Escape from Iran

Scott Shane and Michael Gordon:

After three days on the run, Ahmad Batebi picked his way down a rocky slope to the stream that marked Iran’s border with Iraq. His Kurdish guides, who had led Mr. Batebi, an Iranian dissident, through minefields and dodged nighttime gunfire from border guards, passed him to a new team of shadowy human smugglers.

At the age of 31, after nearly eight years in Iranian prisons, subjected to torture and twice taken to the gallows and fitted with a noose, Mr. Batebi had fled.

But in Iraq, his former captors had one more chilling message for him. Not long after his arrival in Erbil in March, the new cellphone provided by United Nations officials rang. Mr. Batebi was shocked to hear the familiar voice of the chief interrogator at one of Iran’s notorious prisons.

“We know where you are,” the interrogator said. “You must turn yourself in.”

Instead, Mr. Batebi, one of Iran’s best-known dissidents, received permission to enter the United States. He arrived on June 24.

In several lengthy interviews, Mr. Batebi provided an unusual window on Iran under its ruling clerics. His alienation began at age 9, when he witnessed a deadly stoning. He rose to fame in 1999, appearing on the cover of The Economist magazine holding the bloody T-shirt of a fellow student demonstrator — an image he first saw when a judge slapped it before him and declared, “You have signed your own death sentence.” Finally, after a decade of political combat, he reluctantly decided to abandon Iran for an uncertain exile.

His escape has prompted a paroxysm of denunciation in Iran’s controlled news media, which have accused him of defrauding creditors and suggested that he has long been in league with the United States and Israel, claims that human rights groups dismiss as crude propaganda.

From his Yahoo blog, Mr. Batebi has replied, posting the taunt, “Your hands will never reach me” and the instruction “Click here.” The photograph that pops up shows the dissident, an Iranian Johnny Depp with a ponytail and a satisfied expression, posing in front of the United States Capitol.

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Mr. Batebi may have inherited his jaundiced view of his country’s leaders. After the Islamic revolution of 1979, his father, a customs bureaucrat who had fallen out of favor with the shah’s regime, declined to join the Revolutionary Guards. His mother, a first-grade teacher, taught him and his younger brother and sister a mild, Golden Rule Islam that had little in common with the ayatollahs’ harsh theology.

His own awakening began in fourth grade, when his teacher, fed up with the distortions of an official history textbook, burst out: “Go out and read other things to try to get the truth.”

“The teacher probably doesn’t even remember,” Mr. Batebi said. “But he changed the course of my life.”

A few weeks later came the stoning. Though forbidden by his mother, he slipped out of the house to see the commotion near his school. He saw a man, accused of adultery, buried to the waist, his head covered with a sack that turned red as Revolutionary Guards hurled chunks of concrete. A mullah standing atop a wall gave the orders, and an ambivalent crowd of neighbors looked on.

“I was utterly shocked,” he recalled. “My hands and legs were shaking.” Afterward, he suffered from nightmares.

Years later, he would witness public hangings and dismemberments. “But nothing had the impact of that stoning,” he said. “I thought, This can’t be Islam.”

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It is ironic that the public stoning turned a boy into an enemy of the regime when it was supposed to frighten the onlookers into submission to the religious bigots weird beliefs. The hysteria caused by his escape points out just how frightened the religious bigots are of free expression. It is a sign of their weakness. If they were really as powerful as they pretend they would not care at all about one person's leaving Iran.

There is much more at the link above.