Welcome to an excerpt from Empire of Terror, Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, by Mark Silinsky, published by Potomac Books, an imprint of the University of Nebraska Press. This is presented by Kensington Security Consulting, which brings education to national security. This excerpt comes from chapter three and discusses prisons.
Imprisonment and Prisons
Iconic prisons are engines of gruesome lore about sadism, injustice, and audacious escape attempts. The Tower of London in Britain, the Bastille in France, and Alcatraz in the United States have left legacies captured in popular culture. In Russia, the Peter and Paul Fortress, founded by Peter the Great, was filled with political radicals and social irritants in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Among the more famous were Fyodor Dostoevsky, Maxim Gorky, and Leon Trotsky. When the communists set up a government in Moscow, they used the Lubyanka prison to incarcerate and kill their enemies.
If the fortress is associated with the tsar’s repression and the Lubyanka with Stalin’s Soviet justice, Auschwitz became synonymous with mechanized mass murder and sadism. Planet Auschwitz, a term coined by a survivor of that death camp, was a world of inverted values. Cruelty was hailed as virtuous, and compassion was shunned as weakness. Here, too, Iran followed in the footsteps of these gruesome predecessors: After the Islamic Revolution, the new regime’s prison system swelled across the country, with the Guards playing a leading role in its perpetuation.
Mohsen Rezai founded the Guards’ intelligence unit in 1981. Much of the early work involved counterintelligence operations directed against Kurdish separatists. Today, the unit oversees certain facilities within Evin Prison for political prisoners. Evin, built in 1971, originally held enemies of the Shah; today, it confines supposed enemies of the revolution. Toward the end of the shah’s regime in the late 1970s, conditions in Evin Prison were relatively humane. An eclectic corps of regime opponents—liberals, leftists, and Islamists—bunked next to each other and sometimes played chess or volleyball together. That camaraderie ended with the revolutionary regime, when the prison earned the moniker Iran’s Torture Chamber.
After 1979, Iran’s prison population swelled well beyond existing capacity. Facilities were inundated with political prisoners, and the confusion and despair of the teeming, newly incarcerated inmates became palpable. Many political prisoners were executed near the prisons, in local forests or clearings. Often, prisoners were killed without trial. They were rounded up, shot, piled onto trucks, and tossed into mass, unmarked graves near towns. While Iranian prisons would not reach the death counts of the German concentration camps or the Soviet gulag, Iranian prisoners face similarly grim prospects when they enter the gates. The regime claims that those it executes are murderers, rapists, and drug traffickers. Human rights activists counter that many of those killed are regime opponents. Iran has the second-highest annual rate of executions in the world, after China. The Pasdaran casts its net wide to imprison nonconformist political activists, out-of-favor journalists, students, religious dissidents, common criminals, political rivals, and those considered enemies of the state or of the revolutionary spirit. Thousands accused of trying to overthrow the regime have been jailed. Often, the charges are vague. Reporters Without Borders, a watchdog organization for journalists, ranked Iran 169th out of 180 countries in its 2018 World Press Freedom Index. In Iran, death row inmates are often executed at short notice without notifying the families of the condemned. The three preferred methods of execution for women and girls are stoning, public hanging, and shooting.
The camps of the Soviets and Nazis were strewn with corpses and mass graves. Killings were carried out both randomly and methodically. In Iran, there have been mass murders of political prisoners. Khomeini established special commissions to select prisoners for stockyard-like killings; they became known as the “death commissions.” In events known as the Massacre of ’88, up to seven thousand were murdered in the Evin assembly hall in summer 1988. Prisoners were herded in groups of six and hanged. The bodies were transferred to mass graves in meat trucks at night. On some nights, up to four hundred were executed, and their bodies were tossed into a large, makeshift grave. Relatives of those killed called the point of execution the “Flower Garden,” but others know it as the “place of the damned.”
“Planet Evin”: Wards 209 and 350
Evin is located near a busy highway, with a side road providing direct access to the prison. Life inside its gates is generally more humane than life in the Soviet and German concentration camps. There is no evidence of industrial-scale mass murder or large-scale forced death through privation. Germans killed tens of thousands in a matter of days during their rule. In the Soviet Union, historian Richard Pipes has calculated that more than one thousand people were executed each day over the course of 1937 and 1938. But there is ample evidence of lurid torture. The Guards and the mois control their own wards within Evin. They are administered separately from the main Evin prison management. In Evin prison, Ward 209 is run by the mois, and Ward 350 is run by the Guards. The mois-operated Ward 209 is a secret detention center for political prisoners, with solitary confinement cells. In Evin, as in other prisons, the mois and the Guards carry out extra-judicial executions. Detention centers, built to hold people for several days during in-processing, have only a few toilets for hundreds of detainees. Access to medical care is often denied. Life is wretched in the overcrowded cells, and many inmates are forced to sleep on the floors of hallways or in filthy cells. The Guards have a reputation for brutality. Said one prisoner of Evin’s guards, “They use any tool—even toilets, showers, water, and tea.”
Political prisoners endure physical abuse, often in 209’s torture room, located in the prison basement.139 Mental and psychological torture, intended to break the spirit of the incarcerated, includes techniques such as false news and information, threats of flogging, threats to family members, and other forms of deception. Prisoners endure beatings, sleep deprivation, being dunked in cold water, and being paraded naked in cold weather. A particularly feared torture is called “the chicken,” in which a prisoner’s arms are bent back and tied to his ankles while he is suspended in midair. Some prisoners have their heads covered with an iron helmet so they are deafened by their own cries of pain. Emad Bahavar, a supporter of the opposition Green movement serving a ten-year sentence, explained, “They lined us up in the Ward 350 corridor, our faces to the wall. I could hear some crying in pain. . . . They started beating our backs very severely with batons. The screaming and crying got louder.”
For many prisoners in the Guards-operated Ward 350, prison life is tedious, punctuated by surges of fear and periods of brutality. There is a sanitized library, but books and newspapers are not permitted in solitary cells. Life in solitary cells is disorienting. Prisoners lose track of time. Each The prison cell in Ward 350 measures approximately ninety-eight square feet and houses sixteen to twenty prisoners.4 Sometimes, collective beatings occur spontaneously, such as the April 2014 thrashing, when dozens of security guards and senior prison officials attacked and severely beat political prisoners held in Ward 350. Notable prisoners include Esfandyar Rahim Mashaei, former first vice president and chief of staff to former president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. In Evin’s Women’s Ward, political prisoners have difficulty communicating with their families. Many prisoners have no telephones, and family visits, including those with children, are limited to twenty minutes.
These short visits are often traumatic; indeed, some psychologists believe that cabin visits through a glass wall can be harmful to the psychological health of the prisoners’ children. Therefore, many families avoid bringing their children to visit.
The conditions in Evin and other prisons have become a rallying point for civil rights advocates. Sometimes, family and friends will stand outside of Evin to protest incarceration. On occasion, the demonstrations are loud, on others they are silent.8 Some women may have taken inspiration from German wives of incarcerated Jewish men who, in the winter of 1943, stood in front of a Berlin ad hoc incarceration center and shouted to the guards, “Give me back my husband!” Soviet Refuseniks organized publicly to garner attention to their cause. In 1974, a handful of protesters stood openly and defiantly in front of embassies in Moscow, clamoring for exit visas. Years later, in Tehran, a mother organized a sit-in protest against the jailing of her daughter in Evin.
