Terror in the Name of God

By Patricia Blake

The mullahs impose their will with a vengeance

O Islam, what crimes they commit in your name! --Abolhassan Banisadr

Their crime was that they had demonstrated against the dismissal of Banisadr from his post as President of the nation. The Islamic judge who sentenced them--Ayatullah Mohammadi Gilani--did not even know who they were. The twelve girls, the oldest 18, the others under 16, refused to identify themselves in court. When Gilani asked their names, each in turn replied, "Mujahed" (Crusader). To the question "Child of?" each replied, "The people of Iran." Gilani solved the problem of identifying the girls by having them photographed. Then he consigned them to the firing squad.

Islamic guards led the dozen girls to the courtyard of Evin Prison in Tehran. The oldest was clad in a flowing black chador, the traditional Muslim veil. The others wore dark head scarves. As the guards began to blindfold them, the girls started chanting, "Death to fascism! Death to Khomeini!"

In answer, the guards and prison attendants watching the spectacle began their own chant of "Allahu Akbar!" (God is great). Then the rifles roared.

Three days later, the clergy-controlled newspaper Ettela'at printed the girls' pictures with a terse message asking the parents to call for the bodies.

The parents should bring, the paper said, "birth certificates bearing their [the girls'] pictures." At a press conference Gilani defended the trials and executions of the girls. "By the Islamic canon," he said, "a nine-year-old girl is mature. So there is no difference for us between a nine-year-old girl and a 40-year-old man."

Nor was there any difference between wanton brutality and justice in the Islamic Republic of Iran last week as security forces stepped up their search for former President Banisadr and his supporters. In the wake of nationwide riots between pro-and anti-Banisadr crowds, squads of Islamic Revolutionary Guards searched the homes of Iranians suspected of harboring the leader of the country's moderates, who had been Iran's President for the past 17 months. Banisadr vanished after Ayatullah Ruhollah Khomeini dismissed him as chief of the armed forces three weeks ago. Since then, the government has charged Banisadr with unspecified "antirevolutionary and anti-Islamic acts," thus clearing the way for a presidential election next month.

Meanwhile, a mass drive against dissidents was in progress, designed to quell all opposition to the final imposition of a theocratic Muslim state. So sweeping was the roundup that the jails could scarcely contain the torrent of new prisoners. The revolutionary firing squads were working round the clock. In the week following the pro-and anti-Banisadr riots, more than 50 men, women and children were executed. Some of the victims, like the writer and publisher Ali Asghar Amirani, were accused of "strengthening the Shah's regime." Others were members of the Baha'i faith, whose Iranian adherents, numbering between 300,000 and 500,000, are regarded as heretics by Muslims.

To the wall went moderates, liberals and leftists who were on record as opposing the dictatorship of Muslim fundamentalists. The most illustrious victim was Poet Said Soltanpour, who had been arrested at his own wedding several weeks before. As an indomitable opponent of the Shah, Soltanpour had been tortured for his views by the SAVAK, the imperial secret police. At his summary trial last week, Soltanpour told Gilani that he regarded the Islamic Republic as a reactionary and corrupt regime that would soon be "crushed by the people it has betrayed." Gilani sentenced him to death as a "crusader against God."

Presiding over this reign of terror was a three-man presidential council, which took power after Khomeini ousted Banisadr. The council's chief member, Supreme Court President Ayatullah Mohammed Beheshti, has gradually emerged as the strongest of the three, by virtue of his leadership of the clergy-controlled Islamic Republic Party (I.R.P.), the dominant political party in Iran. The other council members were Parliamentary Speaker Hojatolislam Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani and Prime Minister Mohammed Ali Raja'i, who has assumed Banisadr's presidential functions until the July elections, when an I.R.P. candidate is expected to run--and win.

The ruling clergy is determined to dash all hopes of combining modernism with Islam in Iran, which had been the idealistic and forlorn plan of Banisadr. For the fundamentalists, the Paris-educated economist who became President represented a suspiciously Western, secular influence in the revolutionary government. It made no difference that his father, the late Ayatullah Seyed Nasrollah Banisadr, had been an Islamic leader revered by Khomeini. Supporting the suspicions about the deposed President, Khomeini declared last week, "Banisadr and his ilk are Muslims, but their Islam somehow leaves room for U.S. domination." He also charged that Banisadr had urged him "to cashier the government" in his desire "to make a dictator out of me."

Banisadr's crashing fall from power was a classic example of a revolution's destroying its young. He had been Khomeini's protege, the man who had offered the Ayatullah hospitality when he sought refuge in Paris in 1978. Khomeini, who called Banisadr "my son," thought that the owl-eyed intellectual could provide a scientific rationale for the Islamic reforms he proposed to put into effect, thus marrying the 20th and 7th centuries. Following Khomeini's triumphant return to Iran in 1979, Banisadr seemed to have the Ayatullah's full confidence. Though Banisadr was elected President with 75% of the vote in 1980, and soon earned the support of the army as its commander in chief, he was ultimately unable to withstand the fundamentalists' hostility and Khomeini's divide-and-rule tactics, which turned Iranian politics into a welter of warring factions. Banisadr lost more favor when he seemed too eager to work out a deal with the U.S. for the release of the embassy hostages. Late last week, from hiding, Banisadr issued a call to Iranians to "unite against fundamentalists and the unprecedented dictatorship they are imposing on the country." He also demanded an open trial to defend himself.

A strong indication of what the future holds for the Iranian people under fundamentalist leadership is the so-called Retribution Bill, legislation that is currently before parliament. It provides explicitly detailed punishment for the crimes of mayhem, murder, adultery, homosexuality, drinking alcohol, pimping and false accusations of adultery and homosexuality. Except for committing mayhem, all of these crimes, including drinking if repeated three times, are punishable by death.

The proposed code is based on a principle of retribution. A murder victim's relatives could kill the murderer after obtaining permission from a religious judge. In case of mayhem, the victim could inflict on his assailant a comparable injury, which must be exactly similar in "width and length" to the original wound. The code covers a number of contingencies: "For the severance of a right hand, the assailant's right hand must be severed. If the assailant does not have a right hand, his left hand may be severed. If he does not have a left hand either, his foot may be severed." The code also calls for extenuations and differentiations. Married men and women would generally be stoned to death for adultery if at the time they committed the crime they had access to marital sex. A woman, however, would merely be whipped for committing adultery with a prepubescent youth. In executions by stoning, the code specifies, the rocks should not be too large. Big stones kill too fast.

Opposition to the theocracy desired by the Muslim fundamentalists is currently being led by the Mujahedin-e Khalq (People's Crusaders), a clandestine Islamic socialist party that commands some 100,000 armed urban guerrillas. Supporters of Banisadr, the Mujahedin reacted to the President's ouster by engaging Khomeini's armed zealots, the Hezbollahis (Members of God's Party), in bloody street fighting in Tehran and other cities, killing 25 and wounding several hundred.

As the violence continued, the mullahs had other problems on their hands. The economy is a disaster. Inflation is running at 60% for consumer goods. Lamb now costs four times what it did under the Shah; a cake of soap sells for $2. Nearly one-third of the nation's labor force of 12 million is unemployed. Some 1.5 million refugees from Afghanistan have crowded into the country, further straining the economy. More than a million educated Iranians have fled since the Islamic revolution. Though Iran's annual income from oil exports is about $11.5 billion, the war with Iraq is costing some $7.8 billion. As a result, Iran's foreign currency reserves are expected to be depleted soon.

Iran's Kurdish minority, which has been relatively quiescent in the past few months, reacted to Banisadr's ouster by staging riots in the city of Mahabad in northwestern Iran. Many of the nation's 4 million Kurds, who have been fighting for autonomy for generations, seem to have joined forces with other opposition groups who are heeding Banisadr's recent admonition to the Iranian people:

"I warn you that if you do not resist, dictatorship will prevail and reduce you to misery."

--By Patricia Blake

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