My husband was in Evin Prison in Tehran.
He had been tortured and spent nearly four months
in solitary confinement.
It was the last days of the war.
We hoped that with the end of the war,
the conditions might improve.
On the day after the ceasefire, I went to visit him.
As I was approaching the prison compound, I noticed the worried
faces of families of other inmates.
I asked what had happened.
They said a group had been executed.
I went inside.
I asked the prison officials what had happened,
but they wouldn't say.
I cried and screamed, but we were told nothing.
Then they called a member of my family in and told him
that my husband had been executed.
They said that he had not agreed to cooperate, that he did not
want to be on their side.
So he had been executed.
The prison officials would not say where his body had been taken,
but for years we had heard of a cemetery on the Khavaran Road
that runs south of Tehran, where many of the executed were buried.
We went there.
There were a number of new graves, some with bunches of flowers.
I saw a man coming towards us.
He told us that he was the gravedigger and that he'd dug graves
for all the executed.
He asked if any of our relations had been executed.
I said yes.
He said I was not the only one,
and pointed to a part of the cemetery.
We said 60 bodies were brought in the day before.
We asked how one could identify them.
He said that there is a tag around the ankle of each
with the name.
He said we could open the graves if we wanted,
but he would not help.
My mother and I started to dig.
We judged by size, the grave that might be my husband.
The air smelled strongly of the bodies which were buried
just below the surface.
A face fell out of the blanket in which it was wrapped.
It was the face of a young man of no more than 25 years.
I brushed the dirt and blood aside.
He seemed to have a smile on his face.
But it was not my husband.
By now, I was crying and there were too many graves.
It was impossible and we knew that the security forces
could descend on us at any time.
We came back one more time, but the cemetery was circled
by security forces.
They threatened to arrest us.
I told them that they couldn't kill my husband and expect me not
to visit his grave.
I told them if they wanted to arrest me, so be it.
I went to the grave, which I had been told by other families
might be my husband's, and laid flowers there.
Then I left Iran secretly for exile, here in Paris.
I am left now with a lot of memories of the past.
My children are my only source of happiness.
But the important thing that occupies my thoughts
is the question of what it was all for.
GUNFIRE AND CHANTING
Ten years ago, the Shah of Iran was brought
down by a mass revolution.
Ten days ago, Ayatollah Khomeini,
the man who became its leader, died.
At the beginning, it was the revolution that united
all classes in Iranian society against a corrupt regime
that ruled through violence and fear,
through torture and execution.
Together, the Iranian people took on the Shah
and his Western-trained army, and they won.
But ten years on, that unity has disappeared.
The revolution that Ayatollah Khomeini did so much to create
and shape survives, but it has been transformed.
Under his leadership, it has become something that seems intent
on devouring its own children.
Many hundreds of the regime's political opponents
have been executed in Iran's prisons over the last year.
These are lists of those executed published by just one group.
The columns reveal clearly who they were.
These are the children of the middle classes who eagerly embraced
and fought in the revolution ten years ago and now
were being destroyed by it.
The execution has disturbed even those at the heart of the regime.
Ayatollah Montazeri, who was then Ayatollah Khomeini's spiritual heir,
wrote this letter to his leader, pleading with him
to stop the executions.
"They are," he says, "a disregard for the law
"and the ruling of judges.
"They will be seen by our own supporters as no more than an act
"of vengeance and revenge."
HE SPEAKS FRENCH
TRANSLATION: Last year's terror in Iran was unique in the world,
even in Iran's history,
because at that time, all political prisoners were obliged
to repent their political beliefs,
or they were systematically executed.
It was in fact a liquidation, pure and simple,
of all political prisoners, of all organisations
who refused to repent.
How can the revolution come to this?
Well, we've read, haven't we, that all revolutions come to this.
I mean, we were all revolutionaries.
We entered it with dual feelings.
I mean, on the one hand, we thought we were going to make this into
a different revolution.
That a Stalin isn't going to come out of it,
a Robespierre isn't going to come out of it.
I mean, so that was one.
But on the other hand, this revolution, its leadership
was the farthest away from us, from our image of the revolution.
Right?
So how could I have made it into the ideal one?
Into the one that the Russian one was not, the French one was not,
if you like.
I mean, into that perfect one.
To many in the West, the Iranian revolution seems incomprehensible,
a unique upheaval that is dragging Iran back to the seventh century.
But behind its strange images,
there has been a struggle for power that has followed a pattern common
to many other revolutions.
This film is an attempt to understand that pattern.
The road down which many revolutions have gone before,
from liberation to repression.
The Road to Terror.
The first mass revolution began exactly 200 years ago in Paris.
For the first time ever in history, the people rose up as a mass
to demand a change.
Not just in who ruled them, but in the entire
social and political system they lived under.
They wanted to change the world.
The challenge of the revolution was to the age-old order
of European rule, to the notion that men were made by God to be unequal.
To the world of 1789, this was terrifying.
One writer described it as, "An inflamed passion
"which has become a new kind of religion, a religion
"that has flooded the world with its fighters, its apostles
"and its martyrs."
200 years later, we in Western Europe still live in the shadow
of that revolution, but out of the ruins of the autocratic regime
that fell apart that summer of 1789, came an entirely
new idea of society.
It is the goal that the Western world still pursues.
A society where the people are sovereign,
but the exercise of power will be guided, above all,
by a concern for individual liberty and human rights.
True to its revolutionary tradition, Paris has since then been a home
to political exiles and today thousands of Iranians who have fled
the present regime live here.
But ten years ago, the man who was about to become one
of this century's most famous revolutionaries was also based
here in exile.
Ayatollah Khomeini's house in a quiet Paris suburb is now
a ruin, blasted apart by a bomb planted by an opposition group.
But ten years ago, it was home to the man around whom the growing
resistance to the Shah was gathering.
SHE SPEAKS FRENCH
TRANSLATION: It all began here exactly ten years ago.
It was in November or December and it was snowing.
At that time, I was living in Brussels,
and like many other Iranians, I wanted to know why all the people
were talking about Khomeini, and so I decided to come here
to see who he was and what it was he was planning.
I had prepared a number of questions.
Most of all, I wanted to know what he thought about women,
about their role in society,
what would happen to them when he returned to the country,
and also, did he plan to seize power himself?
He began to make quite a speech, saying that under the Shah,
women were treated as objects, like dolls,
but now they would be free to do what they want.
And about power, he said,
"I shall never take power. I only want to return to my country.
"I understand absolutely nothing about politics.
"I only want to go back home."
On January the 31st, 1979,
Ayatollah Khomeini left to return to Tehran.
Although the airports had been closed against him,
he and the group of revolutionary intellectuals around him
were convinced that their time had come.
That the opposition on the streets was now strong enough
to force the regime's hand.
SIREN
HE SPEAKS FRENCH
TRANSLATION: All I had in mind was the overwhelming desire
to see my country.
No-one had ever imagined that we would be able to return.
That the monarchy would be brought down
after centuries and centuries of rule.
That feeling erased everything else.
But in the plane, I could see that person trying to sit
in a particular seat and another person trying to stop
somebody else coming close to Khomeini.
All this made me think again.
What was going to happen once we had succeeded - were victorious?
What would happen to our regime?
He was seen as a leader, as a populist leader,
who would represent all and then who would step aside
and who would let democracy flourish, OK.
SINGING
But the first taste of what was to come, really,
was this interview on the Air France jet
coming to Tehran, right.
With millions of people waiting for him,
estimated five million people waiting for him
in the streets of Tehran.
The interviewer asks him, "How do you feel returning to your country
"after 20 years in exile?"
And he looks and he says nothing.
That's it. Nothing, right.
That really shook us.
The most revered leader,
you know, throughout probably the history of 20th century.
I mean, in a way, more than even Gandhi,
because the Muslims had problems with Gandhi.
Here, you had Armenians, Jews, Zoroastrians, Communists,
you know, Muslims of various sects,
saying, "OK," you know, "Let's do it together. You're our leader."
That's coming from these people.
And he says nothing.
TRANSLATION: And then the mullahs came into the plane
and they came up and encircled him and carried him away.
We were left behind and I had the feeling that now,
we, the intellectuals, our part was over.
Our role had been to look after him
and now the mullahs had come to fetch him
to establish their own power.
Although the Shah had fled Iran before Khomeini's arrival,
he had left behind him a government and an army.
For the next few days, thousands of young revolutionaries
fought together on the streets.
They came from all political and religious groupings,
united against one of the strongest armies in the world,
that was crumbling in front of their eyes.
Hundreds of thousands of weapons were seized and spirited off
by a multitude of revolutionary organisations,
each with their plan for the revolution.
To impose his authority, Khomeini had already announced
a provisional government.
The new Prime Minister would be a man of impeccable liberal
and Islamic credentials - Mehdi Bazargan.
TRANSLATION: I warn everyone that they should obey
because this is an Islamic and legitimate government.
So everybody will obey this government.
HE SPEAKS FRENCH
TRANSLATION: The most important moment for me
was a few hours after the Shah had gone.
Immediately, public opinion began to search for something
to replace him with.
Then, immediately after that, in the public imagination,
the Imam took the place of the Shah.
Because the Shah's departure after 50 years of his family's rule,
had left this vacuum into which Khomeini was then sucked.
But Khomeini did not have the means to take over power as such.
It was going to take a whole series of events to transform him
from being a kind of anti-Shah
to becoming a kind of duplicate of the Shah.
And it would be a diabolical process.
As in other revolutions, it was violence that made
the growing divisions clear.
In May, Ayatollah Motahhari, one of Khomeini's closest advisers,
was mysteriously assassinated.
His death heightened the emotions surrounding the debate
on what should be the shape of the new constitution.
To the liberals and many of the left, Islam was to be separate
from the state and Parliament would be sovereign.
But to those Islamic parties that drew their inspiration
from the writings of Khomeini himself,
sovereignty belonged to God, not to the people.
In their society, political power would lie with the supreme guardian
who interpreted God's law.
It was a struggle for power.
I mean, here...
It was... It was, if you like, the exact opposite
of what was the main characteristic of the pre-revolutionary days.
I mean, then, the Iranian revolution was the most united,
the widest possible revolution, I think, of all times.
I mean, we were all... It seemed that almost...
In its last days, it was, like, everybody together.
SHE SPEAKS FRENCH
TRANSLATION: But little by little, it all began to fall apart
and the fundamentalists began to come and attack people
who were in political discussion.
And then they would shout slogans about Khomeini -
fundamentalist slogans.
As in the French Revolution, the crowd, the mass,
was now fragmenting.
Parts of it were becoming a force to be used by those
who wanted to push the revolution on past the attempts to reform,
to compromise with the country's corrupt past,
towards instead their idea of a completely new sort of society.
REPORTER: Officially, Iran is now ruled by Prime Minister Bazargan,
but real power is in the hands of Ayatollah Khomeini
and the Revolutionary Council.
During the Shah's time, this building housed Iran's parliament -
a largely nominal democracy since he ruled as an autocrat.
Today, the building is the headquarters
of the Central Komiteh -
Tehran's version of the Paris Commune of the French Revolution.
Real power on the streets of Tehran lies not with the Prime Minister
and Cabinet, but with the komitehs led by Ayatollah Khomeini's...
The struggle for power intensified.
In August, the Komiteh ordered its guards to close down
the newspaper Ayandegan, which had consistently criticised
the fundamentalist concept of the Islamic State.
The paper has been what we consider anti-revolutionary
from the very beginning of the Revolution.
Its articles have not been...
..aimed at unifying the people,
or in any direction at all, to that end.
Is that an argument for shutting it down? No.
We did shut it down.
Ayatollah Khomeini said after the last article,
which was a fabrication,
he said, "I will not myself buy this paper again."
That is all he said, but that is enough.
But isn't that freedom of the press up to the point where the people
guided by Ayatollah Khomeini,
decide that freedom shan't exist any longer?
Well, you see, if the majority want this,
then...this is democracy.
They arrested the council of the writers of Ayandegan
and its editorial board.
Whoever was there was arrested.
Of course, we in the National Democratic Front felt
this is the way...this is the day that we should make
a very, very important stand.
If we do not make a stand here for the freedom of press,
we have not accomplished our duty to the Revolution.
We called for a rally in Tehran, in which almost a million persons
turned up on the roads and marched towards the Prime Minister's office.
We were attacked by organised hezbollahis.
They attacked them with knives, they attacked them with stones,
they attacked them with bricks, which they brought with them.
Lorry-loads of them were brought with them,
they would unload them and they threw them.
The people they actually mobilised were the lumpens, the unemployed,
but especially many of those who'd moved in from the countryside
and mainly lived in the shanty towns around Tehran,
who could only fall back,
who had not been integrated within the urban society,
and who could be mobilised and who could get excited about that,
who felt secure only in terms of within a religious medium
and in terms of religious slogans and religious imageries.
And Khomeini and his radicalism and...and his authority...
..you know, just gave them all they needed.
They became their mob...
..to confront the other groups and organisations,
which basically drew their support from very definite layers
of the urban society -
from students, university students, high school students,
government employees, teachers, professionals.
In October, when fundamentalist students
occupied the American Embassy, Bazargan finally resigned.
Power had now firmly shifted from the liberals
to the Islamic revolutionaries.
But the new constitution that installed Ayatollah Khomeini
as supreme authority also provided for a president,
and in January 1980, Abolhassan Bani Sadr was elected.
Although he was close to Khomeini,
Bani Sadr interpreted his 75% majority as a mandate
to pull back the power that had slipped to the mullahs.
HE SPEAKS FRENCH
TRANSLATION: I wanted to realise the principles
for which the people had made the Revolution.
These were freedom, which I wanted to re-establish, and independence.
All of this would be within an Islamic identity.
And I deliberately stood as a candidate
because of the mullahs' claim that the people were following Khomeini.
I said, "No, it's the opposite.
"It is Khomeini who has followed the people."
Bani Sadr had learned his revolutionary theory
not just on the streets of Tehran, but also as a student
in the Paris riots of May '68.
His imagination had been captured by their apparent spontaneity
and in his Islamic society, it would be the people,
whose spontaneous actions had brought the Shah down,
who would be the interpreters of God's will.
In its peculiar mixing of Western revolutionary theory and Islam,
it was a far cry from Khomeini's concept
of the supreme political authority of the mullahs.
TRANSLATION: So how did we try and stop the mullahs' march
towards dictatorship?
Simply by encouraging the people to remain politically active,
to put them, if you like, face-to-face with the mullahs.
JEERING AND SHOUTING
By the summer of 1980, many of the young revolutionaries
who had stood side-by-side against the Shah
now began to fight and shoot each other openly.
GUNSHOTS
Radical left wing groups such as the mujahedin,
who offered an alternative to the fundamentalist vision of society,
began to attract thousands of followers
as Iranian society polarised.
Originally, they had supported Khomeini for his radicalism.
Now, in the struggle for power, they found themselves attacked
as hypocrites who would destroy the revolution.
But it was a revolution that was, in fact, spinning out of control.
On the 22nd of September, Iraq declared war on Iran.
It was to become one of the longest and bloodiest wars
of the 20th century, but its immediate effect
was to bring yet more suspicion and fear.
As in revolutions before, political opponents now saw each other
as potential or actual traitors,
and Revolutionary Guards used the war as a pretext
to search for and arrest anyone they considered subversive.
In an atmosphere of crisis,
Bani Sadr rapidly became the focus for a broad opposition -
one that ranged from the mujahedin to moderate liberals.
The mullahs, whose power lay in the Iranian parliament,
saw his growing popularity as a direct threat
and in June 1981, they persuaded Ayatollah Khomeini to allow them
to put forward a motion for his impeachment.
Once again, the mob was to play a crucial role.
CHANTING
MAN SPEAKS FRENCH
TRANSLATION: They had decided that the deputies would have five hours
to speak against me and I would have five hours to defend myself.
But it was all set up to prevent me replying.
That is why I asked Khomeini to publish a notice
in which he officially guaranteed that I would leave Parliament alive
after my reply.
CHANTING
It never arrived.
Never.
So it was clear that if I went to Parliament,
they might kill me even before I'd got there
and claim it was the people who had done it.
What it was, in fact, was a coup d'etat.
So they decided to depose him.
So the idea then was...
..we should resist this, right?
We should resist this.
And that was signalled by the huge demonstration,
basically called by mujahedin.
Were you there? Yes.
The demonstration attracted thousands from across the spectrum
of political opposition.
Its size shocked the fundamentalist parties.
It was the direct challenge to the power
of their revolutionary organisations
using the methods that had worked so well against the Shah.
From the komitehs, the orders went out, to kill.
In the parliament building, the debate took place
in an atmosphere of menace.
Many of the deputies who supported Bani Sadr did not turn up,
fearing they would be attacked or arrested.
Then the result was announced.
CHEERING AND CHANTING
That demonstration was the bloodiest ever, in a sense.
I mean, it was attacked by the Revolutionary Guards,
by the neighbourhood komitehs.
It was defended at various points with arms.
GUNFIRE
Various people were killed, many were arrested,
and many were immediately executed.
I mean, that's the beginning of the reign of terror.
EXPLOSIONS
Bani Sadr fled into hiding.
The mujahedin and other opposition groups
declared armed resistance to the regime.
Street battles broke out in Tehran and other cities.
And in the north, Kurdish rebels stepped up their attacks.
Earlier, I'd lost my own illusions about where this revolution
was going, but I think many had great illusions still left,
but, all of a sudden, they saw that, ah, the whole thing has ended
and something has begun,
which, just, in their worst nightmares, they couldn't imagine.
Both sides used the tactics of terror.
Six days after the overthrow of Bani Sadr, a bomb exploded
at the headquarters of the largest pro-Khomeini party.
It killed 74 people, including Ayatollah Beheshti,
second only to Khomeini, four cabinet ministers,
ten deputy ministers and 27 deputies.
Two weeks later, another bomb killed the new President
and Prime Minister, but the regime did not falter.
In response, thousands were arrested and taken to the prisons,
such as Evin Prison in Tehran, a centre of torture under the Shah.
There they were shown on television repenting
and pledging their allegiance to the party that now ruled Iran -
Hezbollah, the party of God.
Many thousands were also executed. In Evin, sometimes over 100 a night.
They were under the control of the revolutionary prosecutor
Asadollah Lajevardi.
What he did after the reign of terror was, on the one hand...
..go for immediate executions
and declaring it, coming out on television saying, "We killed..."
"We are going to kill..." giving interviews,
showing and coming out and saying, "No, we are killing."
And, in fact, they went so far as killing
some members of the Revolutionary Guards themselves.
They were killing at such a speed that in the confusion of people
just being taken to Evin, OK,
some guards were mixed up with prisoners
and they were simply shot, you know, right there.
I mean, that came out. Their... Their identities are known to many,
the Revolutionary Guards who were killed by Lajevardi.
But in that sense it was very effective.
I mean, you know, here there is no joke. It is absolute terror.
TRANSLATION: For those who want to make war, there is severe treatment.
But the people themselves are in favour of the regime.
The people themselves, when they give 16 million votes
to our President, Mr Khomeini, it shows that the people are satisfied.
This rule is the rule of the people themselves.
TRANSLATION: I heard that one of my brothers had been executed.
And when I heard the news, I was so shattered, so sad.
I just couldn't understand.
I thought, it's impossible.
So many people had died for this revolution,
just for the sake of going backwards,
to have yet another fascist.
It's just not possible for a revolution to go this way.
But also, I can't understand how people can kill, can execute,
can torture another human being just because of his thoughts.
It's something I'm never able to understand.
I don't even want to understand.
It's so bloody vile, it's so terrible.
This is Pere Lachaise in the heart of Paris, and not Tehran.
This is a very important and famous cemetery
where many exiles are buried, including Iranians.
Iranians who fled from the terror of Khomeini,
mostly from 1981 onwards.
Of course, this is the graveside
of Gholam-Hossein Sa'edi,
a very prominent Iranian writer
and political thinker.
But at the same time, the Iranian resistance had come
abroad, and Paris had become the centre of the Iranian opposition.
One of the most important reasons for which I came to Paris
was to do something about Khomeini,
together with the rest of the opposition,
which had gathered here.
The first mass revolution brought with it the first terror to Paris
in 1793. Thousands of suspected enemies of the revolution were taken
to prisons such as the Conciergerie.
From there, they were driven daily through the streets of Paris
to the guillotine. Faced with invading armies and with plots
to overthrow the government, a small minority of revolutionaries,
led by Robespierre, turned to terror as a method of preserving their idea
of the revolution.
TRANSLATION: It was the same thing that Stalin did
during the Russian Revolution.
Up to the point where he did not feel himself threatened,
Stalin accepted the ways of the Bolshevik Party.
But from the moment he realised that movements within the party
were leading to his own elimination, he turned to terror.
In the Iranian Revolution it was the same.
A small minority took advantage of the danger created by the war,
and the onrush of the revolution, to seize the reins of power.
And then it used terror as a means of governing.
But Robespierre's problem, as it would be for many other
revolutionaries in the future, was how to justify the use of terror,
yet still persuade the people that the aims of the revolution
had not been destroyed.
At the height of the executions, Robespierre made a speech
in which he tackled this problem head on.
Terror, he admitted, was the main force behind despotic government,
the very sort of government that the revolution had fought to destroy.
But for a revolutionary government, terror was something very different
because it meant the destruction of those whose moral corruption
barred the way to a new society of virtue.
"Terror has now become," he said,
"the despotism of liberty against tyranny."
Another of the Jacobins, Saint-Just, put it more simply -
"We must force the people to be free."
And this is the other legacy of the French Revolution
that has echoed down through many other revolutions
of the past 200 years. That there comes a time
when to preserve the purity of your revolution and your power,
it is necessary and justified to kill,
in order to regenerate a society that is not fully aware
of what is good for it.
CHORAL MUSIC PLAYS
I think most of them were doing it because they thought,
here are infidels, here are our enemies of God,
here are those who are rising against the government of Allah,
you know, and his representative on Earth.
I think that for many, it became so easy to do it,
so easy to do it, because, as many other revolutions
in the past had done it for the sake of history, right,
history, you know, history will justify it.
I mean, history demands you to kill.
I think these people thought that they were doing it for the sake
of God, that they were doing it following God's commandment.
Can you compare it to something like the terror in the French Revolution?
To the extent that it was done
self-righteously, to the extent that it was done
for high motives, for ideals.
You know, I mean, to that extent it wasn't done
for petty advancement by many, I think.
To that extent, they're compatible.
I mean, they're comparable to terror in any other revolution,
where it's done for pure... for selfless motives, if you like,
you know. But I think intertwined with that...
And how can we separate it? ..is power, is the lust for power,
is the losing of power. I think that was very much there, too.
I mean, remember this. Here where - I mean, Iran in this sense,
in some ways maybe, also like the French Revolution,
but certainly more than the Russian and the Chinese and many others,
here was a real revolution in the sense that many people
from the lowest stratas of society
were, you know, were brought to where they felt
now they were on top. Now they were on top
and now, I think there was also an element of revenge.
Don't forget that it was... I mean, that element of revenge,
I think, was very important, was central, was there.
I mean, remember that the Shah,
I mean, just on every level, these people felt degraded
from Khomeini and Beheshti down, as mullahs,
as they were representative of an old, dying culture in Iran,
they felt degraded.
They had this vengeance and they wanted to let it out.
And I think that shooting - see, who were they shooting?
Who were they killing?
They were killing the cream of the Iranian society.
Remember that. They were killing the brightest university students,
who usually would become political.
They were killing the brightest high school students.
They were killing these modern political women,
just, you know, what they hated.
And I mean, they were killing...
They were killing professionals, physicians, lawyers.
They were killing the kind of society that had been developing
in Iran for the past, you know, 100 years.
Today in Tehran, thousands and thousands of people on the march
in a procession which is both religious and political.
These are the poor of South Tehran, and the fuel and basis
of Ayatollah Khomeini's revolution.
As long as they support the Ayatollah,
it doesn't matter if covenants are decimated by death,
exile or disgrace.
CHORAL MUSIC PLAYS
Ayatollah Khomeini had now established his idea
of a revolutionary Islamic society in Iran.
But in the process he had used terror to create that new order.
Like the French Revolution,
it also became a regime committed to exporting its ideas,
ferociously criticising those in the West who would criticise it.
Britain and America had used violence for over 50 years
to dominate Iran as part of their empires.
Yet now, like hypocrites,
they pretended a concern for human rights.
TRANSLATION: To serve Islam is to serve mankind.
Mankind is today enslaved in the hands of those
who supervise them in tyranny.
All nations are caught in the talons of these powers
who consider themselves pious and competent.
TRANSLATION: There are those who claim to be followers
of Jesus Christ who said if one slapped your face,
you should turn it, so that he would slap it on the other side.
Jesus Christ would not make such an error.
Do you think that we in the Western press and the Western media can sit
and make simple judgments of right and wrong
about issues such as human rights,
in a process as complicated as the Iranian Revolution has been?
TRANSLATION: I do not believe that any people or individual
has the right to judge a whole nation
with simplistic and short judgments.
But for the French Revolution,
this period of terror was relatively short.
For the Iranian Revolution, sadly,
it is clear that the terror is not finished.
Why is it endless?
One of the most important reasons is that Khomeini's idea
of the society he wants to create in Iran is not clear.
On the one hand, there is a vision of a utopia
that goes back to the society of 14 centuries ago,
but that is an anachronism.
Iranian society is actually a complex society
of the late 20th century.
This means that Khomeini's Islamic rules and ideas, that have remained
static for centuries, must be exploded and reshaped
to fit today's society.
Or Iran, on the other hand, will have to regress to fit
the image of a tribal society of 14 centuries ago.
This is not possible, and it is this tension
that is the root of the violence.
In the French Revolution, the safety afforded by victory in war
began the end of the terror.
For Iran, the war went on and on, its cemeteries becoming elaborate
memorials to a crusade that seemed without end.
By the spring of 1988, Iran prepared to accept the United Nations
ceasefire, and at that point, the Mujahideen invaded
from their bases in Iraq.
To the regime and many ordinary Iranians weary of
eight years of fighting, this attack was pointless treachery,
an alliance between the opposition and the enemy.
The invasion was repulsed,
but in the climate of insecurity created by the failure to win
the war, it gave another twist to the machinery of terror.
Thousands of political prisoners from all opposition groups,
some who had been in jail for over six years, were asked to repent.
If they refused, they were executed.
We all were part of the revolution,
our families also were part of it too.
But a large number of them have been executed recently.
Reza says that his brother was executed.
Following his execution, Reza's brother-in-law
was executed, his cousin was executed
and also his... another cousin, who was the 13th member
of his family who were executed.
When his family went to know about the body of the prisoners,
they told her that they haven't been buried as such.
They are all being put in a cemetery far away, somewhere in Tehran.
So it was up to the families themselves to find the bodies
of their beloved.
I know that I am not alone.
I know that there have been many thousands of executions
in the prisons in the last year.
What is important for me is to know why these people
have lost their lives.
I remember my husband and I used to talk together.
Neither of us could understand how a revolution
could become like this.
But I also know that without revolutions in the past,
the world would not have changed.
And for me, the struggle continues against another dictator.
I regret having lost a man who had been my best friend.
I loved him and still do,
but I do not regret what has happened
because I know that this revolution is not finished yet.
It is important to note that my husband did not die
for a personal end.
He resisted torture and finally died for something he loved,
and once one is in love, one is capable of anything.
TRANSLATION: This is the place where I came ten years ago
because I was waiting so impatiently for the Iranian Revolution.
This is where, hour after hour, we listened to the radio
for the news of what was happening.
Ten years have gone by,
thousands of people have become victims of the revolution,
and it goes on.
I have lost two close members of my family in the executions
and many other close friends.
For me, this is no longer what the revolution was about.
For me, the revolution is what I saw when I first went back to Iran.
It is what I had read about in history.
But we also know that a revolution always goes forward,
never back.