Is This Your First War? by Michael Petrou

Author:Michael Petrou
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi, pdf
Publisher: Dundurn
Published: 2012-09-06T16:00:00+00:00

Amir called me on my hotel’s lobby telephone. I had returned to Tehran as he had instructed.

“Check your email.”

I opened my inbox to find a detailed message from Amir instructing me to wear a red shirt and go to an address in a Tehran suburb. He gave me a password and the response I should expect to hear. I was supposed to be there in two hours. I called a cab and had the driver drop me off nearby.

The man who approached me was tall, with deep-set dark eyes, thick eyebrows, and a loosely parted flop of hair. He seemed friendly but reserved, even sad. Feeling a little self-conscious, I repeated the password I had memorized — a Farsi word I didn’t understand — and shook his hand. “Behrouz,” he said, introducing himself, and smiled with his mouth. His eyes didn’t change. I followed him into a nearby house.

Inside, about a dozen mostly young Iranians sat in a circle on cushions near the wall. Several smoked cigarettes. A few stood up to shake my hand. All were dissidents — activists and democrats, mostly current and former students, but also the parents of two political prisoners.

Among them, only Bina Darabzand, a barrel-chested man with dancing eyes and a quick smile, was older than thirty. He had been arrested for the first time in 1971 at the age of thirteen for protesting rising bus fares. A family friend got him out of prison and urged his parents to send him out of Iran. The worried friend could tell already that Bina had a rebellious streak in him. If Bina didn’t leave Iran, maybe it would be best if he spent a bit of time in jail, the friend thought, just so he would know the consequences of standing up to the authorities before he got himself in more serious trouble. Bina didn’t stop. He campaigned against the shah as a young man, and now, with flecks of grey in his moustache and thick, curly hair, he wanted to bring down Iran’s theocracy.

Many of those present had been jailed at Evin prison, in some cases for years, usually for protesting against the government and demanding democracy and greater freedom in their country. Several had been in Evin when Zahra Kazemi was held there. They wanted to tell me what they knew about her murder.

“When Zahra Kazemi was in section 209, my father would listen to her screaming,” a young, pony-tailed man named Ali Tabarzadi said. “At first he didn’t know who it was. But the agents told him. He could hear her moaning and weeping.”

Ali’s father, Heshmatollah, a journalist and founder of the Democratic Front of Iran, was serving a seven-year sentence for various alleged crimes, such as disturbing public opinion and insulting Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamanei. Section 209 is run by Iran’s Ministry of Intelligence, and it is where some of the worst abuses at Evin are inflicted on political prisoners. Heshmatollah was still incarcerated when I met with his

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