Then They Came for Me

Last updated
Then They Came for Me
Then They Came for Me (Bahari book).jpg
Author Maziar Bahari
LanguageEnglish
Subject Family memoir, imprisonment, Iran
GenreBiography
Publisher Random House
Publication date
2011
Publication placeCanada
Pages384
ISBN 978-1-4000-6946-0

Then They Came for Me: A Family's Story of Love, Captivity, and Survival is a memoir by Iranian Canadian journalist Maziar Bahari with Aimee Molloy, chronicling Bahari's family history, and his arrest and 118-day imprisonment following the controversial 2009 Iran presidential election. It was published by Random House in 2011.

Contents

Content

Iranian-born but living in the West since college, Bahari is in Iran to cover the 2009 presidential election and staying with his elderly mother in Tehran. He witnesses the massive support, enthusiasm and optimism of the reformist presidential campaign; the outrage and protest of reformist voters after the election results shows their candidate(s) losing by an improbably large margin; and the often brutal crackdown of the regime against the protesters and sometimes innocent bystanders.

Bahari is anxious to get back to London to be with his pregnant fiancée, Paola (who tells him "Come home, Mazi. We need you"), [1] but not worried about running afoul of the Islamic regime as (he thinks) he has all the necessary accreditations and has taken all the recommended precautions to avoid trouble. [2] [3] From his father he has heard harrowing tales of prison torture and misery under the Shah, and he has visited his sister in prison in the 1980s during the early years of the Ayatollah Khomeini regime. When he is arrested on June 21 at his mother's house, Bahari first believes it must be a mistake and he will soon be released. [3]

Imprisonment

Bahari is taken to Tehran's notorious Evin Prison, given a small, bare cell which he leaves only for short exercise periods and much longer interrogation sessions. His arrester and regular interrogator (whom Bahari nicknames "Rosewater" for his fragrance of choice), is a large man who explodes into rage without warning, [4] slapping and beating Bahari, sometimes aggravating his migraine headaches until it feels like his "head was going to explode." [5] Using psychological or "white" torture, Rosewater threatens Bahari with the possibility of "every tactic necessary" to make him talk, including interrogation up to fifteen hours a day for four to six years. Bahari is told he will rot in prison (until the jailers "put your bones in a bag and throw it at your mother's doorstep!"), [5] or is soon to be executed as an example to others (I will make sure you die before Ramadan, Mazi, ... but I will also make sure that I smash your handsome face first). [6] Bahari is assured he was "forgotten" and serving time for people who are laughing at you.' [7] ("There are campaigns for everyone in this prison – even the most unknown of the prisoners – but nothing for you" he laughed). [8] When this turns out not to be the case and he is allowed to call his wife, Rosewater listens in and mocks Bahari's declarations of love to his wife.

These threats and beatings are sometimes combined with blandishments, such as offers of Nescafé instant coffee and fruit, and promises that "we are going to be friends". [9] On a couple of occasions his jailers proudly proclaim their "Islamic kindness," and on another he is asked rhetorically after weeks of beatings by Rosewater, "have I ever tortured you?" (obviously expecting "no" for an answer). [10] Occasionally Bahari would be startled by his interrogators' ignorance of politics and culture outside the Islamic Republic. He is accused of being an agent of four foreign intelligence organizations: CIA, MI6, Mossad, and Newsweek. Rosewater is fixated on the American state of New Jersey as "famous". Following the premise that mixing of the sexes must inevitably lead to illicit sex, Rosewater spends much time hoping to shame Bahari by forcing him to list women he had worked with. [11]

Compounding Bahari's suffering was the guilt he felt not only over his pregnant fiancée alone in London, but also over the suffering of his 80+ year old widowed mother who lived alone and whose daughter had died five months earlier. [12] All these facts his jailers reminded him of:

We do not want to harm you. We do not want your wife to raise the child alone. I do not want your child to grow up an orphan. Is it a boy or a girl? ... And you have a mother who has lost two children and her husband in the past four years.' [13]

Beatings and interrogation alternate with stretches of solitary confinement in a windowless cell during which Bahri fears he is going crazy. [14]

"I couldn't escape from the loneliness of solitary confinement, not even in sleep. I would dream about sitting in my cell alone for days, forgotten and abandoned. I would cry for help and try to open the door, but no one could hear me. My cries often woke me up, and seeing the locked metal door, I didn't know if I was awake or still trapped in the dream. This went on for days, and I prayed for Rosewater to call me, even to beat me. At least it was human contact." [15]

During his ordeal Bahari carried on imaginary conversations with his dead father and sister, both former political prisoners. His father (i.e. his memory of his father) urging him to be courageous and offered advice on outsmarting the interrogator. One night Bahari dreams of a song of Leonard Cohen and later called the song his secret weapon against his interrogators:

"Oh the sisters of mercy, they are not departed or gone.

They were waiting for me when I thought that I just can't go on. And they brought me their comfort and later they brought me this song.

I don't know how long the dream lasted, but I didn't want it to end. I knew what emotions awaited me when I woke up – the fear, the shame, the hatred – and I wanted this feeling to last forever. I felt better. I felt safe. And, though only in my dream, I once again felt free." [16]

Desperate to get out, Bahari agrees to video confessions of the wickedness of Western media, but holds out against "naming names", i.e. incriminating individual politicians or journalists, giving information that "would harm my contacts or the people close to me." [17]

He is held on in prison to give these names, but as his interrogation leads nowhere, and pressure to release him from his wife, Newsweek magazine, and US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton mounts, Bahari is transferred to a far more comfortable group cell with other political prisoners. He promises his jailers he will help spy for the Revolutionary Guard (who arrested and interrogated him) after his release, and is given a "partial list" of dozens of journalists and opposition activists inside and outside Iran to monitor. With a three billion rials ($300,000) bail, a signed promise to report to the Guard every week about the activities of the "anti-revolutionary elements", and repeated threats that the Guard will bring him back to Iran "in a bag" if he reneges, Bahari is finally released on October 17, 2009 and flies back to London.

Epilogue

Back in London enjoying his newborn daughter and no longer suffering from nightmares of prison, Bahari begins a series of interviews for television, radio, print, emphasizing that

  1. "I had made my confessions under duress, and
  2. hundreds of innocent prisoners remained inside Iranian jails, enduring the same brutal ordeal I had." [18]

The Guard respond with threats to his family, although his mother's resolute contempt for these ashghals (garbage) makes her a difficult target. Bahari is "tried" in absentia by a revolutionary court (no court session or information provided to his lawyer) and sentenced to thirteen and a half years' imprisonment plus 74 lashes. [19]

Bahari ends by giving his thoughts on Supreme Leader Khamenei (the one Iranian now blamed "for the rapes, tortures, and murders" rather than Mahmoud Ahmadinejad); non-violence (the only effective tactic against the regime); a possible US or Israel attack on Iran (a "nightmare scenario" that would destroy the democratic movement in Iran and damage Western interests); the two main weak points of the regime (information and the economy); whether the Iranian Green Movement is dead (no); and what he has learned from "friends and more than a few strangers with connections inside the government" who have contacted him in London. [20] They tell him his arrest was part of a plan hatched by the Revolutionary Guards a year before the election to eliminate reformists by connecting them with Western powers – Bahari being an agent connecting "the evil Western media and the reformists," according to this plan. His brutal interrogator Rosewater is a colonel in the revolutionary guards from a traditional religious Isfahani family whose organizational name is "Javadi". [21]

Reception

Jon Stewart of The Daily Show commented on the book, "Your ability to connect the story to your family, and the nuances you pick up, even from your captor, is incredible." [22]

"Mr. Bahari's ordeal, which he has chronicled in his moving and, at times, very funny book Then They Came for Me, is more than just a random event in Iran's spiral from authoritarianism into totalitarianism. His arrest in June 2009 was one of the first organized government responses to a wave of grassroots protest movements that would soon sweep across most of the Middle East and North Africa. Because of Mr. Bahari's superb personal knowledge of Iran’s government, he was able to produce an account of exactly how, and why, he was tormented, and the larger context of a fast-changing regime. It offers a number of lessons about the way Middle Eastern politics work." – Doug Saunders, The Globe and Mail . [23]

"Bahari's account of his 118-day incarceration, Then They Came For Me, turns a lens not only on Iran's surreal justice system but on the history and culture that helped produce it... Bahari's book is a damning account of a nation run by paranoid, sexually frustrated conspiracy theorists." – Tara Bahrampour, Washington Post . [24]

"Then They Came for Me is a gripping story that weaves his family's history of incarceration by Iranian rulers with his own." – Leslie Scrivener, The Toronto Star . [25]

"While Bahari's vivid descriptions make for a good read, perhaps the most compelling aspect of Then They Came for Me is Bahari's ability to capture the frustration that many Iranians, at home and abroad, feel toward Iran's current government. Then They Came for Me is not only a fascinating, human exploration into Bahari's personal experience but it also provides insight into the shared experience of those affected by repressive governments everywhere." – Hamed Aleaziz, Mother Jones . [26]

"Then They Came for Me is engaging and informative – a gripping tribute to human dedication and a cogent indictment of a corrupt regime." – Andrew Imbrie Dayton, The Washington Independent Review of Books . [27]

"This harrowing memoir provides an illuminating glimpse into the security apparatus of one of the world's most repressive countries. … Especially timely given recent events throughout the Middle East, this book is recommended for anyone wishing to better understand the workings of a police state." – Kirkus Reviews . [28]

Film

A film titled Rosewater was released in November 2014, based on the book. It was filmed in June and July 2013 and was directed and written by Jon Stewart, [29] [30] with Gael García Bernal starring as Bahari. [31] J. J. Abrams provided some scripting assistance for Stewart. [32]

Music

In 2017 Rapper Magneto Dayo released a song titled "Then They Came For Me (Trump's Wall)" comparing the memoir by Maziar Bahari to the modern-day issues and paying homage to the journalist.

See also

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Zahra Kazemi</span> Iranian-Canadian photojournalist (1948–2003)

Zahra "Ziba" Kazemi-Ahmadabadi was an Iranian-Canadian freelance photojournalist. She gained notoriety for her arrest in Iran and the circumstances in which she was held by Iranian authorities, in whose custody she was killed. Kazemi's autopsy report revealed that she had been raped and tortured by Iranian officials while she was at Evin Prison, located within the capital city of Tehran.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Evin Prison</span> Prison in Iran

Evin Prison is a prison located in the Evin neighborhood of Tehran, Iran. The prison has been the primary site for the housing of Iran's political prisoners since 1972, before and after the Iranian Revolution, in a purpose-built wing nicknamed "Evin University" due to the high number of students and intellectuals detained there. Evin Prison has been accused of committing "serious human rights abuses" against its political dissidents and critics of the government.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum</span> Museum dedicated to the Cambodian Genocide

The Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum, or simply Tuol Sleng, is a museum chronicling the Cambodian genocide. Located in Phnom Penh, the site is a former secondary school which was used as Security Prison 21 by the Khmer Rouge regime from 1975 until its fall in 1979. From 1976 to 1979, an estimated 20,000 people were imprisoned at Tuol Sleng and it was one of between 150 and 196 torture and execution centers established by the Khmer Rouge and the secret police known as the Santebal. On 26 July 2010, the Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia convicted the prison's chief, Kang Kek Iew, for crimes against humanity and grave breaches of the 1949 Geneva Conventions. He died on 2 September 2020 while serving a life sentence.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Mohsen Sazegara</span> Iranian politician

Mohsen Sazegara is an Iranian journalist and pro-democracy political activist. He was the founder of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps after the Iranian Revolution in 1979. He held several offices in the government of Mir Hossein Mousavi. He applied to become a candidate for President of Iran in the 2001 election but was declined.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Jason Jones (actor)</span> Canadian-American actor and comedian

Jason Pierre Jones is a Canadian and American actor, comedian and writer. He was a correspondent on The Daily Show with Jon Stewart from 2005 to 2015. From 2016 to 2019 Jones starred in the TBS comedy series The Detour, which he created with his wife Samantha Bee.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Maziar Bahari</span> Iranian journalist and filmmaker

Maziar Bahari is an Iranian-Canadian journalist, filmmaker and human rights activist. He was a reporter for Newsweek from 1998 to 2011. Bahari was incarcerated by the Iranian government from June 21, 2009 to October 17, 2009, and has written a family memoir, Then They Came for Me, a New York Times best seller. His memoir is the basis for Jon Stewart's 2014 film Rosewater. Bahari later founded the IranWire citizen journalism news site, the freedom of expression campaign Journalism Is Not A Crime and the education and public art organization Paint the Change.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Ahmad Batebi</span> Iranian activist

Ahmad Batebi is an Iranian activist who was designated a prisoner of conscience by Amnesty International. During his studies at the University of Tehran he gained international fame for his appearance on the July 17, 1999, cover of The Economist magazine, holding up a shirt splattered with the blood of a fellow protester.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Ahmad Zeidabadi</span> Iranian journalist

Ahmad Zeidabadi is an Iranian journalist, academic, writer and political analyst and the secretary general of Office for Strengthening Unity. He is one of the notable figures of the Iranian reform movement.

Siamak Pourzand was an Iranian journalist and film critic. He was the manager of the Majmue-ye Farhangi-Honari-ye Tehran—a cultural center for writers, artists, and intellectuals—and wrote cultural commentary for several reformist newspapers later shut down by the Iranian government. In 2001, he was imprisoned for his articles critical of Iranian leadership, a move condemned by numerous human rights and journalism organizations.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Khosro Roozbeh</span> Iranian military officer and activist (1915–1958)

Khosro Roozbeh was an Iranian military officer, mathematician, writer on political and cultural affairs and the chief of military branch of the Communist Tudeh Party of Iran and has been called "probably the most controversial as well as the best-known martyr of the communist movement in Iran".

White torture, often referred to as white room torture, is a type of psychological torture technique aimed at complete sensory deprivation and isolation. A prisoner is held in a cell that deprives them of all senses and identity. It is particularly used in Iran; however, there is also evidence of its use by Venezuelan and United States intelligence services.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Kianush Sanjari</span> Iranian former blogger

Kianush Sanjari, is an Iranian journalist and activist. He has a history of being arrested and imprisoned in solitary confinement several times in Iran.

Hassan Zia-Zarifi was an Iranian intellectual and one of the ideological founders of the communist guerrilla movement in Iran.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Mehdi Hashemi</span> Iranian cleric and military officier

Mehdi Hashemi was an Iranian Shia cleric who after the 1979 Iranian Revolution became a senior official in the Islamic Revolutionary Guards. He was defrocked by the Special Clerical Court and executed by the Islamic Republic in 1987. Officially he was guilty of sedition, murder, and related charges, but others suspect his true crime was opposition to the regime's secret dealings with the United States within the Iran–Contra affair.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">2009 Iran poll protests trial</span>

2009 Iran poll protests trial refers to a series of trials conducted after 2009 Iranian presidential election. Over 140 defendants, including prominent politicians, academics and writers, were put on trial for participating in the 2009 Iranian election protests. The defendants were accused of orchestrating "colour revolution" in Iran, and "exposing cases of violations of human rights." The trials were widely condemned by world leaders both in Iran and worldwide as a "show trial" with coerced confessions.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Sattar Beheshti</span> Iranian blogger who died in custody of the Iranian Cyber Police unit

Seyyed Sattar Beheshti was an Iranian blogger who died under suspicious and unclear circumstances in early November 2012, several days after being arrested by the Iranian Cyber Police unit for criticizing the government of the Islamic Republic on Facebook, and after making a signed complaint of being tortured while in custody. His reported death has drawn international condemnation and led to the dismissal of the commander of Iran's cybercrimes police unit.

<i>Rosewater</i> (film) 2014 film by Jon Stewart

Rosewater is a 2014 American political drama film written, directed and produced by Jon Stewart, based on the memoir Then They Came for Me by Maziar Bahari and Aimee Molloy. It recounts Bahari's 2009 imprisonment by Iran, connected to an interview he participated in on The Daily Show that same year; Iranian authorities presented the interview as evidence that he was in communication with an American spy. Due to the content of the film, Stewart has been accused by Iran's state TV of being funded by Zionists and working with the CIA. The film was released in theaters on November 14, 2014.

<i>Septembers of Shiraz</i> 2015 American film

Septembers of Shiraz is a 2015 American drama film directed by Wayne Blair and written by Hanna Weg. It is based on the 2007 novel The Septembers of Shiraz by Dalia Sofer. The film stars Adrien Brody, Salma Hayek, Shohreh Aghdashloo, Anthony Azizi, Bashar Rahal and Alon Aboutboul. The film was released on June 24, 2016, by Momentum Pictures.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Mahmoud Salavati</span> Iranian cleric

Mahmoud Salavati is a jurist, author, commentator and translator of the Quran and Nahj, religious scholar and member of the Assembly of Qom Seminary Scholars and Researchers. He is a co-founder of the Islamic Revolution and the Iranian Revolutionary Guards. He is also the founder and the first president of the Center for Research and ideological – political Iranian Revolutionary Guards and outstanding student of Ayatollah Montazeri and Ayatollah Yousef Sanei and close associate of the late Ayatollah Taheri Esfahani is. ِِDr fazlollah Salavati is his cousin.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Gohar Eshghi</span> Iranian activist

Gohar Eshghi is a civil activist, one of the Iranian Complainant Mothers and the mother of Sattar Beheshti, Iranian blogger who was killed in November 2012 due to severe torture while in custody of the Islamic Republic security forces in Iran. After the death of her son she made many efforts to bring his killer(s) to justice. She brought media attention to the circumstances of her son's death and caused a wide controversy in the ruling political system of Iran. In 2022, she was named in the BBC 100 Women list.

References

  1. ↑ Then They Came for Me, pp. 160–1
  2. ↑ Then They Came for Me, p. 262
  3. 1 2 Then They Came for Me, p. 115
  4. ↑ Then They Came for Me, p. 202
  5. 1 2 Then They Came for Me, p. 235
  6. ↑ Then They Came for Me, pp. 159, 160, 220)
  7. ↑ Then They Came for Me, p. 216
  8. ↑ Then They Came for Me, pp. 203–4
  9. ↑ Then They Came for Me, pp. 187
  10. ↑ Then They Came for Me, p. 250
  11. ↑ Then They Came for Me, pp. 114, 245, 253
  12. ↑ Then They Came for Me, p. 200
  13. ↑ Then They Came for Me, p. 162
  14. ↑ Then They Came for Me, p. 238
  15. ↑ Then They Came for Me, p. 205
  16. ↑ August 2009 in Evin prison
  17. ↑ Then They Came for Me, pp. 131, 173, 201
  18. ↑ Then They Came for Me, p. 305
  19. ↑ Then They Came for Me, p. 310
  20. ↑ Then They Came for Me, pp. 310–328
  21. ↑ Then They Came for Me, pp. 324–328
  22. ↑ "Exclusive – Maziar Bahari Extended Interview Pt. 1 – The Daily Show with Jon Stewart – 06/06/11 – Video Clip | Comedy Central". Thedailyshow.com. 2011-06-06. Retrieved 2014-06-19.
  23. ↑ "Tossing information grenades over Middle Eastern walls". The Globe and Mail. Toronto. September 10, 2012.
  24. ↑ Bahrampour, Tara (August 11, 2011). "Books". The Washington Post.
  25. ↑ "Black comedy in an Iranian prison – Toronto Star". The Star. Toronto.
  26. ↑ Hamed Aleaziz. "Tales from a Torture Chamber". Mother Jones. Retrieved 2014-06-19.
  27. ↑ "Then They Came for Me: A Family's Story of Love, Captivity and Survival". Washington Independent Review of Books. 2011-06-09. Retrieved 2014-06-19.
  28. ↑ Ebadi, Shirin (2011-06-07). "THEN THEY CAME FOR ME by Maziar Bahari, Aimee Molloy | Kirkus". Kirkusreviews.com. Retrieved 2014-06-19.
  29. ↑ "Stewart to take time off from 'Daily Show,' direct feature film". CNN.com. March 5, 2013. Retrieved March 5, 2013.
  30. ↑ Barnes, Brooks (March 5, 2013). "Jon Stewart to Direct Serious Film, Will Take Hiatus From 'Daily Show'". The New York Times.
  31. ↑ "Gael Garcia Bernal Teams Up With Jon Stewart". Huffington Post. May 28, 2013.
  32. ↑ "Exclusive - J. J. Abrams Extended Interview Pt. 2". The Daily Show. 2013-05-13. Retrieved 2014-06-19.
This page is based on this Wikipedia article
Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply.
Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.