Robert Fisk - The Great War for Civilisation - The Conquest of the Middle East

Khalkhali was unashamed at publicly naming his own ‘hit list’, and he was perfectly serious; more than a decade later, I would meet the head of the Iranian hit squad sent to Paris to murder Bakhtiar. So was Khalkhali really the ‘wrath of God’? I asked. ‘I grew up in poverty and therefore I can understand poor people. I know all about the previous regime. I have read books about politics. The Imam ordered me to be the Islamic judge and I have done the job perfectly. That’s why none of the Shah’s agents in Iran has escaped my hands.’ *

It would be seven months before I saw Khalkhali again. His monstrous reputation had not been sullied by a temporary fall in the number of executions. By July 1980, his wrath was falling on new and more fruitful pastures. He stood now, this formidable judicial luminary, in the sunny courtyard of Qasr prison, brandishing a miniature pink plastic spoon, smacking his lips noisily and tucking into a large cardboard tub of vanilla ice-cream. For a man who had just ordered the first public execution in Tehran for fifteen years, he was in an excellent frame of mind.

Five days earlier, a gruesome new precedent had been set when four people – two of them middle-aged married women – were stoned to death in the southern Iranian city of Kerman. All had been condemned for sexual offences by one of Khalkhali’s revolutionary courts, and within hours the condemned had been dressed in white cloth, buried up to their chests in the ground and bombarded with rocks as large as a man’s fist. In a characteristic and typically unnecessary comment, the court later stated that all four had died of ‘brain damage’. The women were condemned for being ‘involved in prostitution’ and for ‘deceiving young girls’. One of the men was convicted of homosexuality and adultery, and the other for allegedly raping a ten-year-old girl. Before execution, the four were ritually bathed and shrouded, a ceremonial white hood being placed over their heads. Local clergymen had visited the condemned and chosen the stones for the execution, varying in size between one and six inches in diameter. It took the two women and two men fifteen minutes to die. *

‘I don’t know if I approve of stoning,’ Sadeq Khalkhali said, flashing a grin at us journalists and at a group of startled diplomats who had also been invited to the Qasr prison. ‘But in the Koran, it is mentioned that those who commit adultery should be killed by stoning.’ The Hojatolislam dug his little spoon into the melting white ice-cream, oblivious to the bare-headed prisoners who trudged past behind him, heaving barrels loaded with cauldrons of vegetable soup. ‘We approve of anything the Koran says. What is the difference between killing people with stones and killing them with bullets? But throwing stones certainly teaches people a lesson.’ Khalkhali modestly disowned responsibility for the Kerman stonings – his bearded public relations man informed us that a man called Fahin Kermani had taken this weighty decision – but he agreed that he had ordered some fresh executions that morning. Seven men had been lined up at one end of Jamshid Street at five o’clock and shot down by a firing squad while a large crowd gawked from a distance. Many of those who died had been convicted of drug offences, and it was in his role as chief of the Iranian anti-narcotics squad that the Hojatolislam had welcomed us to Qasr prison to view his latest haul of contraband.

One could only be impressed. Khalkhali had piled it up in the prison mosque, a magnificent frescoed edifice with a cupola of red and blue tiles, now filled with tons of opium, kilogram sacks of heroin, large sticky slabs of hashish, stolen refrigerators, ornately carved backgammon boards, a 2½– metre wall of cigarettes – here I thought briefly of Harvey Morris in his Reuters ‘saturnalia’ – thousands of bubble pipes, carpets, knives, automatic rifles and rows of champagne bottles (Krug 1972). The beautiful mosque literally reeked of hashish as Khalkhali made a triumphal tour of his loot, pushing his way past 20 tons of opium and at least 100 kilograms of heroin, each neatly packed into clean white sacks. It was inevitable that he would be asked whether the revolutionary courts were dealing enthusiastically enough with drug-dealers, and equally inevitable that the Hojatolislam would evince a broad smile – directed at the diplomats – before replying. ‘If we did what others wanted us to do, we would have to kill many people – which in my opinion is simply impossible,’ he said. ‘Things could end up in a crisis. If we were going to kill everyone who had five grams of heroin, we would have to kill five thousand people – and that would be difficult.’ In fairness, it should be added that the Ayatollah had made a fair start. In the past seven weeks, his courts had summarily dispatched 176 men and women to the firing squads for narcotics offences, many of them sentenced by Khalkhali himself in the innocuous tree-shaded concrete building 300 metres from the little mosque.

Khalkhali tried hard not to look like an ogre; he repeatedly denied that he was any such thing. His small, plump frame, grey beard and twinkling eyes give him a fatherly appearance, the kind of man who might have been more at home at the fireside in carpet slippers with the family cat purring beside him – just so long as the family cat survived. He joked frequently with us as he made his round of the mosque, good-naturedly poking his finger into the sacks of opium that lay beneath the main cupola. Every minute or so, a young man in a pale green shirt with a pistol tucked into his trousers would clamber onto a pile of heroin bags and scream ‘God is Great’ at the top of his lungs, a refrain that would be taken up and echoed around the mosque.

‘If you look at me, you don’t see an inner struggle written all over my face,’ Khalkhali remarked as he emerged into the sunshine. ‘But I am actually a revolutionary person. I am chasing agents everywhere – in France, England and America. That is a fact. I am chasing them everywhere.’ He claimed a ‘200 per cent success’ in stamping out drug-running in Iran and an 80 per cent victory in preventing international drug-trafficking – which was why the diplomats had been invited to the Qasr prison to listen to the judge. He claimed that an intercontinental mafia was operating a drugs ring from Pakistan, Burma and Thailand, and described how a member of the ex-Shah’s family allegedly used a private aircraft to fly drugs from Afghanistan to a small airfield outside Tehran. The captured opium, he said, might be used by the government for medical purposes. The hashish and heroin would be burned.

The Hojatolislam strode briskly from the courtyard towards a wire fence, but as he did so, something very strange happened. Dozens of black-veiled women – the wives and sisters of the very men whom the Ayatollah would soon be sentencing – ran across a lawn towards him, clutching babies and crying, ‘Hail to Khalkhali.’ The Hojatolislam affected not to notice them as the soldiers held them at bay, and he pushed his way through a gate in the fence. For a few moments, he talked of holding a formal press conference before entering his tiny courthouse. But then a policeman walked over to us and told us that the judge had become ‘angry’. Sensing that a Hojatolislam’s fury could embrace a journalist or two, we brought this most extraordinary public event to a hurried conclusion. We fled. *

For Westerners, Khalkhali represented a special danger. If the American hostages in the embassy were to be tried by an Islamic court, what if Khalkhali was let loose on them? All Khomeini’s promises of protection could be reinterpreted now that the embassy documents were being slowly put back together to reveal that the Iranian claims of a ‘spy nest’ in Tehran were not entirely without foundation. Thus when the Shah moved from the United States to Panama – a journey of which the Iranians were forewarned by three Western diplomats acting at Washington’s request – the ‘Students of the Imam’ put out a statement repeating the promise to ‘try’ the Americans. †In the end, of course, there was no trial.