A State of Fear Read Free

of thick, insulated cable. The pain was indescribable. It tore through every inch of me. I screamed like never before, all the while anger growing inside me. The guard on my back only pushed down harder, grinding my face into the wood. As the flogging intensified, so did my screams. One of the men pushed torn pieces of blanket covered with dirt, blood, dust and hair into my mouth to gag me.
    Throughout the ordeal the interrogator demanded names, times, places and houses of my ‘comrades’. He was fixated on the times and places of alleged secret meetings. I couldn’t have answered even if I had wanted to; with my mouth stuffed with rags it was difficult to breathe, let alone speak. The pain fromthe lashing was almost obscured by the feeling of blind panic that I was going to choke to death. Focusing what little energy I had, I was able to dislodge the rags in my mouth. They were trying to break me mentally as well as physically, claiming they knew the time and place of a certain meeting and demanded that I confirm it. I knew they were bluffing. What they really expected from me was detailed information leading to the capture and arrest of my comrades. Mercifully, I passed out.
     
    My body was covered with a cold sweat. It felt like I had been soaked in icy water. From under the blindfold I could see a narrow beam of light shining through a hole in the door of the torture room. The rags had been removed from my mouth. The chief interrogator told me that Haji Aghah – a priest and representative of the Ayatollah Khomeini in the prisons – gave him written permission to torture me to death.
    ‘Now, what are you going to do? Do you talk, or should I ask our brothers to make you talk? We have forced central committee members to talk. Do you want to be a hero? You’re a fool. No hero will emerge from this cell alive. Do you know where we’ll take your corpse? To a cursed hole where dogs will tear you apart.’
    ‘Brother,’ I said, sobbing, ‘I swear by Imam Khomeini that you have made a mistake, I know nothing about these names and addresses.’
    The chief interrogator and two others took the straps off and sat me up on the bed, still blindfolded, so that I was facing the door. I heard more people entering the room and four more boots appeared on the ground, along with someone wearing plastic prison slippers. I assumed he was another prisoner, but had no idea who he was. The chief interrogator spoke again. ‘Farhad, take off your blindfold and tell us who this man sitting on the bed is.’
    With some hesitation, the prisoner said, ‘He is Karveh, a lecturer at the University of Tehran.’ Karveh was the secret underground name I was known by for 20 years and more while in the Rahe Kargar movement. He gave a list of names of people supposedly working under me and recited a statement that had obviously been dictated by prison officials: ‘My wife and I have both been captured. Our organisation has been attacked at the very top. We have given the brothers all the information that we have. You should do the same, otherwise you and your family will be destroyed.’
    Farhad. I knew that name well. And that voice was familiar, too… it was that of a cadre in Rahe Kargar. It took me a second to place him as he sounded different, broken and desolate. It was a tone that I had never heard before, although I now understood the reason for it. I was aware that anyone I said I knew would share my fate. A name would mean a death. I would be helping to destroy the struggle of which I was a part; the struggle for workers’ rights. Workers had no right of association, unions or bargaining power and it’s the same now. Rahe Kargar was helping to organise secret cells inside factories to fight for these rights. There was only one way to respond.
    ‘Why are you lying?’ I said, furiously. ‘Who are these people you are talking about? Why are you accusing me of having contact with them? Have you ever introduced any of them to me? I