Ameneh Bahrami did not make it easy on her attacker. She waited until the very last second, when the acid drops were about to be dripped into his eyes, before she called the whole thing off.
It has been almost seven years since Bahrami, now 33, had acid thrown in her face by Majid Movahedi, 31, because she did not choose to marry him.
The case has riveted the public and the establishment, with the country deeply divided on whether Movahedi should pay for his crime through invocation of Iran’s Qoranic punishment system of qasas or retribution, which in this case literally means an eye-for-an-eye.
The bulk of the public, apart from the more educated, appears to have supported retribution. But news reports indicate that many officials in the Judiciary have repeatedly urged Bahrami to forego qasas and to accept the cash payment she would be due from Bahrami’s family if she leaves his eyes untouched. It appears that many in the Judiciary are fearful of international condemnation for invoking a form of punishment that was abandoned in the Western world centuries ago.
Retributive justice is known as lex talionis in the European legal tradition. It is the Old Testament punishment standard from the law of Moses, specifically in Deuteronomy 19:17-21, and Exodus 21:23-21:27, which includes the punishments of “life for life, eye for eye, tooth for tooth, hand for hand, foot for foot.”
At one point a few months ago, Bahrami demanded 2 million euros ($2.9 million), far more than the laws allows and a sum that no one believes her attacker’s family could ever produce. More recently, Bahrami said she made that demand simply to highlight the fact that human rights organizations have not helped her in the least. But she did not say how much money she now wanted,
Tehran prosecutor, Abbas Jafari-Dolatabadi lauded Bah-rami for her decision, showing clearly where he stood on the question. “That was very brave of her,” Dolatabadi said. He said Movahedi would remain in jail until a court decided how much he must pay.
Bahrami was brought to a hospital Sunday by her family and friends to be present for the blinding of her attacker. The man fell to his knees weeping when she entered the room. Television cameras recorded the scene as the doctor in charge of applying the acid asked Bahrami, “What do you want to do now?”
After a dramatic pause, Bahrami said: “I forgive him. I forgive him.”
Movahedi cringed against a wall, sobbing.
Bahrami then explained: “It is best to pardon when you are in a position of power.”
She later hinted that the international reaction was a factor. “It seemed like the whole world was waiting to see what we did,” she observed.
Many in Tehran assumed the performance was scripted and that the Judiciary only scheduled the punishment after Bahrami had promised not to carry it out. The acid application had been delayed before when Bahrami was insisting on seeing it carried out.
It appeared unlikely that the Judiciary would allow the cameras in the room if the world was really going to be shown a man in process of being blinded and disfigured. Furthermore, Mov-ahedi had not been sedated, although the court had said he should be before the 20 drops of acid were applied. At the same time, the show of a man reduced to tearful babbling is seen by many in Iran as a frightening lesson that might discourage men with similar ideas from taking out their wrath on former girlfriends.
Two years ago, Bahrami told a radio interviewer in Spain, where she had gone for medical treatment, that she wanted Movahedi blinded. “I am not doing this out of revenge, but rather so that the suffering I went through is not repeated.”
Part of the theory behind qasas is that it deters crime. But some analysts argue that all the publicity behind such cases actually encourages similar attacks. There have been a handful of acid attacks on Iranian women in recent decades, but such crimes are almost unknown in the West where there is no retributive justice anymore.
One thing that is different about this case is that it doesn’t involve some poorly educated villagers, but two students at Tehran University, the country’s most prestigious institution of higher education.
Movahedi threw sulfuric acid in Bahrami’s eyes at a bus stop in 2004 after he had begged her in vain to marry him. For months, he had stalked the electronics major.
In the end, she was left blind and disfigured. She underwent 19 operations.
The court awarded her 300 million rials ($30,000) in compensation and ordered Movahedi sent to jail. But Bahrami said she did not want the money. She wanted her attacker to suffer the same anguish she was forced to endure.
His mother phoned her parents, begging for mercy. Bahrami was quoted recently as saying the young man‘s mother “said that Majid would always work for me if he could keep his eyes. But now it’s too late.”
Bahrami says she has received death threats because of her determination to exact revenge. “The police have told me not to go out on the street alone. My parents are scared. They think the judges are wrong.”
The day before Movahedi’s blinding was scheduled in May and then postponed at the last minute, she said: “I’m very happy. After six years, I’m getting justice. But we are both losers because we have both suffered greatly.”
Some Tehranis sneered that they thought Bahrami was trying to take advantage of the opposition to her blinding Movahedi by extorting 2 million euros from the offended populace.
Bahrami told Rouzegar, “It is my ultimate wish that Majid be blinded.” She said that within her family only her brother opposed the blinding.
She also complained that neither Movahedi nor his parents had ever made any gesture of apologizing for what he had done over the years.
She said that the judges in the case told her the retributive blinding was “too cruel.” She said they only abided by the law of qasas after years of hounding by her.
Along the way, the case has seen some bizarre twists. For example, at one point Bahrami was told she could only blind her attacker in one eye because she is a woman. The legal issue is that Islamic law says a woman’s courtroom testimony is only valued at half a man’s, and the blood money payable for injuring or killing a woman is only half that for injuring or killing a man. Applying that principle to Bahrami’s case, only one eye of her male attacker need be blinded to make “equal” retaliation for blinding the woman in both eyes.
“I explained to the judge that with one eye one can still live,” she said. The court then ruled that Bahrami would be allowed to have her attacker blinded in both eyes only if she gave up the $30,000 in compensation the court had awarded her. That was fine with her.
“He will be anesthetized and will not suffer pain. His face will not be disfigured because only a few drops [of acid] will be needed He will not have the internal injuries I had,” Bahrami told Spanish reporters who interviewed her two years ago while she was in Spain for treatment.
“He did not have any compassion when he waited for me for hours outside my workplace and threw the acid on me,” she said.
Spanish news reports said that after undergoing treatment in Barcelona, Bahrami recovered 40 percent of her vision in one eye. Shortly afterward, however, Bahrami suffered an infection that caused her to lose complete sight in both eyes. In addition to being blinded, Bahrami also suffered serious injuries and permanent scars on her face and body.
There have been other acid attacks in Iran. The most notorious was in 1997 when a spurned suitor hired a man to throw acid in the face of the 17-year-old girl who rejected him. The hired man did so, disfiguring, but not blinding, the 17-year-old and her 10-year-old sister who was standing nearby. A court sentenced the hired hand to 15 years in prison, but the spurned suitor got only three years imprisonment. The public uproar was swift and loud. As the case worked its way through appeals courts, the sentences were progressively increased until the hired hand was sentenced to be disfigured with acid and the suitor was hanged.
Some see the Bahrami-Movahedi case as just another wrenching news story. But others see the case as telling something about weaknesses in Iranian society. Nayereh Tohidi, a professor at California State College in Northridge, told Time magazine: “[Based on] such customs, a man sees it as his prerogative to possess the woman he desires, regardless of her feelings and mutual love. This eye-for-an-eye tribal approach to crime underlies how the law reinforces a cycle of violence instead of reducing it. A young blind man is going to be added to a young blind woman for society to take care of.”