November 22-2013
Hamid Ghassemi-Shall, back home in Toronto after spending more than five years in Iranian jails, says the psychological torture imposed by his captors was far worse than any physical torture, because the physical injuries disappear in time but the psychological wounds never go away.
Ghassemi-Shall immigrated to Canada in the early 1990s. Now he is back and reunited with his Italian-born wife, Antonella Mega.
This month, they sat down with a reporter from Maclean’s, the Canadian version of Time magazine, and spoke for four hours about their ordeal that started in 2008 when Hamid flew to Tehran for a family visit.
The couple met soon after Hamid had arrived in Canada and he was struggling to adjust to a new country. Hamid was working in a shoe store in Toronto when she walked in. Antonella said she had been looking for shoes without success and was feeling irritated. “And then I saw him. And there was something so special about the way he approached me. And so I said to myself, ‘Okay, be nice to him’.”
They started to talk. Hamid guessed she was Italian. Antonella guessed he was from Iran. “I could tell he was new to the country, and he looked like such a nice person,” Antonella says. “And I remembered it was difficult as an immigrant, and I thought, you know, it’s so nice to have friends when you come to the country.”
Within a year they were married. “When you know the person is the right person, hesitation is not an option,” Hamid says.
Antonella still has the shoes Hamid sold her. They had been put aside for another customer, but Hamid decided to sell them to her anyway.
Hamid frequently returned to Iran to visit his family. He never had reason for concern until 2008, when his brother, Alborz, nine years older than Hamid, was arrested. Hamid went to his brother’s home to find out what was going on. While there, he called his mother, who told him officers were at that moment searching her house. Among the items they took was Hamid’s Canadian passport.
Hamid learned his brother was being held by Iranian Army intelligence. An official there told him the problem was related to Alborz’s service in the Iranian Navy, from which he had retired two years earlier after 29 years of service.
Though Hamid was scheduled to return to Canada shortly, he wanted to stay in Tehran to help Alborz. He needed his Canadian passport to cancel his plane ticket, so he went to Army intelligence to retrieve it.
“When I introduced myself, all of a sudden, I saw five guys,” Hamid says. “They surrounded me. They said, ‘We have a few questions for you. It’s going to take about three hours.’ Those three hours became a death sentence, and 64 months in prison.”
His captors placed him in solitary confinement and began their interrogations, hoping to elicit a confession that he was a spy for an unspecified country. The only evidence prosecutors produced, Hamid told Maclean’s, was a faked email from Hamid to Alborz asking for military information.
“They insult you constantly. They’re swearing at you. They’re insulting your family,” he says, describing sessions that took place every day except Fridays. “We all have pride. We all have dignity. And when they try to squeeze everything that you’ve got, destroy everything that you’ve got, this is worse than physical torture, I think.
“You know, when they beat you, they don’t beat you where there is a scar left on your body. They want that you feel the pain, but there is no sign of punches on your body. The pain goes away and you forget. But when they torture you psychologically, it’s with you for the rest of your life. It’s tattooed on your brain and you can’t do anything.”
Hamid’s interrogators told him they would kidnap his sisters, his nephews, even Antonella in Canada, and bring them to the prison. He believed them.
“Anybody does,” he says. “Because when you’re dealing with somebody that is unpredictable, when you haven’t done anything and you’re being charged with espionage, don’t you think they might do it? So that’s the worst torture.”
On top of that was the solitary confinement. Hamid spent all but a few minutes each day in a tiny cell, six feet by 10 feet.
“And you know, the interrogation room is exactly the same size as your cell. They take you from one cell where nobody’s talking to you, and they put you in another cell. There’s a mirror that you see yourself in, and there’s a voice coming from the other side of the glass. And you’re seeing yourself, and you’re talking to yourself. It has a lot of side effects if that person cannot control himself.”
After eight months of solitary confinement, Hamid and Alborz were tried in a Revolutionary Court. Hamid was allowed 15 minutes with his lawyer. That’s when he learned the espionage charges had been dropped months earlier. Now he and Alborz were accused of co-operating with the Mojahedin-e Khalq. There were no witnesses. To support this new charge, Hamid said, prosecutors simply altered their original faked email. Hamid says he has never belonged to the group or involved in politics at all.
But the judge found the brothers guilty and sentenced them to death. Their lawyer, not wanting to panic them, told them it was life imprisonment.
Antonella says of that time, “Really, I was in a black hole. I knew nothing.” Mahin, Hamid’s younger sister, would call Antonella to reassure her that she had seen Hamid and that he was okay, but her English was not fluent and it was difficult for Antonella to understand exactly what was happening. Hamid was not allowed to call his iwfe.
Hamid and Alborz spent 18 months in solitary confinement—first at the military detention center, then at Evin Prison—and were then transferred to Evin’s general population, Section 350, the infamous section used for political prisoners.
Hamid said there are 11 cells in that section, and each cell has 21 beds, for a total population of 231. The prison population swelled after the 2009 post-election protests, however, and some prisoners had to sleep on the floor.
Still, Hamid said, conditions were much better than in solitary. “We had no problems with the guards or the warden. The problem we have is with the justice system,” he said.
When he left solitary confinement, Hamid learned the truth about his sentence. His lawyer had appealed. The Supreme Court rejected the appeal, and Hamid was given written notice. “When I looked at it, I said, ‘Holy God, execution. They told us life’,” Hamid recalled. “From that point, it became really hard.”
Six of Hamid’s fellow political prisoners were executed during his time at Evin. They would simply be called away—even in the middle of a volleyball game.
Two weeks after their transfer to Evin’s general population, Hamid and Alborz were temporarily moved back to the military detention centre where Alborz suffered a panic attack. Alborz’s health began to collapse. He was refused most medical care and soon died.
The official autopsy report said he had succumbed to cancer, but a coroner privately told his family that Alborz’s skull was crushed and he had suffered a brain hemorrhage.
Antonella went 18 months without hearing her husband’s voice. That changed when Hamid left solitary confinement. There was a phone in the prison wing, with allotted time divided among the prisoners. She now knew he was alive, but “the reality is I didn’t keep my spirits together. There was not one moment in my life that I wasn’t thinking about Hamid. And when Alborz passed away, I sat on this chair for three months. I was paralyzed.”
Antonella was initially disappointed in the Canadian government’s response. Officials at Foreign Affairs, she said, refused initially to speak with her about Hamid without his authorization, citing privacy laws. Eventually they did, but Antonella feels their efforts were limited. “They felt their job was just sending diplomatic notes,” she says.
Canada did not publicly raise Hamid’s case until January 2011, when then-Foreign Affairs Minister Lawrence Cannon issued a statement.
Antonella tried other tactics. She applied, unsuccessfully, for an Iranian visa so she could plead Hamid’s case in Tehran. She enlisted the help of Amnesty International, which, following its own investigation, threw its support behind Hamid. And after keeping mostly silent for the first two years of his incarceration, Antonella began speaking to the media in 2010 in an effort to build public support for Hamid.
In 2012, Hamid asked the prison judge whether he had new information about his case. The judge said, “Your file has arrived here for enforcement,” meaning his execution was near.
Hamid told Antonella, who informed Foreign Affairs. Iran’s charge d’affaires was summoned to meet with the deputy minister of Foreign Affairs in Ottawa.
Prime Minister Stephen Harper publicly warned Iran: “The government of Iran should know that the whole world will be watching, and they will cast judgment if terrible and inappropriate things are done in this case.”
News of these interventions reached Hamid in Evin. He says they were “heartwarming.”
“This is the thing that I wanted from the beginning—a statement from the prime minister that he is supporting the case, is drawing a red line for the Iranian government, and not to cross that line. You get a lot of hope with that.”
A month later, the House of Commons passed a unanimous motion calling on Iran to free Hamid.
Then Canada closed its embassy in Tehran and expelled all Iranian diplomats from Canada. The closure affected Hamid’s family directly. Hamid said the embassy was a “sanctuary” for them, somewhere they could go to get news and reassurance that he hadn’t been abandoned.
But he said he was glad Canada shut the embassy down because of the “clear message” it sent the Iranian government. “I knew they didn’t close down the embassy because of me,” he said. “But I knew my case was part of that closure.”
The Canadian embassy was also where his sister got Hamid English reading material in the form of back issues of Maclean’s. Prison censors did not tear our articles. But, in photos of women, any bare skin was blacked out—including one showing Michelle Obama’s arms.
Things changed only this year. A representative from the prosecutor’s office told Hamid he had reviewed his file and judged him to be innocent. He told Hamid he had requested a retrial. An Iranian intelligence director and expert on the Mojahedin-e Khalq then questioned Hamid.
“He told me right from the beginning, ‘If I find out you have any involvement, I’m going to push for the execution. If not, I’m going to help you get out’,” Hamid told Maclean’s.
Six weeks later, the intelligence director returned to Evin Prison and said he had investigated Hamid and his family “inside and outside” Iran and found no evidence of involvement with the Mojahedin-e Khalq. A retrial was set for August.
Oddly, they accused Hamid of yet another crime: “gathering or colluding against the domestic or international security of the nation.” Retrials, however, should not include new charges. Hamid was found innocent of the original charge of membership in the Mojahedin-e Khalq, but guilty of the new charge. That crime carried a penalty of five years, and he had already served four months more than five years. So he was then a free man—with the judicial system never admitting that he should never have been in jail to begin with.
He emerged from Evin to hear “screaming” from 20 to 30 friends and relatives there to welcome him.
“For me, I didn’t care that much. All I wanted was exoneration from the justice system. They knew I was innocent right from the beginning. They made a mistake. I didn’t want any money from them. All I wanted was an apology to my family—to my brother.”
Hamid called Antonella right away. Her happiness was numbed by worry that Hamid’s freedom might be temporary. She says she could detect fear in Hamid, too.
“I could hear in his voice that he was not free. I could hear that they still held something of him, and I was concerned,” she says. Hamid did not sleep during the flight. “When we reached Canadian airspace in Newfoundland, I know I’m back home,” he said.
A Canada Border Services Agency official allowed Antonella past the first security gate so she could see Hamid first. They had a short time alone, then the two walked arm-in-arm through the sliding glass doors to where a crowd was waiting.
“It was overwhelming,” Hamid says. He didn’t expect so many people, especially strangers. Among them was Salman Sima, who was jailed with Hamid at Evin.
Today, Hamid is back home. “It feels weird. All of a sudden, you are in your own home. And the door, you can open it and go for a walk. Space is not limited anymore.”
Maclean’s asked if he is able to sleep now. Yes, he says.
No, says Antonella. “Not really. He’s not sleeping. He sleeps a few hours. He doesn’t sleep a full night. I see things that other people don’t see. I just see that that he has suffered a lot. I see it in his eyes, in his face.”
“We’re trying to get our life back together,” Hamid said. “It’s a long process. It’s been five years and four months I’ve been away from my life. And so far, we’re fine. We’ve managed to catch up with a lot of things, and I’m hoping in the near future we’ll finish it off completely and move on with our life.”