Word: savak
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1970-1979
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Fedayan and Mujahedin are the more dynamic groups with a degree of support among the masses and in the armed services. The most persistent and ferocious of the Shah's opponents, they were brutally suppressed and suffered heavy losses. But they continued to provoke bloody clashes with SAVAK and played a major role in the battle for Tehran, which led to the Shah's downfall. Says a Mujahedin leader: "We have waded through blood and fire to our present status...
...mistake of ignoring the mullahs (priests). The U.S., in turn, embraced him, and even had the CIA engineer a coup to restore him to power in 1953. Corruption, dislocations of life and profoundly disorienting social change all accompanied his rule; so did political suppression and the tortures of SAVAK, his secret police. The U.S. was inextricably implicated in the career of this potentate-Ozymandias and Faust-and shared the people's judgment of him when it came...
There is no longer any dispute that SAVAK practiced systematic torture. Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, a member of Khomeini's Revolutionary Council, described to TIME'S Raji Samghabadi how SAVAK agents in 1964 lashed the soles of his feet with electric cable: "The flesh was torn apart, and the bones jutted out. There were multiple fractures." The agents, he says, also held a knife to his throat for hours, making small nicks and telling him to guess "when the blade might go all the way down and sever my head." Amnesty International in the 1970s described other methods...
William J. Butler, a New York lawyer who investigated SAVAK for the International Commission of Jurists in Geneva, spoke to Reza Baraheni, an Iranian poet who was held for 102 days by the secret police in 1973. Baraheni told of seeing in SAVAK torture rooms "all sizes of whips" and instruments designed to pluck out the fingernails of victims. He described the sufferings of some fellow prisoners: "They hang you upside down, and then someone beats you with a mace on your legs or on your genitals, or they lower you down, pull your pants up and then...
There is some more direct evidence of the Shah's complicity in executions too. Early this year, SAVAK agents testified before" Khomeini's Islamic revolutionary courts that the Shah, under international pressure to liberalize his regime and therefore eager to hide evidence of repression, gave the secret police a terse oral order in 1975: "Don't take any prisoners. Kill them." In a confession interspersed with sobs, Bahman Naderipour described how he and other agents, in response to this order, took nine political prisoners out of Evin jail in northwest Tehran, handcuffed and blindfolded them and then...