Category Archives: Episodes

The perils of reopening the debate on capital punishment

Posted on by
Reply

This was an open letter to the contenders for the leadership of the Conservative Reform <?xml:namespace prefix = st1 ns = “urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:smarttags” />Alliance party, first published in May 2000 in Toronto's The Globe and Mail.

I write to you not simply as a Canadian, but as an Iranian-Canadian.  This is the first time in the thirteen years I have had the privilege of being a citizen of this magnificent country of ours that I hyphenate my citizenship.  It is the first time in the sixteen years I have lived in Canada and under Canada’s benevolent protection that I find my cultural background of some importance in respect of the message I wish to impart.

You see, I write on the subject of capital punishment.  I write to ask you not to open this debate again.  

Twice in one generation Parliament has spoken.  Each time, the debate on capital punishment wounded and scarred the social psyche and pitted brother against sister, friend against friend.  Each time, it focussed our attention on all that was ugly and wrong in us and our souls, to the detriment of peace, forgiveness and charity.  Each time, it forced us to pit moral choice against principles of accountancy (does it cost more or less to keep a convict in prison rather than to put him to death).  Though the outcome was edifying, the debate was not.

I ask you not to open this debate again not only because a society can ill afford such repeated assaults upon its moral tranquillity.  The country is at peace, the crime rate is falling, fewer monsters lurk in the shadows of our society and even in the US, for heaven’s sake, they are re-examining their attachments to Old Sparky and its more humane progeny.

I ask this of you because I know something of state-sanctioned violence.  I know the violence it inflicts not just on the murderer to be hanged, but on the body politic, on justice, on equity, on humanity. 

This is why I write to you as an Iranian-Canadian.

When I left Iran in 1983, that country and its people were wracked by revolutionary fervour, a vicious invasion from without and civil unrest bordering on war within.  It was a society bent on exacting revenge – or retribution, the terms are in large part substitutable – for ills historical and recent.  It was a society whose only voice was of anger, whose only instrument was the bayonet.  It was a society where the spilling of blood – one’s own in martyrdom, or that of others in vengeance – had become a sacrament.  It was a society for which death imposed by the state was literally an Article of Faith.

That was the society I left behind.  From that environment, where violence had dominion, I came to Canada, where violence had no place.  And by that I mean official violence; state-sanctioned violence; state-sanctioned death.

No matter how much you limit the application of the death penalty, no matter if you insist on restricting it to a worst case scenario – a Paul Bernardo or a Clifford Olson – no matter if you put in place safeguards against the murder of innocents – and executing an innocent man is no different from murder – the moral principle at the root of punishment of death is the same.  For either a state accepts death as an instrument of policy or it does not.  The moral choice is as stark as that. 

I lived most of my childhood in a society in which that moral choice was in favour of death.  State-sanctioned death.  The thing is, once the moral choice is made, once the floodgates of official violence are opened, drawing a line in the sand will be as useless against the torrents of vengeance, of more violence, of more death as, well, a line in the sand.  Once it becomes acceptable for the state to kill, once society becomes inured to the daily reports of hangings, gassings, electrocutions and lethal injections (stoning and beheading considered outré these days), the inevitable question of “why Bernardo and not Homolka” will begin to haunt the executioners. 

For, why stop at pre-meditated murder?  Why stop at cop-killers?  Why stop at kidnappers and rapists and drug-dealers?  Why stop at those above 18?  Why stop at those with full mental faculties?  Why give murderers on death row the benefit of endless appeals, of constitutional protections, of “getting off” on technicalities?

Blood will beget blood.  The charity and forgiveness of this vast, pacific land of ours will give way to hardened hatred and base moral ugliness.

As it did, in the country of my birth. 

And I know something of state-sanctioned violence, the damage it does to the conscience of a people.  The damage it does to the conscience of each citizen.

Now, in Canada that moral choice was made twice in the last generation.  Twice the representatives of the people in Parliament assembled turned down death as an instrument of national policy.  Twice the Body Politic was convulsed and then relieved to find itself purged of state-sanctioned death.  Twice the country stared into that moral abyss of putting one of its children to death and thought itself better than the men whom it judged.  Twice in one generation Canada paid heed to the wise words of Churchill, uttered eighty years ago, that the moral strength of a people is to be found in how it treats its worst.

I ask you to respect that choice.  I ask you not to open that debate.  Leave the country at peace, as you would find it if you were to become Leader of the Opposition.  And if you become Prime Minister, bequeath a country to your children – to our children – that proudly checked the punishment of death at the door before entering the great community of civilised nations and refused to leave the room to retrieve it.

I ask you not to open that debate so that I can give my children the gift for which I left my birthplace: a society governed by laws and inspired by hope.  For in a society that chooses death over life, hope is the first casualty.

II

Posted on by
Reply

<?xml:namespace prefix = o ns = “urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:office” />

He remembered the conversation again six months later, when his leg had healed and he was tried, and convicted, for insubordination and cowardice.  And then again under the braided leather whip of the state flogger as he delivered the 150 lashes he had been sentenced to for the crime of hesitating to kill a fellow human being.

 

Who was the enemy and who was the friend?  A soldier whose life you have spared should not shoot you in the back; your team leader, whose honour you have saved, should not put you in the brig for cowardice and insubordination.  That had been the final straw.

 

How could he tell the difference?  Would he have to live his life always looking behind him, fearful of turning his back lest a dagger be planted between his shoulders?  In a land where Fear has dominion, where men walk with their backs against the wall, afraid of exposure and betrayal, where every look has but one question, AWill it be you who will betray me?@, the soul of man withers away.  The body can suffer, and survive, the lashes of braided leather delivered with rage BAwhat did I ever do to you that you hate me so?@; it can recover from prison and shattered bones; but the spirit of man dies where Trust is dead. 

 

And so it was that twice decorated for bravery in action and one of the best snipers and commandos of the Iranian army during the eight years of wanton slaughter that some euphemistically referred to as the Iran-Iraq Awar@, Hessam finally decided to leave homeland and kin and to become a refugee in a land he had heard of only in fairly tales.  He told no one, not even his mother, when he left <?xml:namespace prefix = st1 ns = “urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:smarttags” />Tehran.  He knew every peak, every pass, every pathway of that wild region of Western Iran where it joins Northern Iraq and Southeastern Turkey.  He walked in snow and braved treacherous passes, slept in caves and lived on nuts and dried fruits for a fortnight before surrendering himself to an astonished Turkish Gendermerie post.  In fluent Azeri Turkish he declared himself a refugee, showed his credentials (including pictures of his lacerated back, right after the whipping, and his medals B to prove he was not a mere draft-dodger) and collapsed from fatigue and cold.  The next day he was taken to a military hospital for treatment, which lasted all of two hours.  He simply needed sleep and a hot shower, that was all. 

 

As he was leaving, he noticed that his knapsack had been searched.  The only thing missing was his remaining bag of pistachio nuts; the Turks prefer Iranian pistachios to their own.  A bundle of money B about $10,000 in various currencies B had been left untouched.  In Ankara he lodged with a gentle Turkish family who, hearing of his ordeal, refused to take money from him, treated his wounded soul with care and love, and gave him hope that all was not rotten in the world.  He then presented himself to the Danish Embassy, showed his credentials (the pictures, but not the medals; a statement from the Turkish military hospital about the state they had found him in; and a testimonial from his adopted family) and was bundled off to Aarhus as a Geneva Convention refugee within two months.

 

There he met his wife (a Dane); there his children were born (all with the strikingly exotic combination of tanned skin, light hair and blue-green eyes); there he started university (at the age of 32, supported by the Danish state B he studies business management); and there, in that land in which he is still an alien, whose language he speaks with a strong accent, whose ways of life he has yet to fully absorb, in that land so far away from the land of his fathers for thousands of years, he will stay.  His exotic-looking Danish children will have a dim second-hand memory of another world accessible to them only in fairly tales (or horror stories); and they will see other cousins, equally exotic looking, spread all over the world following paths similar and different, who will also have dim memories of the land of their forefathers.

 

Among strangers he found friends, where among friends he had met only enemies.

 

The trick all along had been to know the difference.

I

Posted on by
Reply

From where the sniper stood, the Iraqi soldier was only about 50 meters away.    A slight man, boy even; a shimmer of a moustache on his lips and a torrent of jet-black hair on top.  The fool is not wearing his helmet, the sniper thought.  The Iraqi got up – torso, neck and unhelmetted head now above the parapets.  The sniper raised his rifle and slowly brought the boy into the view finder.  The Iraqi, perhaps sensing doom, turned and and with eyes half focussed, looked straight at the camouflaged sniper.  The sniper held steady: no prisoners, that was the rule.  But in the view finder, he saw the boy’s eyes slowly realising what he was seeing; a moment later, and sweat beads were collecting on his brow; tears swloly collected, and a tear drop fell from the Iraqi’s long lashes. 

<?xml:namespace prefix = o ns = “urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:office” /> 

The sniper lowered his rifle.  No prisoners, that was the rule; and let no one off.  But by now the two were looking at each other.  The sniper thought he saw a spark of recognition, a hint of gratitude.  No problem mate, he thought; as careless as you are, someone will get you eventually.  But not me, not now.  The sniper quietly hung his rifle on his shoulder, replaced and adjusted his paratrooper’s beret, and turned to run back up the hill, to the agreed pick up rendez-vous.

 

That was when he heard a crack, as of a dried branch snapping under foot, or a handgun going off at 50 meters.  He felt a deep burning sensation in his left calf, and then another crack, as of a dried branch snapping under foot, or the shin yielding to a bullet.  Teeth clenched in pain, anger and hatred, he turned on the shattered bone, breaking it in two other places, raised the rifle and delivered the fatal shot to the Iraqi boy holding a raised hand gun, still standing where he was, torso up over the parapets, unhelmetted head now splattered all over the trenches.

 

The sniper pulled himself under the shadow of a boulder.  The movements from now on were automatic.  Stanch the bloodflow; radio in for help; inject painkiller; wait.  Minutes, hours, years later, two of his comrades arrived to splinter his leg and haul his muscular frame up the hill and over to the rendez-vous point.  He was thrown over a mule and carried a couple of kilometres through craggy and dry mountainous paths.  Then an unsteady jeep, driven by an unsteadier youth of seventeen, over still more sinuous mountain paths pockmarked with mortar fire.  He was jostled this way and that, trying to listen to the conversation around him, trying to concentrate on where he was.  But all he could remember was the very last image of the young man he had just dispatched: a torrent of hair, eyes still brimming with tears of fear and gleaming in the sunlight; and a stupid, wicked grin showing yellow crooked teeth. 

 

At least, that’s what he thought he could remember.

 

They arrived in the field hospital.  He passed out.

 

* * *

It’s funny how I have never been able to tell this story in the first person singular.   I know I was there, because of fragments of memory, here and there, that trouble my days and deprive me of sleep at night.  I know because there were witnesses.  And I know because twenty years on, my leg still hurts from the old war injury – I can’t ever say that without recalling Basil Fawlty – and there was only one way I could have got that bullet in the back of my lower leg. 

 

Because “he” lowered the rifle, and “he” turned to walk away.  Or perhaps run away.  At least, that’s what they tried to pin on me, a year later, when I had recovered, when I had gone back to the Front, when I had refused orders, when I was arrested by the same comrades who had hauled me up the mountain that lost day, when I was lashed and chained and –

 

The charges of cowardice and attempted desertion did not stick, or I would not be writing this now, in the comfort of my home on the shores of <?xml:namespace prefix = st1 ns = “urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:smarttags” />Lake Geneva.  I’d like to think the military judge had a sense of justice, or of mercy, though the hundreds of others who had been consigned to the firing squad or the hangman’s noose by his hands bore witness to the contrary.  I made believe for many years that my friends did not lie under oath, though I would not have spent six months in the brig and suffered 100 lashes of an electric cable if they had not. 

 

And I denied, until only recently, that my “honour had been assailed” – a quaint Persian euphemism for rape – or, at any rate, I had persuaded myself that I had been at fault for not having fought harder against the assailants, though I had been shackled and beaten and semi-conscious when it happened.

 

We are the dead

Posted on by
Reply
“What is the most valuable asset you ever had?” asked the Pupil.
“Trust in a friend,” replied the old Master.
“Don‘t you mean a trustworthy friend?”
“No, that is easy to come by.  The challenge is to be able to place your trust in him.” 
We live behind bars, barriers, dams, and walls of our own making.  Does anyone ever get the chance to break out of their emotional prison cells and to express themselves freely?  Perhaps; and perhaps that is the condition we label madness, or lunacy, or insanity.  Sane people, I would venture to guess, stay within the imaginary walls that are more difficult to breach than the securest of concrete prisons.  I suspect the reason to be that we can never fully trust one another: betrayal is the hallmark of mankind.  The walls that keep us within ourselves, also protect us from the others, much like the way child molesters are put into solitary confinement for their own protection.  We are all in protective solitary confinement.
How impoverished we are.
Perhaps we are afraid of betrayal from within; perhaps we are afraid of ourselves, the intensity of our emotions, the controlling effect of our senses.
How often have I looked at someone and felt that there is nothing in the world I would refuse to do for her.  Nothing.  My senses were alert to her slightest discomfort; I noticed the slightest emotional discomfort, and suffer along.  I became bothered by her silence; her mood dictated mine; her words, thoughts, face, smell dominated my world and shaped my existence.  A slight change in her tone of voice, the look in her eyes, the way she sat or talked or interacted with others, each minutiae of change could betray volumes of anguish and suffering and cause just about the same for the me.  Perhaps it is this intensity, this attachment, that we try to avoid.
***
When he died, I did not feel anything.  An overwhelming numbness enveloped and pushed aside all emotion.  Nostaligic memories was all that I was left with.
What I should have felt, though, was not nostalgia and the occasional bitterness that was, I suppose, inevitable.  I should have felt pain; I should have suffered with him, but I could not. 
Why had I not felt pain?
I did not feel pain, I believe, because I felt dead.  It is not just me, it is everyone.  Reg may have been killed, but we are the dead. 
Oh, we roam the streets and drive cars and eat and sleep and have sex ‑‑ we do everything living beings are supposed to do, but we are not alive.  Our souls are dead; our humanity is dead; we are dead.
For how else can we account for the brutality that we impose and inflict on one another?  What cause, what idea, is worth the price of a human life?  I am not talking about those who depart with it willingly, for valiant or foolish, to them, the price is high.  No.  I ask this of those who take life for an idea, an ideal ‑‑ a conjecture, at best.
My head hurts and my eyes are burning.  I cannot ‑‑ do not want to write any more…
What kind of person does it take to take a life to prove a point?  What certainty of infallibility, what certitude, what righteousness does it take to pass such deadly judgment on another human being?  I suppose it has always been there, but I had not wanted to see it.  As with people in any other movement ‑‑ sane, rational people ‑‑ I had seen just what I had wanted to see, and dismissed the rest.  But the signs were there, in full view of everyone, we just had to open our eyes; and that, often, is the most difficult thing to do.
***
A half moon arisen, a city fast asleep, a seagull aflight ‑‑ I know, even though I cannot see it, for I hear the flutter of the wings.  Moonlight dances on the waves, a bone chilling breeze sweeps into the shore from the mighty ocean.  I have to close my window.
I had the nightmare again last night.  Well, I had a dream, which I do not remember very clearly, except that I woke up shaking with horror and could not go back to sleep, so, I suppose it was a nightmare.  Dark figures dancing around a fire.  I could not make out what was burning ‑‑ I knew it was something important ‑‑ because of the dancing figures, and I could not see the figures clearly because of the fire; there was music, which was drowned out by the cries of the dancers.  Dancers?  I am still not sure they were dancing.  It was too grotesque.  And I knew it was violent, even though in the smoke and the fog it was hard to tell.  I tried to go closer, but I could not.  Was I afraid?  I do not know. Maybe I was just not curious.  Then they raised the fire ‑‑ the object that was burning, and I turned my head away.  I did not want to see it.  And then I could make out the music, and I did not want to hear it.  And then I could see their faces, and I did not want to know them.  Then I woke up.
…
I cannot feel anything.  I have grieved far too much for far too long; I have mourned, I have cried, and now, I have no more tears left.  I have no more grief.  I do not even feel dead any more ‑‑ for dead implies life before expiration, and I do not feel that I have ever been alive.  I feel like the cold gray rocks upon which Tennyson‘s waves break; they sit patiently, bearing with fortitude the weight of an Ocean and the crashing of the wild waves of time, their edges softening, but still waiting, waiting for that one ship to come too close, for that one man to take the wrong step, and then they devour their victims, coldly, silently and passively.
I am scared because I, too, am now waiting for my victims.  I have no one in mind ‑‑ like the rocks, I do not know who will pass me next ‑‑ but I do know that if I feel as cold as those rocks, I will claim my own victim in time.  That is the nature of things.  Maybe if I felt some sorrow, some sadness ….
Evil lurks in my mind.  Like an assassin pacing impatiently back and forth on cold cobblestones of a dark misty alleyway, all I can think of is pulling the trigger.  Vengeance; the thought of revenge began as a small idea, but now it has mushroomed into a creed; a cancerous tumour expanding mercilessly in my thoughts, awake or asleep; a malignant infection, debilitating, all‑consuming, all‑embracing.
When I first saw it in my own eyes I drew back.  It was a passing moment.  The hardness, the dark depth that nearly drowned my consciousness in unforgiving malice, vanished as soon as I recognized it and was scared by it.  But like an annoying noise or habit, I have become used to the almost daily flashes of the thing, the monster, that inhabits my soul.  There is evil, pure evil; it no longer runs through my mind.  Evil lurks within me.
It is an unsettling experience, getting used to the evil within.  At first I resisted it.  I tried to run away from it.  I did not look at myself in the mirror; I ran away from “bad” images; I shut “bad” thoughts out of my mind.  But at night, when I went to bed, evil was an eager and faithful companion.  When I felt grief, it sympathized with me.  When I mourned my friend with eyes that no longer bore any tears, with a heart that no longer felt any pain, and with a soul shot through with confusion and anger, it held me up and nourished me. 
You are a sly one, but a faithful companion!  A weaker man would have given in to your wiles many a moon past: I have already seen too many moons trying to stay awake to avoid your allure.  A weaker man would have sought consolation from you.  But not I.  I know you; I have seen you in the mirror; but I shall not be yours, not yet anyway.
I became aware of my humanity, oddly enough, at the moment when I realized I could take life.  The look I saw in the mirror, MY LOOK, was the look of a murderer.  It was, at that point, just a flash, and I had no inkling of the future frequency of the visit.  Until then, I used to think that when faced with the choice of killing someone and being killed myself, I should have the courage to accept death rather than break my own proscription against taking a life.  But that morning, in a flash of appalled recognition, I saw my capacity to take life ‑‑ not just to save life, but for more unsavoury reasons, for revenge.  I retreated in horror then, but I have been visited by that spectre time and again since that morning encounter, and I have accepted its presence.  Now I can only say that when faced with the choice of killing someone, and not killing someone, I should like to have the will to resist the force of evil. 
But vengeance is a terrible master.  It is merciless to both its victims, the killed and the killer ‑‑ one loses his life, the other his humanity.  And just like night and day, when we become cognizant of the one at the prospect of losing the other, I first became aware of my humanity at that brief moment when I was close to losing it.  Now I am ever closer to its loss.
Ali is aware of this.  He has seen something in my eyes that I see but fleetingly myself, a look, a ghost even.  He told me I was not in good shape, and he was right.  How could a cold gray rock be a good shape for a human being ‑‑ a former human, now gone, now dead, now a mass of frozen lava sitting on a shore waiting to destroy anything that had the mischance of crossing its path?  Ali was worried about the look in my eyes, but I was worried that I had eyes.  Rocks sit passively, patiently, and do not kill unless trod upon.  But I had the nature ‑‑ if it can be so called ‑‑ of a murderous cliff and the hunting instinct of a wounded tiger.  I would not sit passively for my victims, I would seek them out; I would not wait for them to get close to me, I would call on them, like the Sirens, to come to me and to crash on my deadly jagged edges.  It would not be random, but by choice and design ‑‑ my choice.  I would look into the vast ocean, see the ship I wish to sink, and quietly lay myself in its path; and I would not feel any pain, and not have any remorse.  And on to the next ship to sink, the next skull to crack open, the next life to take.
If we are dead, then taking a life would not be such a sin.  If our souls are dead, then I would be putting an end to a mere chemical process.  And after that, no more pain, no more brutality, no more violence, no more unleashing of pent up anger, no more random throw of the darts, no more bloody pants ‑‑ no more death.
“If we are to change anything, it must be intellectually, and not by violence,” Ali said.  He was reading my mind, or my journals.  I looked up, but he turned his eyes away from me.  He looked out at the dancing moonlight; another insomniac fisherman, and his fishing boat broke the liquid silver pattern; the moon frowned; Ali sipped his tea. 
“The look in your eyes in not human.”  He shuddered.  “It‘s still cold in here.” 
He started a fire in the fireplace and went back to the couch, but it did not do him any good.
“Are you concerned for me?”
“No.  I‘m … I‘m scared of you.”