Letters to My Torturer Read online

  Letters to My Torturer

  A journalist, writer, and translator, Houshang Asadi was a member of both the Writers’ Association of Iran and the Iranian Journalists’ Syndicate, and the co-founder of the Association of Iranian Film Critics and Script Writers. Prior to the Islamic Revolution he served for many years as Deputy Editor at Kayhan, Iran’s largest daily news-paper, and was for twelve years the Editor-in-Chief of the country’s largest circulation film magazine, Gozaresh. He is the author of several novels, plays, and film scripts, and has translated into Persian important works by Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Mario Vargas Llosa, and T.S. Eliot.

  In 1974 during the Shah’s regime, Asadi was arrested along with other journalists and found himself sharing a tiny prison cell for 9 months with a young clergyman by the name of Ali Khamenei, currently Iran’s Supreme Spiritual Leader and the appointed successor to Ayatollah Khomeini. The two formed a close friendship that continued until events took a dramatic turn.

  Shortly after the Islamic Revolution of 1979, and following the new government’s crackdown on all opposition parties, Asadi was arrested once again. He was kept in solitary confinement for almost 2 years and severely tortured, until he falsely confessed to operating as a spy for the British and Russian governments. His sentence was death by hanging. In the end this was reduced to 15 years imprisonment. After 6 years he was freed and eventually escaped Iran in 2003. He now lives in exile in Paris with his wife, where he cofounded the influential Persian-language news website Rooz Online, on which he serves as a member of the editorial board.

  To my wife, without whom this book,

  and life, would be incomplete

  LETTERS

  to my

  TORTURER

  LOVE, REVOLUTION, AND IMPRISONMENT IN IRAN

  HOUSHANG ASADI

  Letters to My Torturer

  First published by Oneworld Publications Ltd 2010

  This ebook edition published by Oneworld Publications 2011

  Copyright © Houshang Asadi 2010

  Translation copyright © Nushin Arbabzadah 2010

  The moral right of Houshang Asadi to be identified as the Author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988

  All rights reserved

  Copyright under Berne Convention

  A CIP record for this title is available

  from the British Library

  ISBN 978–1–78074–031–7

  Cover design by www.leonickolls.co.uk

  Oneworld Publications Ltd

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  Oxford OX2 7AR

  England

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  Contents

  Preface

  1 Two Articles of the Constitution

  2 Iran of Those Days: The Age of Compassion

  3 Kissing the Hand of Khomeini

  4 In the Shah’s Prison with Mr Khamenei

  5 Playing “Full or Empty” with Mehdi Karroubi

  6 As Always There’s a Woman Involved ...

  7 How I became a Spy for MI6

  8 Bakhtiar’s Le Monde, Khomeini’s Sandals of Despotism

  9 Khamenei-Kianuri: Political Ping-pong

  10 I used to be Ahmadinejad’s Torturer!

  11 Kabul a Few Days after the Red Army’s Arrival

  12 Defending Khomeini in the Heart of Moscow

  13 Visiting the Dead

  14 Drinking Hard Liquor in the Islamic Torture Chamber

  15 Woof, Woof. I am a Spy

  16 The Coup and the Bullshitters

  17 The Night of the Coup

  18 Return from the Grave

  19 My Wife’s Voice and her Eyes

  20 Sex in the Torture Chamber

  21 Goodbye to Moshtarek Prison, Hello to Evin

  22 Ghezel Hesar Prison and Stalin’s Massacre

  23 Purgatory in Hell

  24 Genocide in the Islamic Republic

  25 Gallows and Mass Murder

  26 Iran of Today: The Reign of Thugs

  Endnotes

  Preface

  I’m talking about torture.

  I was a young man longing for freedom, deeply patriotic, and in love with literature. I thought the world could be changed. I supported the Iranian Revolution in the fervent belief that green shoots of freedom would sprout up, no one would go hungry, and dictatorship would be consigned to dusty museums.

  But suddenly I found myself in hell. In 1983, arrested in a government crackdown on opposition parties, I was assigned to the care of a man who was employed as my “interrogator”. I was helpless prey, caught in the trap of the “brothers”. In the Islamic Republic of Iran, “brother” is the generic title of all male believers, and each of the interrogators were therefore called “brother” and an assumed name. My whole existence lay in the hands of one such brother, “Brother Hamid”. In defending the “holy” government, Brother Hamid saw himself as God’s representative, with absolute control over every aspect of my life. Sleep, medication, food, even going to the toilet, were impossible without his permission. His motivation was hatred based on religious ideology, his tools were a whip and handcuffs. He saw me as a traitor, a spy, the embodiment of corruption and evil. Everything he assumed about me I had to “confess” to, and eventually I did, under the onslaught of brutal whippings, my feet raw and swollen from the lash, strung up from the ceiling of my cell by a rope for days and nights on end, deprived of sleep, of every human dignity, and in torment that my wife was being tortured too. If I needed anything, I had to bark like a dog. And whenever I barked, Brother Hamid laughed.

  Brother Hamid transformed me from a young idealist to the lowest form of life on earth. After 682 days in solitary confinement, subjected to every deprivation, my “confessions” were used, in a show trial lasting just six minutes, to sentence me to fifteen years in prison. In the mass killings that were carried out by the government in the summer of 1988, I came very close to being hanged – called up before another kangaroo court, I was forced to lie. Each prisoner was asked three questions: Are you a Muslim and say your prayers? Do you renounce your past? Do you believe in the Islamic Republic, and who is your point of reference. And I lied to all three questions. I said I hated my past and was devoted to Ayatollah Khomeini, and I was spared the rope. Eventually, after spending six years incarcerated in some of the most infamous jails in the Islamic Republic, I was freed to rejoin the mega-prison that is today’s Iran. I escaped in 2003, and am now forced to live in exile.

  Then one day, a few years ago, someone emailed me an image. He asked if I knew the man in the photo. I did. It was Brother Hamid, by this time one of Iran’s ambassadors. Staring into his eyes, I knew I needed to confront my torturer and the living nightmare that was his legacy to me. I searched through my scattered notes, written intermittently over the years since my release from prison, but they were filled with hatred and I no longer identified with them. I didn’t wish to view the world, as my torturer had, in black and white terms. I didn’t want to respond to the whip with the sword of my pen. No, now that I was the judge, I hated the idea of taking my revenge on him. Instead, I decided to write letters to him, to convey to him in some small way the intimate cruelty of those days and their aftermath.

  Writing this book was a painful struggle. Every dawn as I started work on the manuscript, I would return to Brother Hamid’s hell. I would weep and write and the soles of my feet would throb. I even had a heart attack. Every fibre of my being protested, but I forced myself to keep going. I wanted to lay bare the life of a person under torture, and to describe the effect of that tortu
re on the mind and body of a human being. In the process, I had to overcome my inner turmoil and remove every trace of hatred, line by line. I did my best to view the scene impartially and to be true to myself, as there is nothing more frightening to me than a victim of torture becoming a torturer himself. In the end, I began to see something of myself in my torturer, and found myself recognizing him as a human being too, as another person born in the same autocratic culture. And finally I gathered up my letters in this book, which I hope will eventually reach Brother Hamid’s hands, sooner or later. Perhaps he will recognise himself in these pages.

  During my long years in prison, I realised that thousands of men and women, before me, alongside me, and after me, were tortured to death. I wish the story of torture and imprisonment could end with my story, and that of Brother Hamid. I wish the history of torture, which follows in the footsteps of the inquisitions of the Middle Ages, would end with the Islamic Republic of Iran. But even in recent times, from the valleys of Afghanistan to the prison camp of Guantánamo Bay, prisoners have been interrogated using techniques that, just fifty years earlier, the US military had condemned for eliciting false confessions. And we are all familiar with the sexual degradation and torture of Iraqi prisoners that was captured in chilling photographs, and appeared on our television screens and in newspapers around the world.

  As I finished the first draft of this book in 2009, Iran descended into political unrest and chaos once again. And the people who are protesting against Iran’sautocracy today are sadly being subjected to the same treatment we were a generation ago, as hundreds of new Brother Hamids keep the torture chambers busy. Young men and women are being tormented using ever more refined techniques of physical and psychological manipulation and the application of pain so that they will “confess” to being spies for the USA and Israel.

  In the era when my “Brother Hamid” and his fellow interrogators were torturing political prisoners mercilessly, no one knew about it. It took many years for our stories to leak out and be heard. Today, torture is still being practised in many parts of the world, but the news travels more quickly. In the current political climate, then, Letters to My Torturer is more than the account of one man’s experience of torture. It is the exploration of an issue that sits heavily on humanity’s conscience.

  At the height of one of his torture sessions, Brother Hamid asked me: If one day things change and we end up being your captives, what will you do to us? My answer is this: we will demolish all the world’s infamous prisons of torture and we will sentence the intelligence officers and interrogators to go to their ruins to plant flowers and sing love songs. And the sham trials, the torture, and all forms of degrading and inhuman treatment that went with them will at last be a thing of the past.

  Paris, March 2010

  [email protected]

  Chapter 1

  Two Articles of the Constitution

  And I see stars. No, that’s an old-fashioned way of putting it. Fireworks go off in my head.

  You say: “That was the first article of the constitution. Now lift up your blindfold slightly.” I do as I’m told. You open your military coat. I see the vague outline of a pistol. “And this is the final article, but before we get to this one there will be lots of other articles along the way ...”

  Dear Brother Hamid,

  Greetings again, this time after an absence of twenty-five years. At this moment, as I begin to write, exactly a quarter of a century has passed since the night your first slap made me see stars. I don’t know what you are up to these days at eleven o’clock at night now that you have become an ambassador. I don’t know whether you remember the slap or not. But I go to bed at exactly eleven o’clock and most nights I can still hear the sound of that slap in my ears.

  Every night, yes, every night, my day ends at eleven o’clock, my life reaches its limit and I enter a dark tunnel. I find myself in pitch blackness and I never know whether I’ll manage to get out of the tunnel or not.

  Moshtarek Prison, Tehran, Sunday 6 February 1983

  It’s exactly eleven o’clock in the evening. I’m lying in the corridor, facing the wall. I’ve loosened my blindfold and put on my glasses. Since around eleven o’clock this morning, my life has been reduced to the width and length of the blanket. I’ve learned a number of rules; the most important ones are about the blindfold. When I’m facing the wall, I’m allowed to pull up the blindfold. The damn thing is very coarse, pulling out my eyeballs. Under all other circumstances, I have to tighten it up again.

  A hand touches my shoulder. It makes me jolt against my will. Quickly I grab hold of my glasses. I sit up. I place the glasses inside my shirt pocket. I put on my brown jumper – it was a birthday present. I’m exactly thirty-two years old. No, thirty-two years and one month. I’m at the beginning of the thirty-third year of my life. I adjust the blindfold. A voice shouts my name into my ear. It makes me jump again. The voice says: “Come on.” I stand up. I put on my slippers, which I had placed by the side of the blanket. My spirits lift: “They’re going to release me. They’re going to release me ...” We walk along the corridor and I stumble on something. Someone has come to collect and release me. That someone pulls at my shirtsleeve and announces yet another rule: “Pull up your blindfold just enough so you can see what’s underneath your feet.”

  I do as I’m told. I see everything in a slightly darker shade. I see the ground. I see a pair of military boots and trousers. “It’s the Revolutionary Guards Corps. Yes, it’s them.” My hope grows. The Corps was basically set up to defend the revolution. I myself have written a number of complimentary articles about them. We go through the “Under the Eight”,1 which is a triangular courtyard. I recognize this courtyard. I’ve passed through it many times during earlier detentions. The guard accompanying me says: “Be careful. There’s a step.”

  I can’t see the step. I find it with my foot. There are two of them. I don’t know yet that for years to come I’ll have to watch out for these steps when passing through the courtyard. My companion has a kind voice. My heart lights up. “The Revolutionary Guards must have spent the entire morning defeating the American coup and are now freeing us.” My optimism is based on the analysis of Iran’s Communist Party,2 of which I was a member. Like many political analyses, it is rooted in a particular worldview. “The revolutionary democrats are our allies; the government is in their hands. If the Party were ever crushed, it could only be as a result of an American coup.”

  We hadn’t yet reached the other side of the courtyard when my mind finds the question that I must ask the guard: “Excuse me. Is my wife coming?”

  My wife was also arrested that morning. I am trying to figure out her situation as well as my own. “God willing, she’ll come to pick you up tomorrow morning.”

  I feel a sweet sensation in the pit of my stomach. “In the morning, in the morning, in the morning. They’ve freed my wife. She is coming to pick me up tomorrow morning.”

  We enter another triangular courtyard to the left. I hear the sound of the guard’s tramping boots but to me they sound like the drums of freedom. He opens a door. I enter. It’s a narrow corridor and turns left.

  “Pick up the iron rods and follow me.”

  I pick up the iron rods. It’s cold. We walk up the stairs to the first floor.

  “Turn around.”

  I turn around.

  “Remove your blindfold and sit down, facing the wall.”

  I do as I’m told. A chair is placed in the middle of the room. I sit on it. It’s wooden, a pale brown school chair.

  I look around me. The room is large. The windows, framed on both sides by iron bars, have been painted over. I position myself on the chair and wait. There is silence.

  Then I hear the sound of shuffling feet. The sound is coming from a long way off and is moving in my direction. The door opens. The shuffling sound has entered the room. The door closes and you, Brother Hamid, enter my life for good. You who didn’t believe a single word I said.
/>   You must at least acknowledge after twenty-five years, as your picture gradually builds up on my computer monitor, that I did hear the shuffling of your slippers that day. Living abroad, in a foreign country – this fact in itself represents a continuation of your presence in my life – I was simply sitting in front of my computer when the messenger alert pinged and the following message appeared: “Have a look. Have you seen this picture?”

  And the picture slowly materialized. I had a feeling deep in my gut that it would be you, and that once again you were about to enter my life, as if you were tired of having spent twenty-five years away from me. I’m sure you’d be happy to know that when your photograph finally emerged in full, my body began to shake. A sharp pain went through my back. The soles of my feet started burning. Surely you remember me?

  I used to say: “Hello.”

  You used to respond: “Fuck you.”

  You used to make me lie on the bed. Face down. You used to ask me whether I had performed my ablution.3 You used to say “Remember, not performing it is a punishable offence.” You used to say that your name was Hamid, but we all called you “The Torturer”. And then you would start: “In the name of the Heavenly Fatimeh ...”4 And you whipped me. First strike. Second strike. The harder you beat my feet,5 the louder your voice became. After you had tired yourself out, you would switch on the tape machine: