What Do Political Prisoners say About the 1979 Revolution?

Once upon a time, when he was very young, he was a revolutionary. Now he is an inmate at Evin Prison. “I confess that I made a mistake by taking part in the revolution,” he says.

A young inmate jumps in. “This is the dish that you prepared for us with your lack of wisdom,” he says. No quarrel follows. The give-and-take concludes with jokes and laughter. Even so, the bitterness remains.

“This is not the first time that we are gathering to argue over whether the revolution was right or wrong,” says Mehdi, another political prisoner. “I am too young, but some of our old-timer inmates are well-known figures from the revolution. Sometimes, in a friendly environment, they come forward and confess to some of their mistakes. It happens a lot that the elders confess to their mistakes in the presence of the burnt-out younger generation that is paying for their revolution.”

Mehdi hastens to add that he is not a supporter of the late Shah, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi. “We are not for the monarchy, and we are against the return of the monarchy,” he says. “But the revolution was a mistake and the same despotism remains.”

“The People Didn’t Do It”

Naser is another political prisoner. He views the revolution from a more historical angle. “The revolution was done by the leftists and the Islamists, not by the people,” he says. “The Marxists and the trained forces of the left got into the action with dreams of fighting imperialism. They were joined by Islamists and certain individuals...who wrote in their memoirs that they had received guerrilla training in Palestine and southern Lebanon. They received financial help and arms from Palestine, Pakistan, Iraq and Libya to start a revolution in Iran. The Marxists and the Islamists brought people into the streets with false promises and denied Iran the opportunity for evolutionary progress. Look at the newsreels from that time. Most of the participants in the demonstrations were supporters of the People’s Mojahedin Organization, the [Marxist] People's Fadaei Guerrillas, and the Islamists.”

Mr. G. is a reformist inmate at Evin. He has a different take on 1979. “None of us participated in the revolution with the idea of the society that exists today,” he says. “We had no premonition that those clear and great ideas would be discarded once the revolutionaries took power and that people, including those of us who were the children of the same revolution, would be treated this way. The ideas were distorted and the direct proof is that we are now in prison. In those days, the revolutionaries used the situation of political prisoners as a propaganda tool for the victory of the revolution. They asked why the children of this country must go to prison because of their beliefs. Now, nobody asks why are we in prison.”

“The government of Shapour Bakhtiar, the Shah’s last prime minister, had opened the doors to political freedom,” says an imprisoned nationalist. “He established a kind of constitutional monarchy that, in the end, would have benefited Iran. To be honest, I cannot call the events of 1979 a revolution. I believe it was an Islamic insurgency. According to the statistics gathered by the journalist and human rights activist Emadeddin Baghi, all those killed or executed under the Pahlavi regime from 1963 to 1979 numbered around 1,200. Compare this to the number of political executions that the current regime has carried out.”

“Right Revolution, Wrong Revolutionaries”

A journalist who is serving time in Evin Prison’s ward 7 believes that the revolution was right, but the revolutionaries were wrong. “The country has sunk into corruption up to his neck,” he says. “The people and the intellectuals were used and discarded. What is interesting is that when I ask anybody in the prison whether they participated in anti-Shah demonstrations, they utterly deny it. It appears that for these old men, such a thing has turned into a badge of dishonor.”

But Sadegh, another political prisoner, does not deny that he participated in the 1979 demonstrations. “I was a high school student and I was young,” he says. “I cannot deny that I got caught in the excitement. It was fascinating for us to take part in the demonstrations. To tell the truth my friends and I went to the streets because we liked the excitement and skipping school. It was exciting for us to take part in a struggle, even if we had no idea what it was about.”

Hossein is a “security” prisoner who was born after the revolution. He says he has no idea about those days, but has talked about them with his father. “My father was a teacher and was active in the 1978-79 demonstrations,” he says. "But it surprised me that he always denied it, as though he had something to be ashamed of. Every time our discussions turned into quarrels, I would tell him that he should at least accept his responsibility. He would answer, ‘We were young and clueless. We came into the street to participate in the excitement of the people.'"

“My father says that until a few months before the revolution, he had never heard of Ayatollah Khomeini,” Hossein says. “It was only a few months before the revolution that he turned into a charismatic figure.” If the revolutionaries had not prevented gradual reforms in Iran, Hossein says, it would have been to everybody’s benefit. “Perhaps today our country would have been ahead of many developed countries."

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