Pubdate: Sat, 16 Jul 2005
Source: Financial Times (UK)
Section: Weekend Magazine - Feature; Pg. 16
Copyright: The Financial Times Limited 2005
Contact:  http://www.ft.com/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/154
Author: Kamin Mohammadi
Bookmark: http://www.mapinc.org/heroin.htm (Heroin)
Bookmark: http://www.mapinc.org/youth.htm (Youth)
Note: Kamin Mohammadi is a London-based writer working on her first 
book, a family history of Iran.

THE HERO AND HEROIN

It is Friday and Abadan's graveyard is busy. The second day of the 
Islamic weekend, this is when many Iranians pay their respects to 
their dead. Families come bearing flasks of rosewater and boxes of 
sweets to hand around the raised stone graves, most of which are 
topped by glass cases containing pictures of the deceased.

Beyond, the rain has turned the marshland into fields of mud. I am 
here with my cousin Esmael and his wife and we have brought trays of 
homemade halva, honey biscuits and fruit.

We have come for the rituals marking 40 days after my cousin Ebby's funeral.

We walk past the martyrs' section to another part of the cemetery 
because, although Ebby was a veteran of the Iran-Iraq war, he was not 
martyred on the battlefield, but died 16 years later in an abandoned 
slum in Abadan, a homeless heroin addict with Aids and hepatitis.

He was 38. Already gathered around his grave are his two sisters and 
his estranged wife, Mina, a moon-faced woman in a voluminous black 
chador. None of them had seen Ebby for years before his death, but 
finally they are laying aside their anger to grieve.

Not just for his death, but also for his life. I take my place by 
their side, crouching in the mud by the grave, which is set like a 
table at a party: white gladioli are surrounded by dishes of fruit 
and sweets. There is some shaking of heads and mutters of a wasted 
life, but no one talks about Ebby's death or the drug addiction that 
soared out of control after he came home from the front line of the war.

I have flown here from my home in London, haunted by memories of my 
cousin and his ignominious death.

I have come to try to understand why he died, how the happy boy I 
grew up with became such a desperate man.

During Abadan's oil-drenched heyday, a line from a local song neatly 
captured the city's self-image: "Abadan: don't call it Abadan; call 
it Paris." In the south-western province of Khuzestan, on the 
Iran-Iraq border, Abadan lies on an island of the same name off the 
eastern bank of the Shatt al-Arab waterway, 30 miles from the Persian 
Gulf. It was a small town when the Anglo-Persian Oil Company set up 
its refinery there in 1909, but by the 1950s the facility was the 
largest in the world and Abadan had grown into a city of more than 
220,000 people, with a booming economy and a sophisticated population 
of foreigners and Iranians. From the small airport one could board a 
plane for London, New York and, indeed, Paris. By the late 1970s its 
population had grown to nearly half a million.

Then came 1980 and the Iran-Iraq war. Border areas were worst hit and 
Khuzestan is still struggling to come to terms with its devastation. 
Now, Abadan's airport handles only a few internal flights a week.

My family had lived there since the 1930s, when Reza Shah 
consolidated his power by stripping the local khans of their land and 
absorbing them into local government.

My great-grandfather was from a family of khans who ruled the 
southern Gulf province of Busheir and gladly accepted a local 
government job in Abadan. Soon after, he gave his only daughter, my 
grandmother, to a merchant in marriage and they proceeded to produce 
12 children, the eldest of whom was Ebby's father.

Within this vast family, we children were close.

Even after my parents moved away from Abadan, we would visit often 
and I remember lunches at my uncle's house, falling in the dust as we 
chased each other outside, Ebby helping to pick me up and divert me 
from my bleeding knees.

After we left Iran in 1979, I never saw my uncle again.

Like everyone employed by the oil company, he was not allowed to 
leave his post during the war and he stayed in Abadan throughout. A 
few years after the end of the war, he died of cancer, followed a few 
months later by his wife.

When I last saw Ebby seven years ago, he was a man in his 30s. He 
told me that for the last 18 months of the war he had fought along 
the border further north of Abadan at Shalamcheh, scene of some of 
the conflict's worst battles.

"I can't even describe the things I've seen," he muttered, chain- 
smoking. He was still suffering from nightmares. "There were the 
Iraqis, large men, you know, much bigger than us, and they had the 
latest arms. You felt - here's a war where there are bigger powers 
against us. And us, just disorganised and poor."

He and his wife and two children lived in a small town nearby, but he 
wanted to move. "Saddam used chemical weapons you know," he said. "In 
the last few years two members of our family have died of cancer." He 
was referring to his father and another uncle of ours. Ebby worried 
about the water, the soil, the health of his children.

I was not surprised that he was one of Iran's growing number of heroin addicts.

By 1979, the Shah had gone into exile and Ayatollah Khomeini was 
leading Iran's Islamic revolution. The stage was soon set for war. 
Khomeini vowed to avenge Iraqi Shia victims of Baathist repression 
and called on Iraqis to rise against Saddam Hussein.

Hussein wanted to exploit Iran's post-revolutionary vulnerability. He 
also feared that Tehran's new Shia leadership would encourage Iraq's 
Shia majority to revolt against the ruling Sunni minority.

There was a strategic reason for going to war too: Iraq's only access 
to the Persian Gulf is via the Shatt al-Arab. Historic animosity 
between the two countries had seen several treaties signed and then 
ignored before the 1975 Algiers Agreement settled the exact location 
of the border separating them.

By March 1980, relations had deteriorated so much that Iran withdrew 
its ambassador from Iraq. In September, Iraq abrogated the Algiers 
Agreement and declared full sovereignty over the Shatt al- Arab 
waterway. On September 22, Iraq invaded Iran. On October 22, Abadan 
was besieged by the Iraqi army and on October 24, nearby Khorramshahr 
- - then Iran's largest port - fell to the Iraqis.

Baghdad planned a swift victory.

Hussein knew that despite the Shah's stockpiled arsenal of the latest 
weapons, Iran had just executed or lost to exile all of its top 
military personnel - some 12,000 senior officers had been purged 
during the revolution. The Iranian air force was able to fly only 
half of its aircraft by the start of the war. The Pasdaran 
(Revolutionary Guards) were led by clerics with little or no military 
experience and often armed only with light infantry weapons and 
Molotov cocktails.

Hussein also expected the native population of ethnic Arabs living in 
Khuzestan to rise against the new Islamic regime.

But instead they remained loyal to Iran, and the war dragged on for 
eight long years, a war in which trench warfare was seen for the 
first time since the first world war and nerve gas was used - by Iraq 
- - in combat operations for the first time. But Hussein underestimated 
his opponents' passion for their land and the strength of Khomeini's 
ideology. Iraqi forces were repulsed from Abadan by a small unit 
aided by the city's fierce inhabitants, and Khorramshahr was captured 
only after a house-to-house fight so brutal that the town was 
nicknamed "khunistan" (town of blood). Some 7,000 Iranians died or 
were seriously wounded in the battle.

Another unforeseen factor was the Basij, the people's militia that 
Ayatollah Khomeini called the "Army of 20 Million". By the end of 
November 1980, some 200,000 new Pasdaran were sent to the front, 
accompanied by the Basij, troops so ideologically committed that some 
carried their own shrouds in expectation of impending martyrdom, 
along with plastic keys worn around their necks - issued by the 
regime for entry to paradise.

In Tehran I meet Hassan, a war veteran.

Like Ebby, Hassan is from a secular middle-class family.

But, unlike Ebby, as a teenager during the revolution he became a 
fervent Khomeini supporter.

We are sitting in the Laleh Park in the city's centre and I am 
chaperoned by an uncle: for a devout man like Hassan it would be 
wrong to be alone with an unmarried woman. "The imam called it a 
'holy war'," he says quietly. "He promised us that anyone who died in 
the war would go instantly to paradise." He laughs as if slightly 
embarrassed. "At the time, whenever a mullah came to talk to us about 
the war at school, we were burning to join up."

The regime used aggressive recruiting techniques, particularly in 
mosques and schools in lower income areas.

Iranian television broadcast pictures of young men - boys - with red 
Basij headbands and guns, saying how wonderful it was to be a soldier 
for Islam. Women were shown declaring pride that their sons had died 
as martyrs for the cause.

Although Hassan was 16 when he joined up, there were plenty of 
younger boys. "There was one who was 12," he says. "He lied about his 
age but they let him join anyway."

The cult of martyrdom is still in evidence in Iran - towering 
billboards with names and pictures of the dead proliferate in every 
town. Street names have been changed to commemorate martyrs.

In a country where getting ahead is often a matter of who you know, 
veterans get preferential treatment in university places and 
government jobs, as do martyrs' families.

Some Iranians resent this and exaggerate the benefits, but 
nonetheless there has been a change in attitude to the war and those 
who fought or died in it.

Hassan went to the front in 1981. He won't talk about the actual 
fighting, but I know that in the rain and mud of that winter, Iran 
first employed what would become a trademark tactic, the suicidal 
"human wave", in which thousands of ecstatic soldiers would storm the 
Iraqi lines without artillery or air support, chanting "Allahu 
akbar". An Iraqi officer once described the effect: "They come on in 
their hundreds, often walking straight across the minefields, 
triggering them with their feet." He said that his men would cry with 
fear and try to run away: "My officers had to kick them back to their guns."

In July 1982, Iran launched Operation Ramadan on Iraqi territory, 
near Basra. Although Basra was within range of Iranian artillery, the 
clergy - who had taken charge of operations earlier that year - used 
human wave attacks against the city in one of the biggest land 
battles since 1945. Ranging in age from only nine to over 50, these 
eager soldiers swept over minefields and fortifications to clear safe 
paths for the tanks.

Unsurprisingly, the Iranians sustained an immense number of 
casualties, and it is from this battle that Hassan still bears a limp.

Despite his injuries, he went back a few years later.

I ask him why and he hesitates. "It's hard to explain," he says. "But 
it was impossible to get back to normal life. I just kept thinking of 
my friends and wondering what was happening." He looks embarrassed 
again. "You know, I felt close to God there."

As Hassan talks, I watch a well-dressed young couple walk by. Like 
most of the girls I have seen in northern Tehran, this girl's hejab 
consists of a short, tight coat while the obligatory headscarf 
perches precariously at the back of a towering hairstyle, topping off 
an elaborately made-up face. The man is clean-shaven, his longish 
locks gelled back, and he clutches a mobile phone.

They may be married but it is more likely that they are out on a 
date, and as they pass, they throw Hassan, with his trim beard and 
collarless shirt, a glance.

These are the children of the revolution, the under-30s who make up 
70 per cent of Iran's 68 million population. They didn't live under 
the Shah, they didn't long for revolution or to fight in the "holy 
war". They watch illegal yet ubiquitous satellite television and surf 
the internet.

They have grown up in the Islamic Republic and they are impatient for change.

Hassan sees them and says: "Look, I have friends from the war days 
who are still very devout.

And they look at these youngsters today and they wonder what it was 
we were fighting for." He considers before going on: "My children are 
very respectful but I know when I see some of their friends that they 
don't care about our sacrifice. They don't have respect."

Martyrdom is a familiar concept to Iranians, whose Shia branch of 
Islam is driven by the 8th century martyrdom of Imam Hossein, whose 
death is commemorated during the month of Moharram by thousands, 
flagellating themselves, beating their chests and crying.

In reality, though, most Iranians didn't want to be martyrs, most 
mothers weren't praying that their sons be killed for the glory of Allah.

Iran liberated Khorramshahr in May 1982 and in June Iraq called a 
ceasefire that was rejected by Iran. For Iran's new revolutionary 
government, the war may have served the useful purpose of allowing it 
to consolidate its power and see off opposition groups.

For the world's powers, the Iran-Iraq war ensured a weakened Iran, 
one unable to spread its fundamentalist fervour throughout the region.

At different times through the eight years of the war, various 
western powers supplied arms to both sides, though Iraq received the 
most conspicuous help, in both armaments and economic aid.

Hussein started using chemical weapons against the Iranians in 1982, 
including mustard gas and sarin nerve gas. By the time Ebby was 
called to the front in late 1986, war-weariness had set in. As 
Iranian troops had been called to push into Iraqi territory, many of 
the soldiers had lost their zeal; they had wanted to defend their own 
land, not invade Iraq's. The battles were horrific and losses heavy: 
mass graves harboured thousands of bodies and tales of drug addiction 
in the trenches were rife. Away from the front line, Iran's economy 
was suffering - by 1987 nearly one in two Iranians was unemployed and 
shortages of basic commodities grew worse.

Terror had spread to all of Iran's main cities and nowhere felt safe.

 From Abadan's cemetery we drove back into town. Ebby's wife Mina 
rushed home to make dinner for her children.

After she left Ebby six years ago, she told them that their father 
was working in another town - she hadn't yet told them what had happened.

I asked her when she was planning to let them know and she stared at 
me blankly. "How do I tell them? What do I tell them?"

After dinner with my cousins, we sat over steaming black tea and 
Esmael told me some of the things Ebby had said about his time in the 
war. "He saw too much. He once told me about the night before one of 
those human wave attacks.

No one was sleeping, they were praying and weeping and were really scared.

And there were loads of drugs around - hashish, opium, everything - 
Ebby said that it really helped.

Maybe that was how he got into the heavier stuff." Perhaps Ebby 
became addicted to opium at the front, but we will never know. All 
that is certain is that by the time he came home, he had a habit.

Iranian society is formal, and a drug-addicted child is a problem 
that affects every family member.

Ebby had two marriageable sisters and so he was sheltered by his parents.

There was no official support for addicts or their families then. 
Mina's parents were against their marriage - they had heard the rumours.

Yet for a year Mina refused anyone else. After their marriage in 1990 
they lived with Ebby's parents. He worked and held his life together.

Their son was born after a couple of years and a few years later they 
had a daughter. "We were happy," said Mina. "We were ordinary."

They were living back in Abadan, where Ebby's family had returned 
after the end of the war in 1988. The city was in ruins and the 
economy was a mess but Iran restarted petroleum refining and 
petrochemical production on a smaller scale and the city's port 
reopened in 1993. As Mina says: "There was work and we had a small, 
comfortable life."

It was after the death of my uncle and his wife that it all changed. 
Ebby's addiction was uncontained. His brother and sisters started to 
draw away from him and Mina, whom they accused of encouraging him. I 
asked her if she was involved with drugs and she looked horrified. 
"Of course I wasn't," she pursed her lips. "Look, we weren't like 
that, like those people you see on the streets." Then she grew a 
little sheepish. "But I did buy the drug for him sometimes." She 
looked down. "I had to, he was my husband and he couldn't do without 
it. I loved him and it made him happy."

Eventually Ebby ended up on heroin and on the streets.

Soon after I saw him for the last time in 1998, Mina's parents 
insisted that she leave him, and she took the children and moved back 
into their house. She got a job and got on with life as a single parent.

She never divorced him, though under Iranian law she was entitled to 
do so because of his addiction.

I asked her why and she said: "Because I loved him."

The waters of the Shatt al-Arab still flow lazily between Abadan and 
Iraq's fields of palms, and the refinery is still at work - in 1997 
it reached the same rate of production as before the war. But the 
town is a dusty relic, the pavements half unpaved and streets with 
their neon shopfronts are marred by gaping holes where bombed-out 
ruins have not been rebuilt.

The grand Abadan Hotel where my parents danced is now a shell.

My cousin Milad is taking me on a tour of Abadan. He is a young man 
in his early 20s, typically Abadani, with slicked-back hair and a 
pair of Ray-Bans permanently fixed on his face. He speaks with an 
Abadani accent, his Farsi peppered with English words - another 
legacy of Abadan's cosmopolitan past. It was Milad who found Ebby a 
year ago, begging on the streets, and it was Milad who identified 
Ebby's body when he was missing from his usual post in the town centre.

It is an early winter evening, balmy and breezy with no sign of the 
humidity that besieges Khuzestan for nine months of the year. We pass 
the site of the infamous Cinema Rex, historically the starting point 
of the revolution: on August 20 1978, the cinema was locked from the 
inside and set on fire, resulting in 430 deaths.

It was widely believed that the Shah was responsible - there were 
several dissidents inside.

This sparked mass demonstrations and the Shah was overthrown six months later.

Turning down a side street, we see where Ebby used to sit, outside a 
shop selling brightly patterned blankets.

Across the street, outside the bank where Ebby would spend the 
mornings begging, stand his "friends" - other addicts clustering 
around a blind cigarette seller. They are in various degrees of 
narcosis: one man is standing, leaning at a dangerous angle, another 
is crouching on the ground, head lolling forward.

Everyone knew Ebby had Aids, Milad says, and they let him do whatever 
he wanted.

They didn't want to go near him.

There are an estimated 2 million drug addicts in Iran, though some 
put the real figure as high as 6 million.

This is a significant proportion of a population of nearly 70 million 
- - the US, for instance, has 1 million opiate addicts in a population 
of about 295 million. Iran borders Afghanistan, the world's largest 
producer of opium, and there has always been a tradition of social 
opium smoking; but the big change is the move to cheap and available heroin.

With intravenous drug use comes HIV and hepatitis and, sure enough, 
HIV infection is now regarded as a problem in Iran. The UN estimated 
that more than 30,000 people had contracted the virus by 2003.

Many, such as Ebby, are never treated or registered by the government 
as Aids patients.

Last summer, Abadan hospital's drug clinic refused to take Ebby in, 
because he was too infectious. Better not to risk other lives for one 
that could not be saved, they said. Ebby returned to the streets with 
weeping sores on his legs and feet. Prisons are the main source of 
HIV infection and Ebby had been regularly in and out of jail over the 
years. "After he became homeless," Milad said, "Ebby would try to get 
jailed so he would have somewhere warm and dry to sleep." After he 
developed Aids, he literally couldn't get arrested and Shapur Park is 
where he mostly spent the night, sleeping by a cedar tree.

A recent law has made it possible for pharmacies to supply free 
syringes to registered drug addicts - a sea change in the Iranian 
government's policy - and there are now three methadone centres in 
southern Tehran run by the NGO Persepolis. But these are pinpricks of 
hope in a dark landscape.

There is still a huge stigma attached to having a drug addict in the 
family. Ebby's elder sister, Azar, says to me: "He stole from me, he 
lied to me and I still gave him money.

But it was impossible to try to find a husband for my sister with 
Ebby coming around every time he needed a fix. So in the end I had to 
stop him and when we moved, I never gave him my new address." She is 
crying as she tells me this. "He was my brother and I loved him. But 
what could I do? Our parents aren't here. I had to look out for my sister."

His younger sister, Azine, is nursing her first child.

She is less emotional. "He brought this on himself," she declares. 
"For me, Ebby died a long time ago. And even though I told my husband 
about him after we were married, his family still don't know and I 
have no desire for them to find out. Ebby was a disgrace to us all. 
At least now that he is dead I can get on and grieve for him. But 
Ebby died a long time ago."

Twenty miles from Abadan, we alight in Khorramshahr, declared holy 
ground since the brutal two-year Iraqi occupation. Many buildings are 
mere shells; the economy has never recovered from the destruction the 
city suffered during the war. I head to the city hall to get a pass 
for Shalamcheh, the no-man's land between here and Iraq which saw so 
much bloodshed and is now a shrine to the war, a place of pilgrimage. 
This is where Ebby spent most of his war.

"There are still lots of mines here," says the taxi driver, a 
Khuzestani Arab from a nearby village.

We turn on to a long straight road, surrounded by vast emptiness, the 
odd shelled-out tank providing the only punctuation in the dull brown plains.

Occasionally there are large banners bearing the garishly painted 
images of martyrs who were killed in the war. When we draw into a 
muddy parking lot, the dips and elevations of trenches and dug-outs 
are still clear in the landscape all around us. "Shalamcheh: welcome 
to Iran's Kerbala" announces a sign. Kerbala, in Iraq, is where, in 
the 8th century, Imam Hossein was martyred.

To the right lies a prayer area with rows of billboards displaying 
pictures. The shrine itself is on the left, a dome covering a cool 
hall supported by columns, and the centrepiece, a glass case edged by 
sandbags and red paper flowers.

Inside the case are the broken remains of guns, helmets, Korans and 
other relics of soldiers' lives collected from these killing fields, 
all watched over by a photograph of a dead, bloody soldier.

Outside, there are a couple of watchtowers, a few metres from the 
border with Iraq. I walk up to them, passing two very young, bored- 
looking guards.

 From the top of the watchtower, I spot an Iraqi post on the other 
side of the border.

A lonely guard waves. "Pity you weren't here half an hour ago," says 
one of the soldiers who has wandered over to hand me a pair of 
binoculars. "The Iraqis were singing and dancing." (The Iraqi 
election is days away and the excitement is palpable.)

Later, I wander a little from the path. "Stop!" the other soldier 
shouts after me, alarmed. "Mines," he explains, "there are still 
mines here. All the way to Ahvaz." Ahvaz is 120km away. When it rains 
like this, the mines shift. "We lost a couple of men just a few days 
ago," the young soldier says.

Stories abound of shocking incidents the war made commonplace: half a 
garrison lying down on an electric fence so that others could go 
through; a hundred boys throwing themselves in a river to act as a 
human bridge; the children who ran at Iraqi tanks with Molotov 
cocktails or hand grenades.

Looking over the scrub and mud, I think about Ebby waiting in the 
trenches, scared.

Rousing religious tunes would be played over loudspeakers and mass 
prayers said before battles to whip the troops into a religious 
frenzy, though by that time many of the soldiers were conscripts like 
Ebby and didn't have the same zeal as those who had flocked to enlist 
in the first few years.

The silence here is eerie.

Underneath my every step may be bodies: four major battles were 
fought from April to August 1988, in which the Iraqis used massive 
amounts of nerve and blister agents to defeat the Iranians. In the 
last big battle of the war alone, 65,000 Iranians were killed, many 
by poison gas. The pictures lining the prayer area don't shy away 
from any of this: there are bodies, dismembered, beheaded, bleeding, wounded.

Men praying in the trenches, looking shell-shocked.

There are photographs of the dead with their names underneath: some 
just young boys, some in the height of late-1970s fashion, frozen 
forever in their youth and big hair. Just as shocking is a picture of 
troops marching in the area at the start of hostilities: Shalamcheh 
was like an oasis, green and lush with date trees and all shades of 
bushes and plants.

The pictures are here as a testament to the glorious values of 
martyrdom, of the bravery of Iran's sons. To me they just speak of 
futility, a waste of young lives and of land as old as time.

The war between Iran and Iraq was a great human tragedy.

Perhaps as many as a million people died, many more were wounded, and 
millions were made refugees.

The resources wasted on the war exceeded what the entire Third World 
spent on public health in a decade.

And even now, as those who lived through it struggle to come to terms 
with their memories, the war still claims its casualties, such as Ebby.

In death my cousin has found a status he never enjoyed in life. For 
many of the men who fought in this war, the only honourable outcome 
was death and martyrdom.

For those who survived, it meant reintegrating into a society that 
every year cared less for their war. For the likes of Ebby, that was 
not an option.

Despite support from family, a loving wife and children, Ebby's love 
for the drug that helped him forget was stronger than anything, and 
to it he sacrificed his family, his home and, in the end, his life. 
While still alive, reeling through the streets of Abadan, he was a 
disgrace to his family, an embarrassment to his country and a 
shameful testimony to the war that shaped him. In death, Ebby has 
become once again a beloved son, a missed brother and a father and 
husband. Another martyr to the war that continues to haunt its survivors.
- ---
MAP posted-by: Beth