The following article appeared in the December 15, 1979 issue of L'Express, a mass circulation weekly news magazine published in Paris. Written by Jacques Buob, it is based on interviews with survivors and relatives of those who did not survive the shah's prisons and torture chambers. It is a graphic reminder of why the Iranian masses are demanding the return of the ex-shah to stand trial for his crimes. The translation is by Intercontinental Press/Inprecor]
It all began with Ahmad, the oldest child. Already, in primary school, he was into politics. He would cut his classes in order to go to the Hedayat Mosque to listen to Ayatollah Taleghani and Mehdi Bazargan talk about liberty and justice. At the age of fourteen, he made the decision: to let his studies go in order to found with Badi Zadekan and Hanif Nejad the Mujahedeen movement in Iran.
Ahmad died one day in February 1972, in a street in the southwest of Tehran, where SAVAK had found him. He blew himself up with a grenade, taking along with him those who wanted to arrest him. His brother Reza gave his life for the same cause. Their sister, Sedighen, preferred cyanide rather than fall into the hands of the shah's political police. She was nineteen years old. She didn't want to have to undergo the treatment inflicted upon her other brother, Mehdi, the fourth to die.
The fourth to die, the martyr of martyrs of the Reza Rezai family, Mehdi was tortured to death in SAVAK's prisons in September 1972. When his father saw him, before the trial, he no longer had any fingernails, his body was nothing but one big sore, burned by electricity and cigarette butts. His teeth were all broken.
The regime was getting ready to open its first big political trial before international observers. Before his military judges in full-dress uniform, Mehdi was supposed to admit his errors and proclaim the greatness of the empire. This would save his own neck and allow the shah to triumph over all who accused him of violating human rights.
Mehdi was sent to the hospital for twenty-five days to be patched up and made presentable again. But the young man was stubborn. Sabathi, assistant to the sinister colonel Nassiri (then the head of SAVAK) grew agitated. In Evin prison, next to the Tehran Hilton, he ordered: "Shout 'Long live the shah' or I will piss in your mouth!"
"If you do that," Mehdi answered, "I can always clean my mouth out with water. But if I pronounce that man's name, I can never get rid of the odor of this shit."
So they pissed in his mouth, before his father's eyes. During the trial, Mehdi did not weaken. He recounted the torture he had been subjected to and his hatred of the regime. He had been sentenced to death three times. One time for each SAVAK agent they accused him of having assassi nated. But he was not executed. For having ruined the great trial that was going to prove to the world the equity and clemency of imperial justice, they tortured him again. And this time, tortured him to death.
Throughout Iran, from then on, the name of Reza Rezai, resounded as the symbol of all the crimes of SAVAK, the security and information organization of the Iranian state. This most formidable political police was created in 1956, with the aid of CIA specialists, to combat the Tudeh Party, the Iranian Communist Party. But it quickly went beyond just that objective.
During the shah's regime, when this word was pronounced in Tehran or elsewhere, everyone's face would become frozen. Iranians became deaf and dumb. More than just the armed wing of the regime, SAVAK was the structure on which the whole imperial edifice rested. There were three or four thousand agents, plus 50,000 informers spread throughout the country in all milieus, in all professions. They led an insidious hunt after all enemies of the empire and after any one who dissented. SAVAK evoked throughout the country the specter of torture and death.
Morteza is thirty years old. He takes off his shoe and puts his bare foot on the table. A large scar appears on the sole of his foot. Dead skin falls off. Four years
They blindfold him, and-classical scenario-they send him to an unknown prison. He knows quickly that he is at "Komite," one of the main SAVAK centers. A brick building next to the main post office, in the quiet neighborhood where the ministries are located, protected by armed men and panels on which are written, "No photographs allowed."
It is here and in other prisons and other more anonymous buildings that SAVAK agents perform their work.
Morteza is thrown into a dark cell where he remains for forty-eight hours, cut off from the world. On the second day he is taken to be interrogated, before a door on the ground floor, at the end of a kind of four-story-high tank, onto which the cells open out. This is the domain of Hosseini (his real name is Chabani), the chief jailer, the all-powerful head of these places. He is a roaring giant the sight of whom was terrifying.
It was often necessary to line up in front
СИМ OPPRES ION
A small boy in Tehran whose arms were cut off by SAVAK in the presence of the child's father to try to make him reveal information.
of the downstairs door to wait your turn, closing your ears to the cries of agony that came through the walls, the cries of those who were being systematically and consciously tortured. And it is unbearable waiting to enter.
On this day, Morteza met his executioners. Like Hosseini, the SAVAK men give themselves phony last names. These two called themselves Rasoul and Rahmani. Each day for two whole months they are going to make him suffer so that he will reveal the names of his friends. Each day Morteza is brought down to the chamber. It is 30 square meters. On the wall hang electric cables of different widths. They strap him on a table and beat all over his nude body, his hands, and the soles of his feet. His wounds become infected. He can hardly walk. They strike him again on his abscessed wounds. He does not speak. They hang him by the hands from a hook on the ceiling. His feet don't touch the floor and thev send him crashing against the and they send him crashing against the walls. Morteza still does not speak.
Then one day they cover his head with "Apollo." SAVAK saves "Apollo" for members of leftist groups. It was a specialty reserved for the choice prisoners.
"It is called this because it resembles the helmet of an astronaut. They put it on your head and begin to hit you. And you scream. Your screams are amplified by microphones which resound in your head, breaking your eardrums. These are your own screams, you understand? And your own screams of pain are driving you crazy."
In another corner of the chamber shines a metallic bed without a mattress. SAVAK makes the prisoners sit down. The bedsprings had been heated red hot. The skin was burning, falling off in sheets in an odor of burning flesh.
Ali Reza rolls back down his pants, uncovers his arms and exhibite his large scars.
Nourredine looks at him, his eyes fixed. Brown and emaciated, from time to time he smiles sadly. He must still receive regular care for his psychological problems. He remains in the SAVAK jails. You never forget them.
The police came to arrest Nourredine at the agricultural complex where he was working in 1974. Nourredine was active in a Marxist organization, Red Morning. This was in Khuzestan.
He was blindfolded, transferred to an unknown prison and beaten. SAVAK wanted to know the names of the members of his group, its structure, how they received the Marxist pamphlets that they distributed among the students.
Nourredine was burned with a candle; raped several times; thrown into a mirror; placed in a swiveling chair, swung around at full speed, while the SAVAK agents used razors to cut gashes in his body as he was spun past them. Blood was flowing all over. He fainted. Nourredine goes from o 2303
prison to prison. He is kicked; his eardrums are broken; he becomes crazy.
A mission of the International Red Cross demands that he be hospitalized. In order to prove its humanity, SAVAK goes even further. He is freed. Supreme sadism. Twenty days later, shortly after the Red Cross leaves, he is arrested again.
This time his stomach is crushed with a press. He suffers the agony of "Apollo". *Every three months I cracked up. They sent me to the hospital and it began again." Nourredine saw a friend of his, Azim Assad, die-ripped apart by a stick kicked into his anus.
February 1979—SAVAK lost; the Shah was forced to flee. The masses took over Evin prison where Nourredine had ended up. The political prisoners were freed. The masses carried them triumphantly throughout the city.
Nourredine stares into space with his burning eyes, strangely wide open. "We were gotten out of there more or less in one piece. But how many died? At least 150,000. How many cripples, handicapped, sick people? Tell the world that the shah must pay for so much horror, and the United States also, for having created such executioners, whom they continue to support."
Through the open window you can hear the shouts full of hatred chanted by the crowds in front of the gates of the U.S. embassy nearby. Mr. Reza Rezai, father of four children who are dead because they wanted to fight SAVAK, sets out again. He is carrying under his arms Mujahedeen placards bearing a photo of Mehdi and the memory of his three other children who died in combat against the shah and his SAVAK. At his side, his wife, their mother, hides her face under her chador, a face frozen in eternal pain.