What would you do for political or religious freedom?
by Azita Shafaghat,
as told to Susan McClelland


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My name is Azita. I am in a thick
forest in northeastern Greece, near the Turkish border. I have been hiding underneath leaves in the rain all day. My body shakes with chills. But I don’t care. By morning, I will see my father, mother and younger sister for the first time in six years. They are in Athens, safe. They have paid a smuggler 6,000 euros, or nearly C$9,000—their last remaining money—to get me and my husband, Siavash, out of Iran.

Siavash and I are part of a group of ten refugees. Earlier, the smuggler had told us that Athens was not very far. He also said we should stay hidden in the woods until he gave the go-ahead. Then he left us alone in the darkness.

A van approaches. It slows and then stops on the road just metres in front of me. My heart beats wildly. I wonder, Are these the men who have been paid to take us to Athens?

They are not. When they discover me, one of them kicks me in the knee so hard that I fall to the ground. The other picks me up and tosses me like a ball. He shouts that he is with the Greek border police and that I am under arrest. They push me in with the others they have rounded up—all nine—and shove us into the van.

I was 26 years old that evening in June 2006. Siavash and I had been on the run from Iranian authorities for six years.
Nevertheless, I have many loving memories of growing up in Iran: sitting on my father’s lap as a small child, listening to him tell stories, helping my mother cook.
My family had once been well off. My father and his brother, Ahad—Siavash’s father—held positions in the government. But after the monarch of Iran, the Shah, was overthrown, my father lost his job and we moved from a big house in Tehran to a small house in Karaj, just outside the city.

Then, in the early 1980s, Ahad died, leaving Siavash without a father. My family raised him as one of our own. Until I was about 12, I was told Siavash was my brother.

In Karaj, my father worked as a photographer. He also protested against the regime. As a consequence, in 1989, he was imprisoned. I clung to my “brother” Siavash during these times. I admired him. He was emotionally strong and confident. Once at school, when I was 11 and he was 12, he got in trouble for throwing something at another student during class, and as a punishment he had to write out his lessons dozens of times over the weekend. The last thing we wanted to do was sit inside all day. So I snuck into his room and helped him write out half the assignment. We were done in no time. But the following week, the school called my mother. They had recognized my handwriting. Then both of us were in trouble.

The following year, I learned that we were not brother and sister. We fell in love when we were 16, and my father gave his approval. “It is not so easy to go outside and have girlfriends and boyfriends in Iran,” he said to us. “So if you have feelings of love for each other, there is nothing wrong with it. You are not blood siblings.”

In 1998 we were married. Our wedding was the happiest day of my life. I wore a white dress and the best thing of all was that everyone was so happy. I still see my parents’ and sister’s smiles.

Our honeymoon year turned from sweet to bitter. In July 1999 we were students at the University of Tehran. I studied art and Siavash was in literature. When the government decided to close a reformist newspaper, students at the university demonstrated. In retaliation, members of the Basij, Iran’s notorious paramilitary, stormed the dorms, set some of the rooms on fire and tossed some students out of windows. On July 14, students everywhere united in larger demonstrations.

Siavash and I knew that when we joined the protest we were taking part in an antigovernment activity, the punishment for which could be imprisonment, rape and torture. We went anyway. The streets were alive with thousands of people—swaying, chanting and cheering. The fever was part fear, part excitement. We wanted to believe our protest could change the country.
Suddenly, I was knocked over. Both Siavash and I were pinned down, our backs beaten with batons and the bare hands of the Basij. I began to choke on the tear gas and pepper spray. Then we were arrested, separated and imprisoned for the next six months.

Handcuffed and blindfolded, I was questioned over and over again about my role in the protest: Why was I there? Who was the leader? Who else belonged to my organization? And why was I wearing a cross?
I was up against a wall, and the guards kicked me over and over again. Today, because of all the abuse to my knees inflicted by prison officials in Iran and later, by the border patrol in Greece, I cannot walk long distances.

I told them I was not part of any group. I said I didn’t know what the necklace meant, only that I thought it was pretty.
But the truth was a little more complicated: My paternal grandfather was a Christian. He had converted years ago, before I was born. But after the Shah was overthrown in 1979, converts to Christianity were considered criminals. We kept our beliefs secret, worshipping in makeshift chapels in the basements of parishioner’s homes.

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I didn’t know until I was released six months later whether my beloved Siavash was alive or dead. He told me that he, too, had been beaten. At the time of our arrest, he had been carrying a Bible and had to think up a story quickly. He told his prison interrogators that during the protests someone had given him the Bible. His interrogators wanted him to confess to plotting with other students to overthrow the government. They wanted him to give them names of other students. He refused, and they said they would rape me if he didn’t co-operate. Siavash heard screams coming from the other room. He thought it was me. It wasn’t. But it was someone.

The document we signed upon our release from prison said that although we had insisted we were not Christian, if it was ever proven that we had lied, we would be killed. We also had to promise never to participate in antigovernment activities again. If we were caught doing so, we would be killed.

Siavash and I were not allowed to return to school. Our family had lost everything—jobs, home, religious liberty and now education—but we believed in standing up for our freedom at whatever cost. In February 2000, a few months after the student demonstrations, my father organized a protest on the anniversary of the so-called Iranian revolution in 1979. This time, I filmed it. Plainclothes police grabbed me and tried to force me to the ground, just like the Basij had done before. But other protesters swarmed around us, and I found myself free and running with Siavash. We knew the police would come to our house, so we headed to the bus station. We caught the first bus scheduled for departure: to Arak, a town in western Iran. We spent the next six years in hiding, waiting to find a new and permanent home where we could go out and be free. We knew we could never go back.

When we fled to Arak in 2000, we kept in touch with my family through friends, who provided secret codes to indicate where we were. My family, in turn, sent money via couriers to support us for the years we lived there. For weeks at a time we would stay nestled in the apartment of family friends. We only dared go out under the camouflage of night to forage for food, sometimes resorting to eating weeds and grass.

A few years later, my father, mother and sister began their own exodus out of Iran. They first went east, to Pakistan. They reached Greece in late 2005 and sent word that it was now our turn to come to the West. That’s when they hired the smuggler. His job was to take refugees out of Iran. Siavash and I started out in the spring of 2006. Following the smuggler, we crossed the mountains of Kurdistan on foot. At one point, I fainted from the fatigue and too little food. Siavash carried me on his back.

We travelled through Turkey and crossed the frontier into Greece. It was there, in the forest, that we were captured by the border police. We were close, but not close enough.
We were in custody for 24 hours before being sent back to Turkey. There, we languished in prison for nearly a year. The cells were packed with desperate, hungry, tired people like us, refugees from Moldova, Morocco, Somalia and Iran. The conditions were worse than anything I had seen in Tehran. The prison sewers overflowed and the toilets leaked so that our cells were covered in as much as 30 centimetres of sewage. Siavash was beaten regularly. Our crime? Not having legitimate paperwork to enter any country. We had passports, but our smuggler had forged them. Authorities in Turkey wanted to return us to Iran, where we would face execution.

Siavash and I might still be in a Turkish prison, or possibly dead, if some Iranians living in the West had not heard about our plight. Reza Pardisan in London, England, and Nazanin Afshin-Jam in Vancouver presented our case to the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees. We were granted refugee status and released from prison in 2007.

Reza helped pay for a small apartment in Turkey until the United Nations could find a country willing to accept us. We waited two years, and I prayed every night it would be Greece, so I could rejoin my family. Instead, Canada accepted us in 2009. No other country would.

We now live in Vancouver, not far from Nazanin. We study English at a local college. Siavash and I are together and safe. We worship in a real church, not someone’s basement. We do not fear being Christian or speaking out against the Iranian government.

I speak to my father, sister and mother, still living in Athens, about once a week. I am heartbroken that we are not together. My goal is for us to be reunited, either on Canadian soil or in Athens. But until we learn English and get jobs, we won’t have the money to visit or move.

Not a day goes by that I don’t think about being in the forest in northeastern Greece. We were so close.

When I close my eyes at night before I sleep, I imagine my father pacing the kitchen in Athens, my mother looking at the ticking clock on the wall and my sister praying we’ll be together soon.

Reprinted with permission from the April 2010 magazine.
Copyright (c) 2010 by Reader’s Magazines Canada Limited. Further reproduction or distribution strictly prohibited.