Mohammad Mosaed lives in Washington after being persecuted for his journalism in Iran. 'They cannot silence me,' he says, because doing so would mean the regime 'has broken you. After that you breathe and eat and sleep, but can do nothing more.'Louie Palu/The Globe and Mail
This story is part of a series, Moral Courage, exploring the dangers journalists face around the world. Learn more below.
“When you are born in a country like Iran, you can never be free.”
This is how journalist Mohammad Mosaed described his current plight to me. After his prolonged ordeal at the hands of the Iranian government, culminating in his desperate flight into exile, I could readily understand his grim, fatalistic outlook.
But listening to his story also made me think of another explanation that could account for the path his life had taken – one that did not negate his view, but rather offered a complementary understanding of how he came to find himself in Washington, looking over his shoulder anticipating fresh threats.
“Until you make the unconscious conscious,” wrote Swiss psychiatrist Carl Gustav Jung, “it will direct your life and you will call it fate.”
To put Jung’s theory to the test, we need to take a closer look at Mr. Mosaed’s early years. He was born during a great upheaval. The Manjil-Rudbar earthquake had struck northern Iran, devastating the area and forcing his mother to travel from Sowme’eh Sara, her hometown, to Gorgan in the state of Golestan, to give birth to him.
When young Mohammad was six years of age, his father, a teacher, obtained a post in the village of Abatar, closer to the city they had left to escape the earthquake’s devastation.
The school only had two classrooms. One was used to teach students. The other was home to the Mosaed family, which by now included a second son.
Despite his father being a teacher, Mr. Mosaed’s family was impoverished. Power to their single-room dwelling was supplied by a battery. In northern Iran, the sun sets early in winter. If the family wanted electric light, there would be no hot water. If hot water was needed, the light came from a candle.
These were the kind of decisions Mr. Mosaed recalls his parents having to make daily. And while there was always something to eat, it was not unusual to have only one meal a day.
The family lived this way for four years, and tough as it was, Mr. Mosaed regarded himself as fortunate. He was aware, even at that tender age, of others having it worse.
A family who lost their home in an earthquake clean up outside their tent in Manjil, Iran, in 1990.Bob Jordan/The Associated Press
Ten years after the earthquake that had killed an estimated 42,000 people, Mr. Mosaed’s family moved back to Sowme’eh Sara. He was enrolled in a school for gifted children from poor families. From there, he gained entry to the University of Rasht, where he studied computer science and worked as a mechanic to support himself.
While at university, he continued something he had been doing since elementary school: writing stories. At first, he wrote fiction. Some of his published work came to the attention of an editor at Chelcheragh, a popular weekly magazine with a young readership. He was a offered a part-time job, covering local news in the north of Iran.
Mr. Mosaed’s nascent career as a journalist was interrupted by compulsory national service. He recalls two difficult two years housed in a police station, working long hours seven days a week without pay, living off lousy food and being forbidden to write.
No sooner was this ordeal behind him than he began working full-time for Shargh, a reformist newspaper. Tasked with writing about the economy, he gravitated toward exposing corruption – fertile yet dangerous grounds for an investigative reporter in Iran.
Iranian journalists are understandably hesitant to write about corruption in their country. Ranked 172nd out of 180 nations by Reporters Sans Frontiers when it comes to an index of press freedom, Iran deals harshly with journalists who expose inconvenient truths. Intimidation, arrests, beatings, torture, targeting family members – there’s a playbook of cruelty designed to muzzle an independent press.
Mr. Mosaed would have known this before he began asking his questions. Still, he never hesitated. He was not alone in seeing corruption as a major cause of Iran’s poverty, wealth disparity, delayed development and social crises. He was, however, one of the very few within Iran to shine a light on it.
Newspapers are piled up for sale in Tehran in 2019.Nazanin Tabatabaee/WANA via REUTERS
One of the approaches the Iranian government uses to deal with corruption has been the establishment of anti-corruption courts. What Mr. Mosaed revealed was that these courts are corrupt as well, thus perpetuating the problem.
The regime’s response to his exposé was to ban him from entering the court building. His editor at Sharg also told him to leave the anti-corruption courts alone. It was simply too dangerous to continue.
Mr. Mosaed’s response was to shift his attention to the government’s corrupt practice of selling off state companies to the private sector, a process rife with nepotism, bribery, kickbacks and skimming. In the process, workers lost their jobs and livelihoods and when they protested, they were arrested. This kind of reporting was too risky for Sharg as well. The paper received calls from the government to warn him off.
“I would hand in a 4,000 word article and only 2,000 words would be printed. Some of my reports were suppressed completely,” Mr. Mosaed told me. He recalls his editor pleading with him: “It’s not a free country, be careful.” For three years, the paper walked a tightrope, keen to keep him because of his big readership while simultaneously trying to placate the regime.
Mr. Mosaed chaffed at this in-house censorship. Worse still, when national protests erupted over the state of the economy and the falling value of the rial, a cowed Sharg, like other mainstream media in the country, remained completely silent. Mr. Mosaed could contain his anger no longer. He turned to Twitter to write about things his paper would not print.
“I used the backdoor to avoid the censor,” he said. Almost overnight, he found a huge audience, 10 times Sharg’s circulation. The government, with its antennae finely tuned to the influential sway of online material, tried to still his criticism by pressuring Sharg to shut his Twitter account. Mr. Mosaed refused to back off, threatening to resign if the paper forced him to cut off his Twitter feed.
In Iran, Mr. Mosaed, stymied by in-house censorship at his newspaper, found a bigger audience on Twitter – but also more unwanted attention from the authorities for his anti-corruption reports.Louie Palu/The Globe and Mail
In November, 2019, he was arrested. The circumstances of how he was taken into custody were choreographed to traumatize not only him, but his family too. He had gone to spend a few days at his parent’s house. One morning he awoke to find a stranger in his bedroom filming him with a camcorder. The man was a security agent of the IRCG, the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps. He was accompanied by two fellow agents, one of whom was female and brought along to restrain Mr. Mosaed’s mother should the need arise.
This fealty to religious sensibilities brings to mind French philosopher Blaise Pascal’s trenchant observation that men never do evil so completely and cheerfully as when they do it from religious conviction. Mr. Mosaed watched the agents go through clothing and books, looking for incriminating evidence in the absence of a crime. His hands were tied behind his back. The last thing he saw before being blindfolded was his horrified father shouting in protest and being manhandled aside as he tried to come to his assistance.
Three weeks of solitary confinement in an IRCG cell followed. The tiny two-by-three-metre room had no window or bed. The light was kept on constantly. A camera monitored Mr. Mosaed’s every moment. He was not allowed access to a lawyer. He could not see his family. He would be taken, blindfolded, at all hours to an interrogation room where he was questioned by two men “playing good cop, bad cop,” as he described it. And he was tortured. These were terrifying days for Mr. Mosaed.
“They government did not want facts,” he told me. “They wanted repentance and to leave me as a broken person with no courage to challenge them.” Mr. Mosaed never buckled.
He was released on bail after three weeks, with his parents’ house as surety. He was ordered to stay off social media, but no sooner was he released than he reopened his Twitter account. The state responded by arresting his fiancé, Ashraf Nafari, keeping her in Qarchak prison for two weeks before transferring her to the notorious Evin prison for another three months. Only then did he stop writing.
When Mr. Mosaed finally appeared in the revolutionary court, he was given a token lawyer. His case was heard by Iman Afshari, a mullah, who was in a hurry and asked a few perfunctory questions before telling Mr. Mosaed to go home and await his sentence. The court proceedings lasted less than 15 minutes. Two days later, he was sentenced to four years and nine months in jail, followed by a two year ban on working as a journalist in addition to a further three months of mandatory work for the government as a social worker.
Mr. Mosaed was spared serving his harsh sentence by the cumbersome cogs of a totalitarian bureaucracy. It might take only a few minutes to condemn an innocent man to years in jail, but the paperwork that opens the gates to Evin prison cannot be rushed. In the weeks it took to process the mullah’s decision, Mr. Mosaed, out on bail, fled to Turkey. His hurried farewell to his parents was harrowing.
After taking a train to Khoy, close to the Turkish border, he set out to cross the snowy Zagros mountains in winter at night. Human traffickers involved in the organ trade were active in the area, adding to his anxiety. Despite a full moon lighting the way, he got lost and almost froze to death.
In desperation, his clothes frozen stiff, he called 911 and reached Turkish emergency services. At first, the Turkish authorities wanted to deport him back to Iran, but interventions from the Committee to Protect Journalists, among other organizations aware of his plight, secured his freedom.
Ms. Nafari joined him in Ankara and the couple hunkered down for five months, fearful of venturing outdoors lest they be assassinated or kidnapped by Iranian agents. This fear has lessened but not abated with their move to Washington. Mr. Mosaed still sleeps poorly. He struggles daily with painful memories. One begins to appreciate the depths of his despair when he candidly admits he does not have the “energy and courage” to continue with his psychotherapy.
As for Mr. Mosaed’s parents, they are trying to hold on to their house which the Iranian regime has laid claim to as forfeiture for their son’s flight while on bail. That his parents have been placed in this predicament weighs heavily on him, too. He has told them to disown him, hoping this might save their home.
All of which explains his cri de coeur that, as an Iranian, he will never be free.
Mr. Mosaed still has the beaten-up pair of shoes he wore when escaping on foot into Turkey.Louie Palu/The Globe and Mail
He also has a temporary ID card issued in Turkey, with a photo taken minutes after his arrest.Louie Palu/The Globe and Mail
Mr. Mosaed comes across as quietly spoken, thoughtful and exceedingly polite. I cannot claim to know him well after one interview, but I would be surprised if proved wrong in also viewing him as eminently gentle, patient and kind. But beneath the mild demeanor is a remarkable moral courage that has sustained him in his darkest hours.
In order to understand where his moral code comes from, let us return to Jung and his view of how the unconscious influences behavior. Mr. Mosaed did not chose to write about corruption in Iran by chance. What steered him in this direction were remote childhood experiences, some remembered, others not, all infused with emotions he would not have understood or even been aware of at the time. The indignity of his circumstances marked the child, and in doing so forged the man he would become.
Corruption on a grand scale that impoverished millions of citizens, that forced a school teacher and his family to live out of a classroom without privacy or basic amenities, even as billions of petrodollars gushed into state coffers, is a moral outrage. As a child, Mr. Mosaed lacked the intellectual capacity to see it as such, but he smelled and tasted poverty during his formative years and the visceral memory of it never left him.
Grinding poverty can hold generations captive. Mr. Mosaed, in breaking free, sees himself as having been given a “lucky chance” to bring about change. As he explained it to me: “It is my responsibility to my past, my family, my community.” It is a theme he returned to repeatedly – this moral imperative to expose corruption for the greater good.
“It is not just about me, it is about millions of people.”
Refusing to stay silent has come at considerable personal cost to Mr. Mosaed: torture, exile, the imprisonment of his fiancée, a deep loneliness from a life without friends (too dangerous for them, too risky for him, the paranoia of fear cutting both ways), remorse propelling his request to be disowned. Each of these morally egregious situations has been foisted on him by a vengeful regime, and they all could have been avoided by staying quiet.
When I put this to Mr. Mosaed, he dismissed my assumption out of hand. Doing nothing, he asserted, would be worse than all he has endured. Presented this way, we can see the degree to which moral injury, and its foil, moral courage, have determined his behaviour. Remaining silent, an act of omission, has never been an option, for it opens the door to the shame that follows in moral injury’s wake.
“They cannot silence me,” he asserted. “If we cannot talk about the problem, how can we solve it?” Expanding on this further, he believes “the worst thing is to say what the government wants.” To do so means the regime “has broken you. After that you breathe and eat and sleep, but can do nothing more.”
The road from Abatar to Washington has been long and arduous for Mr. Mosaed. What comes next will not be easy for him and Ms. Nafari. But as he navigates an uncertain future, there is one certainty that he can hold on to, and it will surely comfort him: He remained true to his moral compass.
In doing so, he touched the lives of countless Iranians who avidly read his columns each week, who followed him on Twitter, who learned about things in their country the government wanted hidden and who would come up to him on the streets of Tehran to offer a quiet thank you.
Moral Courage: About the series
Journalists are key to civil society, keeping readers, viewers and listeners informed of events both local and international. At times, this work entails exposure to grave danger. The factors that motivate journalists to continue this work despite these threats are many and complex, but central to it all is moral courage. Simply put, to some journalists, doing nothing in response to the egregious behaviour of corrupt or genocidal politicians, human traffickers and drug cartels is worse than the repercussions that come from exposing such crimes. These journalists are driven by a moral imperative to risk their own safety and psychological well-being for the story – and the price paid for this steely determination is invariably steep.
Anthony Feinstein, a psychiatrist at Sunnybrook Health Sciences Centre and professor of psychiatry at the University of Toronto, is an authority on the psychological effects of conflict on journalists. Together with Dr. Feinstein, The Globe and Mail is running Moral Courage, a project that will feature frank and intimate interviews between Dr. Feinstein and a journalist working in hazardous situations around the globe. Each story showcases the work of these journalists, the factors that explain why they feel compelled to pursue such an all-encompassing mission and the personal consequences their work entails.
More from the series
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