to put about perverted ideas.
There was a privately circulated letter, Emami explains, in which Sirjani used diabolical cunning to fold a very august personage into a retelling of the tale of Sheikh Sanan, the diverted dervish. Everyone knows about Sheikh Sanan and his Christian girlfriend; in the noon of his obsession, she caused him to lose sight of his faith. In Sirjani’s retelling, the dervish became the august personage, and the beguiling girl became political power. Kayhan described Sirjani as ‘counter-Revolutionary, traitorous and perverted’.
But, says Emami, this is a story with a happy ending. It is impossible not to experience a surge of gratitude towards the men—Emami’s men—who induced in Sirjani his eleventh-hour conversion. They put Sirjani before the TV cameras, and he apologized for the things he had been saying and writing. He announced: ‘The New Sirjani is not the same as the Old Sirjani!’ It was little short of miraculous. There were letters to the newspapers, and a full examination of the details of his crimes and the extent of his penitence. By the time Sirjani had had his heart attack in jail, he had been saved. (It was typical of the foreign radio stations and local gossip mongers to make out that Sirjani had been knocked about to get him chatting, and that his heart attack had been induced.)
‘When he first came to us,’ Emami tells his audience, ‘after the boys had picked him up from the drugs combat HQ, he really thought the Information Ministry was going to thrash him, that there was going to be a set-to. To start with, he was preening: when they brought him into the detention centre at the Ministry, he said, “Go on, beat me, cut me to ribbons; I’m not telling you a thing.” But the boys told him: “Listen, this is the Information Ministry. We’re not into beating here. Here’s a pen and paper; go and write.”‘
According to Emami, Sirjani wrote a poem addressed to the Supreme Leader, asking why Iran’s men of letters were being degraded by the regime. One of Emami’s boys replied with a poem of his own. When Sirjani read this reply, its declaration of religious and political faith induced a dramatic transformation in him.
Ten minutes later,’ says Emami with a fond smile, ‘he rapped on the door of his cell and said, “Take me out of here; I want to confess.” I said, “Confess to what?” He said, “I want absolution.”
‘You know, we’ve got fifty hours of him on tape and video…he wrote 1,700 pages on why he had waged war on the clerics. On why he’d been the enemy of the Revolution. Those images we got of Saeedi Sirjani…sometimes I sit down and watch them, and I weep.’
Apparently Sirjani’s penitence was so profound that he was moved to request a trip to the front. ‘The boys took him off, to the section of the front where they were exhuming the corpses from the trenches…and he sat on a pile of corpses and cried his eyes out…
‘At that time, he didn’t know what my position was in the pecking order. I would go every now and then to the house we’d rented for him…there was a pool and some flower beds. He’d get up in the morning and pick flowers, and water the gardens—that sort of thing.
‘Then one day he started to pour his heart out. He said to me, “I’ll tell you something; I’m dying for some dates and ground sesame…” The following morning, I went down to south Tehran and traipsed around for God knows how long, until I’d found some ground sesame, and brought back the ground sesame along with some dates. And afterwards, when he’d realized what my post was (not that my position is anything but humble—far be it for me to contest the role I have been allocated by the Islamic Republic!) and that I’d done him this service, he said, “I can’t believe you went all the way down to the south of the city and traipsed around on account of some ground sesame and dates.”
‘So I said, “Since I sensed that you had started to understand our values, I wanted to indulge you.”‘
After Emami’s death, there was a lot of talk going around to the effect that he and his pals in the Information were regular sickos, that they got their kicks from inflicting mental and physical torture on their subjects. Nowadays, however, they reckon that this aspect of Emami and his pals was overplayed. It seems that trampling on people was the way Emami performed his sacred function.
Saeed Emami and his men tortured Saeedi Sirjani to extract confessions for broadcast. Then they killed him, because he was scum. In the words of Ruhollah Hosseinian, Emami’s old pal from the Information: ‘Saeed Emami really did believe that the enemies of the Islamic Republic should be put to the sword.’
The Cliff
The event was a symposium planned by the PEN Association of Armenia, in 1995. PEN invited all the distinguished Iranian writers they could think of.
In the days leading up to the departure, lots of the writers and journalists pulled out—a suspicious number, it is now thought. One participant said his wife had had a car accident, and it turned out later that she hadn’t. Others came up with flimsy excuses.
Twenty-one of the writers were not tipped off. So there were twenty-one writers and journalists on board the tour bus when it set off for the border, after having stopped for a break in the Caspian town of Rasht.
The driver was a short, dark-skinned fellow called Barati with the liverish lips of the habitual opium user. As they headed into the mountains, and evening turned into night, some of the writers felt like another break. Barati promised to stop at a roadside cafe where they could procure bread and milk and delicious local honey.
They cleared Astar early the following morning. Most of the writers were asleep. Some of them dozed, wondering when they would get their milk and honey.
Then, suddenly, the bus lurched to the right, and came off the road. Those who were awake thought they had reached the roadside cafe which the driver had described. Then Fereshteh Sari screamed. She screamed because Barati had taken the vehicle out of gear, and leaped out. The bus was trundling towards the darkness.
Massoud Tufan, who had taken the two seats at the front on the right-hand side of the aisle, jumped to his feet and wrenched the handbrake. The bus came to a halt a few feet short of the cliff.
The only explanation for what happened next is confusion. Not all the passengers were awake. Those that were assumed that Barati had fallen asleep at the wheel, lost control, and jumped out in a panic. Therefore they made no attempt to stop him when he climbed back into the bus, turned the engine on, and reversed towards the road.
He stopped the bus, and put it back into first gear. He put his foot down on the accelerator. Once again, as the bus trundled towards the cliff, he put the bus into neutral, and leaped out.
This time, a rocky outcrop at the angle of the cliff arrested their forward motion, catching the underside of the bus and preventing it from going over the edge. The front wheels hung in the air.
The writers got out of the bus. A few of them tried to lynch Barati. The others pulled them off; killing him would compound their problems.
As they waited for the police in a nearby cafe, some of them saw a black Mercedes Benz approach, slow down near the spot where the bus had almost gone off the cliff, then speed off. The local police arrived and asked them questions. Later, Alikhani, Emami’s right-hand man, arrived with some of his boys, and shooed the local police away.
Alikhani and his men took Barati away. They escorted the writers to a jail in Astar. Alikhani interrogated the writers in their cell. He asked them:
‘What makes you think the driver was trying to kill you?’
‘What is the purpose of your visit to Armenia?’
‘What is your evaluation of the current cultural climate in Iran?’
Then he let them go.
Ganji’s Campaign
Ganji is the reason we know a lot of this. He said what had only been whispered. He shouted what had been said. He gave meaning to the stuff we already knew from other sources, and didn’t understand. He got Iranians to demand what they had never previously dared to demand of their seniors: an explanation. If Ganji were not Iranian and his mother tongue not Persian, but English, his journalism would have won him Pulitzers and invitations to address dinners in a dicky bow. As it is, he’s just starting a ten year jail sentence and, when that finishes, he’ll have five years’ internal exile somewhere hot. All for saying things he shouldn’t have said.
Ganji gave us Emami boasting in the company of important officials about the way his men had murdered Saeedi Sirjani. He gave us Emami cooperating with Kayhan‘s editor to interrogate subjects, and creating the famous television confessional. He gave us Emami destroying his subjects, Emami with interesting pseudonyms (Kooshan; Mohammad Ali; Kashigar; A Senior Bureaucrat), and Emami openly advocating the murder of five or six of Khatami’s close associates. He gave us Emami planning the early serial murders and guiding the latter ones. He suspected that Emami had been murdered because he knew too much. Even after Emami’s death, Ganji had a use for him. Emami’s brutality illustrated the brutality of which the system was capable. By following Emami, Ganji found the guys who gave the orders.
None of this is to say that Ganji could prove all, or even most, of his claims. It would have been madness for him to have revealed his sources. It may be that he had little, if any, documentary evidence for what he was writing. (The people he was writing about didn’t know that, of course.) He put down what happened, quite baldly, and then hoped that he would be believed. He was.
The young journalists at This Morning, where he wrote his best stuff, revered him because he laughed at the threats. It buoyed them to know that he feared death no more than going to the dentist. They went out whenever he asked them to go, gathering information and conducting interviews. They were aware they were living in the golden age of Iranian journalism, and that their product sold 290,000 copies a day—a figure, already astonishing, that would have been much higher had the presses only worked faster. They were aware, too, that the golden age could come to an end at any moment, that they could be plunged into darkness and silence once more. Some people at the paper suggested that Ganji leave his articles unsigned, but he refused. His revelations were a sort of theatre, and he enjoyed taking a bow. Besides, fame gave him a kind of safety. The greater his notoriety, and the more blatantly his enemies were obliged to loathe him, the better were his chances of staying alive.
One day, in This Morning, he told his readers about Fatemeh Ghaem-Magham. Some of them remembered the unexplained murder of this air stewardess and mother of three from the newspapers. How could she have been a victim of the Information’s scheme to murder political dissidents? It was true, Ganji said, that Ghaem-Magham had no political past. But she had been ‘the witness of a regrettable event whose disclosure would cost the murderer and his ally dearly. So, there was no solution but to kill her.’
Ganji alluded to no document. His description of the way she died—shot, after a conversation with her killer that lasted an hour and a half—added nothing to the previously published newspaper reports. But the Ghaem-Magham piece was thrilling. The ‘murderer’ and his ‘ally’ knew who they were. Ganji knew who they were. Reading the piece was like eavesdropping for a few seconds on a private telephone conversation. There was Ganji, whispering down the line: ‘I’m on to you…’
To help his readers remember who was who, he gave aliases to the villains. These aliases would find their way into Iran’s imagination. Once upon a time, there was a Master Key, who issued orders to kill the people who used words in the wrong way—orders that Emami and his men carried out. But the Master Key, Ganji said, had a second function. It was in his power to open the door to the Dungeon of Ghosts, which was the source of all the evil. Once inside, it would be possible to make out the Eminences Grises, skulking in the shadows. The Eminences Grises were influential people who used their public standing to cast aspersions on a putative victim’s character and personal mores, and to call into question his adherence to Revolutionary ideals. In some cases, the Eminences Grises invoked Islamic law to pass unofficial death sentences on the ‘accused’. As Ganji’s revelations progressed he produced an Eminence Rouge. ‘Louis XIV,’ Ganji told his readers,
appointed Cardinal Richelieu to be his prime minister, and Richelieu gave Father Joseph a position in his administration… On the orders of Father Joseph (the Eminence Grise), dissidents were murdered, and Cardinal Richelieu stayed silent. Because Cardinal Richelieu wore red clothes, they called him the Eminence Rouge.
Ganji managed his readers. He allowed the nimbler ones, those who worked in government offices and picked up scraps of gossip, to guess the true identities of his characters early on. That knowledge made them complicit in Ganji’s revelation, and even keener to find out how the story would end. For every measure of analysis and polemic, he gave them a half measure of thrill. It kept them on the edge of their seats, and receptive to his wider sermon.
Saeed Emami…took Siamak Sanjari and a few others to a house, and he discussed matters there with him for a few hours. Then he ordered his men to stab him to death. Siamak Sanjari started to cry, and said he was due to be married in the next few days. Emami contacted the Master Key by mobile phone, and told him that Sanjari was weeping, and that his wedding ceremony was due to take place soon. ‘He even has invitations addressed to you and me in his pocket.’ The Master Key ordered Emami to kill him, and they stabbed him fifteen times. Then they set fire to Sanjari’s Mercedes Benz in the one of the valleys around Tehran.
Put yourself in the shoes of the Master Key. To start with, you’re affronted by your alias, which makes you out to be a mere facility. But, in the face of Ganji’s strange and intimate knowledge, your irritation turns to apprehension. Before you know it, other journalists also interested in the serial murders pick up on your alias, and have started using it in their articles. It seems as though every paper you open contains references to the Master Key! Gossip is flowing through Tehran. What was going on between Fatemeh and the Master Key? What unorthodox relationship meant that Sanjari, the other non-political victim of the murders, had to die?
Ganji wants to see how you’ll react, whether or not you’ll be panicked into indiscretion. He says he’s not interested in retribution, and that destroying the culture of violence is more important than destroying the perpetrators. At least on that score, you seem reasonably safe—the judge running the case has made it perfectly clear he’s going to look no higher than Emami, and no further back than Darioush Forouhar. But Ganji could seriously damage you. The worst of it, of course, is that you can’t sue him; he hasn’t identified you. Besides, what if he has documentation to back up his claims?
Gradually, even those who hadn’t guessed from the start came to realize that, when Ganji talked about the Master Key, he was referring to Ali Fallahian—Emami’s boss, and Iran’s Information Minister from 1989 to 1997. Ganji dribbled this into his readers’ consciousness in such a way that he wouldn’t get his newspaper banned. (That would come later.) He used suggestive juxtapositions, and allowed his hints to get broader and broader. He got his public used to an allegation of astonishing impudence, without making that allegation explicit. (Until the end of 2000, that is, when he named Fallahian as the Master Key, which spiced up his second appearance at the Revolutionary Court.)
Just as Emami had pointed the way to Fallahian, so Fallahian showed Ganji into the Dungeon of Ghosts. There, Ganji found (and named) the Eminences Grises, some of them senior clerics and judges—and he hinted darkly that they knew a lot more about the serial murders than they were letting on. Later he would accuse one of them of ordering one of the killings. Still Ganji didn’t stop. He went a step higher, to Rafsanjani.
The audacity! Rafsanjani wasn’t just a former president; he was one of the most powerful men in Iran, and reputedly the richest. He was widely tipped to cruise back into Parliament in the 2000 elections, to become the parliamentary speaker. Ganji had other ideas.
‘The Eminence Rouge’, the first and most notorious example of Ganji’s Rafsanjani pieces, was not a very good article. It was uncharacteristically impatient; it attempted to tarnish all of the former president’s brightest buttons in one go. Ganji presented his evidence hurriedly, and some of it wasn’t convincing. A lot of the best stuff was submerged beneath the author’s contempt. There was little, if anything, that was revelatory, little that hadn’t been said a thousand times before, behind Tehran’s nougat-coloured brick facades. The difference is that Ganji was addressing the whole nation, out of doors.
After ‘The Eminence Rouge’, Rafsanjani was no longer able to portray the Iran of his presidency as a just realm, and interpret the nation’s silence as a nod of agreement. No longer could he make out that he presided over (his words) ‘the cleanest period in the Information’s history’.
Seventy-odd extra judicial executions; the abductions and the torture sessions; Emami’s ‘confessional’; the Armenian bus holiday; these took place, Ganji reminded his readers, during ‘the cleanest period in the Information’s history’. Was it not Rafsanjani who had urged Fallahian on to a less than enthusiastic Parliament? Did the Rafsanjani years not coincide with Mykonos and—in the words of Ruhollah Hosseinian, Emami’s old work pal—’hundreds of successful operations committed abroad by Saeed Emami’?
Ganji’s piece ‘The Eminence Rouge’ was only incidentally about the serial murders. It was really about the abuse of power and the contempt of the ruler for the ruled. Ganji impressed on his fellow Iranians the depths to which their leaders had sunk. He questioned the miracles that young Iranians were encouraged to dream about at night.
The Friday after the piece appeared, Rafsanjani accused Ganji in the course of a sermon of ‘calling into question the prestige of the Revolution’—of nothing less than a ‘vast, vast betrayal’.
Rafsanjani’s words did his reputation as much damage as Ganji had. People wanted him to answer the allegations, not equate his own prestige with that of the nation. In the meantime, Ganji was having the time of his life. He challenged Rafsanjani to a public debate. He entitled a subsequent article, ‘I haven’t even started criticizing [Rafsanjani] yet’.
Even newspapers which had previously disapproved of Ganji’s presumptuousness were forced to be more dispassionate in their evaluation of Rafsanjani’s record in office. They, and their readers, found it to be less glorious than they had been led to believe.
In the 2000 parliamentary elections, reformist candidates swept the field. Rafsanjani scraped into Parliament, last of the thirty deputies elected to represent Tehran. It was Ganji’s finest hour, the reformists’ finest hour, and it provoked the conservatives’ fury.
Later that year, conservative judges banned about thirty reformist publications, including This Morning. They jailed more than a dozen journalists.
In January 2001 a judge sentenced to death the three Information agents who had murdered the Forouhars and two other writers. He sentenced two of Emami’s boys (including Alikhani) to life imprisonment. He jailed the opium-using driver, Barati. The families of the murder victims boycotted the trial, denouncing it as a whitewash.
Some of the reformists turned against Ganji. They criticized him for having driven Rafsanjani into the arms of the conservatives, and for provoking the judges’ offensive against the press. Ganji, they argued, had shown excessive disrespect to his seniors. He should have doffed his cap while he was calling them hypocrites, liars, murderers.
Many more people, however, continued to admire Ganji, and to regard his imprisonment as a tragedy. They said that Ganji represented the best and the bravest of their country. They said he had lots more information about the serial murders, and they expressed the hope that one day he would release it.
Remembrance
Parastu Forouhar was in the hall, speaking on the telephone to a journalist in Germany. She was reading out a statement expressing her dissatisfaction with the case file that had been prepared against her parents’ killers. The prosecutors and judges had forgotten to ask who had given the orders. They had left important bits out. Parastu was reading very slowly and loudly. Every now and then she would have to restart a sentence, when the line crackled from all the people listening.
Events had forced her to behave like a politician. Her parents’ colleagues and friends; the young people who came on to the streets when two decent old people were murdered—their anger and righteousness had needed marshalling. Who better than the handsome daughter of the deceased, addressing the anniversary gatherings—her pride and grief against their evil? (At the funeral, her mind seeing with an adman’s lucidity, she had arranged the photo that everyone remembers: a murdered nationalist lying in an open coffin, his breast overlaid with the national flag, a spade-load of Iran’s soil spattered on top.)
She came back into the room, and sat down.
‘Do you think your father was selfish?’
‘He didn’t distinguish between his children and his principles.’
Forouhar had written to her from jail, when she was very little. A serious letter, didactic, assuming intellectual responsibility, loaded up with love. While she was reading it to me, she stopped abruptly, and it looked as though she would start to cry.
‘How long are you prepared to carry on struggling for justice?’
‘I don’t know.’
Giving up would mean betraying. Giving up would mean hearing and uttering her parents’ names a great deal less, and that might be too much for her to bear.
‘What about Ganji? Have you met him?’ I had Ganji’s books in my briefcase, the juiciest bits underlined in pencil.
She hadn’t. She spoke of him dutifully, an orphan reminded of a remote benefactor. I had expected more enthusiasm. Apart from Parastu herself, Ganji had done more than anyone to make sure that people still talked about the Forouhars. Then I thought: she distrusts him.
Ganji was a brave fighter, but for ideas—his ideas, and Khatami’s ideas. Ganji thought that reforming the system would enable it to evolve and survive; Forouhar had in mind a more radical transformation. The Forouhars’ deaths had spurred Ganji not because he loved the Forouhars, but because their deaths offended his politics. Ganji and his sort, the ‘reformers’, were using her father and his memory because it was convenient. They had press-ganged his unresponding soul into a movement for which he had had no time.
The poodle and the retainer saw me off the property, into the alley. I turned into Hedayat, hailed a cab, and told the cab driver I wanted to go to the north of the city.
