How to survive prison in Iran

As a student and political activist in Iran, Abbas Hakimzadeh was jailed three times between 2007 and 2010. He survived physical and psychological abuse, enduring torture for up to 15 hours a day.

Suspecting a fourth arrest was imminent, in 2010 Hakimzadeh fled across the border to Turkey. The Iranian authorities had confiscated his travel documents, and Hakimzadeh took the risk of being shot by border guards to avoid yet another stint in prison.

Still, the ordeal he faced over five years ago pales in comparison to what currently awaits activists and journalists who fall into the clutches of Iran’s justice system, he says. Since the unrests of 2009, the Islamic republic expanded its use of legal tools, including capital punishment, to silence dissidents.

“The stakes are much higher now,” says Hakimzadeh. “In my time, the price you paid for activism was prison. But since the Green Movement, this price has gone up.”

One example is the charge of moharebeh, or ‘waging war against God’, which carries the death penalty. Iranian authorities have expanded the scope of its definition from ‘armed war against the state’ and ‘heresy’ to include ‘working to undermine the Islamic establishment’ and ‘cooperating with foreign agents or entities’. This allows Iranian officials to adjust the meaning of moharebeh to apply to anything from an angry post on Facebook or Twitter to participating in a spontaneous protest rally.

Hakimzadeh believes there are steps activists in Iran can take to better protect themselves, both inside and outside prison walls. He belongs to a group of over a dozen activists who used their hard-earned personal experiences to create a 19-chapter booklet in Farsi and English titled Safe Activism: Reducing the Risks and Impact of Arrest.

Designed to teach activists and journalists how to avoid careless behaviors that could endanger them and those around them, the booklet, now online, also offers guidelines on what to do in case of arrest and how to mitigate the consequences of incarceration.

Mahdieh Javid, who left Iran in her early teens, played a crucial role in writing the booklet. Through her work with activists who left Iran between 2009 and 2010, Mahdieh came into contact with activists based in Iran and made an alarming discovery.

“We realized that many instances of arrest could have been avoided by taking a few simple measures,” she says of her motivation for spearheading the project. “These issues are not talked about or sufficiently discussed. Many of the mistakes are repeated.”

These basic safety measures are highlighted in the first chapters of the ‘Safe Activism’ booklet. Readers are reminded to take precautions before meeting with other activists and not communicate important information over the phone. They are advised to keep sensitive documents as well as identification papers and travel documents at a safe place outside their residence, and to clear their homes of illegal items like drugs, alcohol and banned media.

Mehdi Aminizadeh, another activist who contributed to the project, says his family sent him books from his home library during one of his four stints in prison, without realizing one of them was contraband. Possession of that banned book was later added to his charges.

The guide also devotes a section to digital security. Readers are advised to memorize phone numbers, addresses and other sensitive information instead of recording them. The booklet recommends using a different email address for activism-related exchanges, and preventing the recovery of deleted files by using software like File Shredder.

Looking back, Hakimzadeh says one of his biggest mistakes was writing an email to his girlfriend with instructions on what to do if he was detained. “I don’t know whether I had kept the file on my computer or deleted it and they managed to recover it, but my interrogators knew about it and used it against me.”

Keeping insanity at bay

Activists have no real way of telling when and if they will be arrested or how serious their punishment will be. The arrest strategies employed by Iranian officials also differ. Some arrests are quick and predictable while others come as a surprise as authorities take time to ‘gather information and get to know the person better.’

“For others, they prepare a scenario and wait for certain things to transpire before playing out that scenario...They let the fruit ripen first and then pluck it,” says Hakimzadeh.

The booklet gives readers insight into what to expect during arrest and prison admission, as well as tactics commonly used by interrogators: threatening physical harm and arresting the subject’s family members, employing physical and psychological torture, sexual assault, as well as performing random acts of kindness.

Readers are also advised to not incriminate others when ‘confessing’. In written confessions, the authors recommend giving vague answers and including the interrogator’s questions in their statements. They advise detainees to write what is in their best interest as opposed to what they told the interrogator. To prevent prosecutors from using the confession as evidence against them in a later case, the detainees should number and date all pages. They should also prevent additions by crossing out all blank spaces. Detainees may also write illegibly and scratch out words to make their confessions inadmissible in court.

Preparing activists for solitary confinement, a common method used to break detainees, is perhaps one of the most significant undertakings of the guide. Hakimzadeh, who spent a total of 190 days in solitary, describes it as a vacuum that felt like death.

“I haven’t experienced death but I think this is how it must feel. It is very sudden and unexpected. In an instant, you are cut off from everyone and everything,” he says. “You can’t do trivial things that were once normal and you took for granted like opening a door, looking at yourself in the mirror, or checking the time on your cellphone.”

As time went by, exercise, meditation, positive thoughts and cleaning his cell, among other things, helped Hakimzadeh keep insanity at bay.

“I had a Quran and a prayer book in my cell and I would study them and take notes with the pen and paper I had found and managed to hide,” he says. “Having writing material was illegal there. I would think about my notes and have discussions about them with myself. I would talk to myself. I would walk in my cell for hours.”

The Safe Activism booklet is not the first of its kind, but its writers believe that it is more current on the methods used by Iranian authorities. Compiled by a large group of activists whose ordeals of persecution and incarceration are recent, the booklet incorporates the voices of student activists, women’s rights activists and the Green Movement as well as other groups.

“Some of the items were new even to me, for instance I knew what happens to political and student activists in section 209 [of Tehran’s Evin Prison], but I didn’t know about what happens to prisoners in other cities like Sanandaj or Ahvaz or to religious minorities. This booklet includes their experiences too,” says Hakimzadeh.

While the intended audience of the booklet are activists in Iran, its online nature also gives Islamic republic authorities access to its volume of information. However, the writers of Safe Activism are not concerned that revealing the methods used to persecute activists will result in a change of tactics.

Reading the booklet could lead Iranian officials to take a “smarter approach”, but Hakimzadeh says it will not change the fact that once a “person knows the basics of what will happen there, it will help them adapt.”

“At the very least,” adds one of the contributors who asked to remain unnamed, “it lets them know they are not alone. Others have gone through this ordeal in the past, and some of those people are safe now.”

The Tehran Bureau is an independent media organisation, hosted by the Guardian. Contact us @tehranbureau