EHRAN
— Ahmad Batebi, a student activist, ran so afoul
of the government that he received a death sentence
in 1997. It was never carried out, but he languished
in jail until on one recent day he was given the
luxury of a 20-day leave.
Things went well until, two days before he was to
return to the Evin Prison to serve out his 15-year
sentence, he was rearrested in November. He had met
that day with the United Nations human rights envoy,
Ambeyi Ligabo.
A few days later, Mr. Batebi "had a weak
voice and said that he could not talk much,"
said his father, Mohammad Baqer Batebi, who spoke
with him by phone. "He did not know where he
was taken but said he was in the custody of the
judiciary."
Mr. Batebi became a symbol of student struggle
for democracy after his picture, which showed him
raising the blood-stained T-shirt of a fallen
comrade in the student demonstrations of 1997,
appeared in the Western media. He was charged with
rallying against the government and received the
death sentence, which was later reduced to a jail
term.
"There is not a second that I don't wish I
was a free man," Mr. Batebi said, sipping a
milkshake in a cafe here before his rearrest.
"Whether I want it or not, I am in prison as a
representative of the student movement, and I will
have to carry this burden as honorably as I
can."
The tough days in prison have shattered him. At
the cafe, he pulled out of his pocket a fistful of
medicine that he needs to calm his jittery nerves.
He has lost teeth and has hearing problems and bad
vision because of the beatings of his face.
He has bad lungs, for which he blames his cell's
location in the basement next to the main sewage
pipe. Most prisoners are sick because of lack of air
and the harsh smell of the chemicals used to kill
the smell, he said. One of his cellmates, Akbar
Mohammadi, had lung surgery.
The authorities at the prison summoned him twice
to carry out the death sentence. "They told me
to take off my clothes and wear a white dress,"
he said in the interview. "Every single bone
was shaking in my body, and I could hear their
sound," he said about the first time he felt
the rope around his neck. He was reprieved, but the
next time, they kept him on the stool for two hours
before they announced that the execution had been
postponed.
"Before I was jailed, I thought that the
stories others told about their prison experiences
were exaggerated," he said, referring to prison
memoirs by other activists. "But I told only
one-tenth of what happened to me."
For three years now, Mr. Batebi has been able to
study sociology from prison, and can take exams at
Payam-e-Nour University. "The condition is that
I should not speak to any of the students," he
said.
His joy in prison is a Spanish guitar, which he
luckily found in the cultural section of the prison
and learned to play.
Prison has turned Mr. Batebi, once very
religious, into a secular person. "I read many
books and saw different people in jail," he
said. "I learned that I have to depend on
myself and no other power to survive."
Despite the common feeling of disappointment
toward President Mohammad Khatami, Mr. Batebi says
he owes his life to him. "Thanks to him, there
were at least a couple of free newspapers to write
about Ahmad Batebi and force the authorities to
throw away the death sentence," he said.
"I would have certainly been executed years
earlier."
