The Great War for Civilisation: The Conquest of the Middle East. Robert Fisk
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 six hundred 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.
You could see why death would be the only possible sentence as soon as Rustomi’s trial started. An Islamic priest in long brown robes and a civilian lawyer appointed by the mosque walked onto the stage of the converted theatre and announced that they were to act as prosecuting counsel and judges. Rustomi did not even glance at them. They sat at two iron desks and behind them, fixed on to a starlike design of strip lights, was a crude oil painting of Ayatollah Khomeini. There was no doubt under whose authority this court was sitting.
The mullah made a brief address to the crowd, stating that the trial would be held according to the rules of the Koran, and that the prisoner should be allowed to reply to the charges against him. The mullah was a tall, distinguished man with a long white beard and a kind, honest face. The civilian lawyer looked angry and vindictive, and said something abusive to Rustomi before he sat down. The mullah waved a sheaf of papers in his hand; a series of written testaments by witnesses to anti-Shah demonstrations, each claiming that Rustomi had ordered his company of soldiers to fire at civilians.
One by one, the witnesses were called from the audience to give their evidence – a process occasionally interrupted by shouting at the back of the theatre where more men were pushing their way through the doors and fighting for places in the court. Rustomi pulled his chair up to the mullah’s desk and listened. The first witness was a young man with his shoulder in plaster and the second witness limped onto the stage. They had seen Rustomi order his men to fire at the demonstrators, they claimed, and a third man ran onto the stage and yelled that Rustomi had broken through the door of a mosque and killed a boy hiding in the shrine. There was much discussion of dates and street names – there was, in fact, a genuine if chaotic attempt to define the events surrounding the shooting – before Rustomi stood up.
The crowd bayed at him and for several seconds the mullah did nothing. Rustomi looked down at us with an uncomprehending expression. He wanted to talk. Yes, he said, he had ordered his men to disperse the demonstrators, but he had told them to fire into the air. If anyone had been hit, it must have been a ricochet. There was a momentary silence in the court before another man, scarcely twenty years old, clambered onto the stage and pointed at Rustomi. ‘You’re lying, you bastard,’ he screamed, before the judge ordered him off.
Rustomi fought his corner against obviously impossible odds. He had no defence counsel. He admitted that on another date, he had indeed fired his rifle into a crowd of people who were demanding the overthrow of the Shah. He had questioned the orders to open fire, he said, over his two-way radio, but his major had threatened him with a court martial if he did not obey. At this, an old man in the theatre leapt to his feet. ‘The Holy Koran does not allow any man to take that attitude,’ he shouted. ‘If a Muslim kills another Muslim in those circumstances he is not true to his religion.’ The old man went on and on, abusing Rustomi, and the mullah with the wise, kindly face nodded in an agreeable fashion and allowed the abuse to continue. Rustomi seemed on the verge of tears.
Then the civilian lawyer walked round and shouted ‘Liar!’ in the prisoner’s ear. For a dreadful moment I was reminded of those scratched archive films of the Nazi People’s Court trying the plotters against Hitler’s life in 1944 when Judge Roland Freisler swore at the defendants. At the end of the first day in Qom, the civilian lawyer walked over to me smiling. ‘It’s a fair trial we’re giving him,’ he said. ‘As you can see, we allow Rustomi to answer the charges.’ The court resumed next morning, and Rustomi watched unhappily as two members of his own riot squad condemned him as a murderer. Another soldier did bravely step forward to defend the prisoner, but he was ordered to shut up after being accused of muddling the date of the incident.
When the mullah called a break for lunch, a man of about thirty walked up to me outside the theatre. He was watched suspiciously by a group of Islamic Guards, gunmen wearing the distinctive green armband that showed they were appointed by the mosque. It turned out to be Rustomi’s brother, and he was a frightened man. There was no way we could talk there on the pavement, so we walked down a street together, followed by the gunmen from the court. ‘Do you think this is a fair trial?’ he asked. ‘My brother has no defence counsel. They told him to find one if he wants, but I have been to Tehran to the committee of lawyers, and I’ve spoken to twenty lawyers. Not one of them will take his case. This court has killed every prisoner it has tried.’ There was a sad pause while the man tried to stop himself weeping. ‘My brother has a little boy. He has told the other children at his school that he will kill himself if the court kills his father.’ Then we said goodbye and Rustomi’s brother walked off, the gunmen mincing after him. That same afternoon, I asked Ayatollah Kazem Shariatmadari, one of Khomeini’s closest advisers, why Rustomi was allowed no defence counsel. The white-bearded Ayatollah sat cross-legged on rich ornamental carpets. ‘A prisoner at an Islamic court should be allowed a lawyer to defend him,’ he said. ‘I do not know what is going on at this trial at Qom – I do not know the circumstances of this trial. I do not know the answer to your question.’
He was a gentle old man and a moderate among the divines in the city of Qom. But what did ‘moderate’ mean any more? Shariatmadari simply had no idea what was going on in the courts, and I’m sure he preferred not to find out. I still have the tapes of the old man’s excuses and – far more difficult to listen to – the recordings of the ‘trial’, of the lawyer shrieking ‘Liar!’ in Rustomi’s ear, of the condemned man trying to explain his military rules, of his brother’s tears outside the ‘court’. They carry an authentic, painful reality, of injustice by the many against the few. Khomeini’s ruling after Bazargan’s frantic visit to Qom did not spare the prisoners brought into the converted theatre. Executions started again the morning after I left Qom, and although the identity of the victims was not at first made clear, one of them was a former soldier in the Shah’s army. I knew his name.
There would be no counter-coups in this revolution, no ‘Operation Ajax’, no CIA men operating from within the US embassy to buy up the bazaaris. Indeed, very soon there would be no US embassy. The demands for the return of the Shah were being made not for his restoration but in order to put him on trial. Only when the head of the snake had been cut off would the revolution feel safe. Just as the Americans believed twenty-four years later that only the capture of Saddam Hussein would bring them tranquillity in Iraq, so Khomeini and his retinue were convinced that only the death of the Shah – preferably hanged as a criminal in Iran for ‘crimes against God’ – would free Iran from its corrupt past.* In reality, the Shah was already dying from cancer. Many Iranians saw in his pathetic exile the true justice of God, his cancer the ultimate divine vengeance against one who had ‘sinned on earth’. The Shah’s gruesome odyssey through the hospitals of central America, New York City and, eventually, Cairo gave grim satisfaction to the mullahs who had already ordered his assassination.
Not long after his departure, I had sat at the feet of Hojatolislam Khalkhali, the ‘hanging judge’, as he listed those of the Shah’s family who had been sentenced to death in absentia. Around him sat a score or so of Revolutionary Guards who had been maimed in the revolutionary war against the Kurds of north-western Iran, each of them clacking his newly fitted artificial metal fingers, hands and feet as the prelate outlined the