{"id":711,"date":"2018-02-24T05:09:51","date_gmt":"2018-02-24T05:09:51","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/codir.net\/?p=711"},"modified":"2018-02-24T05:09:51","modified_gmt":"2018-02-24T05:09:51","slug":"forced-confessions-in-irans-house-of-the-dead","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/codir.net\/?p=711","title":{"rendered":"Forced Confessions in Iran\u2019s House of the Dead"},"content":{"rendered":"

By\u00a0ERVAND ABRAHAMIAN<\/span><\/span>

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\u201cThe degree of civilization in a society can be judged by entering its prisons,\u201d Fyodor Dostoyevsky wrote in \u201cThe House of the Dead,\u201d his semi-autobiographical novel about inmates in a Siberian prison camp. Iran continues to fail the Dostoyevsky test.<\/p>\n

The Evin Prison in Tehran, where a long list of leaders, intellectuals and journalists have been detained over the years, added to its infamy this month with the so-called suicide of Kavous Seyed Emami, a leading environmentalist and academic.<\/p>\n

Dr. Seyed Emami, 63, who came from an old clerical family, was a dual Iranian and Canadian citizen. He had received his doctorate from the University of Oregon and returned to Iran in the early 1990s to teach sociology at Imam Sadeq University in Tehran, where Iran\u2019s future elite is educated.<\/p>\n

He helped found the Persian Wildlife Heritage Foundation, Iran\u2019s most important environmental organization, with the encouragement of the United Nations and the Islamic Republic, especially Kaveh Madani, the deputy head of the country\u2019s Department of Environmental Affairs.<\/p>\n

On Jan. 24, Dr. Seyed Emami, Mr. Madani and Morad Tahbaz, an Iranian-American businessman, were\u00a0arrested<\/a>. Dr. Seyed Emami was accused of\u00a0spying<\/a>\u00a0for the United States and Mossad. Two weeks after his arrest, prison authorities informed his family about his death. \u201cThis person was one of the accused, and given he knew there is a torrent of confessions against him and he confessed himself, unfortunately he committed suicide in prison,\u201d Abbas Jafari-Dolatabadi, a prosecutor in Tehran,\u00a0told<\/a>\u00a0an Iranian news agency.<\/p>\n

Dr. Seyed Emami\u2019s relatives raised\u00a0doubts<\/a>\u00a0about the claim that he committed suicide, but the regime\u00a0forced<\/a>\u00a0them to bury him without an independent autopsy.<\/p>\n

Dr. Seyed Emami became a victim of the political struggle between President Hassan Rouhani and moderate reformers who have become increasingly concerned about environmental issues, especially dams, and die-hard conservatives among the Revolutionary Guards who are reluctant to slow down such rural projects.<\/p>\n

When Hassan Firuzabadi, a former chief of staff of Iran\u2019s armed forces and a military adviser to the supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, was asked by the Iranian press about the arrests of the environmentalists, he spoke about Western spies using\u00a0lizards and chameleons<\/a>\u00a0that could \u201cattract atomic waves\u201d to spy on Iran\u2019s nuclear program.<\/p>\n

The increasingly common \u201csuicides\u201d by prisoners stem from Iran\u2019s inordinate reliance on \u201cconfessions\u201d in convicting defendants.<\/p>\n

Iranian judges treat \u201cconfessions\u201d as the \u201cproof of proofs,\u201d the \u201c\u00a0mother of proofs\u201d and the \u201cbest evidence of guilt.\u201d The use of forced confessions began in the last years of the shah\u2019s rule, in the 1970s, but drastically increased after the Iranian revolution in 1979. Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini regarded them as the highest proof of guilt.<\/p>\n

I analyzed numerous legal cases and around 300 prison memoirs for\u00a0a book about forced confessions<\/a>. To obtain such \u201cconfessions,\u201d interrogators in Iran rely heavily on psychological and physical pressures. They \u2014 like fellow interrogators elsewhere \u2014 scrupulously avoid the word torture (\u201cshekanjeh\u201d in Persian). In fact, the Iranian<\/p>\n

Constitution explicitly outlaws shekanjeh. Instead, interrogators describe what they do as \u201cta\u2019zir\u201d (punishment). Innumerable prison memoirs detail this process. It can be described as Iran\u2019s version of \u201cenhanced interrogation.\u201d<\/p>\n

Prisoners are asked a question, and if their answer is unsatisfactory, they are sentenced to a specific number of lashings on the ground that they had lied. These whippings can continue until the desired answer is given \u2014 and committed to paper. According to a letter circulated by some 40 members of Parliament, hallucinatory drugs now supplement these traditional methods.<\/p>\n

In the 1980s and the 1990s, detainees were routinely shown on television reading their confessions, but the broadcasts were mostly stopped after most Iranians concluded that they were staged. The confessions continue to be used in court, however.<\/p>\n

Detainees have a limited number of options in the face of interrogation. They can submit, even before the instruments of enhanced interrogation are displayed. They can undergo prolonged agony, which may lead to death, if inadvertently \u2014 interrogators want a confession, not a badly damaged corpse, which can cause political embarrassment. The detainees can accept a plea bargain and \u201cadmit\u201d to a lesser transgression in return for release or a lighter sentence.<\/p>\n

After the disputed presidential elections in 2009 in which the right-wing populist Mahmoud Ahmadinejad prevailed over reformist opponents, many \u2014 including visitors from abroad \u2014 gave \u201cexclusive\u201d interviews to the regime press\u00a0confessing<\/a>\u00a0to sundry transgressions, especially helping foreign powers conspiring to bring about \u201cregime change.\u201d<\/p>\n

Detainees have also agreed to public confessions and tried to insert phrases that undermined the whole ritual. A prisoner \u2014 later executed \u2014 declared in 1983 that he had been recruited into the K.G.B., the Soviet intelligence agency upon his arrival in Russia in 1951. He would have been aware that anyone versed in the topic would know the K.G.B. was created three years later, in 1954.<\/p>\n

A former Khomeini follower said in his public confession in 1987 that he had resorted to black magic and the occult to spread cancerous cells among clerical leaders he opposed.<\/p>\n

In 1984, leaders of the Communist Tudeh Party who had been arrested after criticizing Iran\u2019s war with Iraq, vociferously thanked their \u201cbenevolent guards\u201d for \u201copening their eyes,\u201d providing them with books that debunked their previous ideology, and transforming prisons into \u201cuniversities\u201d and \u201ceducational institutions.\u201d One stressed that the prison wardens had given them \u201cshalaqha-e haqayeq,\u201d or lashes of truth.<\/p>\n

They confessed to \u201chigh treason\u201d for adopting alien ideologies and failing to study properly the history of their country. They also held themselves \u201cpersonally responsible\u201d for \u201ctreasonable mistakes\u201d made by the left in the distant past, such as during the constitutional revolution of 1906, which took place long before they were born.<\/p>\n

Earlier reformers, led by President Mohammad Khatami, tried between 1997 and 2005 to pass legislation to\u00a0prevent<\/a>\u00a0the use of torture in prison. But such attempts were swept away with the election of Mr. Ahmadinejad in 2005. President Rouhani, now embarrassed by the arrest of his environmentalist allies, is eager to channel the concerns of reformers about the use of torture. He has supported the 40 deputies who have protested prison \u201csuicides\u201d and has set up a\u00a0committee<\/a>\u00a0to investigate the death of Dr. Seyed Emami. Time will show whether this committee has any teeth.<\/p>\n

Irrespective of the findings of Mr. Rouhani\u2019s committee, what Iran needs is a radical reform of its legal procedures to ensure that its courts will stop the use of \u201cconfessions\u201d and instead rely on verifiable independent and collaborative evidence.<\/p>\n