Show Trials
Just as in Nazi Germany and in the Soviet Union of the 1930s, there is a culture of ambient fear of arrest within all Iranian social strata today. It is hard to predict who will be arrested or killed or what the charges will be. In Germany, a passing comment could be classified as Wehrkraftzersetzung, or “subversion” or “undermining the war effort,” which was punishable by death. A generic charge brought by Soviet prosecutors was "being an enemy of the people"; the equivalent in Germany was "being an enemy of the state". From their earliest days in power, Iran’s Guards have had the ability to imprison people in a vast penal system. The charges are often vague, such as war against God or spreading propaganda. For example, in 2018, the Guards arrested an Iranian journalist who spoke of Mohammed’s grandson Hussein as having “passed away” rather than as “dying as a martyr.”
Iran’s show trials harken to the public trials of Soviet and Nazi jurisprudence, during which hollow-eyed and emotionally drained men and women, often dressed in ill-fitting
apparel, sat in rows and denounced each other, their comrades, family, and former friends. The most spectacular confessions were Stalin’s “show trials” of the 1930s. On stage, some hard-core Old Bolsheviks, who had survived tsarist prisons and Siberian exile, confessed to hair-raising and ludicrous tales of conspiracy. The author Arthur Koestler, a former communist, spoke of techniques to create mental breakdowns, as interrogators would use physical torture or drugs tailored to the victim’s personality.
Patently false confessions were ensured by the Soviet “conveyer” system, in which a prisoner was interrogated, beaten, and threatened nonstop for one week without sleep. Finally, the victim would sign any confession, sometimes without even understanding what he had signed. The Nazis used the Soviet trials as exemplars for those held by the People's Court from 1934 to 45.
Before political prisoners were brought to trial, they often confessed after ghastly, prolonged torture. Admissions of guilt were usually followed by immediate execution. Iran’s leaders see their country filled with foreign agents and subversives. British-American author Roger Housden was arrested as he was leaving Iran in February 2009. His captors warned that they could make him “disappear” if he did not surrender information on dissidents. He confessed on television to a host of crimes and implicated people he knew to be innocent. Another British captive said he was bullied, blindfolded, and beaten until he invented a wild story about his activities on behalf of a British service. Like those in Stalin’s Soviet Union and Hitler’s Germany, Iranian intelligence and security personnel purged real, but usually imagined, enemies.
In utter debasement, suspects are compelled to confess on national television to crimes before their court proceedings begin. These forced confessions are then accepted as evidence in court. In Iran, videotaped confessions are staged to elicit optimal performance. According to one former prisoner, he spent hours each day memorizing fabricated information: “They even told me how I should move my hands and keep a happy face so that no one would suspect I was held in solitary confinement or ill-treated.” As in the Soviet Union, Iranian prisoners often invent self-incriminating conspiracy stories after days without sleep and unrelenting beatings. They are routinely denied access to a lawyer or their family for weeks. These confessions are treated as sufficient proof of guilt.
One inmate explained, “You see your own disintegration.” After refusing to sign a confession, the guards put a rope around this prisoner’s neck while he sat at a table: “When they pulled the table, the rope wasn’t attached to anything. I fell backward. I fainted. When I came to, I was wet. They had thrown water over me. I vomited. They took my confession then, and I signed.”
In the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany, family members of the accused could be used as pawns or surrogates for enemies of the state. The German chief judge of the People’s Court, Roland Freisler, shrieked at Elfrede Scholz, the sister of Erich Maria Remarque: “Your brother is beyond our reach, but you will not escape us.” She was beheaded. In Iran, authorities send messages to individuals who have not yet been taken to prison for interrogation.
According to one witness, “Two of my friends, who were recently released from the notorious Section 209 in Evin Prison, gave me a message from their interrogators: ‘We have concocted a nice case against you, and we will get to you soon.’”
The “Terror Club” Trial
Some show trials become iconic. In the Soviet Union, the 1936 Zinoviev-Kamenev “Trial of the Sixteen” was choreographed by Stalin. The trial of the conspirators in the July 1944 plot to kill Hitler featured the flamboyant judge of the People's Court screaming invectives at the accused. Like these trials, the August 2012 Iranian “Terror Club” trial lent a veneer of legal legitimacy to the proceedings. Twelve individuals—seven men and five women—confessed on camera to a conspiracy to kill Iranian nuclear scientists. One defendant confessed to traveling to Israel to practice shooting at targets from speeding motorcycles: “There was a motorcycle racing complex in Tel Aviv. . . . We were given time bombs where we had to push the start button when we attached it,” he said. Another defendant declared that she received training in self-defense and intelligence gathering. On a tape shown on Iranian television, she said, “Global Zionism will commit any kind of crime to fulfill its foul aims.”
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