The making of a human rights champion
Payam Akhavan was nine years old when his family left Iran for Canada. They were members of the persecuted Baha’i faith; within a few years, the Baha’i still in Iran would face arrest, torture and death.
Amid a global outcry — with Canada admitting Baha’i refugees — some were spared from what UN expert Benjamin Whitaker called genocide. But many more died.
One was 17-year-old Mona Mahmudnizhad, who was executed by the Revolutionary Guards in 1983. The death of a vivacious, fearless contemporary deeply moved a young Akhavan.
He ultimately became a leading voice in the cause for human rights, serving as a UN prosecutor at The Hague, as well as with the UN in conflict zones around the world, including Bosnia and Rwanda. He is currently a professor of international law at McGill University.
On the surface, Mona was no different than any of my other friends from Sunday school back in Iran. We were of the same age, in the same community, in the same country. But there was a consequential difference between us: one of us moved to Canada, the other remained in Iran; one of us would live, the other would die.
All those who knew Mona were enchanted by her beautiful presence. She was intensely thoughtful and immensely kind. Her remarkable character mingled with her striking appearance: long black hair, glowing olive skin, penetrating green eyes, and a radiant smile. The images of Mona’s outwardly conventional life show her doing the things one would expect of any teenager. In one photo, she is holding a guitar; in another she is dancing in a colourful traditional dress; in yet another she is on the shores of that same sea where we spent vacations as children. There is a photo of her father, Yad’u’llah, looking at the youngest of his two daughters in adoration. In another Mona is with her loving mother, Farkhundeh, beside a birthday cake and a bouquet of red and white flowers; and there is yet another photo, this one of her funeral, her grave full of flowers, her grief-stricken family mourning her loss.
Mona lived in Shiraz, a fabled city of beautiful gardens and legendary poets. The most renowned of these was Hafez, who spoke of the transcendent joys of love in a rebuke to religious hypocrisy: Love is The funeral pyre Where I have laid my living body. All the false notions of myself That once caused fear, pain, Have turned to ash As I neared God. Alas, in Mona’s time, the religious leaders equated divine transcendence with death of the innocent, not the death of the ego that Hafez spoke of.
Mona was a diligent and idealistic high school student. She volunteered her time at the local orphanage. After the expulsion of Baha’i pupils from elementary schools, she took it upon herself to teach the children at home. But there was also a fearless and fiery side to this otherwise gentle and caring soul. Mona was an outspoken defender of human rights, this in a country where speaking the truth carried grave consequences.
On one occasion, her religious studies teacher had assigned a class essay. The topic was: “The fruit of Islam is freedom of conscience and liberty.” Like the other students, she was expected to deferentially repeat revolutionary polemics, glorifying Iran’s rulers as just and wise. Instead, she had written a provocative essay on their treachery and hypocrisy.
“Freedom,” Mona wrote, “is the most brilliant word,” but there have always been “powerful and unjust” men who have resorted to “oppression and tyranny . . . Why don’t you let me be free . . . to say who I am and what I want? Why don’t you give me freedom of speech so that I may write for publications or talk on radio and television about my ideas? . . . Yes, liberty is a Divine gift, and this gift is for us also, but you don’t let us have it . . . Why don’t you push aside that thick veil from your eyes?”
In a Canadian high school, such words from a 16year-old rebel with a cause would have won the praise of her teachers. In Iran, it would cost Mona her life.
On Oct. 23,1982, at 7:30 p.m., while she was sitting on the couch, studying for her English exam, the Revolutionary Guards raided Mona’s home. Everything was ransacked in search of a pretext to incriminate her in imaginary crimes. They did not find anything, but that hardly mattered. They grabbed her and her father and took them to prison. Her mother recounted begging them to stop: “She’s just a child, where are you taking her? Please don’t take her.” They produced Mona’s essay and retorted: “The person who wrote this isn’t a child.”
For the next eight months, Mona was confined to a filthy prison cell. She endured repeated interrogations and brutal torture. Her tormentors did what they could to extract a confession for fabricated offences such as “misleading children” and “espionage for Israel.” But they failed. My dear friend Ruhi Jahanpour was in prison with Mona and the other Baha’i women in Shiraz. She was among the very few that survived.
Ruhi described the horrible pain of bastinado, the whipping of the soles of the feet with cables: “They blindfolded me and tied me to a kind of bed, and then they put my feet there . . . After a few lashes they would pause for a little bit, because they knew our feet were getting numb and they wanted us to feel the pain. They would continuously say things like, ‘If you deny your faith, I’ll let you go.’ ”
Following these vicious beatings, the women would be dumped in their cell with swollen bleeding feet, unable to walk. Ruhi explained that the prison guards had been told that this brutality would hasten the apocalyptic return of the messianic Hidden Twelfth Imam awaited by the Shia Muslims: “We have to get rid of all of you to prepare the way for him to come. The only reason that he hasn’t come yet is because of you dirty people.”
Having failed to break Mona’s will through torture, the prison officials used her father to make her more compliant with their demands. When they threatened to flog her in front of him, she calmly said: “I am ready.” But her father beseeched her to give them whatever information they wanted. She agreed on the condition that she could embrace her father. In his arms, both full of tears, she confessed: “I was a children’s class teacher.”
Mona’s only “crime” was that the Islamic Republic did not approve of her beliefs. The religious judge who interrogated the prisoners had given the Baha’is a stark choice: “Islam or execution.” It was an ultimatum to convert or face death. In a final attempt to force Mona to change her mind, the authorities arrested her mother. The judge gave her a blunt warning: “We will kill your husband . . . we will kill your daughter . . . and you can go home and mourn their loss.” But the more they tortured Mona, and the more they used her parents against her, the more she refused to budge. Having endured so much pain, she was no longer afraid of death.
Her tormentors did what they could to extract a confession for fabricated offences such as “misleading children” and “espionage for Israel.” But they failed “Why don’t you let me be free . . . to say who I am and what I want? Why don’t you give me freedom of speech so that I may write for publications or talk on radio and television about my ideas?” MONA MAHMUDNIZHAD
On March 12, 1983, Mona’s father was hanged with several other Baha’is in a polo field in Shiraz, their lives extinguished where the Game of Kings was once played. Mona wept in her prison cell, remembering her final farewell, when she had kissed his eyes, knowing that the end had come. It was now her time to say farewell. She knew what awaited her, but she was determined to live her last hours with courage and dignity. Her mother recounted the few minutes they were given to say their final goodbyes:
We walked a little way and then she stopped . . . She looked into my eyes and said, “Mom, you do know that they are going to execute me?”
Suddenly my whole being seemed to be on fire. I didn’t want to believe her. I said, “No, my dear daughter, they are going to let you go. You will get married and have children. My greatest wish is to see your children. No, don’t even think that.”
Mona’s mother was in desperate denial; but she could no longer escape the reality of her daughter’s impending execution. She recounted how Mona comforted her as they bid farewell for the last time: “I felt so small before the greatness of her soul, as if she were the mother and I the child.”
On the evening of June18,1983, the head of Adelabad prison called out the name of Mona and nine other Baha’i women. Under cover of darkness, they were driven in a minibus to the same polo field where her father had been executed. The driver, devastated by what he saw, would later recount what transpired on that terrible, infamous night. The 10 women were hanged one by one. Mona was the last to be brought onto the scaffold. She had been forced to watch the agonizing deaths of all her friends. She had endured months of ruthless torture. She had suffered unspeakably at the loss of her father. And now, in her last moments, the merciless men that were about to snuff out her precious life were subjecting her to vicious insults.
As Mona stood on the gallows, in a final act of defiance, she smiled at her executioner.
In the early hours of June19,1983, sometime between 4 a.m. and 5 a.m., the lifeless bodies of the10 women were brought to the prison morgue. Later that day, Mrs. Mahmudnizhad came to identify her daughter. As she stared at Mona’s beautiful face, she hoped that her daughter’s eyes would open, that she would smile at her one last time. As she stood there, lost in her grief, one of the prison guards approached her. She braced herself for yet more vicious insults. But instead, the mighty-bearded revolutionary broke down in tears: “Please forgive us. We . . . have no authority . . . ? Please forgive me. Please.” She embraced the prison guard, calming him like a child. When the story of Mona’s ordeal reached me, I became dazed and devastated. It took some time for the reality of her execution to sink in. Here I was, a Canadian teenager, worried about popularity among my high school friends, while back in Iran, the youth were being killed for writing an essay. It became in-