Silence in the Face of Tyranny

The mass execution of political prisoners in the summer of 1988 is a unique incident in contemporary Iranian history. The silence of most intellectuals living in Iran at the time, as well as the faded echo of this catastrophe in contemporary art within the borders of Iran, is also unique. Taking note of the acutely intense sensitivity of this society toward a number of phenomena such as “political prisoners,” “executions” and “torture” in the past, an examination of this silence can shed light on aspects of the intellectual and psychological transformation of thinkers and activists within the sphere of Iranian culture. By examining the prevailing attitude of the intellectual community in Iran toward the mass executions of 1988, this article will try to dissect a complex issue. This article covers the period up to 1997, when I was still in Iran.

A Few Years of Preparation

Although the mass execution of political prisoners took place slightly after the Mojahedin-e Khalgh’s guerilla attacks on Iran and the ceasefire between Iran and Iraq, it seems that the preparation for it was underway long before these events took place. It assumed greater urgency when the Islamic Republic came to view the elimination of political prisoners as a necessary addition to its agenda. According to most witnesses, the Ministry of Intelligence began to classify the prisoners by their psychology, position, and attitude, at least a year or two before the mass executions. Thus, officials were sufficiently prepared for the time when implementing this execution strategy would become necessary. The inclusion of a Ministry representative on the three-person committee responsible for determining the fate of each prisoner, created on the authority of Ayatollah Khomeini, was indication of a planned enterprise.

The murder of political prisoners was a method to eliminate those who had escaped the mass executions of 1982 and 1984. Khomeini’s incurable cancer and his impending death made this scheme a top priority. The Islamic Republic’s leadership feared that Ayatollah Montazeri, Khomeini’s probable heir, would free the prisoners, leading the system into crisis. The active presence in society of thousands of former prisoners after the war – when fundamental demands were being voiced – and the absence of Khomeini’s unchallenged political and religious authority would leave the Islamic Republic with onerous tensions. Most prisoners were firm in their political positions. They had accumulated a great deal of experience in their lives and from their period of imprisonment, and they would now be intent on resuming their political activities. In the eyes of the regime, this left them with only one solution.  The mass execution of so many individuals in less than a month, without any legal grounds, was only possible with Khomeini’s decree and only during his lifetime. Montazeri was against such methods. Other leaders of the Islamic Republic, even without Montazeri, would have met with great resistance and numerous obstacles in carrying out this crime.

All the factions of Iran’s ruling body, including the Islamic leftists who held key positions in the judiciary and secret service at that time, either played a part in the massacre or endorsed it through silence and continued cooperation.  Montazeri was the sole figure in the Islamic regime who, despite losing the most important position in the power structure, tried to stop the murders. Others, even those who harbored some criticism of Khomeini’s decree and the method of its implementation, retained their positions of power through cooperation and silent endorsement. Those on the Islamic left, even after their transformation into reformists and pragmatists, denied their contribution to these crimes and, by their silence and refusal to condemn Khomeini, tried to diminish their roles in preparing for the massacre. Some, by pointing to Khomeini’s decree and the Committee of Three, also tried to conceal the role played by policymaking councils at the highest ranks of power.  They also disavowed the role of similar councils in the judiciary and intelligence organizations in the massacre. Others pretended Khomeini’s decree was a sudden reaction to the Mojahedin-e Khalgh’s attack on Iran, allowing them to deny the structural organization of such crimes within the Islamic Republic’s regime.

For a final analysis of the factors that led to Khomeini’s decree, we must wait for the documentation that will someday be made public. Nevertheless, we can still analyze the reaction of the intellectual and cultural communities within Iran.

The Silence of the Intellectuals within the Borders of Iran

Independent Iranian intellectuals —unconnected to the regime— have long rejected the involvement of intellectuals in the political sphere, particularly in the period between August 19, 1953 through the first half of the 1960s.  Nonetheless, to voice their emotional and intellectual connections with the prisoners and victims of political executions, both independent and politicized intellectuals expressed solidarity through their works, statements, and manifestos.  After 1986, though, the prevailing tendency within Iran’s intellectual community was to refrain from identification with opposition figures and organizations.  By consequence, the reaction to imprisonment and execution became one of humane sympathy, regret, and sorrow, but little else. Only in recent years has there been a reemergence of reactions similar to those from the former era.

Forgetting historical crimes paves the way for their recurrence. If they are immortalized in literary and artistic works, which integrate them into the collective language, culture and consciousness of a nation, it becomes impossible to brush national crimes aside. Not only did the compositions of Iran’s great contemporary poets—Nima Yushij, Ahmad Shamlu, Akhavan Saleth, and Forough Farrokhzad—express the politics of protest in the 1950s, ‘60s and ‘70s, but it also introduced criminal episodes and dissenting political figures into the world of art. Many poems by these writers were about eminent political figures and national martyrs.  Stories by distinguished writers such as Gholam Hossein Saedi, Houshang Golshiri, and Ebrahim Golestan, and even some of the popular songs and musical compositions of the 1960s and ‘70s, immortalize murdered political prisoners. As these poems, stories, and songs internalize the epic tragedy of each victim, they are transported from the mutable world of politics into the realm of immortality.

Removed from empty slogans and pronunciations, an enduring artistic or literary work imposes itself upon the collective memory of society and brings permanence to the subject at hand. As long as Shamlu’s poetry thrives in Iranian literature, those responsible for the catastrophic death of Vartan under torture or for Morteza Keyvan’s before the firing squad will be condemned with every reading.  Akhavan’s poetry depicted the August 1953 coup d’etat as a national tragedy. The guerilla movement of 1970-1975 was turned into an enduring epic in Persian literature by Shamlu’s poem “Ebrahim Dar Atash” (Abraham in the Fire).

In the past decade, a skilled poet like Simin Behbahani, by mirroring current political incidents and protesting against totalitarianism, contemporized the oldest forms of classical Iranian poetry – lyric poetry (“ghazal”) and fragment poetry (“qet’e”) – and thus metamorphosed own literary resume. Shamlu, in the poems of “Madayehe Bi Sele” (The Unrewarded Eulogies), condemned religious tyranny and Khomeini in an anthology of some of the most powerful love poems. Alireza Espahbod infused his paintings with the terror of the executions of the 1980s.  And Golshiri, in the “Fathnameye Moqân” (The Victory Chronicle of the Magi), described the violence of religious revolution and the collective psychology of the conformist masses. In his novel, “Shahe Siahpooshan” (The King of the Benighted), and in some of his most beautiful short stories, Golshiri recorded images of the Islamic Republic’s prisons in Iranian culture and language. But the mass executions of 1988 did not receive their deserved attention, even in the works of these writers. Other than one or two pieces that neither achieved fame nor attracted a wide audience, no elegy within the borders of Iran commemorated this unparalleled catastrophe.

The valuable reflection of political and social incidents in literary and artistic works also depends on the passage of time. The hurried and forced imposition of ideology, politics, and current events on art reduces creativity to superficial slogans. An enduring, worthy work absorbs and internalizes politics and history. Artistic and literary creativity is an individual affair that is cultivated from within. But when a staggering calamity, such as the mass executions of 1988, finds no outlet for expression in the art and literature of an era, it is reasonable to speak of a collective reaction. One can assume that, despite sympathy for the victims of the mass executions, the era’s intellectuals did not psychologically absorb and internalize the impact of this disaster. Censorship always plays a part in the creation of such situations; but in Iranian art and literature, which have always spoken through allusion, metaphor, ambiguity, irony, and reading “between the lines,” censorship is not powerful enough to obstruct such reflection.

Unlike other political executions, the mass executions of 1988 were not given proper consideration in the creative works of the Iranian community because the will for this endeavor was lacking. But the negative dimensions of this neglect come to the fore only when we realize that we, the intellectuals within Iran, did not employ any available mechanisms to voice our protest.

Not only do many great thinkers and artists define literary and artistic creativity as an activity beyond or separate from politics, they also apply the same parameters to the function of the intellectual. Politics is the acquisition and maintenance of power, while intellect embraces free thought and imagination. A politicized culture tends to become drained of its essence. However, though protest, whether against the mass execution of political prisoners or against tyrannical rule, does not aim to attain and preserve power, it must sometimes assume a political character. Silence in the face of inhumane crime does not save culture from politics. One could divorce the realm of poetry, fiction, painting and other arts from politics, but writers, artists and journalists, as humans, can use other methods, such as gathering signatures and issuing statements, to defend human rights victims. We, the Iranian intellectuals, who risked threats of imprisonment and torture in our protest against the arrest of Saidi Sirjani only a few years later, remained silent before the mass executions of 1988.
Examining the reasons for our silence may be useful, not to justify our flawed approach, but to illustrate the problem for later analyses:

The potency of fear.  In those times, the fear of imprisonment, torture, and death, sentences which were being distributed generously, sapped our courage to initiate any action. The years between 1981and 1988 was the darkest period of despotism in our recent history.

The ineffectiveness of protest.  At that time, acts taken to voice our objections would not have found a wide audience or affected any process. The only possible outcome would have been the torture and execution of those who objected. This belief in the ineffectiveness of protest discouraged and prevented intellectuals from acting. Even the expression of disapproval by the heir to the Islamic Republic’s leadership was harshly suppressed. In the end, though, despite the heavy price of his protest, Montazeri has a clear conscience and a shining legacy.

The content and form of distributing the news.  It took a few months for news of the mass executions to leak out of the prisons and several more weeks for us to believe it was true. The dimensions of the catastrophe were so great that it seemed unimaginable.

Depoliticization.  The defeat of all opposition groups in the 1980s and the discrediting of the “great meta-narratives” of the world ushered in a wave of depoliticization in Iran’s intellectual community. One of the goals of movements such as the “Third Wave” in poetry and the “Third Generation” in story writing, which for a short time found popularity among some younger writers and artists, was to purge art and literature of politics and protest, even politics and protest that were internalized in the work.

The transformation of the country’s intellectual and cultural milieu.  This factor contributed to the silence of intellectuals and the meager representation of the mass executions in creative works. The vista of the intellectual environment and its rigid value system went through a transformation and shed its skin after the 1980s. Organizational, political and ideological defeat, the decline in prestige of all opposition forces in the ‘80s, the collapse of the Eastern Bloc, the fall of formidable meta-narratives such as communism, and the bitter experiences of the 1979 Revolution all stimulated the critical eye of the majority of intellectuals inside Iran. The communist platforms of traditional leftist organizations, which before the revolution attracted intellectuals captivated by the idea of social justice, were actualized by the Islamic Republic and set great calamities in motion.

Exploiting the populist slogans of the traditional left, the Islamic Republic brandished the banner of fighting against “imperialism” or “the Great Satan” and isolated the country internationally. Under the pretext of battling capitalism, the main portion of the country’s economy came under state control and faltered as a result.  Combined with the pre-existing weaknesses of the market economy, the ordeals of a state-run economy pervaded people’s lives.  The segments close to power built legendary wealth through bribery and the takeover of state-owned monopolies. Ideological despotism, which had been copied from the proletarian dictatorships of the Eastern Bloc, inflicted one of the most nightmarish tyrannies in history on our culture. All this discredited the traditional left and, among Iranian intellectuals, hindered the development of bonds of solidarity and mutual identification with these organizations, their activists and prisoners in the Islamic Republic’s jails. Only a handful of sympathizers and political participants still exhibited the ideological and emotional solidarity that characterized the intellectual milieu of previous decades.  These individuals, too, remained silent in the face of the mass executions of 1988. But from the perspective of most Iranian intellectuals, the projected platforms of the two main opposition blocs– the Mojahedin-e Khalgh and traditional leftist groups – were too similar to the policies of the Islamic Republic; this seemingly reduced their struggle against the government to an unequal and absurd battle. Others groups, including nationalists and liberals, carried no weight at the time.

In the time before the 1979 Revolution, unjust and courageous martyrdom for one’s convictions held utmost value for intellectuals and was one of the most significant attractions of the opposition. Valiant death in the struggle against despotism intensified the support of romantic Iranian intellectuals for the opposition. Indeed, the sanctification of martyrs was rooted in the revolutionary romanticism of Iran’s intellectuals and the Shiite culture of extolling martyrs. After the second half of the 1980s, the value system of most Iranian intellectuals was transformed in this respect. The sanctification of martyrs, which was exploited as one of the main propaganda tools of the Islamic Republic, lost its effectiveness in the final years of the war with Iraq. The appeal of the intellectuals’ revolutionary romanticism also faded when confronted with crushing realities.  From the point of view of most intellectuals inside Iran, martyrdom did not and does not justify the ideological and political tendencies of martyrs, regardless of their cause. As such, the opposition lost one of its most enticing features.

The bitter experience of supporting the 1979 Revolution forced most intellectuals to ponder the platforms, objectives, and the intellectual and organizational fabric of oppositional figures and organizations. Only after this reflection would they declare their solidarity and identification with certain political tendencies and with the sanctification of the victims of tyranny. They would, therefore, ask themselves: “What would the executed prisoners and their political organizations have done if they had assumed power?” The response to this question did not benefit the opposition.
The Mojahedin-e Khalgh proposed another kind of religious rule in their official platform. The organizations of the traditional left – except for the Organization of Communist Unity – had unswervingly advocated for the establishment of a popular or proletarian dictatorship, and the creation of a state-run economy and society, as their most pressing priorities. The religious rule of the Mojahedin, like the popular tyranny of the traditional left, was a frightening specter for most intellectuals.

Political organizations should shoulder the responsibility for their positive and negative actions in the pasts. Two large traditional leftist organizations sympathetic to the Soviet Union, the Tudeh Party and “Fedayeen Aksariat” (Majority), were defending and assisting the fundamentalist – and Maoist – Ranjbaran Party, which itself was aiding other factions of the regime.  Consequently, even the opposition played a substantial role in the establishment of the Islamic dictatorship.  Hence, from the point of view of most Iranian intellectuals, these organizations shared the blame for the catastrophe. The Tudeh Party and “Fedayeen Aksariat” went so far as to provide intelligence agents with information that led to the arrest and execution of many opponents of the regime. No intellectual in Iran endorsed the repression, arrest, and execution of the supporters and members of political groups.  We all sympathized with political prisoners. Along with their treacherous behavior toward their victims and their defense of totalitarian fundamentalists, the role of these organizations in unraveling and suppressing the coalition between the social democrats and the royalists, in what came to be known as the “Nojeh” coup d’etat, was a contributing factor to the intellectuals’ disenchantment with these groups. Other traditional leftist organizations, with their intellectual dogmatism and totalitarian objectives, such as the imposition of state-controlled economic, social and cultural communities, were repulsive to the intellectuals.

The 1988 massacre impressed the system’s violent nature upon the collective memory of most intellectual circles. The victims, however, were also regarded as unwitting symbols of the total defeat and lost credibility of the opposition. They were considered to be the victims of both the regime and the opposition and, unlike the executed heroes of August 1953, they were the tragic heroes of an unjust confrontation.  More akin to the executed members of the guerrilla movement of 1970-1975, these were the heroes of a splendid epic battle fighting to bring about beautiful human ideals.

One can add other factors to the above list, but while a conscientious analysis would explain the reasons for the approach taken by intellectuals in Iran toward the 1988 mass executions, this does not justify our silence. We, the intellectuals in Iran, failed to use mechanisms other than creative works to protest against the massacre. The fear engendered by tyranny, the ineffectiveness of protest in an atmosphere of panic and terror, the method of distributing the news, and the transformation of the value system of Iranian intellectuals, along with other elements, can all explain our silence, but they cannot exonerate us. Iranian intellectuals, especially in recent decades, stepped fearlessly into the jaws of a dragon drunk with power and, in the heat of their zeal, risked their lives in the struggle for human rights and against tyranny, leaving a magnificent mark in the history of Iranian intellectuals.

In the summer of 1988, thousands of humans, deprived of their most basic human rights, were murdered in prisons. The intellectuals, with their silence, left a dark blemish in their own impressive history. I do not forgive myself for this silence that, like a dark season, weighs on my political and cultural life. Shame is also one of the most beautiful human feelings.