There are many people to whom I owe my thanks, both now and over the years.
I’m grateful to my longtime friend Abdolkarim Lahiji, from whom I’ve learned so many things. My daughters, Negar and Nargess, who were my champions throughout the difficult period following 2009 and who have always warmed my heart. My former husband, Javad, for enduring more than thirty-seven years of hardship as a result of my work. I thank him, truly, for his forbearance, and wish him happiness in the new life he has started.
My brother, Jafar, and my sister, Nooshin, for their continued support; I am truly sorry that because of my work they have had to endure so many interrogations at the hands of security officials.
My wonderful colleagues Abdolfatah Soltani and Mohammad Seifzadeh, and Narges Mohammadi, who all worked so closely with me to found the Defenders of Human Rights Center and who, for this reason, sit in prison today. It is only with their help, and the efforts of so many other colleagues, that we were able to make such strides in human rights in Iran in such a relatively short span of time. Thanks as well to all the rest of my colleagues at the center, whose hard work and efforts have helped ease the difficulties of exile. I hope that one day we can gather together in a democratic, secular Iran and work to defend the human rights of those who are victimized.
The Nobel women laureates with whom I formed the Nobel Women’s Initiative, and the group’s staff, all of whom have been a steadfast source of support.
Azadeh Moaveni, without whose efforts, day and night, I would not have had the opportunity to publish this book. David Ebershoff, for his dedication in reading these pages with such acuity and for his invaluable advice. Karolina Sutton, for putting her long-standing experience at my disposal and for helping me clear the various obstacles that stood in the way.
The first Muslim woman to receive the Nobel Peace Prize, Shirin Ebadi has inspired millions around the globe with her work as a human rights lawyer in Iran. Now Ebadi tells her story of bravery and defiance in the face of a government out to destroy her, her loved ones, and her mission: to bring justice to the people and the country she loves.
Following the award of the Nobel, the Iranian government subjected Ebadi to years of intimidation and violence. It tapped her phones, sent spies to follow her, harassed her colleagues, entrapped her husband, detained her daughter, and arrested her sister on trumped-up charges. It shut down her lectures, seized her offices, and nailed a death threat to her front door. While nothing could keep Ebadi from speaking out, the relentless pressure led to her exile.
Disturbing and eye-opening, Until We Are Free illuminates many of today’s issues involving Iran, political Islam, and the Middle East. Ultimately, it is about personal and political betrayal, and about finding the courage to stand up for your beliefs.
Dr. Shirin Ebadi is one of the leading human rights activists in the world and the author of the international bestseller Iran Awakening. Born in 1947, she trained in law and became the first woman ever to serve as a judge in Iran. Following the Islamic Revolution, she was dismissed from her post, but finally succeeded in obtaining a lawyer’s license and setting up her own practice. Since then she has represented the families of political victims, journalists, child custody cases and others. The recipient of many awards and accolades, today she lives in exile in the West and lectures widely around the world on human rights, justice and equality.
The Golden Cage
Iran Awakening
My aim in writing this book is to bear witness to what the people of Iran have endured in the past decade. By reading it, you will see how a police state can affect people’s lives and throw families into disarray. What you can take away from my personal story is this: if a government can behave in this way with a Nobel Peace laureate who has access to the platform of world media, and who is herself a lawyer with intimate knowledge of the country’s legal system, you can imagine what it does to ordinary Iranians, who have no such means or expertise at their disposal. I am compelled to share my story on behalf of the many faceless Iranians, political prisoners and prisoners of conscience, who sit today in the prisons of Iran, an Iran that has become one of the world’s largest prisons for journalists, lawyers, women’s rights activists, and students, who instead of studying are languishing in cellblocks, yet another generation whose talent and dreams are squandered. But the hardship imposed by the Iranian police state has not caused the people of Iran to lose their hope for change or their willingness to reach for it.
The story of Iran is the story of my life. Sometimes I wonder why I am so attached to my country, why the outline of Tehran’s Alborz Mountains is as intimate and precious to me as the curve of my daughter’s face, and why I feel a duty to my nation that overwhelms everything else. I remember when so many of my friends and relatives began leaving the country in the 1980s, disheartened by the bombs raining down from the war with Iraq and by the morality police checkpoints set up by the still new Islamic government. While I did not judge anyone for wanting to leave, I could not fathom the impulse. Did one leave the city where one’s children had been born? Did one walk away from the trees in the garden one planted each year, even before they bore pomegranates and walnuts and scented apples?
For me, this was unthinkable. When I walked into the country’s highest court and the new revolutionary authorities told me that women could no longer be judges, I stayed. I stayed when the authorities demoted me to clerk in the same court I had presided over as a judge. I shut my ears when the revolutionaries who had taken over the justice system talked in my presence about how women were fickle and indecisive and unfit to mete out justice, which would now be the work of men. I stayed as the Iraqi warplanes bombed houses on our street to rubble. I stayed when the new authorities said Islam demanded violent justice, that Islam allowed for young men and women to be executed on rooftops and hung from cranes for their political beliefs, their bodies dumped in mass graves.
In the same way that I did not leave Iran, I did not leave Islam, either. If we all packed our suitcases and boarded planes, what would be left of our country? If we bowed our heads and stayed quietly at home, permitting them to say that Islam allowed the assassination of writers and the execution of teenagers, what would be left of our faith?
I wrote long letters to friends who had emigrated, on the thin, diaphanous paper we used for airmail in those days, and told them that I was still managing to live. In the mid-1980s, I stopped working altogether and turned inward, disconnected from the brutal politics of the new regime. Despite the bombs and the morality checkpoints, my husband and I raised our two girls, who went to school in pigtails and learned how to read. We had dinner together every night. My husband, Javad, continued with his work as an engineer, and I raised the girls, contemplating how I could reinvent myself, now that the judiciary had become the realm of men.
In the early 1990s, after the war had ended, the girls were older and didn’t need me as much. I briefly tried practicing family law, but I saw quickly that the courts under the Islamic Republic operated very differently than they had under the shah. The authorities permitted women to work as lawyers, but the system and all its new procedures were so dysfunctional that it was impossible to take a case forward. On several occasions, I had trouble simply trying to review a file at the courthouse. The clerk, upon realizing that I wasn’t going to “tip” him for retrieving the file (corrupt countries have endless euphemisms for bribery), would say, “Sorry, the file is missing. Come back tomorrow.” I would go back the next day, and he would say, “Sorry, I haven’t had a chance to search for your file.” On the third or fourth day, knowing that I would keep coming back, he would finally produce the file. But because I wasn’t prepared to pay a bribe, I had lost two or three days of work.
It was much worse in the courts. There, the person who was willing to pay more was in the right; justice was bought, not fought for or deliberated. To protest, I eventually hung a big sign in front of my law office: “Due to the current inhospitable circumstance of the courts, I will no longer be accepting clients and can only offer legal advice.” This did not feel, at the time, like a particularly risky thing to do. I was simply being honest about the country’s legal climate, rather than consciously trying to defy the state. But I see now, and learned with time, how peaceful disobedience can be a powerful act of defiance. After a while, people who could not afford to hire a lawyer—often defendants who had been accused of political crimes—found their way to me.
The state of criminal law was especially grave after the 1979 revolution. The Islamic Republic had replaced the secular criminal code Iran had followed under the shah with a system of Islamic law based on seventh-century readings of sharia, Islamic law. I still vividly remember the case that revealed to me the full extent of the system’s dysfunction and cruelty.
My friend Shahla Sherkat, the country’s foremost feminist editor and publisher, called to ask if I could offer any advice to the family of an eleven-year-old girl named Leila. One day, as Leila was picking wildflowers in the hills outside her village, three men snuck up and attacked her. The men raped her, struck her repeatedly on the head, and then threw her to her death over a nearby cliff. The local police arrested the men. One mysteriously hung himself in prison, and the court found the other two guilty of rape and murder. Because the laws at the time valued the life of a man convicted of murder more than that of a girl raped and tossed off a cliff, Leila’s family was held responsible for paying for their executions. The family was unable to come up with the money, and the men were released. The Islamic Republic claimed that these laws were based on the principles of blood money in Islamic sharia, but I believed that not only were they unjust, they were a distortion of true Islamic legal principles.
In the course of seeking justice through the courts, Leila’s family became destitute. Her mother had taken to sitting outside the courthouse each day in a white shroud, silently holding up a placard that described what had happened to her daughter. As I recounted more fully in Iran Awakening, I took on their case, and while I did not manage to secure anything like justice, their ordeal shaped the sort of legal response that became my second career. Though the judge in Leila’s case accused me of contravening Islam in my arguments, I drew on Islamic law and principles to challenge him. I discovered that many judges in the Islamic Republic had little or no understanding of Islamic legal tenets, and also that many Iranian women had no idea of how egregiously the law discriminated against them. It was only when life dragged them to some dark crossroads—divorce, the death of a child, a fight over inheritance—that they realized how little status they had before the law.
I made a showcase out of Leila’s case, writing articles and speaking out publicly, and extensive coverage in the Iranian press soon led to a public outcry. In one article I described how the criminal code around blood money holds that if a man suffers an injury that damages his testicles, he receives compensation equal to a woman’s life. I posed the question this way: If a woman with a PhD is run over by a car and dies, and an illiterate thug gets his testicle hurt in a fight, the value of that woman’s life and that thug’s testicle are equal. Is this, I wrote, how the Islamic Republic regards its women?
For the first time since the revolution, the question of women’s equality before the law came into the national spotlight. I saw then how sympathetic Iranian society was to such injustice and how powerful public outrage could be; more than anything else, it made the authorities pay attention. It was then that I started on the course that I follow to this day, seeking justice in the law through upholding the rights of those most vulnerable—women, children, dissidents, and minorities—and pushing for legal change on the battlefield of public sentiment.
The Islamic Republic has a myriad of shortcomings. It vests absolute power in an unelected supreme leader, harasses independent-minded clerics who challenge the religious basis of its severe Islamic rule, and pursues policies that are ideologically radical and detached from the national interests of the Iranian people. But like any regime committed to perpetuating its own power, it has on some occasions shown sensitivity to the condemnation of the international community and the brewing discontent of its own citizens. It is the system we have in place, and especially in those years, the 1990s and early 2000s, it made several reluctant adjustments to some of its most inhumane laws and policies, in response to the activism I and many colleagues in the field of human rights and the women’s movement pursued. This course seemed the only path possible to follow, bar packing up and leaving. Although, in this era, Iranians began emigrating by the thousands, both those who left and those who stayed behind remained fiercely proud of Iran the nation. We had been ruled by autocrats, kings, and now clerics; our history reached back thousands of years, all the way to Cyrus the Great, the Persian king who inscribed civilization’s first human rights charter on a clay cylinder. I viewed myself as an inheritor of this history, of the great tradition of epic Persian poetry that I had read to my girls every night before bedtime. Like most Iranians, I was bitterly disappointed in Iran’s present precisely because of the love and admiration I had for its past.
I received the Nobel Peace Prize in October 2003 for my efforts for democracy and human rights, and though you would think that this would have propelled my work in Iran and won me some grudging respect, it put me under even more pressure and scrutiny by the government. The Iranian state did everything it could to suppress the news of my award, forbidding the state radio and TV stations to so much as mention it and putting me under an even more severe news embargo. When a reporter asked President Mohammad Khatami, a reformist who was in power at the time, why he had not congratulated me, he responded, “This isn’t such an important prize. It’s only the Nobel in literature that really matters.”
But as is always the case with Iran, there are ways to get around official censorship. News that matters finds its way to those who need to hear about it. I invited a Kurdish music group to perform at the Nobel awards ceremony. The Iranian regime has discriminated against its Kurdish minority for years, denying them the right to study in their own language and to maintain their Kurdish identity in public life. Iranian Kurds across the country watched this Kurdish group performing on satellite television and wept with pride at their inclusion. It was a small act, but symbolic, and the rumor spread among Iranian Kurds that I must be of Kurdish background. While the Iranian government sought to ignore my Nobel Prize—which ultimately recognized the work of human rights defenders trying to peacefully moderate the country from within—we had reached an age when satellite television and digital media meant it was no longer possible to keep a nation in the dark.
Others took notice of the prize as well, particularly the women of Iran, who had long been working for equal rights and recognition; they saw in the Nobel committee’s decision a global support and awareness of their struggle. The chancellor of the all-female Alzahra University, Zahra Rahnavard, invited me to give a public lecture on women’s legal status. Rahnavard, the first woman to head a university since the Islamic Revolution, was a distinguished scholar and activist. The world would come to know her in 2009, when she appeared on the front pages of newspapers as the wife of Mir Hossein Mousavi, the Green Movement opposition leader. That day in 2003, Rahnavard greeted me at the campus lecture theater, a tall building of yellow brick surrounded by wide lawns dotted with young women reading under sycamore trees. Hundreds of students were lining up outside for seats, though the room was already filled to capacity and buzzing with voices. We were discussing where to put the lectern when the doors at the back of the auditorium flew open and a mob of about thirty women, their heads covered by black chadors, poured in, shouting angrily.
“If Ebadi lectures here today, then tomorrow you’re going to ask for George Bush!” they yelled, pushing toward the stage, which Rahnavard and I were standing in front of. They were clearly not students; they were vigilantes supported by the state. “This lecture is canceled!” they shouted. The students in the front rose and moved toward me, forming a protective ring. Rahnavard walked forward a few paces, her face etched with fury.
“This lecture is being held with the official permission of the university. You have no right to disrupt it,” she said. “All of you must leave immediately.”
One of the mob women sprang forward and reached for Rahnavard’s chador. “You don’t even deserve to have this chador on your head,” she said, pulling violently at the fabric, which was pinned to Rahnavard’s manteau beneath.
The rest of her accomplices surged forward. The small band of students who had formed a circle around me started moving toward the back of the lecture hall. “Khanoum Ebadi,” they urged, “we have got to get you out of here—follow us.” They herded the chancellor and me out a back door and down a long corridor. The students led us into a small classroom and closed the door and barricaded it with chairs and tables. Soon we heard shouts and running, cries of “They’re here, they’re hiding in this room!” and then fists pounding against the door, trying to push it open. Rahnavard called the security services on her mobile phone.
“They’ve forced me to do something I never wanted to see happen. I don’t believe that police should set foot on university grounds, but there’s no other choice,” she said to me.
The police arrived and forcibly escorted the mob of women away. We agreed that canceling the lecture seemed the safest course, and I thanked the chancellor and her colleagues for the invitation and their quick wits as we’d faced attack. We shook hands warmly, and then two officers who had stayed behind walked me safely off university grounds. Nothing ever came of the incident, the authorities made no arrests, and we never found out exactly who had dispatched the women to disrupt my lecture that day. Rahnavard threatened to resign if the authorities didn’t find and prosecute those responsible. But they never did, and after Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s election, she eventually stepped down herself or was fired—it was never clear. Though discussing women’s rights in Iran had always been fraught with difficulty, what happened there that day seemed the beginning of an altogether new kind of harassment and intimidation.
Although the Nobel Prize irritated the Iranian government, the money that accompanied it helped my work considerably. I purchased an apartment that would serve as the headquarters for the Defenders of Human Rights Center, the organization I had founded to bring numerous lawyers inside the country together to defend political prisoners and to promote the legal and human rights of Iranian citizens. The center was the most effective force challenging the Iranian government’s political repression; it also functioned as a legal aid network for dissidents and victims of state repression. The Nobel money meant we could pursue more ambitious plans and programs than ever before.
I also deposited some of the money in a high-interest bank account in Iran and distributed the interest income among the families of political prisoners who were living with one breadwinner in prison and badly needed help. I put a small amount, as well, in a bank account in France to help support my daughters’ studies. Since the Islamic authorities had stripped me of my judgeship in 1980, I had not been able to earn income and save money for their education, and the legal work I began to undertake in the 1990s, defending children’s and women’s rights, was almost entirely pro bono.
We weren’t simply providing this pro bono defense because as lawyers we felt it was the right thing to do. We also had a higher goal: we wanted to help give people the courage to express their opinions. We wanted to assure them that if they were arrested because of their pro-democracy activities or for speaking their minds about citizens’ rights or some other sensitive issue, they would know they’d have access to a group of lawyers who would defend them without asking for a fee and would help look after their families. We had a team of psychiatrists and medical doctors, for example, that offered free treatment to our clients’ relatives.
The reports we compiled every three months were the other key effort in our work. We dedicated a great deal of time and care to them and included only abuses that were documented and verified, such as cases of arbitrary detention and harassment of activists. They were the first reports of this kind to be published inside Iran by an Iranian organization, and they soon became a staple resource for the United Nations and other international human rights groups, prompting the authorities to scrutinize the center’s activities even more aggressively. We held training courses for those whose background or activities made them particularly vulnerable to arrest—student activists, religious and ethnic minorities, and journalists. We taught them about their rights should they be detained, and how to navigate the judicial process in order to secure furloughs and, sometimes, early release.
We had started the center with no expectation of ever really making a living, and we had struggled to put even a basic infrastructure in place: an office, some desks, phones that worked, a place people could come to bring their broken lives. Now, with the Nobel Prize money, the center’s lawyers finally had a place to gather and work.
The same year I won the Nobel, a little-known figure was appointed mayor of Tehran. Most Iranians and, indeed, most Tehranis had not previously heard of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the civil engineer from working-class south Tehran. The municipal elections had drawn perhaps the poorest turnout in the city’s history. Only 12 percent of the city’s inhabitants voted, nearly all of them from the traditional, radical minority in society loyal to the Islamic regime. Most Iranians, disappointed by President Mohammad Khatami’s failure to push forward his reforms, sat out the election. With the moderate majority absent, the conservatives easily swept the election, and the city council, composed of traditionalists and hard-liners, chose Ahmadinejad to run Tehran.
What happened next astonished everyone, especially people like me, Muslim Iranians who were quietly faithful in their personal lives but felt that religion should be a private matter, not used for extravagant political gestures. Ahmadinejad declared that the martyrs of the Iran-Iraq War deserved greater public commemoration, and he ordered that newly found remains of the war dead would be buried in seventy-two of the capital’s parks and squares. The Tehran where I had spent my youth as a college student, including the parks where my husband and I had walked hand in hand during our courtship and where I had taken my girls to play when they were small, was going to be transformed into a haphazard cemetery.
Young Iranians, especially, were indignant. The city’s green parks provided the few spaces where friends and couples could go to spend their free time, and given the state’s strict social codes—the ban on Western films and music, the filtering of the Internet, and frequent raids on coffee shops—the parks were particularly precious. But Ahmadinejad was determined. He sent flag-draped coffins bearing veterans’ remains even into Tehran’s universities, and clashes erupted between furious students and the police and municipal undertakers. The biggest confrontation took place at the elite Sharif University of Technology, a feeder school for Stanford University and other top institutions in the West. Iranian universities, like universities in much of the world, are hotbeds for political activism. The students knew that the burials were intended to send a pointed message to them: that freedom of thought, education, and the physical space of the university itself belonged to the revolution and its martyrs.
Slowly Tehran became the canvas on which Ahmadinejad expressed his radical vision for the state. One afternoon, while driving, I looked up to see an enormous mural on the side of a building. It was a female Palestinian suicide bomber clutching a rifle in one hand and her little son in the other. This, it seemed, was the state’s only vision of gender equality. Ahmadinejad instituted separate elevators for men and women in government buildings, and he fired swaths of municipal workers who were not religious or devoted enough to his ideology.
Tehran had long ago started to transform, beginning with the 1979 revolution itself. But the extraordinary way in which Ahmadinejad was taking charge of the city, remaking it to fit his extremist view of the world, filled me with sadness. I recalled the cosmopolitan Tehran of the 1970s in which Javad and I had courted. The elegant restaurants and manicured gardens may have reflected class inequality, but they also symbolized the aspirations of most of the city’s inhabitants to lead comfortable, urbanized lives. Javad, too, was deeply troubled by the remaking of Tehran. He worked as a senior engineer on many of the capital’s leading development projects, and his life’s ambition had been to build a modern city with gleaming hospitals and telecommunications towers.
Javad and I first met in 1974, when I was twenty-seven, at the home of family friends. A few weeks later, he walked into my Tehran courtroom wearing a white suit and pretended to need my opinion on an obscure legal question. He was an electrical engineer whose work didn’t involve fine points of civil law, but he was keen for us to get to know each other.
I appreciated his initiative. Back in those days, many parents insisted on picking out their children’s partners, but my parents were open-minded and were happy for me to make my own decisions. As Javad and I spent evenings together in the restaurants of Tehran in those early days of courtship, it became clear that he was at ease with my independence and appreciated my blunt, willful character. This mattered deeply to me, because many Iranian men were not so receptive to a woman with a demanding career. In the 1970s, many Iranian women from upper-middle-class, educated families pursued careers, but traditional attitudes about women’s duty to home life had scarcely budged. Javad, though, seemed to find it the most natural thing in the world that I was a judge. He appreciated my independence, and I was attracted to his self-confidence. We were married on a spring day, with the head prosecutor of the judiciary as one of our witnesses. I carried a bouquet of white roses.
Since then, despite all the tumult we’d experienced, our marriage had been solid. When I stopped practicing law, Javad was supportive, just as he was in the early 1990s, when I began to take on human rights cases. We had our two daughters to raise and our cottage, with its small orchard, as a refuge; we had our parents and siblings. And though our interests differed—Javad was athletic and enjoyed playing classical Persian instruments, while I worked long hours and went hiking with poet friends—even once our daughters were grown, our marriage had a solidarity that we both treasured, an accumulated store of shared understandings and private jokes and mutual concerns.
The authorities had monitored me closely since the 1990s, when my legal defense of women and children started getting national attention. Once when we were having trouble with our office phone lines, an electrician took the cover off the phone socket in the wall and found two listening devices, bugs as small as watch batteries, attached to the wires. He removed them with pliers and held them up in the air, a look of disbelief on his face.
“Do you want me to go through all the sockets in the office, khanoum?” he asked.
“No, it’s fine. Let them listen.”
I didn’t mind them eavesdropping on my work conversations. I had nothing to hide. Even before seeing the bugs for myself, I had long known that my phones were tapped. During the three weeks I spent in prison in 2000, my interrogators openly referred to private matters—relationships with friends and minute details of discord among colleagues—they could have gleaned only through spying. After the Nobel, though, the surveillance intensified. The state said it feared for my security and assigned me two full-time bodyguards; they were ostensibly there to protect me, but I knew their real purpose was to monitor my work, to report back on every person I met and spoke with. If Javad and I went out to dinner, they came too, sitting at a nearby table.
The scrutiny compelled us to stay at home more. We made salads together in the evenings and sat around our Formica kitchen table, talking about Javad’s latest engineering project—Milad Hospital, to be the largest in the capital—and my latest cases. Now when I came home in the evenings, I would first take off my head scarf, then pull the battery out of my mobile phone. Mobile phones, even when switched off, could be used as listening devices. Like many Iranian families, we shared a building with relatives, and when I visited my mother in her apartment one floor beneath ours, as I did most evenings after dinner, I wondered if they had also bugged her rooms, monitoring the movements and opinions of a seventy-year-old woman.
It left me especially uneasy to know that someone was always listening in on my conversations with my children. My older daughter, Negar, was studying for a master’s degree at McGill University in Canada, and I spoke to her on the phone every day. One night, not long after I had received the Nobel, the phone rang at around three o’clock in the morning. I grasped for it on my nightstand, knocking over the alarm clock and waking Javad. My heart thudded as I hit the button to answer, wondering what had happened. I always worried about them in the back of my mind, my husband and my daughters, because I was aware that the regime would never hesitate to use them against me. I had known this since that day in 1999 when I was going through the government files for a case I was preparing on behalf of the family of two murdered dissidents and I saw my name on the list of targets for state assassination. It was perhaps the single most terrifying moment of my life, but I thanked God many times afterward for the chance to have seen that list. It showed me the ruthlessness I was up against and primed me for how strong and guarded I would, in turn, need to be.
“What’s wrong?” I asked, without saying hello.
“Nothing! I mean, I’m sorry for calling so late. But Behnood asked me to marry him tonight. I wanted you to be the first to know.”
I sank back against my pillow and breathed deeply, waving my free hand to indicate to Javad that it was nothing. Behnood was a young Iranian I had met once in Canada while visiting Negar. I knew they liked each other, but he had moved to the United States to pursue a PhD at Georgia Tech.
“But Behnood is in Georgia,” I said.
As with all determined young people in love, Negar had already charted the path ahead. She had contacted the university and learned that there was a good chance that she could receive funding to do graduate work there as well. I tried to sound encouraging and pleased for her, but her plan worried me. What if she didn’t get admitted? What if she didn’t receive scholarship funding? Would she have to walk away from love or quit her studies and move to Georgia, in the hopes of eventually getting into a nearby university? After we said goodbye, I switched the light off and sank back under the covers, leaving the resolution of the issue to God. Fortunately, not long after, news came that Negar had been admitted to Georgia Tech, and she would soon head to Georgia, where she and Behnood would start their life together.
There was only one small complication. They needed to get married fast, as Negar would be entering the United States on a student visa, and at the time, the U.S. government offered Iranian students only single-entry visas. This meant that the thousands of young Iranians who moved to the United States each year to attend university or do graduate study were effectively marooned there, unable to visit their families in Iran for however long it took them to finish their education. All the years of enmity between Iran and the United States hadn’t cooled the eagerness of young Iranians to study in America, but it imposed terrible hardships on those who did. As always with politics, it was ordinary people who suffered most when their governments quarreled. For Negar and Behnood, getting married in the United States was not an option either, as there was no prospect of Behnood’s parents and relatives receiving American visas to travel for the wedding.
Early that summer, Negar flew back to Tehran. We held her wedding in a large orchard on the outskirts of Tehran, for this was the only place we could have a mixed wedding party. Most of the city’s middle-class couples either got married at home or rented out one of these private wedding orchards, which were specially set up with gazebos and catering facilities for receptions. By law, the city’s hotels and restaurants were not permitted to allow men and women to mix together, even for a wedding party, and the authorities often raided receptions and parties in private homes in Tehran, fining and arresting guests or demanding bribes.
The night of the wedding, I lingered at the edge of the festivities for a moment to watch my daughter. Javad soon joined me, a gentle smile on his face. We stood there together in the warm night, the buzzing of the crickets audible during a pause in the music of the dance floor, and a thought passed unsaid between us: It all turned out all right.
I gave my gratitude to God, and prayed that he would continue to protect us from those who wished us harm.
In most Iranian cities there is at least one artificial limb shop, for the country has the second highest number of land mines in the world studded into its soil. An estimated sixteen million mines are left over from the war with Iraq, waiting to explode beneath an unsuspecting farmer or child. The government has not done nearly enough to address the land mine problem, and to cover up this neglect it also censors news coverage of land mine deaths and mutilations. As a result, most Iranians who live outside the worst-afflicted regions have little idea that their country harbors such dangers.
This is why I established the Mine Clearing Collaboration Association, the first such NGO in Iran. My primary aim was to make land mines a daily topic; in my experience, when a fringe problem becomes a national problem that people are aware of and discuss in daily conversations, solutions emerge, and pressure also mounts on the government to take some action. The state could pursue mine removal more seriously, and it could also join the Ottawa Convention, which demands that states halt the production and deployment of land mines. Another aim of the organization was to provide financial help to the injured and wounded, as many of the hardest-hit areas are also quite poor, and the cost of the prosthetics themselves, along with the loss of the ability to work, can be devastating for families. Gradually the Iranian public became more exposed to the issue. The problem in the ground had become a problem on people’s minds, and I was hopeful that the government would start dealing more proactively with mine removal.
On a cloudy afternoon in February 2004, a middle-aged man came to my personal law office, on the ground floor of my apartment building, and identified himself as a government official. He was accompanied by a man he introduced as an American colleague, a professor from Stanford University. I offered both of them a cup of tea and some raisin cookies, and the official explained to me in detail how the government was deeply committed to tackling the land mine crisis; however, he noted, serious obstacles had emerged around the procurement of advanced mine-removal equipment. The most technologically effective demining tools, he said, qualified as “dual-use” goods, meaning that Iran could also use them for military purposes, and therefore international sanctions made it impossible for the state to import such devices. He insisted that this challenge was at the core of the government’s difficulties in removing mines.
I listened patiently, leaning into the beige floral upholstery of the armchair, wondering where the conversation would lead. The man stated that he had long-standing expertise in demining and that he had personally designed a device that would work effectively to detect mines on the desert terrain of Iran’s western provinces.
“The trouble is, I need to purchase one of the key components abroad, but none of the manufacturers are prepared to sell to me,” he said. “They don’t trust the government with such a part.”
The American, the official explained, was going to assist in the production of the mine-detection equipment. But he did not speak Persian, and he sat impassively listening to our conversation.
“If you, Khanoum Ebadi, would be able to place the order for this component, I would certainly cover all the costs,” the official said.
“What exactly is the problem with this component?” I asked.
“Well, it can be used for making centrifuges.”
At that time, Iran’s nuclear program and all its associated technical complications were not matters of daily debate in the media, so the term “centrifuge” didn’t immediately connote anything for me.
“Centrifuges can have a military use, and these American sanctions end up making it impossible for us to procure things we need. If we had this part, Iran would be able to manufacture its own very effective mine-detection machines. Imagine how quickly we could then remove mines.”
The American shifted his long legs. He said nothing to signal that he understood what was being said about his country’s role in our country’s demining problems.