Instead, I go the Hoetl Iran—the huge illuminated sign on the roof has got the letters mixed up—to eat chicken and rice at the restaurant there. The room feels as if it has been cooled down to ten degrees. Vivaldi’s Four Seasons caresses the ears, and the waiters in white shirts are serving food to the rhythm of “La primavera.” The heat-afflicted Ahvazis would presumably love to have four seasons. There is no way that I would have visited the capital of the oil and gas province had Yasmin not suggested it as the starting point for our trip to two battlefields of the Iran-Iraq War.
At five in the afternoon Farshad picks me up in his Peugeot Pars. The slim forty-six-year-old with a mustache has just finished work as an engineer at a thermal power plant. “Welcome to the hottest city in Iran,” he says, pointing to the display on the dashboard—107 degrees Fahrenheit. “This is still harmless; in summer it is up to ten degrees hotter.”
“How do you survive?”
“By spending as little time as possible outdoors,” he says.
Farshad has been to Germany a number of times for energy conferences. He lists the cities: “Frankfurt, Mannheim, Stuttgart, Hamburg.” And he even remembers the names of subway stations: Messehallen, Schlump. “They’re supposed to be building a subway here, but it is extremely difficult because in some places the oil is only fifty feet below the surface.” The natural resources here are enormously valuable, but they are forever causing problems. Soon the airport here will be moved to a site ten miles away because a large amount of black gold has been discovered below the landing strip.
Farshad lives in the Koorosh district, in an expensively furnished apartment that includes a classy leather couch. On the wall there are Quran pictures and a painting of a Tuscan landscape and a wooden clock, which every half hour chimes a grotesquely distorted Big Ben melody. He introduces me to his wife, Maryan, and his two children: thirteen-year-old Shayan and eleven-year-old Shaqiba.
The most noticeable resident, however, is a yellow-beaked mynah with gray-black feathers, and the name doesn’t remain a puzzle for long, frequently saying “mynah,” with a hefty bobbing of the head. In the same way as parrots, mynahs can mimic sounds in robotic tones. Its repertoire, however, includes enough croaks, hiccups, and peeps to supply a number of pinball machines with sound effects. Farshad opens the cage. The bird hops out, then craps on my backpack before hopping onto my head. Still, better than the other way round. “We just bought it ten days ago for 400,000 toman at the bazaar,” says Farshad while cleaning my backpack with a tissue. “Watch out for your eyes.”
I cover my face with my hands. Being denied a feast of my eyes, the mynah pecks away at my forehead in the hope of finding something edible. This is not the beginning of a wonderful friendship.
The doorbell rings, and Yasmin arrives. Her plane from Tehran landed at the oil field airport an hour ago.
“What have you got on your head?” she asks.
“Mynaaah, mynaaah,” croaks the bird in answer.
WAR
AT THE ENTRANCE, next to a huge visitors’ car park there is a child’s coffin wrapped in an Iranian flag. In front of it are artillery shells, pale red plastic tulips, and a solitary dusty shoe. The wall behind is made of sandbags. A sign states: Welcome to the place where martyrs went to God, and the child in the coffin is one. In no other country in the world are so many martyrs revered as here; in every city there are posters of their faces on the streets. On the walls of housing blocks there are paintings of the war heroes, and hundreds of thousands of them rest in the enormous cemetery of Behesht-e Zahra in Tehran.
In this life they are idols, and in the afterlife they have a great time, at least if you believe the promises in the Quran. Those who die on the battlefield enter Paradise, regardless of the kind of life they had led up until then. They can expect servants, magnificent houses, and seventy-two virgins at their disposal. Soldiers who were about to be sent into battle were given a plastic key, Made in Taiwan, which was supposed to guarantee them quicker access to Paradise. In the firm belief of eternal rewards, human chains of young men walked hand in hand across minefields toward enemy machine gun fire. A number of mines remain on the battlefield of Fath ol-Mobin to this day. Visitors are not allowed to leave the designated trail. Several Iraqi tanks are scattered around looking like huge dead insects, and were it not for the shrubbery, you might think that they had been destroyed yesterday and not thirty years ago.
On September 22, 1980, 100,000 Iraqi soldiers with tanks attacked Khuzestan. Saddam Hussein wanted to seize the oil-rich province because he was convinced of a historical link to Iraq. He was hoping for support from Iranians of Arabic descent, who had long been campaigning for independence. And he was hoping for a victory within a few weeks, as Iran was militarily weak after the fall of the shah. But what followed was the longest war between two countries of the twentieth century, with hundreds of thousands dead on both sides and millions more wounded. In the almost-nine-year war the borders between the two countries were continuously moving with conquests and reconquests.
The scenes of the battles are now pilgrimage sites. According to official figures, 3.5 million tourists visited the battlefields in 2013, around 5 per cent of the population. The pilgrims are called “The Passengers of Light.” “The state subsidizes almost all the travel costs,” says Yasmin, who got her master’s degree in this kind of tourism. She is wearing black gloves because it is not considered acceptable to show nail varnish at holy sites. “One week, including full board, one night in a five-star hotel, and a trip to Khomeini’s birthplace for twenty thousand toman.” A seven-day, all-inclusive patriotic tour for five dollars—an unbeatable offer.
“Citizens are supposed to discover what foreigners did to us,” explains Yasmin, which is why film projects on the topic are state-sponsored. More than seven thousand Iran-Iraq War films have been made since 1988; the directors are certain not to make losses. For the government these subsidies are good investments, as the longer the memories of war remain in people’s minds, the more certain they can be that they will stay in power. Because the war shows that Allah was on the side of the Iranians, who managed to strike back at a far more powerful nation. Because the grief at the loss of family members is so intense, even today, many people are not prepared to risk their lives or the lives of their children for anything (rebellion against the regime, for example). Because it is always good to whip up hatred for the U.S. supporters of Iraq, and then people more readily blame the archenemy for internal deficiencies than mistakes of their own government.
On the ground in front of the entrance are paintings of the Israeli and American flags, and the latter is so faded that it is hardly recognizable. “Everyone who enters has to tread on them,” explains Yasmin. You have to make a detour to avoid them. The choice of the blue Star of David as a doormat is surprising, as during the war Israel supplied antitank missiles and Uzi machine guns to Iran. The propaganda machinery nowadays doesn’t want anything to do with that. For them Israel was always allied with Iraq.
A former commander of the Iranian troops, who introduces himself as Ali Sorkheh, guides us through the trail of the memorial. “Everyone should know the truth about the battlefields,” says the muscular fifty-seven-year-old with a hoarse voice. He is wearing sunglasses, and has white stubble and “Prima” sneakers. He’s been a guide for twenty-three years. “During Operation Fath ol-Mobin, 3,000 Iranian and 25,000 Iraqi soldiers died here, and 50,000 were captured.” And already, discovering the truth about the battlefields is not as simple as it seems. His numbers are exaggerated. According to independent estimates of the Center for Strategic and International Studies, some 5,000 Iranian soldiers died, while 14,000 Iraqi soldiers died or were taken prisoner during Operation Fath ol-Mobin. Sorkheh picks up a cartridge case. “Saddam,” he murmurs. “Many of us still have these things in our bodies.”