Then They Came For Me (39 page)

The next morning, as I sat beside Paola, just hours before Marianna’s birth, I slowly tried to absorb the idea that a difficult period of my life was over and a new, more gratifying period was about to start, but I couldn’t stop worrying about what might happen. I slipped out of the room for a moment and called my mother.

“I hope Paola and the baby will be okay,” I told her. “Paola’s been through a lot.”

My mother had no time for my unnecessary worries. She spoke to me with her usual strength and directness: “Mazi
jaan
, you shouldn’t worry about Paola or the baby’s health. They will be fine. All you have to worry about now is how well you can raise the baby. And I know you won’t have any problem doing that. Now go back to Paola.”

We were called to the operating room soon after. Given the
difficulties Paola had experienced, the doctors planned to deliver Marianna through cesarean surgery, and the room was filled with nurses and the doctors’ assistants. Even though we’d been told that Marianna’s birth had a higher than normal risk for complications, the mood in the room was jovial and Paola and I were full of excitement.

Within minutes, Marianna was born into the world, in even better health than we had dreamt of. A nurse placed Marianna in Paola’s arms. We were both mesmerized by her beauty. We looked at each other but didn’t say anything. As Marianna let out a tiny, perfect cry, I could have sworn I heard someone singing a familiar song:

·   ·   ·

We were able to bring Marianna home within a few days. She slept like an angel. Paola soon recovered from her surgery. At night, as I watched Paola sleeping with the baby beside her, a voice inside me, perhaps my father’s, urged me on: “Okay, that’s done. What now? Are you going to rest on your laurels and let those bastards get away with murder?”

It didn’t take very long for the Revolutionary Guards to contact me. “Mr. Bahari, we’re waiting to see you,” said Rosewater’s boss in a message left on my cell phone one day. “We’re sure that we’re going to see you very soon.”

Many of my friends and colleagues who had spent time in prison in Iran had remained silent about what happened to them. They feared that their comments about their experiences in prison would incense the regime, and that their families would have to suffer the consequences. But their silence gnawed at them from inside. Like me, many of them had been forced to make confessions. They felt guilty and angry about what the regime had put them through, and their anguish swelled because of the fear they suffered, even in freedom.

I couldn’t allow that to happen to me. Instead, I knew that I had a responsibility to campaign on behalf of the hundreds of people who remained in prison. But I had to consult with Paola and my mother first. My decisions would affect them more than anyone else.

“Throughout the ordeal, I was sure of one thing only,” Paola told me when I explained to her what I felt I had to do. “It was that you knew what you were doing. I still believe that.”

My mother was even stronger in her support. When I called to ask what she thought about me writing about my experiences,
she didn’t hesitate. “What’ve you been waiting for?” she said with her characteristic candor. “Of course you should talk about these
ashghals
, this garbage. They’ve ruined the lives of people inside the country, and they think that they can get away with bullying people outside of the country as well.”

A few weeks after my release, I wrote a cover story for
Newsweek
entitled “118 Days in Hell.” It was one of the first accounts of postelection brutalities in Iran, but a few months after the article was published, many prisoners said that they’d gone through the same ordeal as I had. After the article, I did a series of television, radio, and print interviews in which I provided more information about my captivity. I was sure to make two points clear: (1) I had made my confessions under duress, and (2) hundreds of innocent prisoners remained inside Iranian jails, enduring the same brutal ordeal I had.

Back in London, with the help of a number of international organizations, I started a campaign calling for the release of my journalist friends and colleagues. More than one hundred journalists had been arrested after the June 2009 presidential election, and since then the Islamic regime has made journalists its prime target in its fight against what it calls “sedition.” To kick off the campaign, I wrote an open letter to Khamenei that was published in the
International Herald Tribune
and subsequently translated by dozens of Persian websites. “The only accusation against many reporters who are languishing in Iranian jails is that they held a mirror to the actions of the Iranian government,” I wrote. “They did not want to overthrow it. They never took up arms. All of them did their job as peacefully as journalists elsewhere in the world. Many a time my torturer told me that he kicked me to make you happy. He told me, ‘Each time I slap you I can feel that the Master is smiling at me.’ Ayatollah Khamenei, I think you are responsible for what happened to me.”

The Guards reacted immediately. An article in
Javan
, a newspaper
run by the Guards, called me “a natural born criminal who should never have been allowed out of jail,” and Iranian television mocked my media appearances by calling my actions “courage in the comfort of the West.” Rosewater’s cohorts also tried to intimidate me by threatening my family. The Guards instructed my brother-in-law, Mohammad, on the phone, “Tell Maziar that he shouldn’t think we can’t reach him because he is not in Iran. The situation is getting really dangerous now. Anything can happen without advance notice.” The Iranian government has assassinated dozens of dissidents outside Iran, and the threatening calls unsettled me. In the beginning, I thought it best to remain silent, believing that publicizing the threats would only make the situation worse for my mother and Mohammad. But the calls continued for months, so in April 2010, after a particularly menacing call to my family, I decided to break my silence and talk about the threats publicly.

In interviews after the threats, I asked those who made the threats a simple question: “I know that the mighty Revolutionary Guards have agents around the world and can get to me whenever they want. But then what? What do they want to do to me? If they want to kill me, then they’re accepting that they’re part of a terrorist regime, and if they want to kidnap me, then they are admitting that they are a hostage-taking government. I think the brothers in the Revolutionary Guards should be more transparent about their intentions.”

Publicizing the threats made them less frequent. The Islamic regime was still worried about its image in the world, so, according to my sources, the smarter people within the Iranian government told the Guards to stop threatening me through my eighty-four-year-old mother. Yet the Guards were so infuriated with me that they decided to harass my family in a different way. To this day, they have been calling my mother periodically, telling her to be ready for an imminent confiscation of her house because I jumped bail. That confiscation has not yet taken place,
but the threat of being forced out of her home hangs over my mother’s head.

Moloojoon’s reaction to the calls was classic, and it makes me so proud of her. After losing her husband, first-born son, and daughter within four years, she had in many ways lost the desire to live, but the calls gave her a reason to be strong once again and to fight. “Who are you?” my elderly mother demanded, challenging one anonymous caller. “Maziar is out of your hands, he is free, and you can’t do anything to him anymore.” She then simply hung up and phoned me to say that the
ashghals
have been calling her again.

It is very difficult for both of us that, for the foreseeable future, I cannot return to Iran to see her. However, my mother can travel outside of the country and has come to London to visit us three times since my release from prison. As much as I’d love for her to live closer to Paola, Marianna, and me, she has no desire to leave Iran permanently. “Your mother doesn’t want to leave the country to the wolves,” a family friend told me recently. “She’s a proud Iranian who tries to keep the spirit of the country alive in her own way. Your father was also one such Iranian; so was Maryam.” Although I chose a path toward building a more democratic Iran that was different from that of Maryam and my father, their memory still gives me hope and inspires me.

On May 9, 2010, I was tried in absentia by a revolutionary court, a type of court that deals primarily with political crimes. My sentence—thirteen and a half years’ imprisonment plus seventy-four lashes—was one of the most severe imposed on any postelection prisoner. There was no court session, and my lawyer never heard the charges. Rosewater and the Revolutionary Guards’ intelligence unit, which had arrested me, dictated the following sentence to the judge:

1. Five years’ imprisonment for unlawful assembly and conspiring against the security of the state
   . This had to do with my reporting on, and taking part in, four days of peaceful demonstrations after the election, along with millions of other Iranians.
   
2. Four years for collecting and keeping secret and classified documents
   . In 2002, a septuagenarian leader of the opposition group Freedom Movement of Iran gave me a court document regarding a trial of certain members of his group. There was nothing secret in the document, all its contents had been announced by the judiciary, and the file is widely available on the Internet. During the interrogations I was asked only once about the document, which even Rosewater didn’t think was sensitive.
   
3. One year for propagandizing against the holy system of the Islamic Republic
   . This was for all the articles I had written and the films I had made in Iran.
   
4. One-year imprisonment and seventy-four lashes for disrupting the public order
   . This referred to my
   Newsweek
   article and Channel 4 report on the attack against the Basij base after the first peaceful demonstration. Even though I had condemned the violence in my report, the revolutionary court agreed with Rosewater that I was a “peaceful terrorist.”
   
5. Two years for insulting the supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei
   . Nothing would be complete in Iran without mentioning the supreme leader. In an email I’d written to my
   Newsweek
   editors Nisid and Chris, which the Guards had found, I’d said that Khamenei had learned from the mistakes the shah had made when he was overthrown by the Islamic Revolution. I mentioned that Khamenei tries to nip any opposition in the bud by arresting its leaders and preventing people from taking to the streets. Rosewater had told me that by comparing Khamenei to the shah I had implied that the supreme leader was a tyrant, and therefore I had to be punished.
   
6. Six months for implying that the president was a homosexual
   . This was the real icing on the cake. I received this sentence for the picture of a young man kissing Ahmadinejad, which someone else had tagged on my Facebook wall.
   

My only reaction to the sentence was to laugh it off publicly and dismiss it as a bizarre judgment passed by an irrational government. I saw it as part of the regime’s attempt to discourage other freed prisoners from speaking out. The explicit message was that anyone could be subjected to the same sentence if he or she dared to talk about the horrors of prison.

My sentence has made me more determined to speak out
against the injustices committed by the Islamic regime. I believe I have a duty to be the voice of the hundreds of journalists, students, civil rights activists, and even mullahs who oppose Khamenei’s tyrannical rule and still languish in Iranian jails in the hands of Rosewater and his colleagues.

·   ·   ·

My motorcycle cabbie Davood called me a few days after my release, on the day I arrived in London. He told me that as soon as he had heard the news of my arrest, he’d changed his cell phone number and moved back to his hometown of Tabriz, where he now works as a shop assistant and tries to keep his head down. Rosewater had lied. Davood was not arrested after me. However, in January 2010, Davood saw two Basij members arresting a young girl for wearing too much makeup, and he rammed into them with his motorcycle. The Basijis called for help, and Davood was caught and taken to the local prison, where he was badly beaten and spent a few days in a cell with a group of ten student activists. Their cell had been designed for solitary confinement, so they had to sleep in shifts and had no privacy when they used the toilet in the cell. Davood’s cellmates begged him not to complain about the situation because the last time they’d complained, two of the young students were taken to another area of the prison, where drug smugglers and thieves were kept. That night, the two students were gagged by the thugs and raped repeatedly. The thugs even used soda bottles and screwdrivers to hurt the students further. The convicts had been promised by the police that “if they taught the students a lesson,” their sentences would be commuted.

This was not the first time I’d heard such a story. Rape has become a form of punishment in the Islamic Republic. Many Iranian refugees in neighboring countries and around the world have had similar experiences, and I’m sure many young, proud Iranians are too ashamed to come forward to tell their stories.
Davood was released a month later. “What kind of regime does that to the educated people of their country?” Davood asked me on the phone. “It’s become so difficult to live in this country, Mr. Maziar. People are getting poorer, and even the little freedom we used to have is almost gone.” Davood sounded frustrated, and a bit tipsy. When I asked him if he was still drinking, he answered that getting drunk on homemade vodka with his friends was his only solace.

In an ironic twist of fate, his retired Revolutionary Guard father is helping Davood’s younger brother leave the country so he will not have to serve in the military. “My father says this regime is not worth fighting for. I wasted two years in the military, so my father is trying to sell everything he has to send my brother abroad.”