Then They Came for Me_ A Family's Story of Love, Captivity, and Survival - Maziar Bahari [136]
Moloojoon’s reaction to the calls was classic, and it makes me so proud of her. After losing her husband, first-born son, and daughter within four years, she had in many ways lost the desire to live, but the calls gave her a reason to be strong once again and to fight. “Who are you?” my elderly mother demanded, challenging one anonymous caller. “Maziar is out of your hands, he is free, and you can’t do anything to him anymore.” She then simply hung up and phoned me to say that the ashghals have been calling her again.
It is very difficult for both of us that, for the foreseeable future, I cannot return to Iran to see her. However, my mother can travel outside of the country and has come to London to visit us three times since my release from prison. As much as I’d love for her to live closer to Paola, Marianna, and me, she has no desire to leave Iran permanently. “Your mother doesn’t want to leave the country to the wolves,” a family friend told me recently. “She’s a proud Iranian who tries to keep the spirit of the country alive in her own way. Your father was also one such Iranian; so was Maryam.” Although I chose a path toward building a more democratic Iran that was different from that of Maryam and my father, their memory still gives me hope and inspires me.
Epilogue
On May 9, 2010, I was tried in absentia by a revolutionary court, a type of court that deals primarily with political crimes. My sentence—thirteen and a half years’ imprisonment plus seventy-four lashes—was one of the most severe imposed on any postelection prisoner. There was no court session, and my lawyer never heard the charges. Rosewater and the Revolutionary Guards’ intelligence unit, which had arrested me, dictated the following sentence to the judge:
Five years’ imprisonment for unlawful assembly and conspiring against the security of the state. This had to do with my reporting on, and taking part in, four days of peaceful demonstrations after the election, along with millions of other Iranians.
Four years for collecting and keeping secret and classified documents. In 2002, a septuagenarian leader of the opposition group Freedom Movement of Iran gave me a court document regarding a trial of certain members of his group. There was nothing secret in the document, all its contents had been announced by the judiciary, and the file is widely available on the Internet. During the interrogations I was asked only once about the document, which even Rosewater didn’t think was sensitive.
One year for propagandizing against the holy system of the Islamic Republic. This was for all the articles I had written and the films I had made in Iran.
One-year imprisonment and seventy-four lashes for disrupting the public order. This referred to my Newsweek article and Channel 4 report on the attack against the Basij base after the first peaceful demonstration. Even though I had condemned the violence in my report, the revolutionary court agreed with Rosewater that I was a “peaceful terrorist.”
Two years for insulting the supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. Nothing would be complete in Iran without mentioning the supreme leader. In an email I’d written to my Newsweek editors Nisid and Chris, which the Guards had found, I’d said that Khamenei had learned from the mistakes the shah had made when he was overthrown by the Islamic Revolution. I mentioned that Khamenei tries to nip any opposition in the bud by arresting its leaders and preventing people from taking to the streets. Rosewater had told me that by comparing Khamenei to the shah I had implied that the supreme