hundreds of thousands of the democratic and revolutionary forces, and killed and destroyed tens of thousands of them?’ I asked.
‘You people deserve what you get!’ said Parvis. ‘You have risen up against a popular revolutionary and anti-imperialist regime which is also an ally of the Soviet Union. Your politics does not support our people or any revolutionary cause – it only serves the interests of American imperialism.’ We hunched together for such discussions, speaking in hushed voices. Our exchanges became sharper rather than louder and other cellmates shuffled closer to hear. Tudeh members supported Parvis with their contributions. The others listened too, nodding and grunting as we spoke. They were more hesitant about expressing their own opinions, perhaps because they were more conscious of the danger we were in. The pro-Khomeini Tudeh members were, after all, an unknown quantity.
‘What about the genocide against minorities: the Kurds, the Bah’ais? The suppression of freedom and civil liberties? The subjugation of women under the veil?’ I asked.
‘Well,’ he said, ‘who are those women who came out and demonstrated against the Islamic government? Prostitutes, monarchists and those who sought sexual self-gratification. As for the Kurds and the Baha’is, the leaderships of these movements are part of the American imperialist conspiracy against the Islamic regime. The suppression of civil liberties is only a problem for a handful of intellectuals. The workers and peasants in the factories and fields throughout the country are concerned with improving their condition. The Islamic revolution works for their well-being. You oppositionalists are frustrating this process.’
I had heard these arguments before. Some of the academic staff at the university of Tehran who belonged to the Fedayeen Majority had replied in exactly the same way. Not even the brutality of this regime shook them out of their fantasy. ‘How can a regime that has obtained weapons from America and Israel and their allies for use in the war with Iraq and the civil war against the democratic forces be described as a revolutionary regime?’ I said.
‘The Chinese received US aid against Japan in World War II. That did not make China counter-revolutionary.’
‘Okay,’ I said, ‘but how can the regime be improving material conditions? It has wiped out the workers’ councils which arose from the revolutionary overthrow of the Shah. Millions of hectares of land were liberated when the Shah was overthrown. Now they are being confiscated by the Pasdars and given back to feudal landlords.’
He answered, ‘The Islamic shoras [people’s councils] are the revolutionary answer to independent organisations. Anyway, they were being used as counter-revolutionary bases against the Islamic regime by the left. The Islamic regime will develop its own land reform programme which will lead to the orderly handing over of land to the peasants.’ I ended our discussion. I could not yet trust everyone in the cell and, more importantly, I could tell that there was no way that he would see reality.
Adel, the dental student, was a young man with tremendous energy and vitality. By contrast with Parvis his own defence of the regime had become more qualified since his arrest. He was the one on whose shoulders I stood to look out of the window when we went to the bathroom. Now I knew where we were being held. I would have been more wary of this offer had it come from any other prisoner. None of the other Tudeh prisoners would have taken a risk like that.
Adel maintained a good relationship with all other left-leaning prisoners. His dental training came to good use too and he was always willing to examine the teeth of other prisoners, irrespective of their politics. A passionate figure, he participated in unified prison resistance movements and was killed in a mass execution of political prisoners in 1989. Parvis, on the other hand, refused to take part, even when other Tudeh members were involved. I later learned from some of the prisoners that served with him in Evin that he had been accused of co-operating with prison officials. I saw him again in another prison in 1987 and was warned to keep well clear. But we shared a history and I tried to maintain a cordial relationship. Whether he actually co-operated with the authorities or not, he also went to the gallows in 1989.
There was solidarity between the other four leftists in my cell. They, like me, strongly opposed the regime. None of them could have been described as middle class and they had all been tortured. Taregh, one of the two Fedayeen Minority members, was a high school student and only 16 years old. He was the most energetic of the four. Morad, the other Fedayeen, was a school teacher arrested after being informed on by Islamic students – ‘the ears and eyes of Khomeini’. Ahmed was a worker from a factory in Karaj, an industrial city about 40 miles outside Tehran. He had been arrested as a result of a strike in his factory and was a member of Peykar. The fourth, Kaveh, was a member of Rahe Kargar and had been arrested due to his political work at a car plant. All kept their distance from their Tudeh cellmates.
Open political arguments were dangerous, but I couldn’t stop myself from chipping in with references to the defeat of the 1979 revolution or to the nature of the regime. Yet there was little point. Everyone had very set positions in order to protect themselves.
These days, as I stare up at the ceiling, unable to sleep because of constant nagging pains from my injuries, I sometimes ask myself how the hell I got into such a mess. My answer starts with the stories of Iran’s own tragedies. It was once Britain’s unofficial colony. During the 19th century it was strategically important but took on a new importance with oil. When BP moved in, the British government was not far behind. They began to buy off the backward tribal chiefs and destabilise the democratic government introduced after 1907.
In 1920 the British played a key part in installing Reza Shah as dictator – a man who had a nasty little habit of cutting out the tongues of those who criticised him openly – but he started paying court to the Nazis. While I was growing up in the early 1950s, the British were at it again. This time, under a Labour government, they didn’t like a democratically-elected government wanting a fairer share of the oil riches.
Everyone in our family was kept informed about what was going on by my grandfather. He would come home each evening with a basket of food in one hand and a copy of the nationalist paper Shouresh (Rebellion) in the other. We would sit and listen to him reading the latest court intrigues. I sat close, keen to hear every word. In the paper I saw and liked a cartoon of Churchill, complete with dicky bow and tails, dancing cheek to cheek with the Shah’s twin sister, Ashraf. The editor, Karimpur Shirazi, hammered the political point of the cartoon with an editorial raging against the monarchy’s collaboration with imperialism, and in particular BP.
My father was a carpenter who left home around half past five every morning to work in a factory two miles away that produced doors and windows. I was the first born and, when I was six, I went to help my father at his work. I used to hold the end of the planks as my father fed them through the machines. He called me his right hand. The noise and smells, hustle and bustle of the workshop were captivating. I was very happy, playing with the piles of fine sawdust on the factory floor. It was official: I was a grown-up.
We used to get home at about six in in the evening, where our evening meal would be waiting. But not everyone was happy. When I was ten, my grandparents decided to have it out with my father and told him I was out of control and needed to go to school. In truth, when I watched my friends carrying their books to and from school, I did feel jealous. Even at that young age I knew that, without any real education, I faced a bleak future. My father could not read or write a word, even his own name. He agreed that education was essential if I was to avoid his fate and so I started school, albeit as a late developer. I realised from the outset that this was my only life-raft; the penalty for failure was to finish up like my father.
My mother was born in 1927, some two decades after the proclamation of the universal right to secular education. Nevertheless, like my father, she never learnt to read and write. She was married at 11 and was 12 when I was born. By 20 she had given birth to no less than six children. She was dead by 35, totally