The Great War for Civilisation: The Conquest of the Middle East. Robert Fisk
one and six inches in diameter. It took the two women and two men fifteen minutes to die.*
‘I don’t know if I approve of stoning,’ Sadeq Khalkhali said, flashing a grin at us journalists and at a group of startled diplomats who had also been invited to the Qasr prison. ‘But in the Koran, it is mentioned that those who commit adultery should be killed by stoning.’ The Hojatolislam dug his little spoon into the melting white ice-cream, oblivious to the bare-headed prisoners who trudged past behind him, heaving barrels loaded with cauldrons of vegetable soup. ‘We approve of anything the Koran says. What is the difference between killing people with stones and killing them with bullets? But throwing stones certainly teaches people a lesson.’ Khalkhali modestly disowned responsibility for the Kerman stonings – his bearded public relations man informed us that a man called Fahin Kermani had taken this weighty decision – but he agreed that he had ordered some fresh executions that morning. Seven men had been lined up at one end of Jamshid Street at five o’clock and shot down by a firing squad while a large crowd gawked from a distance. Many of those who died had been convicted of drug offences, and it was in his role as chief of the Iranian anti-narcotics squad that the Hojatolislam had welcomed us to Qasr prison to view his latest haul of contraband.
One could only be impressed. Khalkhali had piled it up in the prison mosque, a magnificent frescoed edifice with a cupola of red and blue tiles, now filled with tons of opium, kilogram sacks of heroin, large sticky slabs of hashish, stolen refrigerators, ornately carved backgammon boards, a 2½– metre wall of cigarettes – here I thought briefly of Harvey Morris in his Reuters ‘saturnalia’ – thousands of bubble pipes, carpets, knives, automatic rifles and rows of champagne bottles (Krug 1972). The beautiful mosque literally reeked of hashish as Khalkhali made a triumphal tour of his loot, pushing his way past 20 tons of opium and at least 100 kilograms of heroin, each neatly packed into clean white sacks. It was inevitable that he would be asked whether the revolutionary courts were dealing enthusiastically enough with drug-dealers, and equally inevitable that the Hojatolislam would evince a broad smile – directed at the diplomats – before replying. ‘If we did what others wanted us to do, we would have to kill many people – which in my opinion is simply impossible,’ he said. ‘Things could end up in a crisis. If we were going to kill everyone who had five grams of heroin, we would have to kill five thousand people – and that would be difficult.’ In fairness, it should be added that the Ayatollah had made a fair start. In the past seven weeks, his courts had summarily dispatched 176 men and women to the firing squads for narcotics offences, many of them sentenced by Khalkhali himself in the innocuous tree-shaded concrete building 300 metres from the little mosque.
Khalkhali tried hard not to look like an ogre; he repeatedly denied that he was any such thing. His small, plump frame, grey beard and twinkling eyes give him a fatherly appearance, the kind of man who might have been more at home at the fireside in carpet slippers with the family cat purring beside him – just so long as the family cat survived. He joked frequently with us as he made his round of the mosque, good-naturedly poking his finger into the sacks of opium that lay beneath the main cupola. Every minute or so, a young man in a pale green shirt with a pistol tucked into his trousers would clamber onto a pile of heroin bags and scream ‘God is Great’ at the top of his lungs, a refrain that would be taken up and echoed around the mosque.
‘If you look at me, you don’t see an inner struggle written all over my face,’ Khalkhali remarked as he emerged into the sunshine. ‘But I am actually a revolutionary person. I am chasing agents everywhere – in France, England and America. That is a fact. I am chasing them everywhere.’ He claimed a ‘200 per cent success’ in stamping out drug-running in Iran and an 80 per cent victory in preventing international drug-trafficking – which was why the diplomats had been invited to the Qasr prison to listen to the judge. He claimed that an intercontinental mafia was operating a drugs ring from Pakistan, Burma and Thailand, and described how a member of the ex-Shah’s family allegedly used a private aircraft to fly drugs from Afghanistan to a small airfield outside Tehran. The captured opium, he said, might be used by the government for medical purposes. The hashish and heroin would be burned.
The Hojatolislam strode briskly from the courtyard towards a wire fence, but as he did so, something very strange happened. Dozens of black-veiled women – the wives and sisters of the very men whom the Ayatollah would soon be sentencing – ran across a lawn towards him, clutching babies and crying, ‘Hail to Khalkhali.’ The Hojatolislam affected not to notice them as the soldiers held them at bay, and he pushed his way through a gate in the fence. For a few moments, he talked of holding a formal press conference before entering his tiny courthouse. But then a policeman walked over to us and told us that the judge had become ‘angry’. Sensing that a Hojatolislam’s fury could embrace a journalist or two, we brought this most extraordinary public event to a hurried conclusion. We fled.*
For Westerners, Khalkhali represented a special danger. If the American hostages in the embassy were to be tried by an Islamic court, what if Khalkhali was let loose on them? All Khomeini’s promises of protection could be reinterpreted now that the embassy documents were being slowly put back together to reveal that the Iranian claims of a ‘spy nest’ in Tehran were not entirely without foundation. Thus when the Shah moved from the United States to Panama – a journey of which the Iranians were forewarned by three Western diplomats acting at Washington’s request – the ‘Students of the Imam’ put out a statement repeating the promise to ‘try’ the Americans.† In the end, of course, there was no trial.
Inevitably, the Iranians lost their patience with the foreign journalists in Tehran. The day after the ‘trial’ statement, Abolhassan Sadeq walked into the Iranian Ministry of Islamic Guidance with the troubled expression of a headmaster forced at last to deal with a persistently unruly class. Harvey Morris, shrouded in his usual smoke haze – mercifully for him, it was to be at least a decade before Iran would ban smoking in government buildings – knew what was coming. ‘Well, Fisky, we’ll see who’s going to get the order of the boot today,’ he murmured. The ministry contained an underground auditorium that looked uncomfortably like a school hall and there we waited to hear the worst. Sadeq, the school director, took his place at a desk on a small raised podium and stared down at us severely. We all knew that an expulsion or two was in the air.
‘Gentlemen,’ he began – Harvey always liked the ‘gentlemen’ bit – ‘I want to share with you a bit of agony we are going through with regard to the foreign media. With great displeasure, we are expelling the entire Time magazine crew from Iran.’ It mattered little that the ‘entire’ staff of Time in the country numbered just two. This was not how Sadeq saw things. There were over three hundred foreign journalists in Iran from more than thirty countries, he said, but Time had gone too far. He flourished a clutch of front covers from the offending organ, one of which carried an unflattering portrait of Khomeini.
‘Since the problem of hostages came up,’ Sadeq said, waving the latest issue of Time in his hand, ‘this has done nothing but arouse the hatred of the American people. The front covers have been like a hammer on the brain. The magazine has created some very irrational reaction on behalf of the American people.’ Time was not the only news organisation to feel Iranian wrath. Eight days earlier, Alex Eftyvoulos, a correspondent for the Associated Press – a bearded part-Russian Cypriot who looked like Rasputin – had been expelled for allegedly distorting news of rioting in the Azerbaijani provincial capital of Tabriz. Even the British had fallen foul of Iranian anger. In early December, Enayat Ettehad of Iranian television had been watching BBC News in a London hotel and was angered by a report on the hostages in which Keith Graves described in unpleasant detail how their hands were bound with rope and how they were forbidden to speak to each other or receive news from the outside world. I wasn’t surprised. Over the next two and a half decades, Graves would infuriate the Taliban, the Israeli army, the US government, the IRA, the British army, NATO, the Egyptians, the PLO, the Hizballah, the Syrians, the Turks and even the Cypriots – the latter an astonishing achievement even for a man of Graves’s abrasiveness – and survive them all. But the BBC was made to pay for it. Ettehad instructed Iranian television to refuse