LIFE IN AN IRANIAN JAIL
A Canadian resident turns 40 making wood keychains and fending off mice,
At 40, many of us step back and assess where our lives are heading.
But if Iran’s clerical regime has its way, Saeed Malekpour’s future is assured. Locked in Tehran’s dungeonlike Evin Prison, the Canadian resident is serving a life sentence that made his landmark birthday on June 5 just one more day in the thousands that will pass, predictably, without choices, aspirations or decisions that face those on the outside.
In the seven years he has already spent behind bars, the passage of time has become a blur of accustomed pain, anxiety and numbness, which began with his arrest in October 2008 during a visit to his dying father.
A graduate engineer and computer programmer, Malekpour was accused of masterminding a pornographic network on the instigation of western countries plotting to corrupt the morals of Iranian citizens. His original sentence, commuted after a widely discredited trial, was death by hanging.
Now his life has shrunk from cyberspace to a series of walls. How to live through a sentence without end?
“Every day is routine,” says his sister, Maryam Malekpour, a mechanical engineer living in Edmonton who is able to talk to him by phone. “He tries to put on a brave act as though he’s fine. But I can tell by his voice that it often isn’t true.”
For a man who was labelled a genius for his mathematical and computer skills, who loves nature and found his greatest pleasure in hiking Canada’s western wilderness, confinement is a double punishment.
Emigrating to Victoria, B.C., in 2004, near wildlife parks, mountains and sea, was his dream come true. Before making his ill-fated visit to Tehran, he was about to enrol in a PhD program to better his chances of a job in his field: metallurgical engineering.
Now his days tick by on prison time, starting from the early-morning wake-up call. In a general ward of about 15 fellow prisoners, the challenge is to subdue the infestations of mice and insects that plague the cells.
Some who cannot sleep force themselves to face the day after a long night of exchanging life stories and professional advice with their colleagues. In Iran, citizens of all stations can be condemned on trumped-up charges sparked by political or personal vendettas.
As the day begins, Malekpour looks forward to his woodworking classes. Hours pass as he painstakingly carves small wooden ornaments — a Zen exercise of designing, trimming and lacquering them. Some could become key chains, others pendants for necklaces or household ornaments.
“They sell the woodwork and buy new materials,” says Maryam.
It’s part of the jail’s own perverse economic system: in a state prison, inmates must ante up for all their needs.
Soap, shampoo, even food is bought from the prison shop with money supplied by relatives; prisoners’ families cannot drop off the goods themselves.
Malekpour’s financially strapped, ailing mother must provide the cash he needs for day-to-day life. Those without support live in the lowest circle of misery on meagre and substandard prison supplies.
“The prison food they give you is disgusting,” said a former inmate who is now in Canada. “We once fed some to a cat, and it refused to eat it.”
Only the air is free — when prisoners are able to breathe it outside their locked cells. For exercise, Malekpour walks in the small prison courtyard, a far cry from his hours-long rambles up B.C.’s forested mountain paths. In Tehran the chokingly hot, dry summers can top 35 C, while in winter, temperatures may plunge to just above freezing. Sickness is frequent, and medical treatment sparse to nonexistent.
For diversion, Malekpour turns to books: even if he had access to computers, says Maryam, he would reject it. After years of brutal interrogation and attempts to force him to confess to an Internet conspiracy — the result of a program he created for a client that was later allegedly used for transmitting pornographic images — he is done with technology. “He would like to start a small farm in Canada,” she says.
Classified as “high security,” he is allowed to visit with relatives only through a glass barrier.
“He told our mother not to come any more,” said Maryam. “She’s old and it’s too much of a strain to go to the prison just to sit and look at him from another room for 20 minutes.”
On June 5, the only celebrations for Malekpour were outside the jail. Inside, there were no happy birthdays. Only Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, knows how many more he will pass inside Evin’s unyielding walls.