Free A State of Fear by Dr Reza Ghaffari Page B

pray now, the guards will think that I have done something wrong and am repenting. I’ve never prayed insideprison and I see no reason to start doing it now. They’d think I’m trying to fool them.’
    Each morning at about three or four o’clock, when the guards hammered on the door and bellowed ‘Prayer time!’ the sound system relayed the wailing voices calling us to prayer. My cellmate would rise and put a large prayer mat in front of the small hole in the prison door so that if the guards looked in they could see him ‘hard at it’.
    Two weeks after the man had walked into the cell he was removed. Sure enough, after two more days, he reappeared at the cell door with a file in his hand. There was another Tavab with him, another former member of a Kurdish group. These two both had a long discussion about articles in an internal prison newsletter called The Tavabins (‘The Repentants’), which they and others had put together to undermine prisoners’ morale. From their discussion, I gathered that it contained articles directed against revolutionary organisations in Kurdistan and elsewhere in Iran, which they branded as anti-Islamic and pro-American. The man would arrive in the evening and work on the file he had with him until the early morning. Initially, I thought that this file contained his written answers to the interrogators’ questions, much as I had been asked to write, but it seems that he was making comments on the files of other prisoners for the interrogators. He was in fact helping the interrogators in their persecution of the prisoners. It was clear he was evaluating me. A few days later they again took him out of the cell.
    I remember him asking me about the films I liked which had affected me, ploys like this. So I would respond, giving him a synopsis of some films I had seen, with beautiful landscapes and mountain climbing – anything I could think of that didn’t have any political connotations. He asked me if I’d seen a particular film about a peasant revolt in pre-revolutionary Russia. ‘No’, I lied. ‘I don’t go to political films.’
    My time in solitary came to an end – finally – in the spring of 1982. I was moved out of the hated block to a cell shared with other prisoners. Outside the walls of Evin, there were now constant clashes between the Islamic guards and the various shades of opposition to the government. Whenever the guards raided the underground organisations and killed some of their members, they brought the corpses to Evin. Haji Lajiverdi, Evin’s revolutionary prosecutor, would force us prisoners out of our cells to look at the bodies, supposedly to identify them. This was only a pretext because they already had more than sufficient information. This gruesome routine was really to break the prisoners’ resistance.
    Early one cold morning, at about three or four, my cell door was flung open. I had my uniform on and was blindfolded but had no shoes. The guards took me down to the lower floor, near the slaughter house used by the firing squad which executed thousands of prisoners, often two or three hundred at a time. I was marched along with about 80 other inmates. This was a confusing moment. Prisoners had already been told by Haji Lajiverdi that if the Islamic government was in any danger of losing power, ‘We will clean the prisons by putting the lot of you in front of the firing squad’. My mind was racing. I had the distinct feeling that my time had come and I was to be executed.
    One of the prisoners sung a revolutionary song, others started to shout slogans: ‘Long live the revolution!’ and ‘Down with the counter-revolution!’ We were ordered to remove our blindfolds. I will never forget the horrific scene in front of me: a line of corpses lay stretched out on the floor. Men and women together. All had been shot. Some of the bodies were missing feet, hands and entire limbs – their flesh ripped apart by machine-gun bullets. Others, while intact,