Beginnings of Public Recantations (1971–75)
The guerrilla movement posed a serious challenge to the regime precisely because it came at a time when the young intelligentsia was growing by leaps and bounds. Between 1963 and 1979, enrollment in colleges increased from 24,885 to
154, 215; in foreign universities, from 18,000 to more than 80,000; and in technical, vocational, and teachers' training colleges, from 14,240 to 227,497. The number of universities grew from 4 to 16; technical schools, from 36 to more than 800; and secondary schools, from 527 to 1,714. Their graduates—like graduates the world over—wanted greater participation in politics and a larger share of the national income, especially that derived from the rising oil revenues. Moreover, the entry of working-class children into higher education radicalized the whole intelligentsia. Further, all this took place in the context of an attentive public rapidly expanding throughout the country. Literacy was growing, newspapers were increasing their circulation, transistor radios were reaching the countryside, and television was making its debut.
The challenge was compounded by the harsh reality that the Shah lacked solid legitimacy. Some felt he had forfeited it in the 1940s by violating the constitutional laws and preferring to reign rather than rule. Some felt he had forfeited it in 1953 by overthrowing Mossadeq. Some felt he had forfeited it in the 1950s and 1960s by distancing Iran from the rest of the Third World—especially over the sensitive issues of Palestine and Vietnam. Some felt he had forfeited it with his so-called White Revolution designed to glorify the pre-Islamic monarchy and thereby demean Islam. Others felt he had forfeited it in 1963 by ordering his troops to kill hundreds—if not thousands—of unarmed demonstrators. In short, the regime faced a double crisis—that of legitimacy as well as participation.
The regime tried to overcome these challenges by winning over the new intelligentsia. It created more white-collar jobs; raised salaries; awarded an increasing number of scholarships for study abroad; publicized the rising oil revenues; launched ambitious plans for industrialization, land reform, and eradication of illiteracy; created the Resurgence party with a blatantly populist program; promised to make Iran a modern Japan within a generation; and, with much fanfare, declared the Shah to be leading Iran into a New Great Civilization.
It was as part of this attempt to influence the intelligentsia and drum up support for the White Revolution that the regime
hit on the strategy of televised public recantations. It seems to have hit on this strategy inadvertently. In 1971, a well-known physicist named Parviz Nikkhah serving a ten-year prison sentence for communist subversion experienced a genuine change of heart. In 1965, he, together with some recent graduates from England, had been charged with plotting to assassinate the Shah. In England, they had been active in the Confederation of Iranian Students and in the Maoist Revolutionary Organization of the Tudeh party. One of those arrested was a childhood friend of a palace guard who had tried to machine-gun the Shah. Although the assassination charges were dropped, Nikkhah and his colleagues had been given long sentences for advocating guerrilla warfare and having contacts with China. The trial had become a cause célèbre with foreign journalists' gaining access to the proceedings. Nikkhah took the opportunity to accuse SAVAK of using torture to obtain false confessions.
Six years later, Nikkhah astounded the public by coming out in full support of the regime. He argued that "true patriots" should rally behind the Shah because he was distributing land to the peasants, providing them with medical and educational facilities, developing the economy, extracting more from the exploitative oil companies, building viable state institutions, and protecting the nation from cultural imperialism. "These reforms," he argued, "have made Mao's theory of peasant war redundant and have ended Iran's era as a semi-feudal semicolonial society."[79] The regime made sure Nikkhah's statements were circulated widely both inside and outside the country. In one of Nikkhah's many press conferences, the interviewer introduced him as "a revolutionary of yesterday and a revolutionary of today" who supports the Shah for all the "right revolutionary reasons." After his conversion, Nikkhah worked for the Radio-Television Network; some believe he also worked as a consultant for SAVAK.
Once the regime savored the Nikkhah success, it did not take it long to go one step further and "induce" other "conversions." In other words, SAVAK began to torture to get recantations as
well as information. This made the nature of torture infinitely worse. With torture for information, the victims could expect eventual relief since the information was usually obsolete after the passage of time—often after twenty-four hours. But with torture for recantation, the victims could be tormented indefinitely. Their only hope was to compromise with their tormentors and produce watered-down recantations—or else convince them they preferred death to total submission. Few have appreciated the qualitative difference between these two forms of torture.
Soon after Nikkhah, eight other Confederation leaders gave similar public recantations—all in the form of radio, television, and press mosahebehs (interviews).[80] They declared that they wanted to "share" their experiences so that the country would understand why they had so completely changed their views. When they had first left Iran to study abroad, the country had been backward and abysmally poor. But on their return, they had found that the White Revolution—which they had dismissed as "phony"—had successfully transformed the whole country. It had implemented land reform, eliminated feudalism, built roads, bridges, and dams, set up medical clinics and rural cooperatives, electrified the countryside, industrialized the economy, and made Iran fully independent of the imperial powers. In short, the White Revolution had accomplished everything they hoped for.
They advised students abroad not to be misled by the subversive National Front, the Tudeh, the Revolutionary Organization, or the Confederation. These groups retained an outdated view of Iran and kept their members ignorant of the true situation back home. What is more, their leaders were "selfish," "bureaucratic," "opportunistic," and "beholden to foreign powers." One claimed that the FBI and the CIA had thoroughly infiltrated the National Front. Why else would the Americans permit the Confederation to demonstrate against the Shah in the streets of the United States? They confessed they had returned to Iran with the full intention of launching a guerrilla war. But now that they had seen the reality with their own eyes,
they wanted to partake in the Great Shah-People's Revolution. One stressed that he retained his former din (religion) of serving the masses. Another argued that he wanted to overcome his "intellectual" snobbery and study the masses firsthand. "Iran," he declared, "was neither China nor Cuba. It is endowed with its own customs, traditions, religion, history, and popular culture." One government functionary later stressed how "such statements from the highly educated profoundly affected the likes of himself who had no more than a high school diploma." To the present day, these recanters remain reticent about their experiences.
The most sensational "interviews" were given by three well-known national personalities: Parviz Qalech-Khani, a star athlete and football player; Ghulam-Hossein Sa'edi, a doctorpsychologist turned playwright; and Reza Barahani, a prominent poet, essayist, and translator. All three were highly regarded by the university educated. Their "interviews" were first aired on radio and then printed in the mass circulation newspapers.
Qalech-Khani appeared in March 1972 to explain why he had been released after being detained fourteen days for "communistic activities" (he had been caught bringing banned books into the country).[81] He explained that because he knew little about sociology he had been easily deceived by subversive propaganda: "I always searched to find fault and blamed all shortcomings on the regime." But he now knew better and appreciated the achievements of the White Revolution—especially the fivefold expansion of education: "Our pampered youth does not appreciate this major achievement." He hoped that the Shah would forgive him for not having given him due credit for all his great accomplishments.
Barahani was arrested in September 1973; his interview appeared one hundred days later. In it, he denounced terrorism, enumerated the failings of Marxism, criticized cultural imperialism, distanced himself from all oppositional groups, and stressed that Islam was incompatible with Marxism—this echoed the official line against the Mojahedin.[82] He also criticized
those who mimicked Europe, arguing that mindless Westernization inevitably produces social alienation—in Iran as well as in the rest of the Third World. Although the interview was sprinkled with Franz Fanon quotations, its whole tenor was to reinforce the official view of the opposition.
Sa'edi's appearance in 1975 was billed as a "chitchat" (goftehgu ).[83] He took the political opposition to task for "exploiting" his works, serving as "tools of foreign powers," misunderstanding the country's culture, and refusing to credit the glorious achievements of the Shah-People's Revolution. He denounced the Soviets for persecuting writers and creating a "totalitarian culture." He conceded that his own works had been depressing but explained that they had been conceived in the bad old days of feudalism before the Shah had implemented his Great Revolution. He ended the interview by promising to make his future works more positive and respectful of the country's achievements, especially the nationalization of the country's forests. He added that "Marxism has absolutely no relevance to Iran because Islam, the White Revolution, and the monarchy had given the country special characteristics."
None of these three ever linked their "interviews" to torture—at least, not in public. To do so meant admitting submission, which, in turn, meant losing self-respect and public aberu, or reputation. In this age of revolutionary martyrdom, true heroes were supposed to die rather than submit and compromise their beliefs. Soon after his interview, Barahani was permitted to travel to the United States and was vehemently denounced by the Confederation for "collaborating" with the regime. He wrote his prison memoirs, lectured extensively on torture, and tried to inform the Western public about the Shah's unpopularity in Iran.[84] But these prolific writings avoided the unsavory subject of his forced interviews and the link between torture and his unmentionable interview. On the contrary, he argued that he had been released merely because of international pressure.[85] Thus his prison memoir reads like an incomprehensible theater of the absurd—as if the concept of being tortured for an "interview" is not absurd enough. In one place he touches
briefly on the issue of forced recantations—but only in the most abstract terms: "The intellectual is taken to prison, tortured and forced to recant; as a consequence of recantation he is isolated from the mainstream of the opposition and considered a traitor."[86]
For his part, Sa'edi wrote a play entitled Honeymoon in which an uninvited guest together with a television set, a cameraman, and thugs take over the home of a newlywed couple and proceed to play havoc with their lives. The husband is driven to drink; the wife, to spouting gibberish about nationalized forests and bejeweled marshes.[87] The uninvited guest concludes by declaring that "the best hosts are those who are happy and have nothing on their minds." A fellow writer later noted that Sa'edi had been shattered by his prison experience.[88]Honeymoon is the first work in Persian literature to deal exclusively with the intrusion of the state into the inner sanctuary of the home as well as of the mind. Needless to say, the work was not published until after the revolution.
In private Barahani and Sa'edi were more forthright. An American writer reported confidentially that SAVAK was using "techniques perfected in Ancient Rome and Medieval Spain as well as Auschwitz and Saigon" to produce television shows "reminiscent of the Stalinist ear."[89] He also claimed that Barahani had been offered a compromise—"a statement on national television, denouncing Marxism and terrorism, in return for which his own life and those of his wife and daughter would be spared." This statement was prepared initially by Barahani himself and then revised by SAVAK before being deemed "suitable for public consumption." The report mentioned that during the broadcast a SAVAK official had been present "with a gun to attain a good performance." In his prison memoirs, Barahani mentions in passing that a genuine writer cannot possibly recant, for such an act is tantamount to the "end of his political, literary, academic, and public life, not to mention life as a human being."[90]
Sa'edi did not speak of his own prison experiences until 1984—when in Paris dying from cirrhosis of the liver. There he
revealed for the first time how he had been kidnapped, taken to Evin, and subjected to days of "nightmarish tortures"—all for the purpose of extracting an "interview." He reported, "I kept pleading that if they had any charges against me they should try me in court. They kept retorting that they were interested not in a trial but in a television interview." The interrogator admitted that he wanted Sa'edi to be publicly humiliated because mere imprisonment would make him into a public hero—a mistake made with previous writers. Sa'edi mentions in passing that his body still bore the marks of these tortures. He also mentions that Nikkhah had been present as a "consultant" at the eventual filming.[91] After his release, Sa'edi had been permitted to travel to America, where he wrote a New York Times op-ed piece describing how one of his "patients" hated to be questioned about his prison experiences: "The psychological traumas of a person incarcerated, brutally tortured, then released, hardly heal. I knew a bookseller who had been frequently arrested. He was a man stricken by fear. He spoke with the minimum amount of words."[92]
Sa'edi was the last intellectual to be tortured into recanting. By 1975–76, the regime's human rights record was being scrutinized by numerous international organizations and foreign newspapers—Amnesty International, Sartre's Committee on Iran, the Red Cross, PEN, the International Commission of Jurists, the UN-affiliated International League for Human Rights, the New York Times , the Washington Post , the London Times , the Observer , and the Sunday Times . The weight of Washington was added when Jimmy Carter, running for the presidency, raised the issue of human rights in Iran as well as in the Soviet Union. The Shah tried to forestall further scrutiny by forbidding SAVAK to use physical torture—even on suspected guerrillas. Overnight prison conditions changed. Inmates dubbed this the dawn of jimmykrasy . Without these changes, public recantations may well have blossomed into a full industry in the 1970s under the Shah—long before they did so in the 1980s under the Islamic Republic.