Ervand Abrahamian. Forced Confessions: Prisons and Public Recantations in Modern Iran. (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1999. 285 pages.

Prisons occupy a central place in Iran's violent political history. Many Iranians passed through their gates. This was where they met fellow activists, where they were educated in politics, or simply where they learned how to read. For scholars, many questions are unanswered. How did prisons effect society and politics? What was prison life like? What was the prison population like? Ervand Abrahamian's Forced Confessions fills this huge gap in our understanding. Based primarily on prison memoirs of political prisoners, Forced Confessions deals with torture, confession, prison life, communal cell government, prison management, and political repression, especially the massacre of 1988. Assembling this material in itself was no easy task; future scholars are indebted to Abrahamian for laying the groundwork for further studies.

Abrahamian's central thesis is that because Iranian police wanted to stage public confessions and recantations, they tortured ever more brutally. Abrahamian shows how forced public confessions move from a peripheral position within the Iranian police system under Reza Shah to the pivot around which the entire torture system turned. He concedes that the original motivation for torture, both under the Imperial and the Islamic state, was police intelligence (p. 136, 105-7). But while recantations don't explain the origin of torture, for Abrahamian they explain its persistence after the need for police intelligence died out. This is why Abrahamian's chronologies of torture and forced recantations are crucial: when recantations aren't central to the police system, torture is largely absent from the prison memoirs. Whenever police become obsessed with confessions, torture becomes pervasive and horrific. Hence crucially, Abrahamian argues that torture wasn't a pervasive feature of Reza Shah's prisons, Muhammad Reza Shah's early reign, or the revolutionary interregnum (1979-1981). As well, in these periods, he argues, recantations weren't considered important or if they were sought, the public didn't believe them (p.97) In the 1970s, SAVAK discovers how forced confessions can sow confusion in the political opposition. SAVAK set about staging sincere performances by former political prisoners. Islamic Republic's police imitated this model but by 1990 recantations lost their value. Today, recantations are still sought, but they are shown only in prisons, not to the public.

For Abrahamian, Iranian torture is modern, rational, and calculated: it serves to produce public recantations. If torture exists in periods where recantations aren't valued, then one can question the link Abrahamian draws between torture and forced confessions. Scholars may be tempted to identify particular torture episodes in Reza Shah's prisons, during Muhammad Reza Shah's early reign, or in the brief revolutionary interregnum (1979-1981). This weakens though it doesn't disprove Abrahamian's thesis. For Abrahamian concedes that there was some corporal violence in these periods; the question is how we weigh this evidence. Abrahamian argues that the torture was infrequent, unsystematic, exaggerated, shorter in duration, or less painful than torture that followed the 1970s.

I shall return to this important question. But Abrahamian buttresses the Iranian case with comparative evidence from the Inquisition, Stalinist Russia, and Maoist China, and I want to consider the broader question first: Is the causal link between torture and confessions as strong as Abrahamian wants to make out? The answer to that is unfortunately no. On the one hand, you don't need a system that emphasizes forced confessions to trigger torture. There are societies -- Chile, Guatemala, Kenya, South Africa and El Salvador -- where torture was common but where forced confessions were not. On the other hand, you don't need torture to generate forced confessions. Indeed, there can be police systems that generate forced confessions that torture very little. In the US, forced confessions have been as troubling a phenomenon, and Zimbardo has shown that police seek false confessions frequently, intensely, and with coercive techniques that have no relation to torture. In Japan, 86.6% of all criminal cases end with full confessions to the crime by the accused, a figure that any Iranian or American prosecutor would envy. Japanese police appear to torture in some cases, but it is also clear that the coercive pressures Zimbardo outlines are far more preferred. Even the Spanish Inquisition was familiar with these techniques, one reason why religious courts tortured far less than secular criminal courts, even though the religious courts were obsessed with saving souls, not just catching criminals. What we can say at best is that when a system considers confession as the best proof, policemen try to get it by any means, sometimes torture. Forced confessions have an elective affinity to torture: each is sufficient, but not necessary for the other to appear.

Notice these counterexamples draw on democratic societies and ordinary criminals, not political prisoners in dictatorships. Iranian political memoirs don't mention ordinary criminals much. Abrahamian mentions that ordinary prisoners were tortured brutally in Reza Shah's prisons. (p. 41). Why? If this was to generate false confessions to crimes, it becomes crucial to relate ordinary and political prison systems. And this changes Abrahamian's story completely. The new story would be how forced recantations were first developed in the civilian prison system under Reza Shah for ordinary crimes. The technique then travels to the political prisoners later. If ordinary prisoners weren't being tortured to secure false confessions, then Abrahamian has a problematic example of persistent widespread torture without forced confessions. In the 1970s, political prisoners don't mention ordinary prisoners, emphasizing instead their companions' martyrdom (p. 120-123). Had false confessions ceased in the ordinary prisons just as they became pivotal in the political prisons ? And finally today are ordinary prisoners, e.g. smugglers, addicts and homosexuals, tortured for confessions? Is that why torture persists now that recantations have ceased? Or are we observing empty bureaucratic ritualism?

These tantalizing questions define how much work remains to be done. They also underline the hazards of using political prisoners to study torturers, Abrahamian's main source. Victims have partial perspectives, and political victims see torturers in particular contexts with particular motives. It is a hazardous business using this material to understand torturers who move freely between ordinary and political prisoners Furthermore, political prison memoirs are written to be consumed by specific audiences. In a 1985 interview, Bozorg Alavi describes being thrown into boiling water by Reza Shah's torturers. Yet Abrahamian cites with approval Bozorg Alavi's remark that the torture that he suffered under Reza Shah does not compare to that of later generations. What are we to make of such remarks by a man who was boiled alive? Abrahamian takes this statement at face value (p.3) Another way to take this and other such statements is as rhetorical moves in a language game, a game of political status common among opposition groups. In this game, the pain one suffers proves one's moral qualities as well as the merit of one's political ideas. To cede to anther's pain or to claim great pain for oneself aren't factual statements, but rather powerful moves in a high stakes game for political advantage.

Comparative "pain-claims" pervade Iranian politics: we have suffered more than you, we are truly dedicated, and no one can understand our pain. This game yields competing hierarchies of political martyrs. People are shunned, articles rejected, and groups condemned because they don't acknowledge the proper hierarchies. Sometimes Abrahamian's material leads him perilously close to collapsing a sociological change in torture technique to a psychological claim about comparative pain (p. 3, 106). That there was a genuine shift in method, technique and rationale in torture between the Reza Shah and Muhammad Reza Shah period, Abrahamian indubitably demonstrates. But to get involved in sorting out which tortures were more painful is to get involved in a political status game which is epistemologically suspect. Clinically, as Melzack has shown, pain is far too complex a phenomenon to allow for such simple comparative claims. Philosophically, as Wittgenstein has shown, claiming inexpressible incomparable suffering for this or that experience are illogical. And, I would argue, they yield a politically dangerous solipsism. This brings me to the central question of Abrahamian's book: not what caused forced confessions, but why they so successfully demoralized groups (pp. 149-150, 153), so much so that the entire system turned to their production?

Abrahamian states that this was because people were naive about how much torture went into producing such torture. How can this be? Iranians have long known their governments torture. Why didn't they disbelieve them as they had in the past (p. 97). Even if we concede that their paranoia led them to overlook what many already knew, why was the opposition so naive? Why did they accept public confessions as sincere (p. 187)? They had been to prison. They had experienced the torture and staging themselves. The answer goes to the heart of the political language game of pain. For it was widely believed that a true revolutionary would die under torture than change his mind under torture (p. 92, p. 107). At most, he would make "tactical" concessions, not soulful recantations. (p. 225) Thus when someone known to one changed his views, it had to be because the change was sincere. Otherwise they would have willingly chosen political martyrdom. This is naiveté alight, but this naiveté isn't corrected with more factual information, but rather with a fundamental self-reconceptualization. Abrahamian believes that the political opposition has learned from the past and sees through the forced confessions. But the evidence he presents suggests that these groups are only skeptical about forced confessions in this regime. Political groups are still committed to political martyrdom, comparative pain-claims, "tactical" concessions, and victim hierarchies, and so they will succumb to the spell of public confessions again. Until Iranian activists undo this part of their heritage, sooner or later, they are doomed to relive the past under future regimes or even in purges among their own parties. In this respect, Abrahamian's book is an antidote to political naiveté, a medicine that one can only hope is taken widely.

Note on Sources: This review cites sources not usually known by scholars of Iran. They are:

Ronald Melzack and Patrick Wall, The Challenge of Pain Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1984

Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1976.

Phillip Zimbardo, "Coercion and Compliance: The Psychology of Police Confessions"

from Perucci and Pilisuk eds. The Triple Revolution Emerging, pp. 591-507.

Edward Peters, Inquisition Berkeley, CA, University of California Press, 1988, p.92, 132

G. McCormick, "Crime, Confession and Control in Contemporary Japan" and Futaba "Forced to Confess" in Democracy in Contemporary Japan, ed. G. McCormack and Y. Sugimoto (Armonk, NY: M.E. Sharpe, 1986), pp. 186-214

Donne Raffat, The Prison Papers of Bozorg Alavi: A Literary Odyssey Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1985. p. 95

Darius Rejali teaches political philosophy and comparative politics at Reed College, Portland, Oregon.

Copyright (c) 1999 by Darius Rejali, all rights reserved. This text may be used and shared in accordance with the fair-use provisions of U.S. copyright law, and it may be archived and redistributed in electronic form, provided that the editors are notified and no fee is charged for access. Archiving, redistribution, or republication of this text on other terms, in any medium, requires the consent of the author and the notification of the publisher