I'm Writing You from Tehran Read online

  What “saint” to turn to? What “imam”? Did I have to rely, like other journalists, on the goodwill of Tehran? Which is to say, plaster on a smile at the Ministry of Culture and hope to be selected for a guided tour, with a close escort, of one of the nuclear sites? The lucky few scored a permit to access Natanz or Arak, both under close surveillance. As for me, years later I would receive a consolation prize: the nuclear power plant in Bushehr! The southern port was home to a site whose construction, at first supervised by the German company Siemens, had been suspended after the 1979 revolution, before the Russians took over in 1995. But what could I really hope for from a quick tour, nose pressed to the window of a minibus shuttling us from facility to facility, like bears in cages, under the vigilant eye of uranium guardians? I would have preferred to waste my time eating grilled fish and spicy shrimp in memory of my first trip to the banks of the Persian Gulf. I wouldn’t see much of this grand performance except for antimissile batteries deployed along the road leading to the site, the first signs of Iran flexing its muscles against outside threats. And more than anything—yes, more than anything—thousands of burly men with their blond hair and their skin red from the sun, sweating on their bikes: the many Russian technicians who shuttled back and forth every day, in sauna-like heat, between the nuclear facilities and their homes. Once on this gigantic campus, a true city within a city, they had everything within reach: a supermarket, nonalcoholic Baltika beer, a private school for their children … Far from prying eyes, their wives even took off their headscarves. Once more, the real entwined with the absurd!

  I’d had enough of going around in circles. There was no doubt that Iran wanted to develop nuclear technology. But while Iranians were gradually growing irritated at the entire world trying to make impossible predictions of how many years it would take Iran to obtain the Bomb, another question was gnawing at me: Why? Yes, why was the Islamic Republic so obsessed with the nuclear race?

  A few months later, at the foot of the Zagros Mountains, about six miles from the Iraqi border, I would find a semblance of an answer in an isolated village. Far, very far from Western cameras. A minuscule point unknown to the maps of the world, inscribed like an indelible stain on Iranians’ memories: Sardasht. Lost in the depths of the mountains of West Azerbaijan Province, it had been the first city to fall victim to Saddam Hussein’s chemical weapons. During the Iran-Iraq War, to complete international silence. That attack, on June 28, 1987, sealed Iran’s fate, leading to Tehran’s retreat toward nationalism and its determination to protect itself—at all costs.

  * * *

  I took a seat in the black pleather armchair offered by Mustafah Asaghzadeh, a tall mustached man with a Kurdish accent and ebony eyes. His window on the hillside overlooked a landscape imbued with a singular beauty. Thickets of pine blanketed the contours of the mountains. Pomegranate trees heavy with ripe fruit let the morning breeze dance with their branches. In the middle of the fields, farmers wearing sharwal, those traditional baggy pants, were busy collecting apples. A village woman in a dress with colored sequins was walking briskly, a stack of sangak bread on her veiled head. I noticed a rainbow on the surface of the water flowing between the rocks. Like scenery from a postcard! But the storybook image froze dramatically as, staring out the window, my host started to scrutinize the past.

  “There was a time when those who lived here called Sardasht ‘Paradise,’” Mustafah Asaghzadeh murmured.

  With eyes that had lost their sparkle, he grabbed a photo album sitting on the table and handed it to me with a slow, awkward gesture. In a group photo yellowed with time was his entire family. The women wore colorful headscarves and cheerful faces. The men were carrying the children in their arms. They had happy smiles on their faces.

  “This is all I have left of my family … It’s all I was able to save.”

  “What happened, exactly?” I asked.

  He took a deep breath. And opened his wounded heart:

  “It’s around four in the afternoon, June 28, 1987 … I’m eighteen years old and doing my military service in Tehran. My parents stayed in Sardasht. That day, a friend calls me from Tabriz, panic-stricken. ‘There was an attack on Sardasht! There was an attack on Sardasht!’ he screams. At first, I’m not worried. Since the start of the war, Saddam’s troops had regularly attacked the Iranian army bases and the Kurdish rebels at the periphery of the city. The inhabitants were used to hiding in their shelters. But my friend insists: ‘One of the bombs dropped near your parents’ house. They were taken to the hospital.’ To the hospital? I can’t believe my ears. This time, the city center had been targeted! A residential area! I have to get back home as quickly as possible. In a panic, I drive to Sardasht. When I arrive at the hospital, I realize the extent of the damage: masses of the wounded pouring into a courtyard already jammed with people. At least seven hundred heaped there in the blazing sun! Astonishingly, they show no signs of broken bones or scratches. Their wounds are unusual: red eyes, blistered skin. Their breathing, heavy and wheezy. I lower my eyes. In front of me, a woman is suffocating while vomiting blood. Nearby, a man begs a nurse to inject him with morphine to ease his itching. Farther on, a child’s body on the ground. Inert. I grope my way forward. Sardasht, my little Paradise, what has happened to you? And my family? Where are they? In the chaos, I search desperately for my parents. In vain. A doctor approaches me. ‘Sorry, truly sorry,’ he says to me. At first, I don’t understand. ‘We’re all sorry,’ I reply. ‘No, sorry for you … You arrived too late … Your father is dead, your mother, too,’ he adds … My parents! I fall to my knees, wrecked.”

  Mustafah lowered his head, out of breath. His face was pale, as if he was about to faint. I was stunned by the sharpness of his description, by his way of speaking about the past in the present tense. I wanted to hear the rest, even if I sensed the tragic end to his story.

  “In shock, I follow the doctor, who signals for me to come with him. We cross a long corridor; it’s like we’re crossing through hell. The wounded are leaning against the walls. Their screams echo endlessly. Pale with exhaustion, the nurses brandish razors, saying they have to pierce the blisters. A patient bursts into sobs. Hands to the sky, he implores Allah to help him understand this strange plague that has fallen upon Sardasht. He cries that only eight bombs fell on the city … Eight bombs shouldn’t cause this much damage! Eight bombs … When I try to learn more, he tells me about the strange odor of garlic and apples floating in the air, the city seized in an overwhelming cloud of powder … Strange phenomenon … Inexplicable … The doctor takes me by the hand. He opens a door. Lying on a bed, a young man is suffocating and coughing, a tube down his throat. It’s Hadi, my fourteen-year-old little brother! I barely recognize him. His words, incomprehensible, sound like a cat’s meowing. I can’t hold back my tears anymore. Leaning over him, I promise him that I will find the other members of our family alive. But a few hours later, the body of my older brother Ali greets me at the morgue. I go from the hospital to the free clinic; in the end, I learn that all my other brothers and sisters have died. My grandparents, too! After four months, Hadi also left me. My last family tie, my reason to live … I went mad!”

  Mustafah stood up, closed the album, and pressed his face against the window. Such a contrast between his cruel memories and this landscape, seemingly so peaceful. A long silence invaded the room. Not wanting to interrupt his thoughts, I remained glued to my armchair. After a few minutes, he turned back toward me before murmuring, his face clouded:

  “With time, I learned to accept the curse, live with it, even if the pain will never end.”

  Mustafah then signaled for me to follow him so he could show me, with a trembling hand, one of the partitions of his house, newly renovated.

  “You see this wall? It’s still contaminated. A few months ago, when the workers sanded it before repainting it, their eyes started to swell and get red. The gas infected people, houses, the earth, the air, and perhaps the water. An incurable disease.”
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br />   In Sardasht, stories like his were not isolated incidents. Behind the door of every house lurked another such hidden trauma, each more unbearable than the last.

  I met Hossein Mohammadian the same day. A forty-four-year-old farmer, he directed a small local Kurdish association that gave aid to people such as Mustafah. A walking encyclopedia, he knew the tiniest details of this tragedy, having been a victim himself and having only narrowly escaped. The day of the attack, he was on his way to his neighborhood bakery. Flattened to the ground by the impact of the explosion, he had crawled to his house, crammed his wife and their three young children into his old Land Rover, and fled the city as quickly as possible. It was only six hours later that he began to feel an unsettling discomfort. He remembers every single detail of his descent into hell:

  “I suddenly lost my sight! And yet, I wasn’t wounded … And then my voice started to malfunction. My skin itched! It was unbearable. At the clinic of a neighboring village, I quickly understood that I was not the only one … According to the doctors, at least a third of the twenty-thousand inhabitants of Sardasht were suffering the same symptoms. And a hundred others were dead, like Mustafah’s parents. The doctors were distraught, unable to arrive at a diagnosis. They evacuated us to Tehran one after another … It wasn’t until a week later, after they had sent me to a special hospital in Spain, that experts ended up diagnosing me with mustard gas poisoning.”

  So, Saddam Hussein had used chemical gas. But Iraq had signed the Geneva Convention in 1925, which banned the use of such weapons. How could a crime deliberately targeting civilian populations have been justified? The war had been dragging on for years, each day bringing new “martyrs.” For years, the Iraqi president had been threatening his Iranian enemies with the worst. But no one had dared imagine that one day an entire city’s population would pay the price. Had the Iraqi president, grown weary of the Iranian capacity for resistance, tried to bring a radical end to the war? Or did he want to impede a secret meeting that he had caught wind of, between Kurdish opposition forces and Iranian officials?

  “To this day, all those questions, unfortunately, remain unanswered,” Hossein Mohammadian said with a sigh.

  “But how is that possible? Surely international inquiries were conducted. Specialists must have looked into the matter.”

  “No, I swear to you, no.”

  Then he continued:

  “As you know, an investigation into the gassing would certainly have put the suppliers of Saddam’s chemical weapons at risk: big European and American companies. So those in the West have no interest in conducting an inquiry. Right after the attack, no one deigned to lift even a finger.”

  The silence of the West: the second blow to the inhabitants of Sardasht. Less visible, but more perfidious. According to Hossein Mohammadian, the international indifference only encouraged Saddam Hussein a few months later to launch a gas attack against Halabja, a city in Iraqi Kurdistan where five thousand inhabitants were killed, and to continue his chemical attacks against Iran. In total, 360 chemical bombs targeted Iranian military and civilians. The United Nations was the only organization to carry out a semblance of an investigation at the time. Seven fact-finding missions were conducted throughout the war. But the two reports from the UN Security Council didn’t lead to any satisfying outcomes for the inhabitants of Sardasht. The first, on May 9, 1988, concluded with a vague warning to the two countries, telling them not to use chemical bombs anymore. The second, in August 1988, specified that “chemical gas was used against Iran” without acknowledging its origin, Iraq.

  “Even the UN ended up abandoning us,” Hossein Mohammadian continued. “Even the UN.”

  He stopped talking. His eyes were red. His voice was trembling; his breathing had intensified. With a slow gesture, he rifled in his pocket and took out a tube of Ventolin, the only palliative for “chemical” asthmatics. Once his cough had died down, he explained to me that there were three thousand people in Sardasht (out of a total of forty-five thousand throughout the country) still suffering the consequences of the chemicals and requiring special care. He and I went to meet other victims. Words were all they had left for venting their sadness. I remember an old man lying on cushions. Beneath his shirt, his chest bore traces of strange burns.

  “Did we really deserve that? Iran has never attacked any country! It’s unjust!” he declared.

  Another, a woman, whom I met in her modest apartment, confided in me the pain of not being able to get pregnant. Infertility was one of the numerous side effects attributed to the gas. “The mustard gas has a delayed reaction. It penetrates into your tissues, affects the DNA, and can manifest itself many years later,” a doctor whispered to me. Listening to him, I thought again of Sepideh’s father. His tremors didn’t appear until ten years after he had been exposed to chemical gas on the front lines. One victim among so many others!

  Before leaving, Hossein insisted we have another tea together, at the foot of the pretty waterfall that remained the charming focal point of this scarred city. In silence, we contemplated the torrent of water flowing along the rock.

  Then he added, nostalgically:

  “Behind its bucolic landscape, Sardasht, our little Paradise, will never again be as it was.”

  * * *

  For a long time, I kept thinking about these stories. No narrative had ever explained so well your compatriots’ propensity for feeling like victims, and their extreme protectionism in the face of the major powers. It made me wonder whether the Iranian nuclear program wasn’t, to a certain extent, the legacy of the chemical gassing perpetrated by Iraq against the backdrop of complete international indifference.

  At the end of the war, in 1988, the Islamic Republic did indeed draw two lessons from Sardasht’s tragedy: no matter what, avoid finding yourself in a vulnerable position and never again trust in international treaties and conventions. Haunted by paranoia, the authorities wanted at all costs to equip themselves with the means to prevent future danger. “The use of biological weapons may well be inhumane, but we still have to consider developing them for our defense,” declared Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, then chairman of Parliament, adding, “The war has taught us that international laws are nothing but ink on paper.”

  In the eyes of the West, the Islamic Republic is often perceived as a threatening power, ready to export Islamic revolution, to support terrorism, to strike Israel with its missiles, and to manufacture nuclear weapons. But after several years in your country, I gradually learned that, for Iranians, their contemporary history was, by contrast, a succession of conspiracies often carried out by the West. In 1906, when Iran’s monarch Mohammad Ali Shah crushed the constitutional revolution, it was with the aid of the British and the Russians, who were in a hurry to put an end to an unprecedented democratic experiment in the Middle East. In 1953, the coup d’état against Prime Minister Mossadegh, champion of nationalizing Iran’s oil industry and of the country’s independence, would not have taken place without the intervention of the Americans. When the 1979 revolution mobilized the masses, it was in part because it carried with it the promise of liberating the country from foreign control.

  Years later, in 2005, the specter of foreign conspiracies would be skillfully exploited for political ends by President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. In the guise of fighting a foreign enemy, and playing on Iranians’ nationalist fervor, he set about strengthening his hold on society while accelerating the nuclear program, which had been suspended during negotiations between Khatami and the West in 2003. But we weren’t quite there yet.

  In the winter of 2002, the United States turned to Iraq, accusing it (far too late!) of possessing weapons of mass destruction—weapons that, paradoxically, had ceased to exist fifteen years after the attack against Sardasht.

  In Tehran, those in power started to tremble. In his war on terror, Bush had first targeted Afghanistan. This time, it was Iraq, the other main neighbor of the Islamic Republic. Iranians asked themselves: When will our turn come? At the soun
d of combat boots in Baghdad, Iran started to retreat further into itself. In a new surge of protectionism, the authorities in Tehran decided to attack the first target within reach: the Western media.

  * * *

  On New Year’s Day 2003, the telephone rang. It was a call from the Ministry of Culture. My press pass had been revoked, without warning. On the eve of the American invasion of Iraq, I became persona non grata in your country.

  THE DOOR OPENED. Two men. I recognized them immediately. Haggard features, squared shoulders, backs glued to their chairs. Apart from a few more white hairs, they hadn’t changed.

  “Khanum Minoui! Long time no see,” exclaimed the interrogator with the two missing fingers.

  Four years had passed since the secret police last summoned me. Next to the lead interrogator, the same henchman. Slumped in his chair. Silent, staring at me. That day, instead of meeting at the Department of Foreign Nationals, they had “invited” me to a more incongruous place: a room in a big Tehran hotel. I went reluctantly. It was a few days after my press credentials had been revoked. On the phone, the boss had been brief. They wanted to see me as soon as possible. Without giving me a particular reason.

  “Hello,” I threw out casually, entering the room.

  “Sit down!”

  I jumped at the sound of the slamming door. It had closed behind me automatically. Obeying his orders, I took a seat in the empty armchair. A coffee table separated us. For a moment, I wondered if they had summoned me again because of Niloufar. She had taken the risk of reentering Iran. But as a precaution, we had chosen not to see each other since then. Oddly enough, she had nothing to do with this. That day, to my great surprise, they were interested in me.