A Plot That Backfired on Killers

There are some events whose significance is knowable only in retrospect. The death last year of Mohammed Jafar Pouyandeh may well have been one of those occurrences: the killing of an obscure translator that could mark a turning point for Iran.

Pouyandeh, who was little known outside a small circle of intellectuals and writers, was abducted, strangled and dumped along a railroad track in December.

He was the last of at least six Iranian dissidents who disappeared, were slain or died under suspicious circumstances in the waning days of 1998.

The perpetrators of the crimes apparently intended to sow terror among their political opponents, but the opposite happened.

Iranian society recoiled. Complaints appeared in the media. President Mohammad Khatami’s hand was strengthened to do what he could not before: take on the security apparatus; fire the minister of intelligence; and demand accountability and rule of law for the country’s shadowy secret police units and their allies.

This month, as Khatami basks in a landslide victory by moderates in municipal elections that could augur a similar defeat for hard-liners in parliament next year, it seems fitting to remember Pouyandeh, an anonymous hero who gave his life for freedom.

To be sure, the victory of moderates over the hard-liners--who distrust democracy and want to maintain a mullah-run state hostile to the West--is not complete. It is conceivable that there could still be a backlash against Khatami and that conservatives may still prevail in their ongoing political war.

But like the 1977 death in police custody of anti-apartheid activist Steve Biko in South Africa or the 1984 murder of the anti-Communist Father Jerzy Popieluszko along a Polish highway, the eradication of Pouyandeh and the other intellectuals has become for many Iranians the symbol for the brutality that must be stamped out of their system.

He Left His Downtown Office About 3 p.m.

It was the 18th of Azar on the Iranian calendar, Dec. 9 in the West.

About 3 p.m., on a cold, clear Wednesday, Pouyandeh left his office at the Cultural Research Center in downtown Tehran. The quasi-public institution, housed in a small gray building on a busy street, periodically issues books on Iranian culture. As is the case at most official institutions, one of the last things Pouyandeh would have seen before he walked out the door was a portrait of Iran’s bearded, turbaned supreme leader, the Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.

It had been a normal day for Pouyandeh. Up early enough to see Nazanin, his 17-year-old daughter, off to school at the music university. Then a glass of tea and some cookies for breakfast with his wife, Sima, a teacher of nursing, before they parted for work.

Their apartment was tiny, reflecting small incomes: one room that served as living room, dining room and study; a kitchen; two small bedrooms, heated by a radiator in the foyer where a kettle for tea was kept warm. The most notable feature was its books, crammed on bookshelves--mainly Persian-language works, but also English, French and German tomes of philosophy, sociology and literature, and dictionaries in all four languages.

The morning was normal, but Pouyandeh’s state of mind was not.

He was in a “twilight zone,” his wife said.

His close friend and collaborator, poet Mohammed Mokhtari, had disappeared six days before, and Pouyandeh was worried about his own safety.

Throughout the day that her husband disappeared, Sima Pouyandeh was filled with anxiety. She had had a premonition that morning that the parting might be their last.

Although it was a clear day, she recalled later, “inside me it was raining.”

Scholars Tried to Restore Writers Guild

Mokhtari and Pouyandeh were members of a committee seeking to resuscitate the Iranian Writers’ Assn., a cultural-professional guild that had not been permitted to meet since the early days of the Iranian Revolution.

They had been summoned, along with four other committee members, to appear before the Revolutionary Court in October. There they had been interrogated and warned to drop the effort, which they had agreed to do.

Nevertheless, Pouyandeh had gotten some unwelcome publicity from the incident, and a right-wing newspaper had attacked him personally, issuing a veiled threat.

Pouyandeh, according to his wife, believed that Mokhtari had been arrested and he feared he could be next. In a country like Iran, he felt painfully vulnerable.

“He was anxious and pale and asking what should be done,” Sima Pouyandeh recounted. “He talked to other writers and asked . . . but no one could tell him what he should do. There was no one to turn to.”

Her husband felt no recourse but to go on with his normal routine.

The evening of Dec. 9, Sima Pouyandeh returned about 7 p.m. and found her daughter in tears.

“When I returned from my job and saw that my husband had not returned, I was really worried,” she recalled. “He was supposed to be home at 5 o’clock.”

She began phoning places she thought her husband might be. The evening was especially difficult because at 4 p.m. authorities had announced that the body of Mokhtari had been found. Thinking her husband may have gone to Mokhtari’s house to offer sympathy, she telephoned there. No sign of him. She also called others who had been at a publishers’ meeting her husband was to have attended after work.

No one had seen Pouyandeh.

“I thought he must have been arrested. I called all the police stations and hospitals around his office,” she said. “I was crying. I was begging them to do something. . . . I even called to the president’s office and asked them to close the roads out of Tehran. Bythen I was sure that he was grabbed during the day.”

By the time Pouyandeh was abducted, there was already a sense of panic among Iranians critical of the country’s Islamic authorities. Despite the 1997 election of the moderate Khatami as the country’s president, there had been frequent outbreaks of violence against Khatami supporters by right-wing groups.

Sinister Element Added to the Fears

The killings in November of two seemingly harmless, elderly opponents of the regime--Dariush Foruhar, leader of the banned Iranian National Party, and his wife, Parvanjeh--added a sinister element to the fears.

According to associates, the couple’s home was almost always monitored by intelligence agents. Yet someone entered the house on a Saturday night and stabbed them to death. Foruhar was discovered the next day seated in his study with a knife sticking from his heart. He had been stabbed 13 times. His wife, found upstairs in her nightclothes curled up in a fetal position, had 24 stab wounds.

After their deaths, dissident writer Majid Sharif was found dead under suspicious circumstances. Another author, Pirouz Davani, disappeared. Then Mokhtari was found dead.

Seated in their apartment next to a black-bordered portrait of her husband--a vigorous-looking man with a high forehead and dark, penetrating eyes--Sima Pouyandeh last month recalled her fruitless efforts to find him on that first night and the following day. She had gone to police headquarters with his photograph, which was faxed to other police stations. Then she toured the morgue.

“They showed me all the bodies,” she said. “It was very awful. I was crying during the whole time.”

It was not until 10 p.m. on Saturday that she got word of her husband.

Police in Shariyar, outside Tehran, called to say that they had found a body Thursday fitting his description.

She arrived in Shariyar around midnight, only to be told that the body had been moved to Tehran. The next day, her brother made the identification; she could not face looking at the body herself.

At that time, all she knew was that her husband bore marks of strangulation. In the weeks that followed, she learned more of his fate.

According to a colleague of her husband, a white Peykan--an Iranian make of automobile ubiquitous on Tehran’s streets--had been parked outside Pouyandeh’s office on the day he was seized. When Pouyandeh came out shortly before 3 p.m., one of the occupants stepped from the car and spoke to him. Pouyandeh showed his identification card.

When the man demanded that Pouyandeh get in the car, he resisted. Voices were raised. Then three men manhandled him into the vehicle.

“People saw and no one acted,” Sima Pouyandeh said. “They just wrote down the number of the license plate.”

Rumors of Death Squads, Blacklists

The disappearance of Pouyandeh on the same day that Mokhtari’s body was found sent shock waves through Iranian society when it was reported in independent press over the subsequent days.

Rumors began to circulate of death squads and blacklists. About a thousand students demonstrated at Tehran University, demanding that the chief of the Intelligence Ministry resign.

In response to this growing public pressure, Khatami appointed a commission headed by a senior military judge to investigate the killings.

The commission reported its findings to Khatami’s inner Cabinet less than a month later. Its conclusion: Agents of the Intelligence Ministry had carried out the killings of Pouyandeh, Mokhtari and the Foruhars.

“It was not good news,” said Khatami’s Cabinet chief, Mohammed Ali Abtahi. Yet it was not a great surprise either, he acknowledged. “This was not far from our minds.”

After disclosure of the Intelligence Ministry’s role, 10 people reportedly were arrested, though they have not been publicly identified. According to media reports, some upper-level managers in the ministry were implicated. Khatami obtained the resignation of Intelligence Minister Qorbanali Dorri-Najafabadi in February, replacing him with Ali Yunesi--the military judge who had helped investigate the crimes.

Pouyandeh Worked on Rights Book

In the months before his abduction, Pouyandeh had been translating into the Persian language a book on the history of the U.N.’s Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Coincidentally, that book was published on the day he disappeared. The day his body was found, Dec. 10, was the 50th anniversary of the declaration’s adoption by the General Assembly.

Thousands came to Pouyandeh’s funeral, including prominent writers, journalists and opposition activists. Sima Pouyandeh delivered a eulogy.

“My husband’s life served two aims--freedom and the truth,” she said. “For certain, he was a hero, because he gave his life for freedom of thought and freedom of speech.”

His greatest legacy may be that on March 4 the Iranian Writers’ Assn.--the group that he and Mokhtari had fought to revive--held its first meeting since the early 1980s. Seventy members assembled legally and openly, with police protection.

None of this eases the pain of the 36-year-old Pouyandeh, who met her husband when she was 18 and was married to him within months.

They had met hiking, both participants in an informal group of writers, poets, students and intellectuals who, in those days, would traipse the Elborz Mountains overlooking Tehran and then sit down to debate and discuss their work.

Sima said that what impressed her at first about her future husband was his intelligence and honesty. At one of their first meetings, she was moved when he read to her from the prison letters of Antonio Gramsci, an Italian Marxist once jailed by Benito Mussolini’s regime.

She recalls him as a voracious intellect, but one who was not directly interested in politics. His involvement with the guild stemmed mainly from wanting to improve writers’ pay and social benefits and because he believed that censorship was an obstacle to creativity.

She is not hopeful about what the future holds for Iran, despite the nationwide condemnation engendered by the killing of her husband and the others.

“In my opinion, it is not possible to predict the future of Iran, because one day I woke up and found that my husband had been killed. . . .

“A place that should protect the security of the state and its citizens has been transformed into a place of murderers.”