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Indicting Rafsanjani

Death plus ten years

The following are excerpts from Roger Cooper documentary book which gives us a first hand picture of life in the prisons of "Islamic Republic of Iran": torture, degrading and inhuman treatment prisoners are subject to.

Roger Cooper’s arrest at gunpoint while on a business trip to Tehran in December 1985 marked the beginning of an extraordinary mental and physical struggle that was to last in all five years, three months and 25 days.

Evin prison is one of the most feared in the world: hundreds died there before the Ayatollah’s revolution, and tens of thousands during and after it.

Cooper accused of espionage, became the first Birton ever to be incarcerated there. This is the memorable and gripping story, told with a superb sense of irony, of how one man survived years of constant interrogation and solitary confinement by drawing all his resourcefulness and powers of ingenuity. Months after his parody of a trial by revolutionary Court, Cooper learnt of his sentences: ‘Death plus ten years.’ Asking ‘Which comes first?’, he was told he would be held for ten years and then hanged. He replied: Please don’t make it the other way round.

For 25 years Roger Cooper had lived in Iran, working as a journalist, teacher, Persian translator, business consultant and Middle Eastern expert. Now he found himself beaten and blindfolded and threatened with indefinite goal unless he ‘confessed’. So he set about creating a fictitious ‘British Intelligent Service’ peopled by characters from the novels of Evelyn Waugh.

International events repeatedly dashed any hopes of an early release and turned him into a political pawn. He spent his days getting to know his guards and, later on fellow prisoners, fighting an endless battle of wits with his interrogator and officially translating Principles of Islamic Ideology- a book written by the self-same Ayatollah and Minister for Intelligence responsible for his arrest. With its vivid description of prisons life and personal survival techniques, Death Plus Ten years takes its place among the classics of modern prison literatures...

Roger Cooper was born in London in 1935 and educated at Clifton College and St John’s College, Oxford, from where he was sent down for taking a car-load of antibiotics to Budapest during the Hungarian Revolution and being arrested as an alleged spy. He trained as a journalist in Canada and settled in Tehran in 1958, working as an English teacher, learning Persian and Marrying an Iranian. At the time of his arrest in late 1958 he had become Middle East sales manager for an offshore construction company based in Dubai.

Cooper talks of frequent beatings he received in prison by saying:
"The beatings were unpleasant enough, of course. Occasionally Hosein would draw blood from my nose or lips, and twice he punched my ear so hard that it was painful to sleep on that side for several days .....”

"Just as disturbing in its way, was the steady stream of manic cries and groans from other prisoners on my floor and from floors above and below me. One particularly persistent moaning sound seemed to come from far down as if a dungeon or isolated punishment cell .....”

"The interrogations themselves take place in rooms... shouting and cries of pain are often heard from behind the double doors, only partially drowned out by religious chants and prayer ceremonies played endlessly on a tape recorder in the corridor.”

"One of the many aspects of the Iranian justice at least as practiced by the Revolutionary Courts, that is contrary to natural law is the fact that the defendant is not allowed to call a witness or produce evidence in his defense.”