VIDEO - Dispatch from Albania: Inside the Iranian Opposition Compound where Survivors of Regime Recount Unfathomable Abuse
As the White House comes closer to reviving the JCPOA, we cannot forget the abuses of the past.
Wild animals never kill for sport. Man is the only one to whom the torture and death of his fellow creatures is amusing in itself.
-James Anthony Froude
It is the stuff of wild nightmares.
Despite the passage of three decades, for Iranian dissidents residing in a sprawling Albanian compound – far from their homeland – the torture and trauma of life inside an Iranian regime prison is still raw.
“I was a university student, almost seven months pregnant when the Iranian Revolution Guards Corps (IRGC) came,” Kobra Jowkar, now 59, says softly. “They raided our home at midnight and were very ruthless.”
That ruthlessness, she claims, was observing her bulging belly and yet still kicking her around like a football – even walking on her stomach. But the most searing affliction would come later, she insists, behind bars in Evin prison when guards mauled her raw flesh with cables and sticks in front of her husband, knowing he could do nothing but watch motionless, unable to protect his young wife and unborn first child.
Their crime? Suspicion of supporting the Mojahedin-e Khalq organization, better known by its Farsi-language abbreviation, MEK.
Jowkar continues that her husband was soon executed in the dilapidated prison courtyard, and that she gave birth inside a filthy, infested cell with the help of a fellow prisoner around her mother's age.
Yet the ramifications of generational trauma seemingly persist.
“My son is a grown man now, an engineer, in Sweden, but he has had to undergo an operation for his pelvis, and one leg that was growing shorter than the other,” Jowkar explains, adjusting her neatly tied silk headscarf, shifting uncomfortable like a little girl herself.
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Her baby boy was hardly the only child to grow up in the confines of political imprisonment in one of the many penitentiaries scattered across Iran in the tumultuous decade following the 1979 revolution, members allege. There were dozens of newborns, Jowkar says, born to extremely malnourished mothers that many could not produce milk. Thus, she took other infants to breastfeed them whatever excess she could produce.
Moreover, Hengameh Haj-Hassan, now 65, worked as a nurse in Tehran amid the rise of the new religious regime. Although a devout Muslim and scarf-adorner herself, in 1980 she recalls taking to the streets in protest of new hijab mandates.
“If a woman did not observe the veil, they (authorities) splashed acid on them or cut their face with razors,” Hassan claims. “Some even received a thumbtack through the forehead to make sure the scarf was kept on their head.”
Soon, religious police wielding clubs also dragged the young medical professional into Evin, she says. Within the notorious gulag, still considered one of the worst in the world, guards took Hassan for interrogation, where the beatings immediately began.
“There were many women, and I saw they all had calves lacerated,” she recalls. “I thought they had been shot in the leg. But I later found out everyone had been flogged with cables. I couldn’t believe my eyes – that a Muslim government was doing this to other Muslims.”
Over the course of their long and arduous years behind bars, detainees describe being routinely transferred from prison to prison, from the horrifying to horrendous. But the most gut-wrenching moment buried deep in Hassan’s graveyard of memories was when a six-month-old baby was taken away for "medical help" and never returned.
“The mother was crying and asking for her child,” Hassan claims, her voice cracking. “It took them a long time, but eventually guards finally told her that her child had died but nobody knew how and they let her see him.”
When the topic of sexual violence is brought up, the group of five female survivors huddled together in uniform-like blazers with knotted navy and red headscarves seem to drift into dream-like states. One victim slowly stands up and begins pacing aimlessly around the room, unable to idle by as the stories are brought back to life.
Hassan describes an incident in which a young woman threw herself out of the cell window after allegedly being raped. Another girl, in a fit of rage, threw her clothes against the wall, she recalls.
“Another time, fifteen or sixteen guards took one very beautiful girl into a room, and you could hear her screaming,” Hassan tells me, a hint of bitterness creeping into her gentle voice. “They wanted to make sure she didn’t die a virgin. So then she was executed.”
Often, torture victims recount the modes of torture they endured with a kind of distant stoicism, as if talking about a life that isn't really theirs, as if to separate themselves from the flood of muscle memory. In Hassan’s case, she chronicles the brutality of being blindfolded and summoned inside “the cage” – a narrow enclosure just big enough for her body to curl into with her head hung low.
She says she remained there for eight months, allowed to shower only on rare occasions, and let out just long enough to pray.
But it was the psychological torment – the animal-like screams of fellow detainees “losing their mental balance,” along with the routine sounds of executions that became the hardest to withstand.
“In the beginning, I thought there was construction happening outside,” Hassan claims with a long pause. “And then I was told that was the sound of a firing squad.”
The men also speak of horrors so unimaginable it is hard to believe humans could do this to other humans.
“The first day I arrived, they shaved my head and eyebrows and forced me to eat them,” Mahmoud Royaei alleges jarringly.
Many survivors point to one individual, Ebrahim Raisi – the then Deputy Prosecutor and then Prosecutor of Tehran in the 1980s and 1990s – as the architect of the "kangaroo courts," which resulted in countless people being shot or being taken to the gallows within minutes. The inmates dubbed him "The Butcher," and he was always pressing for more dead bodies to pile up on dirty floors. The exact number of executions during the turbulent decade, culminating in the 1988 mass prison massacre, is hard to verify, but MEK officials estimate that the figure likely exceeds 30,000.
Raisi, the same man who overseen the mayhem in Iranian gulags in the 1980s, was elected last year as the new president of Iran in what many consider to be a farcical election process. Handpicked by the Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khamenei, the move represented the regime's shift to a harder stance and even more ardent conviction, months after President Biden came to power and discussions concerning the controversial Iran Deal resumed.
From Tehran's perspective, the MEK remains a "terrorist cult." The regime has long denied many of the claims perpetrated by the MEK, accusing them of exaggerating tales of figures of the number of those executed.
However, the likes of Pavin Pour-Eghbal, who was fifteen when she was apprehended, says she only made it through years in the prison system because she was “not brave enough to defend (her) cause.” Yet those who were – refusing to denounce their dissident ideology – are etched into her consciousness.
“I remember (guards) giving the belongings of executed prisoners to families,” Eghbal continues. “But they didn’t give them a place of burial.”
According to a 2016 Human Rights Watch report, the events of 1988 betoken “a grim nadir in Iran’s recent human rights record,” in which political prisoners were not even granted the “formalities of a show trial” and scores “summarily executed” after having languished in jails for years.
Other human rights groups, such as Amnesty International, also point to the regime’s endeavor to “erase the 1988 massacre from memories,” suggesting that the number of executed is closer to 5000, but that the true numbers are yet to be known.
“Amnesty International urges the Iranian authorities to uphold the right to truth, justice and reparation of the families of those killed in what will remain known to Iranians as the ‘Prison Massacre,’” the organization wrote in a 2013 statement.
And Akbar Samadi, now 55 years old, contends with a pinched face and listless hands that he wanted to demonstrate in the street as a teenager in response to the "unjust distribution of wealth in society."
The MEK began as a revolt against the dictatorship of Iran's last shah in 1965, espousing a more tolerant version of Islam at the time. The group, however, became a potent threat to Ayatollah Khomeini and his Revolutionary Guard Corps troops after the shah fell in 1979.
Subsequently, on August 10, 1981, Samadi was just one of an estimated 1200 swept off the streets by police and marched into darkness. Samadi illustrates with words the many torture methods used in detail. As an example, he claims he was forced on multiple occasions to stand for three whole days with his arms raised until his joints locked, and his blood vessels swelled and almost burst.
“They wanted to force you into betraying your friends or make you go totally crazy,” Samadi stresses.
Then there was the ominous "corridor of death," the haunting hall where prisoners lined up, bloodied and blindfolded, waiting for their execution orders. Samadi believes he only survived after a face-to-face encounter with Raisi because his death sentence mandate was left on the table, and his name was never called.
“Every half an hour, they would call a group of names and take them. One time, they read a name, and the guard became very anxious because the person did not answer, and they realized they had executed a person with a similar name by mistake,” Samadi testifies. “Because my name wasn’t there and they did not know what to do with me, I was sent to solitary confinement instead.”
Asghar Mehdizadeh vows to be one of the few known survivors to have passed through the corridor, and then the “final will and letter writing room,” before being dragged into the dark expanse called “the final stage” as a means of psychological suffering. Bloated corpses piled up on the floor, and twelve blindfolded men waited with nooses around their necks, he tells me with a tremble.
“They started chanting and were kicking the chairs themselves,” Mehdizadeh whispers, emphasizing that the men would not allow the guards to determine the timing of the final moment on earth. “I started feeling dizzy, and I fainted.”
Mehdizadeh claims he was yanked out again, although he knew he had entered a place in his mind he could never leave, forever haunted by what he witnessed.
Nonetheless, the alleged horrors endured by Iranian survivors have often been downplayed in press accounts over the years, in part due to the contentious reputation the MEK has acquired at the marketing behest of the Tehran leadership, who have painted members as terrorists and cult followers. The decades-long policy of conciliation with Tehran has also played a role in the mainstream media not addressing this issue because it would make engaging with such a brutal regime difficult to justify. Nevertheless, whatever one thinks of the opposition outfit, dismissing those still traumatized decades later is a blow to any efforts for the international community to value and promote human rights.
MEK remains a designated terrorist organization in Iran, and was a Foreign Terrorist Organization (FTO) in the United States for fifteen years. In 1997, the Clinton administration slapped the anti-Tehran government ensemble, which had a Washington office at the time, with such a label – along with 29 other foreign groups – essentially freezing their assets and immediately initiating travel bans on its members. This was widely considered a “goodwill gesture to Iran,” in which Tehran pledged to label the growing Lebanese militia Hezbollah with the same terrorist title on its turf, only that promise never materialized.
However, even during the time as an FTO, MEK’s members were deemed “protected persons” by Washington under the Geneva Convention, given that a large swath of its members – who would have faced death in Iran – fled to camps “Ashraf 1” in the northeast Iraqi province of Diyala and “Ashraf 2” next to Baghdad International Airport. When Saddam was ousted during the U.S. invasion in 2003, the encampments came under the protection of the U.S. military, and American troops instead stood guard at the gates.
But after the protection designation expired in 2009, the U.S. handed full sovereignty to the Shia-dominated new Iraqi government, then led by Nouri al-Malaki. As a result, the MEK soon found themselves in the line of fire by their new "protectors," Iraqi forces – closely tied to Tehran. Bombs, missiles, and bullets rained down on the unarmed compounds in from 2009 until 2016, claiming a multitude of lives and hostages, in what the organization claims were assaults at the behest of Iran, with Iraqi complicity.
Thus, with their safety spiraling and their removal as an FTO in 2012 – due mostly to intense lobbying and advocacy by the group and court victories – Washington and the United Nations embarked on finding a new base for the dissidents.
In 2017, the group built “Ashraf 3” in the quiet plains of the Albanian countryside with the welcoming of a Tirana leadership seeking to enhance ties with D.C.
But even that – some 2,200 miles from Tehran – has come under threat.
A long driveway leads to the storied bivouac on the sleepy outskirts of the capital. As the Call to Prayer rings out, the aroma of Persian cooking wafts through the streets. In honor of the dead, there are Iranian flags everywhere and memorials dotted with red poppies, as well as a large museum. The self-sustained camp resembles a small city, complete with dwellings for the several thousand residents, a gymnasium, bakeries, a mosque, and a grocery store.
Albanian police unearthed what they believe was an "active terrorist cell" operated by a foreign wing of the IRGC, intent on attacking MEK members on Tehran's orders. Authorities said at the time they had foiled several planned assaults on the group at the behest of the regime by individuals claiming to be former members, subsequently straining diplomatic ties between Tirana and Tehran.
In Iran, the group is primarily demonized for allegedly supporting Iraq against Iran during the bloody cross-border war between 1980 and 1988. However, the MEK leadership contends they fought with Iran against Saddam’s troops early on. When Khomeini elongated the suffering by refusing a diplomatic end to the conflict after Iraq withdrew behind international borders and declared readiness to end the bloody conflict, the MEK embarked on a worldwide campaign in support of peace and relocated to Iraq in 1986, six years after the war had started.
“The MEK conducted gradually more threatening armed incursions into the homeland in the context of their self-proclaimed objective to liberate their compatriots from dictatorship. Its military operations began in earnest in 1987, the last full year of the war, and when the conflict’s unpopularity climaxed,” its top-brass states, vowing that its operations only targeted the IRGC.
There are no children in Ashraf 3, as devotees say all their energy and attention should focus on overthrowing the hardline Iranian leadership.
Day and night, women and men – from young to the old, some in the early twenties – move about carrying clipboards and backpacks, maneuvering from meeting to meeting. From their purview, there is no room for reform.
“It is a war over human dignity,” asserts another survivor, Hossein Farsi. “When I was released, I could not convince myself to go and have an ordinary life.”
The former prisoners, all with a calm demeanor, carry brightly colored folders filled with pictures, memories, stories, and iniquities of the dead. Followers also point to Maryam Rajavi’s “ten-point plan” – evolved from their initial leftist ideology instead for a system of “democratic values” – vowing that their vision of Iran is a country centered on the separation of religion and state, religious freedom, gender equality and an end to Sharia Law. Rajavi is the President-elect of the National Council of Resistance of Iran, MEK’s parent organization.
Over the years, MEK has had a mixed relationship with Washington officials and think-tanks. The organization gained prominent footing under the Trump administration, given the administration’s push to isolate Tehran from the international playing field through a “maximum pressure” campaign with support from the likes of John Bolton and Rudy Giuliani. With Iran talks ongoing under the Biden White House, MEK appears to have less pull in the current administration, and some think-tank critics who maintain the outfit has limited ability to take down the hardline Tehran government and liken its approach to a “terrorist cult.”
The group sharply rebukes such a characterization when I raise it, insisting they have “every intention to return to Iran triumphantly, relying heavily on their network Iran, in the form of the Resistance Units, comprised of younger generation men and women that has dramatically increased its membership and activities, and is working round-the-lock towards organizing the people towards a nationwide uprising that will topple the regime.”
While they maintain that their revolution is nonviolent and could happen at any time, they consider the "small steps" inside their country to be moral victories. Late last month, disruptors briefly hacked state-controlled television channels simultaneously with images of the Rajavi’s.
A few weeks earlier, after much trumpeting and fanfare, the regime unveiled a giant fiber-glass statue days after the Second Anniversary of the death of Qassam Soleimani, the shadowy Iranian spymaster bombed in Baghdad under the instruction of then U.S. President Donald Trump.
But just hours after it was erected in the southwestern Iranian city of Shahrekord, mysterious assailants torched the prized effigy to the ground.
“These acts are important,” one MEK member says with a smile. “People are no longer afraid.”
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