The Great War for Civilisation: The Conquest of the Middle East. Robert Fisk
at Bakhtiar’s home. This time they cut his head off. Accused of helping the murderers, an Iranian businessman told the Paris assize court that Bakhtiar ‘killed 5,000 people during his thirty-three days in power. Secondly, he was planning a coup d’état in Iran … thirdly, he collaborated with Saddam Hussein during the Iran – Iraq war …’†
Just as Saddam was planning the destruction of the Iranian revolution, so Khomeini was calling for the overthrow of Saddam and the Baath, or the ‘Aflaqis’ as he quaintly called them after the name of the Syrian founder of the party. After learning of Bakr Sadr’s execution and that of his sister, Khomeini openly called for Saddam’s overthrow. ‘It would be strange,’ he wrote on 2 April 1980,
if the Islamic nations, especially the noble nation of Iraq, the tribes of the Tigris and Euphrates, the brave students of the universities and other young people turned a blind eye to this great calamity inflicted upon Islam and the household of the Messenger of God, peace be upon him, and allowed the accursed Baath party to martyr their eminent personalities one after the other. It would be even more strange if the Iraqi army and other forces were tools in the hands of these criminals, assisting them in the eradication of Islam. I have no faith in the top-ranking officers of the Iraqi armed forces but I am not disappointed in the other officers, the non-commissioned officers or their soldiers. I expect them to either rise up bravely and overthrow this oppression as was the case in Iran or to flee the garrisons and barracks … I hope that God the Almighty will destroy the system of oppression of these criminals.
Oppression lay like a blanket over the Middle East in the early 1980s, in Iraq, in Iran, and in Afghanistan. And if the West was indifferent to the suffering of millions of Muslims, so, shamefully, were most of the Arab leaders. Arafat never dared to condemn the Soviet Union after its invasion of Afghanistan – Moscow was still the PLO’s most important ally – and the kings and princes and presidents of the Arab world, who knew better than their Western counterparts what was happening in Iraq, were silent about Saddam’s deportations and tortures and executions and genocidal killings. Most of them used variations of the same techniques on their own populations. In Syria, where the ‘German chair’ torture was used to break the backs of opposition militants, the bloodbath of the Hama uprising lay less than two years away.*
In Iran, the authorities turned brutally against members of the Bahai faith whose 2 million members regard Moses, Buddha, Christ and Mohamed as ‘divine educators’ and whose centre of worship – the tomb of a nineteenth-century Persian nobleman – lies outside Acre in present-day Israel. By 1983, Amnesty estimated that at least 170 Bahais had been executed for heresy among the 5,000 Iranians put to death since the revolution. Among them were ten young women, two of them teenagers, all hanged in Shiraz in June of 1983. At least two, Zarrin Muqimi and Shirin Dalvand, both in their twenties, were allowed to pray towards Acre before the hangmen tied their hands and led them to the gallows. All were accused of being ‘Zionist agents’. Evin prison began to fill with women, some members of the Iraqi-supported Mujahedin-e-Qalq – People’s Mujahedin – others merely arrested while watching political protests. They were ferociously beaten on the feet to make them confess to being counter-revolutionaries. On one night, 150 women were shot. At least forty of them were told to prepare themselves for execution by firing squad by writing their names on their right hands and left legs with felt-tip markers; the guards wanted to identify them afterwards and this was often difficult when ‘finishing shots’ to the head would make their faces unrecognisable. But Bahais were not the only victims.
Executions took place in all the major cities of Iran. In July 1980, for example, Iranian state radio reported fourteen executions in Shiraz, all carried out at eleven at night, including a retired major-general – for ‘making attacks on Muslims’ – a former police officer, an army major charged with beating prisoners, an Iranian Jew sentenced for running a ‘centre of fornication’ and seven others for alleged narcotics offences. One man, Habib Faili, was executed for ‘homosexual relations’. Two days earlier, Mehdi Qaheri and Haider Ali Qayur were shot by firing squad for ‘homosexual offences’ in Najafabad. Naturally, Sadeq Khalkhali presided over most of these ‘trials’.
Amnesty recorded the evidence of a female student imprisoned in Evin between September 1981 and March 1982 who was held in a cell containing 120 women, ranging from schoolgirls to the very old. The woman described how:
One night a young girl called Tahereh was brought straight from the courtroom to our cell. She had just been sentenced to death, and was confused and agitated. She didn’t seem to know why she was there. She settled down to sleep next to me, but at intervals she woke up with a start, terrified, and grasped me, asking if it were true that she really would be executed. I put my arms around her and tried to comfort her, and reassure her that it wouldn’t happen, but at about 4 a.m. they came for her and she was taken away to be executed. She was sixteen years old.
A frightening nine-page pamphlet issued by the Iranian Ministry for Islamic Guidance – but carrying neither the ministry’s name nor that of its author – admitted that ‘some believe only murderers deserve capital punishment, but not those who are guilty of hundreds of other crimes … Weren’t the wicked acts of those upon whom [the] death penalty was inflicted tantamount to the spread … of corruption … The people have indirectly seconded the act of the revolutionary courts, because they realise the courts have acted in compliance with their wishes.’ The same booklet claimed that trials of senior officials of the Shah’s government had to be carried out swiftly lest ‘counter-revolutionary’ elements tried to rescue them from prison.
Khomeini raged, against the leftists and communists who dared to oppose his theocracy, and the Great Satan America and its Iraqi ally. Why did people oppose the death penalty, he asked. ‘… the trial of several young men … and the execution of a number of those who had revolted against Islam and the Islamic Republic and were sentenced to death, make you cry for humanity!’ The ‘colonial powers’ had frightened Muslims with their ‘satanic might and advancement’ – Khomeini’s prescient expression for the ‘shock and awe’ that US defence secretary Donald Rumsfeld would call down on Iraq almost exactly twenty years later – and now communists were ‘ready to sacrifice [their] lives out of love of the party’ while the people of Afghanistan were ‘perishing under the Soviet regime’s cruelty’.
Here Khomeini was on safe ground. From Afghan exile groups and humanitarian organisations there came a flood of evidence that Soviet troops were now carrying out atrocities in Afghanistan. Human Rights Watch was reporting by 1984 that it had become clear ‘that Soviet personnel have been taking an increasingly active role in the Afghan government’s oppression of its citizens. Soviet officers are not just serving as “advisors” to Afghan Khad agents who administer torture – routinely and savagely in detention centres and prisons; according to reports we received there are Soviets who participate directly in interrogation and torture.’ The same document provided appalling evidence of torture. A 21-year-old accused of distributing ‘night letters’ against the government was hung up by a belt until he almost strangled, beaten until his face was twice its normal size and had his hands crushed under a chair. ‘… mothers were forced to watch their infant babies being given electric shocks … Afghan men … were held in torture chambers where women were being sexually molested. A young woman who had been tortured in prison described how she and others had been forced to stand in water that had been treated in chemicals that made the skin come off their feet.’ After Afghans captured a Soviet army captain and three other soldiers in the town of Tashqurghan in April 1982, killed them, chopped up their bodies and threw them in a river, the brother of the officer took his unit – from the Soviet 122nd Brigade – to the town and slaughtered the entire population of around 2,000 people.
An exile