Repentance: a Strategy for Making an Islamist Man
In the months that followed June 21st [1981], the prisons filled up, to the point at which the Islamic Republic had the task of constructing new ones or enlarging the old ones, inherited from the Shah's regime. From that heritage also came the organization of the secret police, the methods for hunting opponents, and the use of torture as an interrogation technique.
Not only would the information collected by SAVAK agents arrested after the overthrow of the Shah be used, but a certain number of them would be engaged to collaborate in the formation of a secret police. Eight months after the institution of the Islamic regime, the secretary of the association of former political prisoners informed the public of the establishment in court of a list of militants and ex-political prisoners which, at the desired time, would be used to arrest them.
The black lists were established and easily completed thanks to the network of Islamic authorities and organizations deployed in all areas of civil society. The Islamic "people" constituted an essential pillar of the secret police system that held the new regime in place. It moreover distinguished itself in many ways from the SAVAK. M. Homayoun and V. Bamdad, two former political prisoners of the Islamic Republic, analyze the particularities of the ideological system.
Far from being centralized, right from the beginning it integrated a multitude of authorities for decision and action that reflected the diverse trends and interest groups in power. But those authorities of repression, however, converge as far as their common interest, the survival of the regime, is concerned.
Spider's Web of Islamist Police
The liberal and moderate religious figures who made up the first government of the regime supported the preservation of official institutions such as the army and the judiciary. They notably initiated the creation of a central body of intelligence in charge of security.
This body worked under the supervision of the Prime Minister [The post of Prime Minister was eliminated in July 1989 after the revision of the Constitution]. Therefore, along with the revolutionary organizations established by the Islamists, this body was [and still is] only one of the numerous organizations in charge of security. Because each institution has its own mode of action and means, taken as a whole they constitute an omnipresent and frighteningly powerful system of repression. They include the army of the sépahé pasdarans (soldiers of the revolution (Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC))), the revolutionary committees, and the dadsetani-e enghelab (headquarters of the prosecutors of the revolution).
Having proved itself in the bloody repression of Kurdish and Turkmen political movements, the IRGC played an important role in the hunt for "counter-revolutionaries." Its military-ideological orientation is validated by a supreme council in which certain well-known political figures, such as Hashemi Rafsandjani and the Ayatollah Khamenei, vali-e faghih, the actual supreme leader, successor to Khomeini, have participated since the beginning.
The IRGC is made up of four units: "the military unit," "the security unit," "the cultural unit" and the "intelligence unit."
The propaganda activities carried out by the cultural section also profit the intelligence section in furnishing it, in particular, with agents planted in diverse popular milieus.
Strongly involved in the intelligence section, the IRGC succeeded in cementing its place in that domain by directing the arrest of members of the group Forghan, of religious leanings, which engaged in the terrorist acts against the religious leaders close to Khomeini. The IRGC also actively contributed to the arrest of the members of the military close to Bakhtiar who were preparing a coup d'état against the regime.
As M. Homayoun emphasizes, these operations show that the IRGC controlled the techniques for gathering information and methods for pursuit resulting in arrest. These are the techniques which would be used to break up political groups.
The popular bodies and committees born out of the revolution would be ideologically channeled and reorganized by the Islamists in power. They established their own modes of gathering information, their methods for pursuit and arrest, as well as their own interrogation sites.
For thirteen years (1978-1991), they pursued their security activities under the direction of the religious political leaders, such as Mahdavi Kani and the then the future minister of intelligence, Falahian, whose name was particularly known for the organization of terrorist acts against opponents in exile.
The networks of city neighborhood committees, in connection with the mosques, organized a formidable police. As M. Bamdad notes, for Tehran, the country's capital, these networks are composed of 14 regional committees, encompassing 70 sectors of operation. Each committee is directed by the imam of a large mosque in the region or a person named by him. The committees also constitute the source of the bands of Hezbollah nicknamed tchomaghdarans (armed with batons) which attack non-Islamist demonstrators, using all sorts of acts of violence, from insults to beatings with batons. These bands recruit their members just as easily among fanatics as in the underworld, men and women, rewarded for their activity.
The members of these bands sometimes possess firearms and go around on motorcycles and in cars. The committees, for their part, like the IRGC, have set up their own patrols. They patrol the streets in order to control and arrest suspects, while installing posts to control passers-by at the entrances to the cities.
In connection with the revolutionary tribunals, these authorities played, over the course of the years of massive repression of the opposition, a very important role in their reliance on a close collaboration with the committees. Their common plan for controlling places of residence, as Bamdad notes, offers an example of a joint intervention of different bodies of ideological repression which resulted in a complete police control.
This plan, called "landlords and tenants" (malek va mostaajer), was applied in 1982 in the capital and in the big cities to facilitate the pursuit of opponents. Those opponents, reduced to clandestine activity and looking to escape the repression, were forced to change their place of residence. But the landlords saw it as their duty to declare the identity of their tenants and several other pieces of information. The authorities followed-up on the tenants through their system of rationing during the war with Iraq. [Tenants who did not claim their ration tickets were considered suspect].
The role of the "revolutionary prosecutors" in the police repression of the first years of the Islamic regime assumed a great importance. Those authorities possessed their own system of intelligence, of hunting opponents, and could carry out their own interrogations. Relying for all [those tasks] on the committees, the "prosecutors of the revolution" also established units of action called grouh zarbat (attack groups) composed of trained agents capable of the worst cruelty. The Tehran prosecutor, Asadollah Lajevardi, a well-known Islamist, was also the head of Evin prison, one of the principal detention centers for political prisoners.
In these two functions, he was one of the key figures of the system of repression that had been put in place. As a revolutionary prosecutor, in collaboration with the religious leaders directing the revolutionary tribunals and committees, he contributed to the administration of procedures of police repression. And as head of Evin prison, he employed his cruelty and boundless audacity in inventing torture methods applied to political prisoners.
The Frontier of Hate
Lajevardi, zealous Islamist, had himself experienced political prison under the Shah's regime. He had been arrested and imprisoned in 1968 for involvement in an attack against the airline El Al. The political prisoners who knew him at that time testify in their writings to his fanatical attitude and his hatred of the communist political prisoners. These testimonies report that in the Shah's political prison, a certain number of partisans of Islamist groups, like Lajevardi, considered the communists as "impure" and a "stain." Like Lajevardi, the prisoners belonging to Islamist groups conducted themselves according to a code of "non-mixing" with the impure, avoiding touching and being touched by them. They would not eat with the communists, neither mixing their plates nor mingling with them.
This frontier of hatred erected between them and those impious ones is founded upon an ideological interpretation of the sacred text which refers to certain verses which affirm God's anger against the infidels: "Believers, unbelievers are nothing but a stain."
Khomeini, in his treatise Tosihol Masael, intended as an explanation and clarification of the precepts of Islam, emphasizes: "An impious person, that is to say the one who denies the existence of God or who denies the unity of God in attributing to him an associate or who does not recognize that the prophet Mohammed is the last of God's messengers, is a blasphemer."
Other Muslims propose different interpretations of verses of the sacred book with respect to the impious, relying on other verses of the Koran. Still others evoke the necessity of reading the sacred text while taking into account facts relative to the historical context of the time and concluding that Islam is supposed to be a religion of peace. But, it is no less true that when one transforms religion into law, as with the Fegh (Islamic jurisprudence), the verses which advocate war against the impious can be taken as law.
Sacred Offenses, Sacred Judgments!
Consequently, when Islam becomes a state ideology and source of constitutional law, we witness a fusion of sacred laws and verdicts which lead inevitably, as M. Kouhiar emphasizes, to a confusion between the notion of offense and the notion of sin: as “right” and “law” come under divine [jurisdiction], each infraction of the law becomes a “sin.” The infraction is in effect a violation of “divine law” and that is why in the Fegh the notion of prosecutor does not exist.
Given that judgment is a religious affair, the judge is a guarantor of God’s
laws. In a civil society, the citizens who commit an offense are responsible before the society and must, on that account, respond to the prosecutor who represents the society. But in the view of the Fegh, the believer or the impious, in committing an infraction of the law, is above all else responsible before God.
In the same sense, the presence of a lawyer for the defense of the accused is not at all necessary. In effect, the guilty party, whose offense is considered a sin and therefore
a violation of God’s laws, is not in a situation in which there is an equality of rights with God but, on the contrary, one in which he has a duty toward the divine authority, represented by the religious judge.
It is hardly surprising that under the authority of the Islamists a fanatic such as Lajevardi, designated as a prosecutor of divine law, could find in the position of the head of Evin prison tremendous means for assuaging for years his hatred against the impure unbelievers who filled the political prisons of the Islamist regime. The prison, where the means of control are effective and the jailors can exercise absolute power, constitutes an ideal place for a perfected application of the Islamist vision of the world and the human being. It forms a closed society in the image of the fantasies of its founders and jailors. One finds at the root of this fantasy the founding ideas of ideological Islam for representing God on earth.
Social Purification
With the politicization of religion, the notion of purification, omnipresent in the codes of conduct prescribed by Islam for bringing the Muslim closer to God, immediately applies to society.
“If you are unclean…purify yourself,” demands God in the sacred text. Believers are constantly in contact with defiling objects, some of them, such as blood and sperm, causing a state of major impurity and others, such as urine, salt, impure objects and beings, minor impurity.
The meticulous rules defined by Islamic law indicate to Muslims the practical details of purification and the situations which demand that purification. The goal of purification, as A. Bouhdiba emphasizes, is to “make possible a dialogue with the sacred.” But beyond the spiritual significance of the purification rites, we have no choice but to agree with Mary Douglas, author of a profound study on the notion of defilement, that there really exists a fundamental link between the two complementary concepts of pure and impure and order and disorder. That is to say that the designation of dirty and impure serves to construct and perpetuate a given order.
The overlapping of the religious and sociopolitical orders leads to the implementation of a purification of the forces which threaten the order which is considered sacred. Their exclusion is brought about, as we noted, in designating them as blasphemers warring against God or as hypocrites sowing discord among the faithful. In one case as in another, they clear the devil’s path and present obstacles to the ultimate realization of the divine project. To reprimand them is thus presented as necessary for the purification of society.
Transgression of the order becomes immersed in this context of the meaning of sin and offense transformed into an error that propagates defilement. Political opponents who threaten the established order are presented as allies of the devil. The Koranic verses serve to legitimate ideological acts: “The believers fight on the path of God and the unbelievers on the path of Taghout. Fight the followers of Satan because the strategy of Satan is not strong.”
Torture as Correction
In this context, execution and torture are punishments appropriate to the sins committed by the impious blasphemers and the hypocrites allied with the devil.
The Islamic Republic does not recognize the existence of torture, which is otherwise prohibited by the Constitution in force in Iran. But at the same time, this law advocates the preeminence of Islam and permits the use of any means necessary for the application of Islamic law. Article 2 of the Constitution bases the laws on “divine revelation” and Article 5 attributes a quasi-absolute power to the religious authority which occupies the place of vali-e faghih (the supreme religious leader). Finally, it affirms, in Article 4, the absolute necessity of conformity of the laws with the principles of Islam.
The criminal code is also founded on Islamic law. By the law called Hodoud ete Qesas(limits and reparation), this code legitimates diverse penalties, physical punishments and financial sanctions corresponding to different types of infractions and offenses. From that perspective, stoning is legitimated as reparation for adultery, and mutilation of parts of the body, like the hand in the case of a robber, is legalized as a realization of had (limit), a concept which refers to the punishments measured and validated by Islamic law. In addition, the fines and compensations speak to the concept of dyé (payment to repair damages). Finally, other measures, like flogging, fall under the category of tazire, referring to less important corrections than those established by the had. Thus, a pre-pubescent child cannot be subjected to had, but he can receive the tazir as punishment.
In reference to these ideas, torture in an Islamic political prison is legitimated as a punitive and corrective act and is used in all possible and imaginable dimensions. Torture also changes in name and significance to become a means of punishment, as well as a tool for putting to rights those who have strayed from the correct path. The government holds up the prison as a place of training in Islam, a place of repentance. The physical tortures look to this end, with a program of Islamic propaganda imposed in different forms on the prisoners.
Police Repentance
The notion of repentance (tobeh) occupies a particular place in the prison politics of Islamic power. It is used for multiple ends. The admissions and confessions of the “repentant” concerning their “errors” and their demands for “pardon” serve at once to confirm their condemnation and, in a larger sense, to legitimate the prison, torture and executions. In addition, the confessions of the repentant are used to break the resistance of prisoners who persist in their rebellion. Finally, the regime uses some of the repentant as collaborating agents inside the prison. It thereby creates an omnipresent system of police control.
Repentance sums up the foundation of the philosophy of the political prison, created by the Islamic authorities as a place of submission of infidels to the order which is considered sacred. In that sense, the political prison is a laboratory of the faultless exercise of ideological Islam.
Dozens of thousands of men and women have been submitted to this frightening exercise of power in the name of God. Since 1979, each year the reports of humanitarian organizations such as Amnesty International, the human rights leagues in different countries and the United Nations Commission on Human Rights present figures which they declare to be lower that the real figures. The dictatorial regime in effect renders it impossible to obtain exact facts.
The Range of Crimes
However, the figures on the number of executions tell us about the waves of arrests and permit us to ascertain the extent of the crimes committed by the regime. In its 1983 annual report, Amnesty reported 4,605 executions. The report specifies: “This figure only recapitulates the officially announced executions and does not take into account those which were not announced. Amnesty International is not in a position to evaluate the number of executions which were not announced, but, according to information received from different sources before and during 1982, it estimates a larger number.”
In 1985, Amnesty’s report gave the number of 6,108 executions. In 1987, the organization published a specific document – “The Islamic Republic and the Violations of Human Rights in Iran” – which concerned, in particular, the accounts of ex-political prisoners who had succeeded in leaving in Iran and were refugees in different countries. That document reported thousands of political imprisonments and noted the diversity in the profiles of the prisoners, among which were found former partisans of the Shah and agents of his regime, sympathizers of different opposition movements, members of ethnic minorities and followers of the Baha’i religion.
It included among them “as well as writers, journalists, doctors, lawyers, teachers in secondary and higher education, [also] students, women without professions, factor workers and manual laborers of all ages, from adolescents to those over seventy.”
Evoking the situation of political prisoners, the document emphasized arbitrary arrests, unfair trials and use of torture as current practices. It noted beatings, floggings and suspension by the arms or wrists for many hours. Flogging with “electric cables…steel cable opened into a claw at one end” aimed at reinforcing the blows. The technique of “soccer” was used upon the arrival of the prisoner at the detention center in order “to disorient and demotivate him […] he was tied, blindfolded, and the guards threw him from one to another, punching and kicking him.”
The report also emphasizes the frequent sexual abuses, including rape, which were exercised on the men and women prisoners. In addition, it notes the use of forms of torture aimed at psychological effects: threats, “mock executions,” “complete isolation for long periods,” “deprivation of medical care.” In the same document, Amnesty notes “an almost inexistent hygiene, rudimentary sanitary facilities,” and sometimes, “a grave problem of overpopulation in the prisons.” “The fact of poor conditions of hygiene and lack of care, open and painful wounds, following torture, get infected and give off a nauseating odor.”
Finally, this report broke the news of a “very large amount of information” on deaths under torture. It notes that “the bodies of victims tortured and executed were rarely restored to their families for interment.”
During 1988, the regime organized a large operation to liquidate political prisoners in the prisons of the capital. Years late, Ayatollah Montazeri spoke in his memoirs of this collective crime and gave the figure of 2, 800 to 3, 800 people.
We do not know the exact number of political prisoners who were executed or died under torture in that first decade of the reign of the Islamic regime marked by a bloody repression of political groups and people with opposing convictions. We know only that they number in the thousands. Nevertheless, we know the identity of a certain number of the executed political prisoners, thanks to the collection of facts carried out by political groups and associations for the defense of political prisoners working in exile.
E. Abrahamian, in his study on “Torture and Confession in the Prisons of Contemporary Iran,” presents an analysis of the profiles of executed prisoners, from a incomplete list which reorganizes the information collected by the Mojahedin of the People and which concerns the identity of 7, 943 opponents executed from June 1981 to July 1988.
It deals with sympathizers of the Mojahedin, as well as partisans of diverse groups of the radical left like Fadians (minority section), the Peykar, the Kurdish democratic party, Komele (also Kurdish), the union of communists, Rah-e Karegar, Ranjbaran, Toufan and other groups.
Abrahamian notes the fact that this list does not include the names of sympathizers of leftist groups such as the party Toudeh and the Fadians (majority section) – which, even though they opted for active support of the regime, did not, however, escape the wave of terror – nor does it mention the names of the Baha’i and Jews who were executed.
An analysis of the facts concerning the 7, 943 executed prisoners on this list reveals their young age: 76% were younger than twenty-six and 20% were younger than twenty. The majority were high-schoolers, students and young bachelors. Another important fact concerns the considerable number of women political prisoners executed in the Islamist prisons. They constituted more than 14% of the Mojahedin and nearly 8% of the leftist Marxist opponents, executed during the seven years taken into account for this list.
Over the course of this first decade of the reign of the Islamic regime concerned in our analysis, in addition to the thousands of prisoners who were massacred, tens of thousands of other opponents found themselves in prison and were submitted to a program of repentance. Some survivors were able to go into exile. Those among them who had the enterprise to testify on the subject of their lives in prison give body to the figures and facts. The unbelievable reality which is thus revealed goes beyond the imagination to join the phantasmagoric project of the Islamic jailors aimed at molding miscreants.
Hell on Earth
Torture is a part of the interrogation routine in political prisons, and particularly in the context of a dictatorship. It is employed there to make the person confess, to obtain the information necessary for the police to disrupt the organized opposition. But beyond that aspect, torture “when it is a state institution”, as Pierre Vidal-Nacquet emphasizes, “is in effect nothing other than the most direct, most immediate form of domination of man over man. It crystallizes the relation of power to dissidence.”
In speaking of torture, one of the political prisoners of the Islamic regime stresses its total and omnipresent character in the Islamist prison: “One generally thinks that after having been tortured during the first days, if one resists, once the interrogation stops, the torture will end. But that rule has no value in the prisons of the Islamic Republic. After the interrogation, another step of the torture starts. There is no end to torture.”
She then describes the mechanisms through which the Islamic State submits the prisoner to continual torture. Torture becomes the foundation and the end of a process during which the exercise of permanent control, physical and psychological torture and Islamic propaganda are interlinked. The presence of repentant collaborators permits the precise application of this plan:
“If during the interrogation we were in front of one or two interrogators, one time in the cell, we found ourselves in front of other interrogators named [‘]repentant[’]…”
“Their presence created an atmosphere of constant psychological pressure. Those women ‘repentant’ reported all our doings; we could not speak in confidence, not even in a lowered voice. We put our hands in front of our mouths to avoid allowing them to read our lips and report our remarks.
“Today, even in freedom, when I speak, I have the tendency to cover my mouth with my hand. This habit has not left me; we were day and night under control and that made us suffer. Those among us who did not pray were considered ‘impure ones.’ They did not have the right to do those things which risked moistening their hands: this prohibition was meant to prevent them from soiling objects and other people with which they came into contact. The ideological confrontation began with the arrest and continued throughout the imprisonment.”
Even physical torture was permeated with Islamist language so that it became an aspect of the divine combat against miscreants:
“The moans of prisoners, under torture, filled the place. Approaching the main corridor of the prison, I heard more clearly their cries and lamentations. Blindfolded, in passing by the stairs, I fell to the ground. The hand of the person accompanying me took me by the sleeve to lift me up. Why by the sleeve? Because in the eyes of these ‘brother believers,’ I was considered ‘impure,’ ‘a defiled being”…My head met an obstacle and I again fell to the ground. I understood that it was the ceiling of the corridor, rather low. My blindfolded eyes could not distinguish it and my head hit it. That corridor was like the path of hell. All the prisoners passed blindfolded through this narrow path and hit that roof. At the shock, they understood that they were entering another world.” The interrogation had begun. A voice yelled, “Brother Rahmat, pass him to me, I will kill him to send him to hell.”
It was with these words that Reza Ghafari, ex-political prisoner, described his entry into prison. Economist, associate professor at the University of Tehran, Reza Ghafari was arrested and imprisoned for his activities in the ranks of an independent communist group, Rah-e Karegar. For six years, he would be violently tortured, at the beginning so that he provided information, after so that he confessed his “mistakes” and repented. Following these tortures, he lost the sight in 95% of his right eye and he will forever be lame.
Beatings were not exclusively reserved for interrogation sessions, but were repeated until new information was acquired either through torturing the latest arrivals, or through the reports of the collaborating repentant. The prisoners received the blows of the Islamist agents every time the occasion presented itself: “The whole day and during the night loudspeakers broadcast recitations of the Koran and speeches by religious leaders. In the intervals between these programs were also broadcast announcements of the victorious advancement of the army in the war against Iraq; it was in those moments that the agents passed through the corridors, kicking the prisoners while yelling: “You have offended God, Islam and Khomeini; either repentance or death! O, dear Khomeini, give me the order to make the blood flow!” Many of these agents were IRGC who had just left the front. Some of them had lost there an eye, an arm or a leg, or their mental equilibrium. These ex-IRGC who had lost close friends to the war became our prison guards and were the most dangerous of the agents.
“The majority of them were illiterate villagers. They constantly came and went to punch and kick us under any pretext. We received them for having put a hand on our heads, scratched our noses or rubbed our eyes. Smashed skulls, blood flowing from ears and broken noses, shattered teeth and jaws were usual sights. The complete liberty that the Hezbollah agents had to torture us was their reward for having fought on the front.”
During his years of imprisonment, like many of the other prisoners, Reza Ghafari was sent from one prison to another and thus knew the different modes of torture invented by the Islamist jailors. These here reflect the ideals of the executioners described as “delegates [designated] by God to confront miscreants.”
“Ghyamat,” the Day of the Last Judgment
Ghyamat refers to the day of “last judgment” which constitutes one of the ideas central to Islamic teaching. That day, which will be that of the end of the world, human beings, resurrected, will be judged according to their acts by a divine tribunal. The faithful believers will go to paradise and the sinners to hell. Ghyamat is the moment when one is put to the test: “When the date arrives; when the earth shakes; when the mountains begin to walk! Until there is nothing but scattered dust,” “if the dying is close to God; to him [is given] rest, perfume, a garden of delights,” “but if he is a denier, someone who has been led astray, to him [is given] to stay in boiling water; to be offered to the furnace; yes, certainly; it is a real certainty; glorify the name of your grand lord.”
Ghyamat was the name of the cell where the political prisoners (men) were sent after a collective interrogation organized, in autumn 1983, in the prison of Ghezel Hessar in Tehran, where a section of the political prisoners was concentrated. The name of the head jailor of that prison, Haji Davoud, often comes back in the memories of the men and women who found themselves, during the 80’s, in the Islamic political prisons. A zealous Islamist, Haji invented methods for breaking the resistance of the prisoners who resisted and refused to repent. The latter, called “those who persevere in their convictions,” were, as they went along, regrouped into distinct zones and received frequent visits from the Islamic guards come to exercise their abuse. In that way, during one of those visits, an autumn evening, after the beatings, Haji decided to submit the resistant prisoners to an interrogation:
“Put facing the wall, they received a pencil and a paper to respond to several questions. The [questions] concerned the opinions of the prisoner on the Islamic Republic, the war with Iraq, Israel, the United States and the Soviet Union. The prisoners were asked to give their opinion on the treatment of prisoners in that prison or the different prisons that they had known over the course of their detention. In addition, the prisoner had to mention the names of prisoners who were attempting to organize a resistance inside the prison. The last question was the following: Would you like to repent? If the response was positive, the prisoner had to give some piece of information that he had not given up until then.
“Those of the prisoners who had responded negatively or who had no information to give were taken to Ghyamat. This operation, far from being prepared in advance, was in fact a completely spontaneous invention. The modes of realization and principles of the operation Ghyamat were the following: first of all the prisoner was isolated, his eyes blindfolded, he was put facing the wall and he could thus do nothing but listen to the religious speeches and recitations broadcast in the cell. There, one also heard the interviews of the leaders of political groups who had confessed. The prisoners of Ghyamat spent several days like that, without the right to sleep. When they fell down from fatigue, they received blows to make them get up. Their only breaks were at meal times or in their private moments at the toilets. In the second stage of Ghyamat, the jailors decided to permit the prisoner to sit down on the ground facing the wall. Finally, in the last stage, they separated the Ghyamat prisoners with a piece of wood.”
The laws of Ghyamat, says Reza Ghafari, “were not written in a sacred book, but came from the mouth of Haji Davoud, the guards and the repentant. No one knew what was forbidden and what was allowed in that appalling abyss. The inhabitants of Ghyamat realized that when they committed a ‘mistake’ they received a ‘sanction.’ A moment later, that law could be annulled according to the will of the decision-makers.”
“Days and weeks passed, months as well. Some of the prisoners yielded and cried: “Haji Davoud, give me the pencil and the paper! I will write all that you want.” The jailor filmed the ceremonies for the confessions organized according to the wishes of Haji Davoud.
“They confessed to acts which they had never committed. They sat down on the stage and laughed. Some had lost their voices, others could not concentrate. Some had lost their memory. Suicide attempts were not unusual. After five months in Ghyamat, a young man spoke to himself while walking ceaselessly. He had cut himself off entirely from the group, having learned not to trust anyone, not to establish a relation with anyone else. Four years later, he committed suicide.”
The Tomb
The women political prisoners would know in their turn the hell that the Islamist jailors created on earth. They speak in their memoirs of a similar operation that they call tabout (coffin) or jaabeh (box) or dastgah (apparatus). Chahrnoush Parsipour, a well-known writer who spent nearly five years in the Islamic political prisons without having ever engaged in any political activity or belonged to a political group, lived through two months of that torture. They ate in the tombs and could stretch out to sleep for a time after the noon and evening meals. They could listen to the television: “In the dastgah, one cannot do anything. It is impossible to make any movement, or to speak with neighbors or with those responsible for the cell. There are no books and the zone of vision is very limited. The only thing there remains to do is to forge pipes.”
One month later, Chahrnoush was transferred to another cell, to another “tomb”: “The walls of that room were covered in mosaics. Behind me, there was a wall, a window. The image of a tree was reflected clearly, alongside all the beauty of the wall ceramics, facing me. For three years, I had not seen a tree. That day was also the birthday of my son; that coincidence moved me so much that I cried for joy…; the memory of the tree consoled me for several days, but then the same boredom began again. What became troubling, as I went along, was the impossibility of controlling my train of thought. I saw that sometimes the others cried. I understood that they could no longer bear the situation.”
Chahrnoush was able to leave the “tomb” after two months. She speaks in her memoirs of prisoners who repented in those tombs. Azita, one of them, recounted to [Chahrnoush] her conversation: “When I was sitting in the dastgah, I changed bit by bit. I discovered certain universes. Little by little, I felt that as a communist I was ‘defiled.’ In the end, I discovered the truth. I asked the sister guards to give me new clothes. I took a shower. I fulfilled the ritual of ablution. I begged them to burn my old clothes, because they were impure. Then I prayed. I was purified. I became human. God, how I have erred! I said to the sisters that my first name was unclean, that I must change it.” Azita would go on to choose a religious first name, Fatima. Years later, Chahrnoush learned that she had finally lost her mental equilibrium and sometimes took herself for Azita, sometimes for Fatima, each time changing her attitude.
Sacred Sado-Fascism
Monireh Baradaran passed nine years of her youth in the Islamic political prisons and also speaks, in her memoirs, of this torture operation. For six months, she knew the torment of that which she calls the jaabeh (box).
Some prisoners left it later, but Monireh was transferred after fifteen days to another prison. She recounts the sort of prisoners whose resistance had been shattered under that torture reinforced by the verbal abuse and flogging imposed as day-to-day punishment for every transgression of the rules.
“Some [prisoners], having lost their mental equilibrium, yielded by declaring to Haji their will to obey. The head of the prison, in spite of their poor mental state, immediately took them to the interview. They announced, weeping a lot, that they were abject and pathetic people and that to satisfy their caprices and desires they had committed crimes and betrayed their people. They declared their repentance and begged that they be pardoned.
“The presence of the prisoners at these interviews was obligatory. Once recorded, these interviews were broadcast, aimed at those who were in the boxes. You can imagine what a painful catastrophe these declarations of defeat and impotence from the mouths of companions and friends in misfortune could be, for those who lived without any other link with the group. It only served to reinforce their solitude. Haji did not content himself with the broadcast of the interviews; he sometimes took the repentant to the prisoners in the ‘boxes’ to speak of their repentance.”
Erich Fromm, in his study of the anatomy of the “destructivity” in the human being, emphasizes the relation between fascism and sadism. He notes, in that regard, the fact that “the meaning of sadism, common to all its forms, resides in the desire to exercise a control without bounds over a living being, whether animal or human, child or adult, man or woman. To submit a person to pain or contempt without allowing him to defend himself is one of the forms of the direction of total control, but it is not the only one. The person who exercises total control over another transforms that other into his object, into his good to become his God.” Fromm insists on the fact that sadism is not an ordinary phenomenon, but transforms impotence into experience of total power. In that sense, Fromm qualifies it as a “religion of the mentally impotent.”
Islamic jailors such as Lajevardi and Haji Davoud are examples of that. In attributing to themselves the role of God’s delegates on earth, they mix their ambitions and ideological aims with their sadistic desires to make their strategy of repentance succeed. Operations like Ghyamat and the “tombs” crystallize the sadistic aspect of the fascist strategy of repentance.
Prison: Islamist School
In addition to this type of operation which represents the ultimate realization of the morbid impulses of the Islamist victors, the plan of repentance involves a series of measures which articulate propaganda, pedagogy and repression.
The courses of Islamic teaching are organized into parallel sessions of physical torture and interrogations that include the examination of the religiosity of the prisoner. Hasan Derviche, imprisoned from 1981 to 1983 in the prison of Machaad, the capital of Khorasan, described the process of the Islamicisation of the political prison set in place by strengthening the pressure to bring the prisoners to repent and by then pressing the repentant to put pressure on the other political prisoners.
A religious man named Najafi directed that process: “Najafi was a large man with a handsome face. He wore black glasses, was always dressed in an aba and a black turban. He had a loud voice, authoritarian and spoken like a military leader. Very soon after his arrival, he introduced changes in the administration of the prison. His first act was to organize networks of tavabes [the repentant] in prison. Najafi said to the prisoners: ‘In the Islamic Republic, prison does not exist. Here, it is a university. Liberty will be for those who have been guided on the right path.’ He threatened us that he would massacre everyone if conditions worsened and he announced: ‘We will bring you Islamic teachings, physically and spiritually. We will establish the Islamic order.’” The exemplary floggings and executions provoked an increase in the number of tavabes (repentant) and allowed for the fulfillment of this plan of ideological purification.
Gatherings and critical and self-critical debates on the positions of political groups were established, along with reading groups of the writings of religious authorities. Finally, a system of examination was organized: each week the prisoners underwent a written examination on what they had learned on the subject of religion.
The Tragedy of the Repentant
The repentant constituted an important pillar in the Islamicization of the political prison. The strategy of repentance established in the political prison from 1981 to 1988 encapsulates the doctrine of political Islamism founded upon the submission of the individual and the collectivity to Islamic law, under the tutelage of God’s representatives. In that sense, the Islamic political prison in that period represented a microcosm that put into practice the tenants and accomplishments of this sociopolitical project. In that theatre, the repentant were the characters who revealed the other dimensions of the unfolding tragedy. The prisoners’ memoirs that discuss the repentant are marked by anger, regret and pity:
“He had denounced many people, even his two sisters. He had formerly been a part of the unit for which I was responsible. He loved with a devoted love the organization in which we fought and believed in its ideals. He was intense, honest and worked a lot. When he returned to the cell, I could see a physical change. His head was shaved, and his pale face was covered by a graying beard. The pressures of interrogation and torture, for one thing, and the death of his brother and his feeling of guilt, for another, had finished him. He seemed withered, broken. His eyes no longer had a normal appearance, they focused on one point. He spoke very little. In speaking, he did not look his interlocutor in the eyes, he lowered his eyes.”
Hasan Derviche thus describes his confrontation with a repentant. He knew that the latter represented a real danger to him because his political activity was not entirely known by the Islamic police. He continued, however, to speak to him and tried to establish a link with him. One day, Said came to speak to him:
“Why are you so kind to me? I am a repentant, I have moreover denounced you, only I gave your pseudonym because I did not know your name.”
Hasan said to him that his life depended on him. The repentant cried a lot, saying that he could not do it, that he had already collaborated, that he was already dishonored. Hasan said to him that it was not his fault, that he had been broken, that he was no longer himself and that he could try to find himself again.”
The repentant did not speak. Hasan Derviche recounted that he was sanctioned for that: he was condemned to many years of prison and sent to a cell reserved for that category of political prisoner.
All, like their profiles and paths, were not homogenous, the tavabes’ fates were not always identical. Not all the repentant collaborated. In effect, the political prisoners’ memoirs and other writings reveal different degrees of repentance in the Islamic prison, from the renunciation of their convictions and the admission of their “errors” to total collaboration with the jailors. The repentant were also useful for presenting a decent image of the Islamic prisoner to the rest of the world. M. Baradaran writes in her memoirs on this subject: “For the anniversary of the revolution, the regime organized special programs at Hosseinye […] that year they had also invited and received the guests who came from abroad to visit Evin prison. To organize this program, some prisoners had been selected from among the repentant.”
Jailors’ Dreams, Prisoners’ Nightmares
In addition to these tasks concerned with propaganda, the collaborating repentant carried out controls in the interior of the cells, made reports on the prisoners, and sometimes participated in interrogations.
Also, those whom the prisoners called the “real repentant” transformed themselves into agents of power yet more formidable than the others, because they had information that the regime did not. The regime exercised great pressure on the leading officers of political groups to produce repentant people. Those who yielded had a serious impact on the spirits of the prisoners who were grassroots militants, often quite young and with little or no political experience. Their recorded interviews were broadcast massively in the cells. Lajevardi organized public evenings, in a place in Evin called Hosseinye, to set the repentant against all the men and women prisoners in an ideological debate. The repentant also intervened with the resistant prisoners to advise them to abandon their convictions and confess their errors.
It should be emphasized, however, that the leftist political groups were for the most part of the culture of Marxist-Leninism. Following the example of the Mojahedin of the people, their vision of the revolutionary organization was founded on the quasi-sacredness of the organization and, thus, on the cult of their leaders.
The spectacle of the repentance of those leaders imploring the Islamic regime to pardon them had a devastating effect on the spirit of the young militants, often high-school and university students. As for the repentant former political leaders, once the Islamist government found them too worn down to be useful, they were executed, for the most part, in spite of the services they had rendered.
But not all the militant officers yielded. Many were executed or died under torture. In addition, many of the grassroots militants were not submitted to the plan of repentance. This was why the jailors always invented new methods for submitting the rebels and using widely the real repentant.
In his memoirs of his long years in the Islamic prisons (1982-1990), Nima Parvaresh, a political prisoner, described the years 1982-1983. At that time, those responsible for the Ghezal Hessar prison put pressure for an entire year on the dissenting prisoners concentrated in several bands (grouped together in a group of cells): “With the arrival of new prisoners, the population of the cells increased. As they went along, the rules of life in the band became stricter and control over the prisoners was strengthened. Living conditions deteriorated and there were daily punishments. Each day the prisoners were brought from the band to ziré hasht (place designated for punishment) to stay there, at first, for three or four days and undergo flogging with electric cables.
Each band had a quarter of an hour each day for recreation, three outings to use the toilets, limited to 7 to 10 minutes for the small bands, less populated, and to 7 to 15 minutes for the larger bands. The quality of the meals deteriorated from day to day. The majority the prisoners got weaker and lost weight. Later, any handiwork was prohibited under penalty of heavy punishment. In response to prisoner demands for the improvement of the situation, the pressures exerted were formalized as rules integrating the new restrictions, aimed at destroying the links between the prisoners: “Communal acquisition was prohibited. Communal use of anything was prohibited. No contact was allowed to be established with prisoners in other bands. In the band or during recreation, the prisoners did not have the right to assemble in groups of more than two. During the broadcasts over the loudspeakers in the bands of the interviews of the repentant or of the lessons in Islam, the prisoners were required to cease all activity and listen in silence. According to these new rules, each repentant was considered the representative of the head of the prisoner. The latter was the representative of the supreme religious leader (vali-e faghih) and, consequently, every person who insulted a tavab also insulted the supreme authority and merited the worst sanctions. Finally, the decree affirmed that the only possible way out [of prison] was to convert to Islam, to say prayers, and to repent in a public meeting. After the arrival of the repentant in the cells, daily life became harsher. Each evening, some of us endured beating. At noon and in the evening, the repentant organized collective prayers in the corridor. Beginning at five in the morning, the loudspeakers broadcast radio programs devoted to the recitation of the Koran. Without a moment of respite, it seemed to us that madness or death were the best ends. But they did not want to kill us. They wanted to break our resistance, to destroy us entirely.”
In “this situation of horror and growing terror,” says Nima, “the number of nervous problems among the prisoners increased each day and some lost their psychological equilibrium. During the night, the cries of those with nightmares awoke everyone. […] But few of the troubled people agreed to repent; some tried to commit suicide, but others stayed awake to prevent their death […] In this catastrophic situation, I consoled myself by telling myself that it would be better to become crazy than to become a repentant (tavab) and to join the front of torturers.”
The resistance of political prisoners to the Islamic repentance strategy thus transformed itself into a fight to defend their human integrity, to refuse to be reduced to an object in the hands of the sado-fascist jailors. Ali Shirasi, a former political prisoner, described repentance as a “putting to death of the dreams and ideals” of the person.
Monireh Baradaran speaks of the painful ordeal that she endured in agreeing to say prayers. In her memoirs, she describes herself as torn apart by a struggle between the “interior self” and the “exterior self.” Having been transferred to Evin prison for new interrogations which were to determine her future, she says, “After a time of hesitation and interior tearing apart, one day, I began to say prayers. I qualified that act as an act of obligatory resignation to the Ghezel Hessar prison, where I had said prayers during two months. This act made me suffer less while at Evin, where it was no longer a direct obligation but a choice between life and death. I risked the death penalty. The interrogator had said that the defense of my convictions could confirm my condemnation to death. The state of my dossier permitted me to avoid that penalty, on the condition that I take a less radical position. And I, in that nightmarish universe, I fled death in moments when I hated life. In fleeing, I felt humiliated. Each time that I bent down to say my prayers, I felt that humiliation yet more keenly.”
Monireh experienced a period of depression after that ordeal, and later returned to that decision. She then felt more confident in herself.
Becoming a tavab is, as Monireh Baradaran and Nima Parvaresh explain, the great fear of prisoners who resist. The real repentant are only different from torturers who share the fate of the prisoners in so far as they do not know what will happen to them. The jailors continually ask them to prove their fidelity, to demonstrate that they are the real repentant. This [took place] particularly because, following the recommendations made by the Mojahedin of the People to their sympathizers to opt for tactical repentance, a network of false repentant was established in the prison. The jailors’ discovery of this network reinforced their suspicions about the repentant. The jailors, therefore, forced the repentant who agreed to collaborate to accomplish even more vile tasks, such as helping with the execution of condemned prisoners, to prove the sincerity of their repentance. However, a certain number of them were never freed and were executed in prison.
Heroic Face of the Islamist Mother
The Islamist justification of this act consisted in declaring that assuming the penalty permitted the repentant to perfect his act of repentance. Also, after having left this world, he would have a strong chance of having God accept his repentance and, consequently, of avoiding being condemned to hell.
During the days of August 11 and 12, 1982, Iranian television broadcast a report on the last encounter of a believing mother with her son, a militant in the Communist group Paykar, imprisoned and condemned to the death penalty.
The scene happened before the execution, in the prison of Ispahan, capital of the reigion of Ispahan. The mother reminded her son that she had told him to repent and to cease fighting against God; now, he would have to answer for those acts. Crying, the son kissed his mother’s hands and announced to her that he had repented. But the mother said to him coldly that she had not come to see him, but that she had been summoned by the revolutionary prosecutor and that she had only come to thank the Islamic tribunals for crushing the counter-revolutionaries. She finally concluded [by saying that] she had prayed to thank God when [her son] had been arrested, and that he must also repent before Him. The son replied that he had never participated in terrorist actions and that he was ready to kiss the hands of the Imam Khomeini. Several minutes later, the television host announced the execution of the prisoner, Mahmoud Tarigholislam.
A vision of Islam such as that is applied in the political prison to the enemies of Islam, representatives of the devil in the war against God. This political doctrine reflects at its base an understanding of the human being as a source of sin, as a potential home for the devil. From that understanding comes the necessity for total submission to a defined order according to religious laws.
On June 21, 1981 Abdolhassan Banisadr, the first President of Iran following the Revolution, was impeached by the Iranian Parliament, upon the instigation of Ayatollah Khomeini. Immediately, the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) seized the Presidential buildings, some of Banisadr’s associates were imprisoned or executed, and Banisadr himself went into hiding before managing to flee the country. The elimination of Banisadr allowed for the increasing concentration of power in the hands of the radical clerics. [Note added by translator].
The National Intelligence and Security Organization (SAVAK) functioned as a secret police, from 1957 to 1979, under the direction of Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi. SAVAK became increasingly identified with torture and other human rights abuses and, as such, stood as a symbol of what was hated about the Shah’s regime. It was dismantled under the government of Shapur Bakhtiar shortly before the Islamic Revolution in February 1979. After the Revolution, hundreds of SAVAK agents were pursued and executed by the security forces of the new Islamic Republic. [Note added by translator].
See M. Homayoun, "The Steps and Forms of Arrest," in Ketab-e Zendan (Prison Book), under the direction of Nasser Mohajer, v.I, United States, Noghteh Editions, 1998.
See M. Homayoun; see alos Verya Bamdad, Djomhouri-e Zendanha (The Republic of Prisons), Frankfurt, v. I, June 2001.
The Sépahé Pasdaran-Enghélab, or Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, is the army of the Guardians of the Revolution constituted by the order of the Ayatollah Khomeini, in March 1979, which developed into an important military and repressive institution.
A revolutionary Islamist political organization founded organized by Akbar Gudarzi, a young seminarian who, in the couple years leading up to the 1979 Revolution, taught Koranic courses influenced by the teaching of Ali Shariati, a contemporary religious thinker whose reinterpretation of Islam in terms of modern sociology contributed to the Islamic revival of that time. The existence of the Forghan group was made known through the publication of political and religious statements in 1976, and its members numbered from 50 to 60. In keeping with Shariati’s teachings, the Forghan was against clerical involvement in politics and, after the victory of Ayatoallah Khomeini in 1979, the organization set out to eliminate prominent figures in the new regime. They succeeded in killing high ranking clergymen in the Islamic Republic’s Party, including Motahari and Moffateh. Forghan’s leader and four of its prominent members were arrested in early 1980 and executed May 24th of that year. The organization did not survive the execution of its leaders. [Noted added by translator].
A lawyer and pro-democracy advocate with social democratic leanings, Dr. Shapur (Chapour) Bakhtiar was one of the leaders of the liberal, pro-Mosadeq, opposition to the late Shah's dictatorship. During the revolutionary turmoil of 1978, Dr. Bakhtiar accepted the Shah’s offer of the post of Prime Minister, which he held from January 3 to February 11, 1979. Ayatollah Khomeini, the revolutionary leader of Iran's popular movement, who advocated a theocracy, dismissed Bakhtiar's effort to establish democratic rule and called upon the people to rebel against his government. On February 11th, 1979, Bakhtiar's government was toppled by a popular insurrection. Forced into exile, he continued his support for democracy in Iran from abroad. Dr. Bakhtiar was murdered by agents of the Iranian government in his home outside Paris on August 6, 1991. [Note added by translator].
On July 7, 1980, the Islamic Republic of Iran authorities announced the discovery and dismantling of a civil and military network which had planned a coup d’etat, called the Nojeh Coup, to overthrow the regime. Following this discovery, more than sixty officers and civilians were executed in several Iranian cities within less than a month. Most of the officers were still active in the army and had not been purged in the first wave of purges which took place within the file and ranks of the army after the fall of the monarchy. Two months later, the organization NEGHAB, in a communiqué, claimed responsibility for the coup attempt, claiming Bakhtiar as its “authentic leader.” (Iran: In Defense of Human Rights, National Movement of the Iranian Resistance, Paris, 1983). [Note added by translator].
The Ayatollah Mohammed Reza Mahdavi Kani is an Iranian cleric and politician who continues to be influential in Iranian politics. He served as Minister of the Interior from August 1980 to August 1981, as Interim Prime Minister in September and October of 1981, and as a member of the council for the amendment of the Constitution of Iran in 1989. He is currently the Secretary General of the Combatant Clergy Association and head of Tehran’s Imam Sadegh University. [Note added by translator].
Ali Falahian is an Iranian politician and cleric on the Islamic Republic’s third Assembly of Experts and as Minister of Intelligence from 1989 to 1997. He is currently under international warrant for arrest for his involvement in the 1992 Mykonos restaurant assassinations, the 1994 bombings of Jewish community buildings in Buenos Aires and 1990 assassination near Geneva of Kazem Rajavi, a well-known human opponent to the Islamic Republic of Iran. [Note added by translator].
Sura IX, The Repentance, verse 28.
M. Kouhiar, Baresi aghlani-e ghanon va edalat dar elsam (A Critical Study of Law and Justice in Islam), p.152-153
Sura V, verse 6.
Mary Douglass, Of Defilement, Paris fm/foundation, 1981, p.59.
Sura IV, verse 76
Hodoud signifies a group of hads, limits, measures upheld by the penal code, drawn from Islamic law. They determine the punishments which correspond to the different offenses and transgressions considered to be sins. To amputate the hand of robber is a had.
Qesas is a law of reparation based on the Islamic law for imposing on the guilty a punishment equal to the crime committed. Stoning for adultery is one example. However, the reprisal allowed for by this law, founded on the logic of vengeance, is not so much egalitarian as it looks to be equitable in the measure that it considers the respective statuses of the victim and the perpetrator of the crime.
Translation from the French; exact wording unknown. The original text could not be found as no specific reference was given.
Amnesty International, Iran, the Islamic Republic and Human Rights Violations, 1987, p.33.
Ibid., p.37.
Lists presented by the People's Mojahedin of Iran.
The People's Mojahedin of Iran is a militant Islamic Socialist organization that advocates the overthrow of the current government of the Islamic Republic. It was originally founded in 1965 as a group committed to armed struggle against the government of the Shah of Iran, Mohammed Reza Pahlavi, and the Western capitalist and imperialist forces with which it was considered to be allied. Though it officially renounced violence in 2001, the Islamic Republic and a number of Western countries, including the United States, continue to designate it as a terrorist organization. [Note added by translator].
The Fadaiyan Khalq Organization, a Marxist Leninist group inspired by the Cuban Revolution and the urban guerilla movements of Latin America, was founded in 1971 by two communist groups opposed to the Pahlavi regime. Following the 1979 revolution, the Organization, which had renounced armed struggle, split over their support of the Islamic Republic and of the Soviet Union. The Fadaiyan Khalq Minority opposed the Islamic Republic and was active mainly in the political arena and the labor movement. [Note added by translator].
The Peykar Organization for the Liberation of the Working Class was founded by a number of dissident members of the Mojahedin Khalq Organization which had converted to Marxism-Leninism. Peykar was also joined by a number of political organizations, known as Khat-e Se (Third line). The founding tenets of Peykar included the rejection of guerrilla struggle and a strong stand against the pro-Soviet policies of the Iranian Tudeh Party. Peykar viewed the Soviet Union as a "Social imperialist" state, believed that China had deviated from Marxist-Leninist principles, and radically opposed all factions of the Islamic regime of Iran. The brutal repression of dissidents by the Iranian government and splits within Peykar in 1981 and 1982 effectively dismantled the organization and scattered its supporters. By the mid-1980s, Peykar was no longer in existence. [Note added by translator].
Komele is a Kurdish Marxist opposition group that was founded in 1967 in opposition to the government of the Shah of Iran, Mohammed Reza Pahlavi. In 1983, it joined with other Iranian Marxist and socialist groups to form the Communist Party of Iran. However, unlike the Tudeh Party, it has remained independent of communist states. The group looks to end the national oppression of and bring about conditions favorable to the self-determination of the Kurds in Iranian Kurdistan. [Note added by translator].
“Rah-e Karegar” or the “Revolutionary Workers Organization of Iran” was established in the summer of 1979. The Organization was founded by individuals from various leftist groups who rejected the idea of armed struggle and believed in political action. They identified themselves as Marxist-Leninists, promoting a socialist revolution and the leadership of the proletariat. They differed with the pro-Soviet communist party, Toudeh, in that they opposed the Islamic Republic and Ayatollah Khomeini’s leadership. [Note added by translator].
The Ranjbaran Party of Iran was established in Tehran by a number of Marxist groups and parties in late December 1979. The founders of Ranjbaran were Marxist-Leninist and followers of Mao Tse-Tung’s school of thought. They opposed the USA and the USSR and supported Ruhollah Khomeini as an anti-imperialist leader. During the massive repression of 1981, the party was banned and its leaders were executed. Its publication, “Ranjbar,” has occasionally been published outside Iran since 1981. [Note added by translator].
An offshoot of the Iranian pro-Soviet Tudeh Party (see below), the Toufan Party was formed by a number of Tudeh members who refused to accept the de-Stalinization of the Soviet Union in the 1960s and maintained the more radical Stalinist principles that continued to be adhered to by Maoist groups. [Note added by translator].
The Tudeh Party of Iran was created in 1941. The Tudeh's ideology was Marxist-Leninist and it supported the Soviet Union's policies. The Party played a major role in Iranian politics until it was banned for a second time following the August 19, 1953 coup. After the 1979 Revolution, the Tudeh declared Ayatollah Khomeini and the Islamic Republic regime revolutionaries and anti-imperialists and actively supported the new government. Although the Party never opposed the Islamic Republic, it became the target of its attacks beginning in 1982, when most of the Party's leaders and members were imprisoned. [Note added by translator].
The Fadayian [Fadian] Khalq Organization, a Marxist-Leninist group inspired by the Cuban Revolution and the urban guerilla movements of Latin America, was founded in 1971 by two communist groups opposed to the Pahlavi regime. Following the 1979 revolution, the Organization, which had renounced armed struggle, split over their support of the Islamic Republic and of the Soviet Union. The Fadayian Khalq Majority considered the Islamic Republic as a revolutionary and anti-imperialist regime and supported it. They shared the views of the Tudeh Party and collaborated with the government. By 1983, however, their political beliefs made them the target of the Islamic Republic's repression. [Note added by translator].
Pierre Vidal-Nacquet, Torture in the Republic, Essay on Contemporary History and Politics, 1954-1962, Paris
Report “Torture Without End,” Ghoftégho hay-e Zendan (Prison Dialogues), no. 1, Autumn 1997, Federal Republic of Germany, Ed. Sonboleh.
Reza Ghafari, Khatérat-e yek zendani az zendanhay-e djomhouri-e eslami (Memoirs of a Prisoner of the Prisons of the Islamic Republic), Sweden, Ed. Arash, March 1998, p. 11.
R. Ghafari, p. 28-30.
Sura LVI, Verses 1-7 and 88-86.
R. Ghafari, p. 128-132.
Sharnush Parsipour, Khaterat-e zendan (Prison Memoirs), Sweden, Ed. Baran, 1996.
Ibid., p.298-299.
Ibid., p.302-303.
M. Raha (Monireh Baradaran), Haghghat-e sadeh’ (The Simple Truth), Hanover, Independent Democratic Association of Iranian Women, 1992.
Ibid., p. 160-163.
Erich Fromm, The Anatomy of Human Destructiveness, part III, 1997; Trans. in Persian A. Sabouri, Tehran, Ed. Poyech, 1982.
Hasan Derviche, Va hanouz ghessé bar yad ast (And the Story is Still Among My Memories), United States, Ed. Nogth Book, 1997.
Cloak worn by the religious.
H. Derviche, p. 139-140.
H. Derviche, p. 165-168.
The large hall in Evin Prison used for group events, religious ceremonies and the public confessions of prisoners. See below. [Note added by translator].
M. Raha (Monireh Baradaran), Haghighat-e sadeh’ (The Simple Truth), p. 32.
Nima Parvaresh, Dar nabardi na barabar (In an Illegal Combat), Federal Republic of Germany, Ed. Andishé va Paykar, 1995.
Ibid., p.44-48.
M. Raha (Monireh Baradaran), Haghighat-e sadeh (The Simple Truth), v. II, p. 35.
Ibid., p.155.
See Le Monde, 15 août 1982.