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The lies of Iran, in pictures
By :Joshua Prager
, February 7, 2010
The Los Angeles Times: In 1979, and again last year, the reality of the Islamic Republic was revealed in famous images of death.
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This 1979 photo of an Iranian firing squad executing a group of men, including Ahsan and Shahriar Nahid, won a
Pulitzer Prize.
(Jahangir Razmi / Associated Press)
Among the condemned were Ahsan and Shahriar Nahid. Ahsan, an engineer
in Tehran, had joined a Kurdish separatist organization after the
revolution and moved to Sanandaj. Shahriar, a medical student, had been
visiting his brother when the two were arrested at a military
checkpoint.
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On June 20, a young Iranian woman was shot dead at one of the mass
protests that followed the contested re- election of President Mahmoud
Ahmadinejad. Millions of people around the world watched video of Neda
Agha-Soltan hemorrhaging on Tehran's Karegar Street, and hers became
the tragic, beautiful and galvanizing face of the reform movement in
Iran.
Witnesses implicated a member of the Basij, the governmental
militia, in Agha-Soltan's death. But an Iranian ambassador and
ayatollah quickly pinned her shooting on the CIA and her fellow
protesters, while a broadcasting official -- and a government-sponsored
documentary that aired last month -- said the death had been simulated
by the Western news media and by Agha-Soltan herself.
In August 1979, seven months after the ouster of the shah, the euphoria
of revolution had given way to the realities of Islamic fundamentalism
-- black chadors, broken wine bottles, censorship, public executions.
Protests in Tehran were drawing enormous crowds, while in Kurdistan,
separatists were demanding an independent Kurdish state. On Aug. 16,
Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini dispatched Iranian troops to put down the
movement.
The troops had been killing Kurds for 11 days when, on Aug. 27, 11 more
"counterrevolutionaries" were sentenced to die in Sanandaj
Among the condemned were Ahsan and Shahriar Nahid. Ahsan, an engineer
in Tehran, had joined a Kurdish separatist organization after the
revolution and moved to Sanandaj. Shahriar, a medical student, had been
visiting his brother when the two were arrested at a military
checkpoint.
Their mother, Monir, raced from Tehran to try and help her sons. She
found them under guard in an army hospital and an airport control
tower. But when she returned to the latter with a change of clothing,
she learned that the young men and nine others had been shot by a
firing squad on a dirt airfield. She threw down the Koran she carried
in her blouse.
"Min itr Musulman nim," she said in Kurdish. "I am no longer a Muslim."
The next afternoon, a photograph of the execution ran in Ettela'at,
Iran's oldest paper. Suddenly, the estimated 500 victims of the
ayatollah's firing squads had a face. Newsstands in Tehran sold out.
The next day, the photo ran on the front pages of papers around the
world.
A week after the Nahid brothers were buried in Talah Cemetery in
Sanandaj, their brother, Farhad, spent his savings to photocopy the
picture of their execution; he and friends canvassed Tehran with it.
Their mother then brandished the photograph at meetings with Prime
Minister Mehdi Bazargan, cleric Mahmoud Taleghani and essayist Haj
Seyyed Javadi.
The government did not respond as Monir Nahid had hoped. Sadegh
Khalkhali, the judge who had sentenced her sons to death (and granted
permission to the Ettela'at photographer to take the photograph),
declared on state TV that she had fabricated the photo and that she was
related to the sister of the deposed shah. (She wasn't.) Later, the
judge went back on television and declared that the photograph had been
forged by Israel. And on Sept. 9, Ahmad Azari Qomi, the prosecuting
attorney of the Islamic Revolutionary Council, issued a statement that
cited the famous image. It began:
"Following the order of Imam Khomeini . . . journalists should refrain
from insertion of bold phrases and headlines, evocative pictures which
could incite people."
On Oct. 8, one day after the brothers' mother addressed a crowd of
students at Tehran University, the police raided her apartment one
story above Seyyed Khandan Street. But she had flown at 6 a.m. to
Germany on a passport registered under her maiden name. Twenty days
later, she flew to the United States. She now lives in Los Angeles.
In April 1980, the photograph won the Pulitzer Prize. The prizewinning
photographer, Jahangir Razmi, remained anonymous until, with his
permission, I told his story in the Wall Street Journal in 2006. The
next year, at a dinner in New York, Nahid embraced the man who had
captured her sons' deaths on film.
Six months ago, Nahid, then 84 years old, watched video of the death of
Agha-Soltan and listened to the lies that followed. She says that just
as after the deaths of her sons, Iranians today know their government
is lying -- and the government knows its people know the truth.
But, she notes, there is a difference. In 1979, the Iranian people
wanted to believe the lies that followed her sons' deaths because they
came from a government the people had recently ushered into power.
Today, she says, the lies that followed Agha-Soltan's death have fallen
on deaf ears because they came from a government so many Iranians had
voted to remove from power -- only to see their votes ignored. And so,
says Nahid, the government has reason to be scared.
Joshua Prager is writing a book about his recovery from quadriplegia and will be a 2011 Nieman Fellow at Harvard.
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