The Great War for Civilisation (22 page)

One of the most impressive of the revolutionary posters depicted the Shah in his full regalia, crown toppling from his balding head, hurtling towards the everlasting bonfire as the avenging Ayatollah swept above him on wings of gold. If ever a Middle Eastern potentate was so frequently portrayed as the Devil, surely never in Islamic art did a living human—Khomeini—so closely resemble the form of the Deity. Tramping through the snow-swamped streets of Tehran, I was stopped by a schoolboy outside the gates of Tehran University who wanted, for a few rials, to sell me a remarkable example of post-revolutionary graphic art. It was a cardboard face-mask of the Shah, his jowls slack and diseased, his crown kept in place only by two massive black horns. Push out the detachable cardboard eyes, place the mask over your own face and you could peer through the Devil's own image at the black chadors and serious-faced young men of central Tehran. The effect was curious; whenever a stroller purchased a mask—whenever I held it to my own face in the street—the young men would cry
Marg ba Shah—
“Death to the Shah”—with a special intensity. It was as if the cardboard actually assumed the substance of the man; the Devil made flesh.

Khomeini had already returned from Paris, and his Islamic revolution initially seduced the more liberal of our journalistic brethren. Edward Mortimer, an equally beached
Times
journalist—a leader-writer on the paper and a fellow of All Souls, he was also a close friend—caught this false romanticism in its most embarrassing form in an article in
The Spectator
in which he favourably compared the revolution to both the 1789 fall of the Bastille and the 1917 overthrow of the Tsar. To Mortimer, Charles Fox's welcome to the French revolution—“How much the greatest event it is that ever happened in the world! And how much the best!”—seemed “entirely apposite” in the Tehran household among whom he was listening to revolutionary songs broadcast from the newly captured headquarters of Iranian National Radio. The events in Iran, Mortimer wrote, “are a genuine popular revolution in the fullest sense of the word: the most genuine, probably, since 1917 anywhere in the world, perhaps
more
genuinely popular than the Bolshevik revolution was, and quite possibly . . . no less far-reaching in its implications for the rest of the world . . . Khomeini has himself defied religious conservatism, and is therefore most unlikely to want to impose it on the rest of society.”

Now this was a journalism of awesome—one might even say suicidal— bravery. While I could not disagree with Edward's remarks on the far-reaching implications of the Iranian revolution, his trust in Khomeini's liberal intentions was born of faith rather than experience. Mossadeq's downfall had demonstrated that only a revolution founded upon the blood of its enemies—as well as the blood of its own martyrs—would survive in Iran. Savak had been blamed for the cinema fire in Abadan in August 1978 in which 419 Iranians were burned alive; the Shah, his enemies claimed, wanted Muslim revolutionaries to be accused of the massacre. Each period of mourning had been followed by ever-larger protest demonstrations and ever-greater slaughter. Street marches in Tehran were more than a million strong. Revolutionary literature still claims that the Shah's army killed 4,000 demonstrators in Jaleh Square in Tehran on 8 September. When Ayatollah Khomeini arrived back in Iran from Paris—the French, who had provided the wine for the Shah at Persepolis, provided Khomeini with the aircraft to fly him home— he was at once taken by helicopter to the cemetery of Behesht-i-Zahra. Four days later, on 5 February 1979, he announced a provisional government headed by Mehdi Bazargan. Iran might still become a democracy, but it would also be a necrocracy: government of, by and for the dead.

And once the martyrs of the revolution had been honoured, it was time for the Shah's men to pay the price. Each morning in Tehran I would wake to a newspaper front page of condemned men, of Savak interrogators slumping before firing squads or twisting from gallows. By 9 March, there had been forty death sentences handed down by revolutionary courts. None of his 60,000 agents could save Nimatollah Nassiri, the head of Savak; grey-haired, naked and diminutive, he lay on a mortuary stretcher, a hole through the right side of his chest. This was the same Nassiri who had brought the Shah's firman to Mossadeq to resign in 1953, the same Nassiri who had arranged the visits of Ben Gurion, Dayan and Rabin to Tehran. General Jaffar Qoli Sadri, Tehran's chief of police—once head of the notorious Komiteh prison—was executed, along with Colonel Nasser Ghavami, the head of the Tehran bazaar police station, and a man accused of being one of Savak's most savage torturers at Qasr prison, Captain Qassem Jahanpanar. All three had been sentenced in the evening and executed within twelve hours.

Many who faced the firing squad that March were found guilty of shooting at demonstrators during the great anti-Shah marches. On 11 March, Lieutenant Ahmed Bahadori was shot for killing protesters in Hamadan. In Abadan, four more ex-policemen were executed for killing a nineteen-year-old youth during demonstrations. On 13 March, revolutionary courts sent another thirteen men accused of being censors and secret police agents to the firing squad. Among them were Mahmoud Jaafarian, the Sorbonne-educated head of the Iranian National News Agency, and former television director Parviz Nikkhah. Before his death, fifty-six-year-old Jaafarian would say only that “I hope when I die my family and my countrymen will live in freedom.” Nikkhah was believed to be the journalist who wrote the inflammatory article against Khomeini that provoked the first bloody religious riots in the holy city of Qom in 1978. One newspaper carried photographs of all eleven with their names written on cardboard around their necks. Jaafarian stares without hope at the camera. Nikkhah looks angrily to the right. The eyes of one ex-secret policeman are directed at the floor. In their minds, they must already be dead.
Kayhan
published two pictures of former Qom police officer Agha Hosseini. In one, he is tied to a ladder, his eyes covered in a white cloth, his mouth open and his teeth gritted as he prepares to receive the first bullets. In the other, his knees have buckled and he sags against the ladder.

Mehdi Bazargan appeared on television, condemning the kangaroo trials as a disgrace to “a wonderful revolution of religious and human values.” Bazargan was angered in April when he heard that the Shah's former prime minister Amir Abbas Hoveyda had been taken from his prison—in which the Shah had confined him in a last attempt to curry favour with the revolution before fleeing the country himself—and charged with “corruption on earth” and “a battle against God.” Only hours before Hoveyda was to go before a firing squad, Bazargan drove at speed to Qom to speak to Khomeini, who immediately set new rules for revolutionary courts. To no avail.

Hoveyda, an intellectual, urbane man whose interests included Bach, Oscar Wilde and James Bond and whose contempt for the corruption surrounding the Shah had earned him the trust of statesmen and diplomats—but not of ordinary Iranians—had been brought to the revolutionary court from his bed at Qasr prison just before midnight, bleary-eyed and pleading that “my doctor has given me a sedative and I can hardly talk, let alone defend myself properly.” But he knew what was coming. “If your orders are for me to get condemned, then I have nothing more to say. The life of an individual is not worth much against the life of a whole nation.” What does a “battle against God” mean? Hoveyda asked the court. If it meant that he was a member of the “system,” then up to 700,000 people had worked in the Shah's civil service. “I had a share in this system—call it the regime of a battle against God if you so wish—and so did you and all the others,” he told the court. He wanted time to gather evidence in his defence. “My hand is unstained both by blood and money,” he pleaded. “ . . . You have brought me here as prime minister while five prime ministers have left the country. Couldn't I also be walking on the Champs Elysées or in the streets of New York?” He had no control over Savak, he said. “In all Savak papers, if you find a single document showing that the prime minister had any role in the organisation, then I shall say no more in my defence.” Hoveyda turned to the reporters in the audience. “What's the news?” he asked them. “I haven't seen any papers or heard the radio for some time.”

Hoveyda was eventually sentenced to death as a “doer of mischief on earth.” Immediately after the sentence, Ayatollah Sadeq Khalkhali, the “hanging judge” of the revolution, disconnected the telephones in the prison, locked the doors, and had Hoveyda dragged into the prison yard, tied to a stake and shot. “The first bullets hit him in the neck but did not kill him,” William Shawcross wrote in his gripping account of the Shah's last days. “He was ordered by his executioner, a mullah, to hold up his head. The next bullet hit him in the head and he died.”
Paris Match
was to carry a photograph of his corpse with a grinning gunman looking at it. Alongside, the magazine carried a picture of the exiled royal family swimming on Paradise Island. Put not your trust in Shahs.

In those early days of the revolution, Iran was in too much anarchy for the new authorities to control journalists. Revolutionary Guards on the roads would send foreign reporters back to Tehran, but they never thought to look for us on the trains. And with a student card—I was using my free time during the stoppage at
The Times
to take a Ph.D. in politics at Trinity College, Dublin—I bought an all-rail card that allowed me to travel across Iran by train. They were long revolutionary trains, the windows smashed, portraits of Khomeini and poster tulips—symbols of martyrdom—plastered over the rolling stock, their restaurant cars serving chicken, rice and tea for breakfast, lunch and dinner. Unable to write for my own newspaper, I sent a long letter to Ivan Barnes, the foreign news editor, to describe Iran's unfinished revolution. The Shah's acolytes, I told him, had usually been insufferably arrogant.

I found that this arrogance had disappeared with the revolution. I was treated with courtesy and kindness almost everywhere I went and found Iranians much more aware of the implications of world events than . . . the inhabitants of Arab countries. There was a straightforward quality about Iranians in the country as well as the towns that I couldn't help admiring. They were thirsting to talk about anything. The only trouble I had was on the train to Qum [
sic
] when a gang of Islamic Guards (green armbands and M-16 rifles) opened the compartment door and saw me recording a cassette with train sounds. I was immediately accused of being a CIA spy (what else?) but explained that I was a journalist working for Canadian radio. The interpreter, a leftist student who travelled with me everywhere . . . repeated the same thing and they relaxed a bit. I had been told in Tehran to always say
Deroot do Khomeini, marg ba Shah!
to anyone nasty (“Long live Khomeini, death to the Shah!”). I said my piece, at which the Khomeini guards all raised their right fists in the air and shouted their approval. Then they all shook hands with me with giant smiles and tramped off down the train to torment someone in another compartment.

From the desert to the north, Qom stands like an island of distant gold, the cupolas of its mosques and its plump, generous minarets an oasis of beauty at dawn. Like the spires of a medieval English university, its ancient centre appears to reach up to heaven. But my train pulled in after dark, the suburbs thick with exhaust and dust and vast crowds, dark-jacketed, bearded men and black-veiled women moving like a tide towards a grim red-brick building surrounded by big, muscular men with automatic rifles. My leftist student friend turned to me. “There is a trial,” he shouted. “They are trying one of the Shah's men.” I dumped my bag in a hotel crammed between shops opposite the Friday Mosque, pulled out my old clunker of a tape recorder and ran back to what was already called the “court.”

Warrant Officer Rustomi of the Shah's Imperial Army sat on a metal-framed chair on the stage of the revolutionary court, his hands clasped in front of him and his gaze fixed on the wooden floor of the converted theatre where he was now on trial. He was a middle-aged man and wore an untidy grey-brown beard. He had long ago been stripped of his artillery regiment uniform, and he appeared in court in a creased green anorak and a pair of dirty jeans, a crumpled figure relieved only by the snappy pair of built-up French shoes on his feet. He looked for all the world like a bored defendant awaiting judgement for a minor traffic offence rather than a man who was waiting only for the legal niceties—if “legal” was the right word— of a death sentence. He was accused of killing anti-Shah demonstrators.

The Islamic court in Qom had dispatched its fifth victim to the firing squad only six hours earlier. He was a local policeman accused of killing demonstrators in the revolution, the man who had appeared on the newspaper front page, tied to the ladder, gritting his teeth in front of the firing squad. Someone had cruelly shown the newspaper to Rustomi; maybe it was the inevitability of his sentence that made him so calm, sitting up there on the platform above us. Every few minutes he would take a packet of American cigarettes out of his pocket, and a gunman with a rifle—yes, an American rifle—slung over his shoulder would step over to him obligingly with a match. Rustomi dragged heavily on the cigarettes and glanced occasionally over towards us with a kind of lifelessness in his eyes.

There were more than 600 men—no women—in the audience and most of them were talking of that morning's execution, although it was difficult to understand why the event should have occasioned any excitement. There had been no acquittals in the revolutionary courts and the only punishment handed out had been death. The crowd had come to watch the prisoner, to see if he cried or pleaded for life or walked defiantly to the firing squad, to watch the mighty fallen. George Bernard Shaw once claimed that if Christians were thrown to the lions in the Royal Albert Hall in London there would be a packed house each night. These excited men in the audience must have been wearing the same faces as the mobs that gathered before the guillotine during the French revolution.