Dimentions of Torture, a personal account

“…States should ensure the following minimum guarantees, which are not dependent on the political, social, or cultural backgrounds of the country concerned:

· The absolute prohibition of incommunicado detention;
· The right of arrested persons to immediately contact relatives, a lawyer, and a doctor.
· The right of arrested persons to be brought promptly (within 48 hours of arrest) to a judge and to have a medical examination.
· Supervision of interrogations by an independent authority.
· Prohibition of the use of statements obtained by torture as evidence before court.” Manfred Nowak, States of Bondage, 1994.

Late in 1997, on the evening of a cold autumn day, a few hours after I had returned home from work, I heard a faint knocking on my apartment door. Who could it be? I was not expecting company. Could it be one of the neighbors who needed to borrow something?

I asked my 15-year-old daughter to open the door and see who it was.

During the next two hours, my two children stood in a corner watching in fear as the Iranian Revolutionary Guards ransacked the apartment, tearing open every mattress, every cushion, bagging every item that they found suspicious, mostly books and scraps of paper here and there, the family album, the music CD’s, the video tapes, the computer, etc.

Then, quite unceremoniously, as if engaged in an over rehearsed, mundane routine, they handcuffed and blindfolded me. I was put on the back seat of a car, and it wasn’t until a month and twenty days later when I found out where I had spent my time in custody.

I spent the next month and twenty days in a 5X8 square foot cell. I was never charged with anything, nor did I appear before a judge in the first 48 hours after my arrest, or for that matter throughout my entire confinement. The only people that I did come in contact with were the prison guards and my interrogators. I was not allowed representation nor was I allowed a phone call to my family. All along my family thought I had been executed.

Many a time, during the night, I would be awakened by the loud banging of a baton on my cell door. On a daily basis I would be hosed down with cold water. Then as I was shivering with cold, I would be dragged to the interrogation room where I would be asked the same questions over and over:

Who pays you to write the nonsense that you write?
How come you can get a visa to the United States every time you apply?
Are you willing to sign a letter distancing yourself from what you have written in your articles?
Are you willing to say that you have been wrong about the Islamic republic?

The only book that I was allowed was the Quran, even though I am not a Muslim. The food consisted of bread and water and sometimes rice, twice daily. Occasionally even that was denied me. In such cases I knew that I had to be expecting some tougher interrogation sessions.

Eventually I decided that all my ideals, no matter how noble, were not worth the humiliation that I was being subjected to. Early in the spring of 1998, in one of the daily Q and A sessions, I broke and told my interrogator that I was willing to sign anything that they wanted. I was ready to repudiate any ideology that they thought I was associated with.

They had me participate in a video taped interview where they forced me to read a prepared statement, which basically said that I was wrong in my criticism of the Islamic Republic, and that I had been enlightened by my jailers to the fact that Islam is the only ideology that can bring prosperity and happiness to its followers. I was also forced to say that during my captivity I had been treated with the utmost respect and integrity, which is part of the teachings of Islam.

Ten days later I was released just as unceremoniously as I had been arrested.

I learned later that during the period of time that I had spent in my 5X8 square foot solitary confinement, the UN Special Rapporteur on Torture had traveled to Tehran twice. My name, however – and I am sure that of many others - was not included in the list of the prisoners of conscience that was given to him. My brother and a few of my friends had attempted to present a letter to him at his place of stay. They had been arrested and kept in custody until after the UN Rapporteur had departed.

Not a single one of the provisions set forth by all the UN agreements and protocols, or other international covenants (the 1949 Geneva Convention, the 1969 International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, the 1984 UN Convention against Torture, the European Convention on Human Rights of 1950, the American Convention on Human Rights of 1969, or the African Charter on Human and Peoples’ Rights of 1981) were observed in my case. Nor are they observed in the case of any of the political prisoners in the Islamic Republic of Iran, or for that matter, in China, Burma, North Korea, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Sudan, etc.

The list is now enhanced with the addition of the United States and its treatment of the prisoners in Guantanamo Bay and Abu Gharib detention centers, not to mention the outsourcing of torture as a means of eliciting information to countries such as Egypt and Jordan where many kinds of physical abuse are deemed appropriate in the handling of prisoners.

“The detention camp at the US Naval Base in Guantanamo Bay in Cuba has become a symbol of the US administration’s refusal to put human rights and the rule of law at the heart of its response to the atrocities of 11 September 2001. Hundreds of people of around 35 different nationalities remain held in effect in a legal black hole, many without access to any court, legal counsel or family visits.” From the Amnesty International report UNITED STATES OF AMERICA, Guantanamo and beyond: The Continuing Pursuit of Unchecked Executive Power, May 13, 2005.

“Whereas slavery and the slave trade were explicitly prohibited by a number of bilateral and multilateral treaties culminating in the 1962 Slavery Convention, torture was so much regarded as a phenomenon of the past that neither international human rights law nor even the most domestic bills of rights of this period contained explicit prohibitions.” Manfred Nowak, States of Bondage, 1994.

The problem of addressing human rights as pertain to torture does not appear to be lack or absence of sufficient international covenants and treaties that appropriately define and condemn torture. The issue seems to be twofold:

Firstly, the international definitions of torture come in clash with domestic cultural and religious practices. Examples of this include limb amputations, flogging, and stoning in Muslim countries, and female genital mutilation among some North African peoples. The elimination of such practices should comprise an immense effort in educating the people involved in them.

And secondly, but probably more important is the fact that in many cases confronting the countries where torture is commonly practiced is compromised for expediency. The trade agreements between China and the United States in effect brought about an attitude of indifference and an implicit condoning of all the atrocities that are being exercised in China against human rights activists. The heroes of Tianamen Square were soon forgotten in favor of lucrative trade agreements.

During the apartheid years in South Africa, many of the UN resolutions in condemnation of the South African regime’s inhumane handling of the anti apartheid activists were vetoed or otherwise suppressed by Britain, which was directly benefiting from the state of apartheid in South Africa.

Likewise the European Community has long overlooked all the torture and human rights abuses that are systematically practiced by the rulers of the Islamic Republic in exchange for the petroleum trade and lucrative contracts with Iran.

The campaign for human rights and irradication of all kinds and forms of torture and humiliation of human dignity has had some highlights in the past 10 years. “The CAT – UN Convention Against Torture – provides for universal jurisdiction, which means that torturers can be detained, prosecuted, and punished in all State Parties regardless of nationality of the torturer or his victims or the territory in which the act of torture was perpetrated.” State of Bondage, Manfred Nowak, 1994.

An example of this happened in 1998 when Augusto Pinochet, the Chilean general, who had staged the U.S. backed coupe of 1973 against the democratically elected president of Chile, Salvador Allende, and is known to have been the perpetrator of the mass killings of the many Chileans in the years that followed the coupe, was arrested in London, thousands of mile outside Chile, where the crimes had been committed, on orders from a Spanish judge. To the despair and dismay of human rights activists, after about 16 months, a British court ruled that Pinochet was too old and too feeble to stand trial.

Pinochet’s case aside, many violators of human rights and perpetrators of torture and abuse still freely travel around the world with impunity. Only last month, the newly “elected” president of the Islamic Republic, Mahmood Ahmadinejad was given a visa to attend the General Assembly of the United Nations in New York while at the same time many Iranian dissidents are enduring the darkest and most inhumane forms of torture and abuse in the dungeons of the Islamic Republic.