I wrote a book about my experiences in my homeland, Iran, called Letters to My Torturer. I was in prison in Iran from 1983 to 1989 and was forced to leave Iran in 2004.
The subject of my book is a painful one - it is about what goes on behind prison walls in Iran, but it is also about what goes on in Iran in general.
People are curious about life in prison, especially in the Islamic Republic of Iran where the rulers do everything in the name of religion.
In 1988, as the mass killing of political prisoners was underway on the direct orders of Ayatollah Khomeini, I was on the verge of being executed. I lied in the “court” and saved my life, perhaps so that many years later one day I could stand in front of you to describe the horrendous tragic of the Islamic Republic of Iran.
For those of you who have not read my book, I would like to summarize its contents under three general headings: Love, Power and Torture.
Love: The underlying theme of my book is love. Love for freedom.
Love for ones fellow human beings, and love for my wife. These loves intermingle and converge into my love for my country, beloved Iran.
Power: The book also talks of power. I take the reader back over thirty years to my first imprisonment in 1974, and to my tiny prison cell, which I shared for many months with a young cleric. A friendship developed between us. The cleric was kind, and his face bore a smile. He was familiar with literature and love. When a leftist prisoner was brought into his prison cell, who had been tortured, this cleric fed him his own food, using his bare hands, after saying his prayers.
Today people all around the world know that cleric. But everybody knows Ayatollah Khamenei who rules Iran as a dictator. That very hand that fed a leftist prisoner then; today signs orders for the execution and torture of thousands of young Muslims.
My book also talks of other political figures, but Ayatollah Khamenei’s journey is most interesting;
Torture: When I was arrested once again in 1983, Ayatollah Khamenei had just become the President of Iran. In prison, they by chance took me to the very same cell where I had been locked up with Mr. Khamenei. I remember it was winter when I had been transferred out of that cell in 1974. On that day, Mr. Khamenei, who was very thin, was shivering. I gave him my jacket, and he whispered in my ear as tears ran down his face, “Under an Islamic government, not a single tear will be shed by the innocent.”
But I had just been put in prison by the Islamic regime. My crime was that I worked at a newspaper belonging to a leftist political party that supported the Islamic Republic of Iran. And in a regime in which no tear was supposed to be shed, I learned of ideological torture.
I have described this torture in my book, and it is very clear that its purpose was to break the person utterly: his human spirit, his love, and his fire inside.
I suddenly found myself in hell. For three months the only other person in my physical life was a person called the torturer. His ideology of hate arose from his religious beliefs, his instruments were the whip and the handcuff.
I was blindfolded and defenseless like a deer, completely at the mercy of a “brother.” In the Islamic Republic of Iran, “brother” is the general title of all believers. And all tortures were “brothers”, all of whom used nicknames. My life was in the hands of one such brother, whom everyone called “Brother Hamid.” Anything I wanted or needed to do could only be done with his express permission. This included eating, sleeping, receiving medication, etc. I could not even go to the bathroom without his ok. He viewed himself as the exclusive owner of all rights, and as the defender of the “holly” regime, he viewed me as a traitor, a spy, and immoral. He was the image of God while I was Satan. I had to “confess” to whatever he dreamed up - which I did. I lost consciousness under torture, spent nights and days hung from the ceiling with one arm twisted up behind my back, and was forbidden of sleep and of every human dignity, and even forced to eat my own feces. And so I “confessed.”
I had been turned from an idealistic young man to the most hateful person at the hands of “Brother Hamid.” I had to walk and bark likes a dog. I had to spend six hundreds and eighty two days in solitary confinement and then make “confessions” that would be used against me in my six-minute sham trial in “court”.
Although I had been “released” from prison, security agents routinely summoned my wife and myself to their offices and subjected us to detailed questioning over the most private aspects of our lives. I always thought that if George Orwell had been alive he would have revised his Animal Farm story and would have written a new book, the “Republic of mobs.”
The importance of narrating what I have been through is not simply to record the past. Today, as I speak with you, my torturers, who have now attained full political power in Iran, have started a new shocking era of torture.
It is my personal account, but my experiences during the six years I spent behind bars are not very different from the way thousands of others are treated in Iranian prisons today. Today however, their treatment is even worse.
It is these mobs who last year used the most savage torture to destroy Iran’s new pro-democracy movement. Thirty years ago, when “Brother Hamid” and his colleagues were ruthlessly torturing us to force us to say that we were agents of the Soviet Union, they did it secretly. It took years for our voices to be heard outside the prison.
Today, they torture young girls and boys using modern torture techniques to force them to say that they are agents of the US and Israel .Today the torturers call the young prisoners prostitutes and sexual perverts. In addition, today’s prisoners are routinely raped with no recourse to justice.
Fortunately, everything comes to light more rapidly now, and the whole world
hears what is going on.
If you asked me why are things so much worse in Iran today than they were 30 years ago, I would let you make your own conclusion by telling you that my torturer brother Hamid was rewarded with position as the ambassador of the Islamic Republic of Iran in Tajikistan. This is not at all accidental ; I can confidently say that intelligence agents and torturers currently hold key sensitive political posts in the Islamic Republic of Iran.
I suspect this is the first time in history that mobs have had full control over a country with a civilization and culture that has a history of thousands of years. These mobs are the very image of the torturer I describe in my book. It is these very mobs who used to threaten me and my wife, “You are outsiders here. Either gets out or we will take care of you.”
In the Islamic Republic, it is not only those who work for freedom and human rights who are treated as outsiders. The Republic of Mob which is fed by Shiite Taliban doctrines is the enemy of the modern word and democracy. The destruction of Iran today; is the beginning for the destruction of the free world tomorrow.
I would like to conclude my remarks with this: If the free world, and at its top the United States falls for the lies of the Islamic Republic and reconciles with it, the free world will be registering a dark chapter in the history of democracy. I have no doubt that the Iranian people will not forget such a bitter event.
The problem of the Iranian people today is first human rights then other issues such as atomic weapons.
Speech in George Town University
