Prison Memoirs of Azam Haj-Heydari from the book The Price of Being Human — Final Part
In the final installment of her prison memoir, Azam Haj-Heydari recounts how the women political prisoners at Evin continued their education and preserved their collective life despite the authorities’ efforts to crush their resistance. She describes being tried again in 1986 and refusing to yield to pressure from interrogators and prison guards. She also recalls the day of her freedom, the painful separation from the women with whom she had shared years of imprisonment, and a decision that had taken root in her mind despite the danger of being arrested again: to find a way to reconnect with the PMOI.[1]
Throughout The Price of Being Human, Azam’s account bears witness to the determination of the PMOI women who, even under the most severe repression, torture, and restrictions—including the Cage Ward and the Residential Unit—struggled to preserve their ideals, awareness, solidarity, and will. They remained faithful, at the cost of their lives and beyond the limits of human endurance, to the pledge they had made in the cause of freedom for their people and homeland.
Education Behind Bars
After that raid by the Revolutionary Guards, our first priority was to restore some semblance of normal life. We all got to work immediately. We divided up the tasks among ourselves: some began sorting out our belongings, putting things back in order, sewing, and making repairs. Others took responsibility for finding ways to replace the books that had been destroyed so that our educational classes would not have to stop.
We had a schedule for every hour of the day and night, determined not to let our time go to waste. Some of the women with higher education taught what they knew in classes of just two or three people. We could not gather in larger groups under the constant watch of the informers. Those who attended the classes, in turn, passed the lessons on to other prisoners.
In this way, we organized classes in several languages, including Arabic, English, and French, which some of the women knew very well. Those who had studied different academic disciplines also taught classes in their own fields.
Huriyeh Beheshti-Tabar, a PMOI member who was later executed and held a master’s degree in economics, taught us economics. Our course materials came either from the teacher’s own knowledge, which she wrote down and organized into study notes, or from newspapers. When we were taken for interrogation, we sometimes managed to smuggle newspapers out of the interrogators’ offices or waiting rooms. We also exchanged them between wards. We collected these newspapers and used some of their articles as source material for our economics classes.
When the prison guards looked through the cell hatch and saw that everyone was busy doing something, they became furious and almost hysterical. They hurled insults and curses at us. They could see, right before their eyes, how helpless they were to break the prisoners’ resistance.
Tried Again
In March–May 1986, after the events in the Cage Ward, I was subjected to another round of interrogation and punitive conditions. According to the authorities, the reason was that I had helped organize the ward and had taken part in activities there. But what they called “organizing the ward” was nothing more than living collectively and refusing to submit to the demands of the regime and its executioners, who wanted to strip prisoners of even the most basic conditions of human existence. We had resisted those demands together.
As in my first trial, the presiding judge was the cleric Mohammad Mohammadi Gilani.[2] We called him “the Dinosaur” because there was not the slightest trace of human feeling in him. He was consumed by hatred, resentment, and a savage hostility toward anyone associated with the PMOI or the resistance, and toward anyone who showed even the smallest sign of humanity.
At this so-called trial, there were Gilani and two Revolutionary Guards. I think one of them was the interrogator who had dealt with me directly. But during interrogations I was always blindfolded, and at the hearing he remained silent so that I would not recognize his voice. So, I cannot say with certainty whether it was the same man. Three informers were also present as witnesses.
As before, they asked me to confirm my personal details, and I answered. Then Gilani told me, “Defend yourself!”
“I have nothing to defend,” I replied.
I was certain that the three informers had arranged the whole thing to make accusations against me. Throughout the four months of renewed punishment I had endured at Evin, one of them, a woman named Manijeh, had constantly picked fights with me. She knew me well from before my imprisonment, which made her particularly determined to target me.
My suspicion proved correct. As soon as I said I had nothing to defend and that they would say one thing while I would say another, Manijeh launched into a torrent of abuse. She started shouting and arguing, then hit me on the head twice. She proceeded to recite what she called my record, from my political activities to my involvement in the ward and my resistance in the Cage Ward.
That wretched woman ranted and screamed for forty-five minutes without stopping. She apparently thought that the more aggressively she denounced me, the more favorably the executioners would look upon her—and the sooner they would let her go.
After her, another informer named Mansoureh began denouncing me. Her approach was different. She was less fiery, but she accompanied her accusations with tears and sobbing. Most of what she said concerned my supposed offenses during the two months I had spent in quarantine.
When she finished, I decided to provoke Manijeh. “I don’t know this woman,” I said. “I have no idea what she’s talking about!”
Manijeh immediately erupted again, screaming and spouting more nonsense.
Then it was the turn of Homa, the third informer. She began by swearing an oath as a witness. Then she turned toward me, apparently convinced that she could establish that we knew each other.
She stood in front of me and asked, “Do you know me?”
She was certain I would say yes.
“No,” I replied.
Now it was her turn to scream and shout. She began recounting the activities we had supposedly carried out together during our political work, the time we had spent together in Ward 240, and her seven and a half months of collaboration with the prison authorities, during which she had been watching me and the other women throughout our time in the Cage Ward. She had been driven by resentment and hostility toward me, and now she threw everything she could think of into her testimony—truths, lies, and whatever else she could invent—in the hope of making me remember.
I remained silent throughout. I did not say a word.
Finally, they read out my new sentence: five years of imprisonment to be served and another ten years suspended. That brought the hearing to an end.
I cannot remember whether I signed a document after they read out the sentence. But when I left the courtroom, they kept me standing outside for several hours. Everyone who came or went had something to say, trying to frighten me. The informers were especially eager to do so. They had made such a show of denouncing me and, by their own account, had been expecting a very heavy sentence.
But after everything I had endured during the roughly year and a half since the Cage Ward—every kind of punishment and deprivation—I was no longer bothered by any of it. Even as I stood there, I used my silence to infuriate them. Each person who came by tried to make me speak.
“What’s happened? Has Azam the insolent gone quiet? Has she finally been put in her place?”
I knew they were trying to provoke me into reacting.
Freedom from Prison
After my second trial, they summoned me to the interrogation branch two or three more times. They wanted me to give an interview. Each time, I told them plainly, “I won’t do it!”
The interrogator would fly into a rage, strike me on the head and face with a whip, and threaten me.
“I’ll make sure you never get to play the hero,” he would say. “I’ll keep you here until you rot!”
He repeated something Haji Davoud had once said: “I’ll keep you here until the hair on your head turns as white as your teeth, and your teeth turn as black as your hair.”[3]
It was around the middle of early September 1986 when they summoned me again. Along with the usual insults, they told me:
“We know you’re a Monafegh (hypocrite). If we let you out, you’ll go straight back to the Organization. We’ll release you only so we can arrest you again and tear you to pieces.”
Until then, I had not expected to be released. But I understood that they were planning to let me go. Right there, I made a decision and promised myself that if they released me, I would do exactly what they feared: my first priority would be to find a way to reconnect with the Organization.
A week later, on September 14, 1986, they summoned me and told me to report to the ward office for interrogation. They deliberately presented it that way so the other women would not realize they intended to release me and try to send messages outside through me. I myself did not believe I was about to be freed. In fact, freedom was the last thing on my mind. I assumed someone had filed another report against me and that I was being called in for questioning because of it.
I went to the ward office, still uncertain about what was happening. The guards whispered among themselves for several minutes, deliberately trying to unsettle me. Then they announced over the loudspeaker, “Send her belongings out.”
The women immediately gathered my things and sent them out.
I was overwhelmed with shock. Was I really going to be separated from the women with whom I had shared every bitter and joyful moment for years?
The thought of leaving them was unbearable. I suddenly remembered all the strikes, protests, punishments, beatings, and acts of resistance we had gone through together. They were now on the other side of the wall. I burst into tears and sobbed uncontrollably.
The foolish, brutal guards thought I was crying because I was afraid of being transferred. They laughed at me mockingly, especially when one of them said, “You’re going home—you’re being released!”
That only made the pain worse. I was thinking about being separated from the women and wondering how I would manage without them in a society ruled by Khomeini’s reactionary forces. How would I go on living? How would I even breathe? And those foolish guards had no idea what I was really thinking about.
Right there, I made up my mind: I had to leave—and I had to find a way to do it.
A few months earlier, when one of the women named Farah was about to be released, I had joked with her: “If you’re leaving, leave me some kind of lead so that if I get out, I can find you.”
My entire family supported Khomeini’s regime, and I had no one I could turn to for help reconnecting with the Organization. I suddenly remembered that conversation and thought, “God, could Farah have left a lead for me?” And if she hadn’t, where would I even begin looking?
After five and a half years in prison, I had no clear idea what life outside was like anymore.
While I was lost in these thoughts, the guards checked my belongings and handed me my bag. They blindfolded me again and took me toward the interrogation branch.
They had also told my older sister, Mahin, who had come to the prison to collect me, that if I tried to join the PMOI, they would tear me to pieces. She was terrified.
A few months later, when my sister Najmeh and I had crossed the border and called her from abroad, telling her that we were calling from outside the country, she was so overwhelmed with excitement and happiness that she fainted and collapsed beside the phone. She had been desperately afraid that we would be arrested again. She knew exactly what that meant, having herself endured two years of imprisonment and torture under Khomeini’s regime.
To be honest, I was no less afraid of being arrested again than my sister was. I had seen and heard too many accounts of what the regime had done to women who, after their release, had tried to reconnect with the Organization.
But I kept asking myself: When you were first arrested, did you expect to be released? Every time they summoned you for interrogation, didn’t you think you might never come back? So, what had really changed?
The regime was still there. It had killed so many of the people dearest to you, and some of those you loved were still in its clutches. Could anyone imagine having security or a normal life under such a regime? Every day lived under its rule was a kind of death. Every time I saw a Revolutionary Guard, every time the telephone rang unexpectedly, every time I had to report to the prosecutor’s office to sign in, I would die a little and come back to life again.
But if I were arrested while trying to leave the country and join the Organization, I would die once—and that would be the end of it.
So, I made up my mind. My sister Najmeh and I decided to join our brothers and sisters in the National Liberation Army.[4]
The End
[1] PMOI is the abbreviation for the People’s Mojahedin Organization of Iran.
[2] Mohammad Mohammadi Gilani was a cleric who served as a judge in Tehran’s Revolutionary Courts in the early 1980s and later held senior positions, including membership in the Guardian Council. Academic research describes his role in issuing death sentences against political dissidents during the early years of the regime.
[3] Haji Davoud refers to Hajj Davoud Rahmani, the head of Qezel-Hesar Prison, who was associated with the severe treatment of political prisoners there. The quote in this passage is recalled by Azam from an earlier threat; it is not presented as a statement made during this 1986 hearing.
[4] The National Liberation Army refers to the PMOI’s military force, established in Iraq in 1987.
