by SUSAN ORMISTON
Homa Hoodfar seen arriving in Montreal. Her niece, Amanda Ghahremani, is seen in the background PHOTO/Ryan Remiorz/Canadian Press
Montreal’s Homa Hoodfar says members of Iran’s Revolutionary Guard psychologically tortured her during dozens of interrogations over the course of 112 brutal days in Tehran’s notorious Evin prison.
They threatened “they would send my dead body back to Canada,” the retired Concordia University professor told CBC News in her first interview since her release on Sept. 26.
“I was prepared I might face a few years in prison, or as they said 15 years, maybe I would never be released,” she said in a lengthy interview in her second-floor apartment in Montreal.
She says the interrogators tried to break her spirit. The worst part, she said, was when they played music from the funeral of her husband, who died in December 2014. They had found the music on Hoodfar’s iPad.
“One of the techniques they have is to make you cry,” she said. “I didn’t, so they played the music that was played when my husband’s body was removed from here (their Montreal apartment).
“That was the most difficult moment I had with them.”
Deal at the UN
After 112 days in prison, Hoodfar, 65, was released last Monday and flown to Muscat, Oman. Canada had secured Oman’s diplomatic help a week earlier, on the sidelines of the UN General Assembly in New York.
Iran’s state prosecutor had accused the anthropologist of “dabbling in feminism,” but she says that’s not a crime so the authorities came up with charges that she collaborated with a hostile government against national security, without any evidence.
She believes she was taken as a pawn in the internal political struggle between the elected government led by President Hassan Rouhani and the country’s more conservative, anti-West forces, including the judiciary and the Revolutionary Guard, whose agents first interrogated her.
“The fact that I live in the West and taught at a Western university, for them, was enough,” she said.
“In some way, they arrested me because they wanted to embarrass and put pressure on the elected body [in Iran].”
Her ordeal began with a visit from Revolutionary Guard agents back in March. She was due to return home to Montreal two days later, but they barred her departure, seized her computer, phone and passport.
Twelve interrogations followed. She was free on bail until June, when they arrested her again and locked her up in a tiny cell. Over the next four months, she was interrogated 30 times.
Toothbrush notes
Dressed in pink prison garb, including pants, a long coat and a pink and white head scarf, she turned the prison experience into research.
She decided to take notes of her interrogations, but she had no pen or paper. So after each one, she’d lie on the floor of her cell and scribble barely legible notes on the cell walls with her toothbrush.
“The first week was hard, but after that I thought, ‘You know what, I’m an anthropologist, I’m here in Evin prison … I had not planned to do field work in prison, but I’m here.”
Evin is renowned for the many political prisoners and intellectuals who have been incarcerated there, including Canadian-Iranian photojournalist Zahra Kazemi, who was arrested in 2003 while taking photos outside the prison and died in custody less than a month later.
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