RETURN TO ABADAN
This article was written after a visit to Iran in the autumn of 1998, before the latest round of hostilities between Britain, the US and Iraq. It was recorded that several of the US’s missiles aimed at Basra have strayed into Iranian soil, landing in Khorram-Shahr and Abadan. No Iranian casualties were reported.
“Abadan: don’t call it Abadan; call it Paris”. So ran a local song when Abadan was in its heyday, thirty years ago. The centre of Iran’s booming oil industry, Abadan was home to Iran’s largest and most important refinery. From its small airport one could step on a plane for London, New York and, indeed, Paris. Now, when one takes off from the arid land of Abadan, one can only fly to Tehran, Iran’s capital and a couple of other national destinations, and even then not every day.
“It’s just like England, don’t you think?” Says 20-year old Pegah, shrugging towards the houses down the street where she lives. I look out through the haze, melting inside my hejab in the “mild” temperature of 42 degrees, at the flat dusty earth of Abadan, the bugalows set in gardens boasting usually a eucalyptus tree and some hard-won grass. I study the dwellings with their low, sprawling forms, watching as a little beige lizard scuttles across the path and I can’t think of anything that is less like England. I wonder where Pegah gets this idea from. “Well, the English built Abadan, didn’t they, and look, those are their roofs.” She points at a sloping rooftop, different from the flat and wide roofs of the local arabs’ dwellings. OK, I concede, English houses do have roofs a little bit like that...
Pegah was a baby when the war that stripped Abadan of its glory started. The Iran-Iraq war destroyed much of Iran, but the areas on the border with Iraq suffered the worst and still Khuzestan is struggling to come to terms with its devestation. Khuzestan is situated in the South-West of Iran, sharing a border with Iraq and dipping its toes into the Persian Gulf to the south. An area of immensely humid heat and salty infertile soil, the boring flat landscape does not have much to recommend it. But this dusty earth harbours the source of Iran’s wealth – and much of its troubles – oil. It was here that, at the beginning of the century, a British government-backed Australian named William Knox D’Arcy found the first well and so, in 1908, the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company was born. This same well is still pouring forth its black gold with no sign of abating. Many wells have joined this first, all fecund and full.
The area should be used to conflict and the international machinations that oil inevitably attracts. It had its first taste during World War I, when the British sought to protect their interests and ensure military control of the wells by occupying the area and sending the renowned General Percy Sykes to lead a force of Iranian recruits called the South Persia Rifles. The Germans, however, also understood the importance of this new fuel and smuggled arms to the local nomads to stir up the already volatile feelings engendered by the British occupation.
The British reigned in Iran in all but name in the first third of the century. Not only did Iran receive only 16% of the industry’s profits, but the top jobs were not open to Iranians. The very area of Abadan I am standing in with Pegah, Braim, used to be solely British: Iranians were not allowed into the compound. John Strachey commented in his 1959 book The End of Empire: “This last British empire, the empire of oil, has ‘paid’ better than any other.” The arrival of oil gave Khuzestan – a hitherto remote and ignored province – an experience that the rest of Iran had had for centuries: that of being a pawn for stronger powers. The Iran/Iraq war, was, for many who fought here, but the latest move in the game.
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We drive out of Abadan to visit the cemetry, in a no-man’s land between Abadan and Iraq. On the way we pass the walls of the refinery, still peppered with bullet holes. At the cemetry I am shocked by the vast plots of land devoted to the “martyrs” – those who died in the war are invariably martyred. Above each grave flies the flag of the Islamic Republic of Iran and at the head, a locked glass case with a picture of the dead man. Except that these pictures are not of men, they are boys. Along the central reservations running down the main roads of every town round here are similar pictures, poster art in style, bearing the faces and the names of the town’s endless dead. “Though of course that’s not all of them,” one of my companions snorts.
Stories abound of shocking incidents the war made commonplace: half a garrison lying down on an electric fence so that others may go through; a hundred boys throwing themselves in a river to act as a human bridge; the children that ran at Iraqi tanks with Molotov cocktails or hand grenades. Bitterness is directed at Khomeini: “all those young lives wasted so he could glorify the Islamic Revolution,” says one of my companions. They describe to me some of the regime’s tactics. Unruly school children would be threatened with being sent to the front line; kids would be given plastic keys as they marched into battle and told that they held the key to Paradise where they were undoubtedly headed; sentimental religious songs would be played over Tannoys to whip up the soldiers into a state of religious frenzy before battle.
Pegah tells me about Hussain Fahmideh. “There is a book you are given in school,” she says “about a boy called Hussain Fahmideh who is now in Paradise because he died for his country.” Hussain is depicted as a 12-year-old. Pegah explains that Hussain Fahmideh is unlikely to be a real name since “fahmideh” means “wise”, but there were enough boys like him – and younger – who longed to go to war and glorify their country and be martyred for their religion. “The mullahs are still justifying Khomeini’s actions,’ she says in disgust.
The bitterness is widespread. Ebby, now a man in his 30s with a family and a decent job, fought along the border for the last 18 months of the war. “I can’t even describe the things I’ve seen,” he mutters, sitting cross-legged on the floor, his foot twitching constantly. Eight years on, you can see he still has nightmares. “There were the Iraqis, large men you know, much bigger than us, and they had the latest arms, brand-new kalashes, shiney tanks,” Ebby takes a deep drag of his cigarette, his foot thumping against the floor, “You felt, here’s a war where there are bigger powers against just us, disorganised and poor.” He shakes his head, the deeply-etched lines dragging down his mouth testifying that he sees no glory in this. No-one fell for Khomeini’s declaration of victory: “It was just stalemate”.
Ebby insists that the effects of the war go on, unrecorded. He and his family live locally, in a small town an hour away from Abadan, but he would love to move. “Saddam used chemical weapons you know,’ he points out. “In the last few years two members if my family have died of cancer.” They were both men who fought in the war. Ebby worries about the water, the soil, the health of his children. His brow in constantly furrowed. I am not surprised to learn that he is one of Iran’s growing army of heroin addicts.
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Beyond the cemetry squat huge oil storage drums, now burnt out and half melted. They were the classic targets of the Iraqi bombers. “During the war” explains Pegah’s mother Farideh “the days were dark and the nights were light”. These drums were responsible: all night they would burn while men struggled to put them out and all day the thick, acrid smoke billowed out from them to strangle the sun.
“I was the only woman in Abadan” declares Farideh “I resettled my kids in Shiraz and then came back here with Pegah – she was just a baby.” Farideh’s husband is head of the firefighters in the Petrochemical department of the oil company and he couldn’t leave. Farideh decided that she would rather die with her man than live without him, a decision explained with the forthright simplicity that characterises her talk. Hussain, Farideh’s husband, does not think of himslef as a hero: “I was terrified”, he says: “we weren’t allowed to leave”. Every hour of every day announcements would be made over the radio, the television and Tannoys set up across town reminding the men that if they left their jobs, they would be treated as deserters and executed. Hussain was the head of his department, he had to set an example to the men.
Farideh explains the routine of her life: “Every morning I would come into town, Pegah strapped to my front, and I would go round the hospitals and emergency health points and I would look for Hussain.” Having then ascertained that he was alive and uninjured, she would return home to wait for him and cook. And cook and cook. “I was the only woman in Abadan” she reminds me again “all these men, they needed food.” So he would come home at last, shaking with fear, shock and fury. They throw each other a glance. There are things that husbands and wives keep to themsleves. Farideh will never tell me the reality of Hussain’s fear, but its legacy is an engorged thyroid on his neck.
They show me pictures of their wedding and their youth. The young couple captured in black and white are handsome and carefree. A slim Farideh pouts at the lens, her skirt several inches shy of the knee, her black beehive dropping teased curls on her brow while beside her a smooth-necked Hussain seems filled with confidence of the future. You can almost hear the money jingling in his pockets, an air of immense well-being pervading the scene. “Ah” Farideh sighs, “Those days in Abadan. Dances at the yacht club, parties at the Caravanserai Hotel...” Farideh still possesses cheekbones to swing off, but her hair is hennaed to cover the grey and her figure long ago permanently shrouded in a shapeless dress. Hussain’s bright white hair is deceptive: he has only recently turned 50. And around his mouth lurks a hardness that doesn’t exist in the old photos.
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Mina is a formidable woman also in her 50s. She now lives in a tiny apartment in Shiraz in central Iran: “I arrived there as a war refugee right at the beginning of the war,” she tells me over steaming black tea and almond and rosewater sweets. She used to live in Khorram-Shahr, a town near Abadan which, at its moment of glory, boasted some of the most exclusive and expensive neighbourhoods in Iran. It was also the first town invaded by the Iraqis, an indignity that Abadan never suffered. Mina talks wistfully of her lovely house, her beautiful carpets, the order and comfort of her life there, but when I ask her why she doesn’t move back, she decides to show me.
We drive through once-smart streets that are now covered in dust and colonnised by herds of goats. She points out the mosque, with its unusual pink minarets and invocation of the Shia Imam Ali inscribed on the dome. “They wrote that when the Iranians retook the town,” she explains. “This was the first site they reoccupied.” All around us is the bustle of the bazaar, just around the corner. The local Arabs sit on the ground behind their wares, the women clad in black with their faces tattooed, the men in their long robes and eghals on their heads. Mina whispers with distaste: “These Arabs were excited at the thought of an Iraqi invasion.”
Though Iranian, the ethnicity of many of the tribes that live in Khuzestan is Arab. Just as in the province of Kurdistan, there are Kurds, in Azerbaijan Turks, in Turkomenistan, Turkoman and in Baluchistan, Baluchis. Iranian identity is a complex and complicated matter, with different groups preserving their own language, dress and customs while being part of an Iranian whole. It may explain why there has always been a problem with Iranian unity in times of crisis: tribal mentality is still potent. Mina tells me that during the black-outs, when the population were implored not to let any light escape into the night, the Arabs would be flashing torches out of their windows. “To try and guide the Iraqi planes,” she goes on. “I don’t know if Saddam had promised them something, but they were very keen to let him in.”
Eventually we drive up to Mina’s house. It looks fine from the outside, a large house set in its own grounds. We peek through a window: inside it is a shell. All around are similarly grand houses. “But really, no-one has come back,” Mina says. You can see why: a few houses look in a better state than others; those are the ones where the absent owners have installed guards. The others are being squatted: through open gates we see large yards busy with wandering goats, dirty-faced children and women in the black Arab chadors with sleeves, crouching on the ground as they clean herbs or wash rice. Mina exclaims: “I don’t know where they have all come from, these Arabs aren’t even Iranian. They must have sneaked over the border.”
Mina insists that Khorram-Shahr has had its day. The government have only recently started to put money back into Abadan and it is unlikely that they will ever get round to Khorram-Shahr. By the river, where the wreck of a large merchant ship slowly rusts, Mina points to the site of what was once her favourite café and falls to talking of the good times she had there. When the war came, “all I knew was that the Iraqis were coming and were on the road to Khorram-Shahr” before one of her sisters rushed in telling her of a lift she had found with a friend. Without thinking, Mina and her husband walked out of their house and locked the door. They thought they would return in a few days when the troubles were over. Mina was still in her slippers. They never went back.
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Shalamcheh is a barren area a few miles from Khorram-Shahr, spanning the distance between Iran and Iraq. The worst horrors of the war took place in border areas like this. Today it is still heavily guarded, with numerous checkpoints and a night-time curfew. “You’ll be sniped at” the soldiers warn us when we insist on going in an hour before sunset. “We have trouble at night” they say “Mojahadin trying to cross the broder from Iraq.” But eventually they let us through, warning us to be back in an hour. “It’s quite a way to the border,” they call after us “don’t be late.”
We drive through flat wastelands of scrub and dust. There are the odd remains of machine guns and the burnt-out shells of tanks abandoned at the side of the road. Occassionally there are large banners bearing the garishly painted images of “martyrs” who died in the war, of generals, of ordinary soldiers too. We are ushered through another checkpoint and eventually the road ends at a couple of watchtowers and heavily guarded barriers. The lights of the Iraqi town of Basra blink at us, closer now than Khorram-Shahr.
We pass a car park, edged with a sudden abundance of palm trees. In front of the car park is a dome structure, at the centre of which is a glass case filled with the broken remains of guns, helmets, Korans and other relics of soldiers’ lives collected from these killing fields. Underneath this ghoulish display case are the bodies of 400 men, a troop that came from the holy town of Mashad in the northwest of the country, only to be buried alive by the Iraqis on arrival. To one side are seven slabs of carved stone that mark the lives of seven unidentified soldiers they had dug up a couple of weeks earlier. This monument has been erected for the visitors that come here to pay their respects to their dead. No-one knows how many men (and boys) died here.
One of the soldiers steps forward to explain all this to us. He didn’t fight in the war himself, he shrugs, he was too young. Indeed, he is only carrying out his national service, as are the majority of other soldiers stationed here, and most of them look no older than 17. Speaking quietly, his huge chocolate-coloured eyes fringed by dark lashes, he looks the picture of peaceful, healthy youth. But every day he says, they experience the horror of the war. “We are digging up bodies now” he tells us, describing the daily routine for the squad assigned to this task. Starting at four am, the troop with their special machinery cross the border into the area currently designated for digging, joining their Iraqi counterparts. All day they dig and separate the Iranian bodies from the Iraqis. They return for lunch, sometime bringing the Iraqis with them, sometimes accepting their invitation to join them for lunch: “because we are all friends now,” he smiles wryly. And then begins the process of notifying the families of those still identifiable and transporting the bodies back to their homes.
I wander off as I’m listening to him, a little way from the path. “Stop” he shouts after me, alarmed. “Mines” he explains “there are still mines here. All the way to Ahvaz.” Ahvaz is some 120km away. “As soon as we think we know where the mines are, they shift,” he explains. The dry soil is fed deep below by a series of streams originating from the river that makes Abadan almost an island, so, particularly in the winter, the mines move. “We lost a couple of men just a few weeks ago” the young soldier says. I go to talk to his colleagues in the watchtower, who, with a mixture of Iranian courtesy and teenage bashfulness say they wish they could let me go up, but it’s strictly forbidden and they daren’t break the rules with a lady. “Pity you weren’t here half an hour ago” they laugh “the Iraqis were singing and dancing over there.”
As we drive back to the original checkpoint, the sun blazes exquisitely vivid hues of burnt pink and orange, infusing the sky with a kaleidescope of reds. The flat ground forgets its harrowing memories and, just for the hour of sunset, dons an unexpected cloak of colour, soaking up the last rays of light. The mud huts of the local Arabs, bunched around the checkpoint, take on a mystical aspect, the rounded earthen walls speckled with blood-red shadows. After what we have just seen, I find this unexpected beauty immensly moving, that at least for an hour every day, Khuzstan can shed its turbulent past, its deceptive dullness, its bloody recent history, and under the sinking globe of the sun, glory in an unrivalled desert beauty.
© Kamin Mohammadi, January 1999